Three Minutes Sixteen Seconds / PRD R.I.P./ We're not Paying for Your Crisis

Three Minutes Sixteen Seconds
The following from Rocio Ortega, newly-unemployed radio producer, Oaxaca: "This past November 6th, the program 'Music Non-Stop' (which I was the producer of on 96.9 FM) had on as its guest the artist and curator Olga Margarita Dávila for its segment, 'Biographies and Personalities'...In order to put into context the founding of 'La Curtiduria,' a space devoted to promoting contemporary art and taking in artists from all over the world, Olga cited the Oaxaca conflict of 2006 in the following manner:

And amongst all the ups and downs life has provided me with, one of them has been to come to Oaxaca and work here thanks to Demian Flores at the Curtiduria, which is a contemporary space for the arts, for artist's residences, for projects and workshops, education. It's a space that was born out of the movement of 2006 as an inclusive space, as a response to everything that moved this great conflict, this great force, this big, little transformation that we all experienced, even more those who were behind the barricades and involved in the whole process. This allowed the Curtiduria ['The Tannery'] to be named what it was: in an abandoned space in the old tannery area on 5 de Mayo Street in Jalatlaco, we inaugurated this space in 2006 with the help and logistics and strength of a large community of creators and artists who...asked what can we do and how can we do it, who are we as artists and what are we to do with this occupation of life, and we decided to open this space. And I joined in at the end of 2006, the beginning of 2007 intermittently at first, coming and going, I had commitments in Los Angeles and Tijuana, and little by little I kept getting more involved until, starting in the middle of last summer, I began to stay in La Curtiduria and began to make Oaxaca my home. Now I have been living in Oaxaca definitively for the last six months, with a great deal of pleasure, and tranquility....

"This audio segment lasted 3'16", and preceded some music that the guest shared with our listeners. The listeners, however, were not able to hear it. On orders from Mercedes Rojas Saldaña, director of CORTV, the transmission was interrupted and music was broadcast with the excuse of technical problems, thus censuring the program's content.
"If this were not enough, and without any reasons, the head of programming informed me by phone that I was being suspended (on the 11th, one week later), that my programs would not be going on the air anymore and that my professional relationship with the station was being terminated. He alleged they had tried to contact me to tell me that the people invited onto Music Non-Stop 'weren't Oaxacans' and as well that the program's music 'didn't convince them.' Along with this the program 'Music para Respirar' (Music for Breathing), which I am also the producer of, will be taken off the air - a progam devoted to genres such as world beat, new age, ambiental and hetero...
"If this is not to be seen as a lack of ethics and professionalism, a demonstration of ignorance and incompetence, a brazen and high-handed act, an attack of free speech and fundamental rights perpetrated by the director of a station paid for by our taxes, I demand an explanation and make a call to the support, friendship and gratitude of those who that afternoon, on this station, could not and now will not be able to hear me any longer.

Rocio Ortega,
Oaxaca, Oaxaca November 18th, 2008

If two radio progams can be pulled from the air and a producer fired for comments as innocuous as Olga Margarita Davila's, if people are being kidnapped in broad daylight only 7 blocks away from where the Governor is gearing up for his State of the State message (http://www.noticias-oax.com.mx/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15502&Itemid=31), is it not clear that Oaxaca is suffering through the worst of both worlds: on one hand, the arbitrary repression of a police state, and on the other, the lack of any state-provided security whatsoever?

(Spanish speakers can read the full text of Rocio Ortega's comments at:
http://www.arteven.org/profiles/blogs/carta-de-rocio-ortega-a)


PRD R.I.P
Friends, please break out your mourning clothes to attend the political wake of the year (no, not Mouriño): the PRD is dead, cut down in the flower of its youth at only 19 years old. The party, founded by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and the coalition of parties that had supported him in the 1988 presidential elections, died last week when the Federal Electoral Tribunal - the same one that installed electoral deliquent Felipe Calderon into the presidency of the nation, installed electoral delinquent Jesus Ortega into the party presidency of the PRD. The decision, an unprecedented meddling in internal party affairs which flagrantly overruled a wise internal party decision to simply annul the damned thing, was made even with the Tribunal itself admitting that a mere 22.88% (!) of precincts contained anomalies, and in grand Mexican style, included in its final count the results of polling places which were never set up on the day of the election! As I understand it, the high-minded ethical reasoning of the Tribunal goes thus: even if Ortega did do what they say he did, as long as what he did didn't "change the final results" (however circumlocuitously those are gotten at), his little shenanigans - oh you, Chuy! (slap slap) - are A-okay in the ledgers of justice. Kant is dead: there are no wrong acts as such, only wrong results...er, results subject to change.
With this, the circle is closed, and the party is pulled off the life support it had been on since its circus-like internal elections earlier this year. Felipe Calderon, with the help as always of his state-level surrogates (namely the governors of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Veracruz, from whence came the phantom results from inexistent precincts) have succeeded not only in installing their own man in the presidency of the PRD - one who will make a "modern" left that "Mexico can be proud of" (I can see the 30-second spots now), but in converting the party, born in the aftermath of one electoral fraud and toppled by another, sixteen years later, into yet another co-opted organ of the state. The clear intent is to remove any institutional channels for the mass popular movement led by López Obrador, and by attempting to marginalize him within his own party, make him look even more extreme and that much more cut-off from the normal political life of this grand, inclusive republic. With Jesus Ortega and his new-left "chuchos" in control of the party's apparatus, expect a bland and innocuous slate of compromised candidates for next year's legislative elections, absent any Lopez-Obradoristas or other rabble rousers. Expect, too, a sound thrashing for the PRD at the polls, not only due to the pre-announced (Garcia Marquez style) defeat of the left by the right (he who controls the electoral mechanisms controls the votes), but due to massive defections of the what was formerly the base of the PRD brand in favor of the other two members of the Broad Progressive Front: Convergencia and the Worker's Party (PT). For what it's worth (a bag of chips? cup of watery decaf?), this blogger, for one, will be voting PT/Convergencia.


We're Not Paying for Your Crisis
The three-time Berlusconi government in Italy (talk about electoral masochism) has recently introduced an educational counter-reform which, among other enlightened measures, slashes elementary school class time, eliminates up to 100,000 teaching positions, reduces the number of degree programs offered at the college level, and opens up the university system to privatization by stealth by allowing them to create "foundations" to traffic in private dollars for supposedly public ends. The massive protests stemming from this (surrounding the Senate building a la Mexicana, among other things - we should send over the Adelitas as back-up) have as their rallying cry: "We're Not Paying for Your Crisis."
I loved that. We're not paying for your crisis. The world financial system, by means of rampant speculation, disproportionate greed and sheer, deregulated stupidity, has dug itself into the biggest hole it has managed since 1929, and already, the cuts are coming everywhere to compensate it all. But not where the cuts should be made - in the boardroom - but in the living room, the classroom, and the lecture hall. This is also, in Naomi Klein's paradigm, the use of a "shock" (world financial crisis) to force through draconian cuts in education which, just as in Mexico, has the goal of dismantling one of the last functions of government (with its accompanying unions) that hasn't been privatized or sold off. Now I am no fan of public education as it exists in any country I know of - where the main goal has historically been that of producing docile capitalist cogs rather than questioning, creative human beings - but the practical matter is, public education and teacher's unions are pretty much the last thing standing the way of the final dismantling of many nation-states, and thus must be disposed of when the shock is right. Hence, Mexico's Alliance for Education, the closing of the normal schools, the ongoing war against dissident sections of the national union.
All this not to mention the twenty-some-odd increases in the gas tax this year in Mexico and the application of the flat-rate, regressive 16.5% IETU tax, which has nailed those of us who actually try to be honest and declare our earnings with the Revenue Department (que pendejos somos...!). We're not paying for your crisis. You broke it, you clean it up.