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PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS ON HOW THE 'FREE TRADE' CASE FOR OFFSHORING AMERICA'S JOBS HAS COME UNGLUED Roberts on the sensational exposure of the faked "gains" and phantom stats of the free traders. Who was America's most anti-imperialist president? Try Grover Cleveland! JoAnn Wypijewski on the unlikely hero of Hawai'i's restoration movement. Alexander Cockburn reports on evangelical Christians in crisis amid fresh onslaughts by forces of darkness. The Warbler's Parable: Rosa Miriam Elizalde on the black-masked visitors to Cuba defying the US economic blockade.
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Today's Stories June 30 / July 1, 2007 John
Ross Alan
Farago Peter
Quinn Robert
Fisk Uri
Avnery Judith
Siers-Poisson Saul
Landau Ralph
Nader Mike
Whitney Jacob
Hill Kenneth
Couesbouc Missy
Beattie Ramzy
Baroud Leonard
Peltier
June 29, 2007 St.
Clair / Frank Brian
Cloughley Patrick
Cockburn Gilad
Atzmon Dave
Lindorff Jennifer
Matsui / Kevin
Zeese Daniel
Klimek David
Michael Green John
Chuckman Website
of the Day
June 28, 2007 Bill
Quigley Vijay
Prashad Margaret
Kimberley Winslow
T. Wheeler Philip
Rizk D.
K. Wilson Bill
Williams Mahmoud
El-Yousseph Richard
Rhames Paul
Krassner Website
of the Day
Marjorie
Cohn Dr.
Susan Rosenthal, MD Alan
Farago Carla
Blank Matthew
Abraham Sunsara
Taylor Russell
D. Hoffman Robert
Weissman Sen.
Russ Feingold Paul
Buchheit Website
of the Day
June 26, 2007 Jonathan
Cook Ralph
Nader Corporate
Crime Reporter Ron
Jacobs Martha
Rosenberg John
Chuckman Denny
Haldeman Anthony
DiMaggio Stephen
Fleischman William
S. Lind Website
of the Day
Paul
Craig Roberts Jennifer
Loewenstein Bob
Anderson Robert
Pollin Patrick
Cockburn Eva
Liddell Dan
Bacher Larry
Atkins Mark
Brenner James
Rothenberg Website
of the Day June 23 / 24, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Jeff
Taylor Oren
Ben-Dor Gary
Leupp Robert
Fisk David
Rosen Russell
Mokhiber Alison
Weir Robert
Fantina D.
K. Wilson Nicole
Colson Stephen
Soldz, Steven Reisner and Brad Olson Dave
Lindorff Benjamin
Dangl Michael
Dickinson Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
June 22, 2007 Andy
Worthington Sherwood
Ross Eliana
Monteforte Robert
Weissman Richard
Rhames Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy
Baroud Ehud
Krinis, David Shulman and Neve Gordon David
Michael Green Kathryn
Webber Website
of the Day
June 21, 2007 Peter
Linebaugh Natsu
Saito Ron
Jacobs Saree
Makdisi John
Stauber Scott
Liebertz Tom
Clifford Robert
Jensen Michael
J. Smith Jeb
Sprague Website
of the Day
Omar
Barghouti Andy
Worthington Margaret
Kimberley Robert
Weissman Russell
D. Hoffman Rannie
Amiri Stephen
Lendman Dave
Lindorff David
Swanson Anne
Dachel Website
of the Day
June 19, 2007 Ralph
Nader Dr.
Shepherd Bliss Bill
and Kathleen Christison Jeff
Leys Dave
Zirin Chris
Floyd Ben
Terrall Anthony
Papa VIPS Linda Flores Website
of the Day
John
Ross Paul
Craig Roberts Martha
Rosenberg Norman
Solomon Don
Santina Isabella
Kenfield James
Brooks Eva
Liddell Sam
Husseini Akiva
Eldar Website
of the Day
Alexander
Cockburn John
Halle Robert
Fisk Andy
Worthington Uri
Avnery Fred
Gardner Saul
Landau P.
Sainath Missy
Comley Beattie Alan
Gregory Walter
Brasch Website
of the Weekend
June 15, 2007 Alan
Farago Andy
Worthington Michael
Simmons Franklin
Lamb Gary
Leupp John
Ross Website
of the Day
June 14, 2007 Michael
Donnelly
Faisal
Kutty Harry
Browne Charles
Jonkel Steven
Higgs Bruce
Dixon Bruce
K. Gagnon
Website
of the Day June 13, 2007 Glen Ford Marjorie Cohn Bill Christison Charles Jonkel Silvia Cattori Richard Gott Firmin DeBrabander William S. Lind Keith Rosenthal Website of the Day June 12, 2007 Jeffrey St.
Clair Paul Craig
Roberts P. Sainath Ralph Nader Omar Waraich Dave Lindorff Harvey Wasserman Malini Johar
Schueller Ramzy Baroud Website of
the Day
June 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Norman Solomon Eva Liddell Rannie Amiri Rachel Voss Christopher
Brauchli D. K. Wilson Website of
the Day
Alexander Cockburn George Ciccariello-Maher Saul Landau Robert Fisk Brian Cloughley Ron Jacobs Ward Boston Conn Hallinan Leonard Peltier Lawrence Davidson John Ross Kate Allan Fred Gardner Stephen Fleischman Monica Benderman Geoff Bailey Missy Beattie Patrick Dyer Tim Lengerich James Irani
Gary Leupp Michael Tillery Michael Simmons Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
June 8, 2007 Serge Halimi Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair
Paul Craig Roberts William Blum Joshua Frank Lance Selfa Dave Lindorff Lawrence Ferlinghetti Website of the Day
Marjorie Cohn Soldz, Reisner
and Olson: Soldz, Reisner
Paul Craig Roberts Bill Quigley Silvia Cattori Carl G. Estabrook Ellen Taylor Corporate Crime
Reporter Brenda Norrell D. K. Wilson Kevin Zeese Website of
the Day
Alain Gresh Gary Leupp Steven Sherman Bruce Dixon Corporate Crime Reporter Brian M. Downing Ron Jacobs George Bisharat Nicole Colson Bruce K. Gagnon Website of the Day
June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Jonathan Cook David Vest Robert Fantina Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury John V. Walsh Richard Cretan Adam Engel William S. Lind Myles Hoenig Jim Minick Website of
the Day
Nizar Latif Diana Johnstone Gregory Wilpert Paul Watson Susan Rosenthal,
MD Richard Ward Eva Liddell Zahi Khouri Evelyn Pringle China Hand Karyn Strickler Website of the Day
June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Marc Levy Martin Smith Diana Johnstone John Ross Uri Avnery Sunsara Taylor Richard Neville P. Sainath Missy Comley
Beattie Nisrine Abiad Rannie Amiri Margot Pepper Eric Stewart Ralph Nader Dan Bacher Shaun Harkin Richard Rhames Frederick Hudson Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Dave Marsh Saul Landau David Phinney Robert Jensen Stanley Heller Yifat Susskind Robert Weissman Paul Buchheit William S.
Lind Sherwood Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
Robert Bryce Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Kathy Kelly Marjorie Cohn Chris Kutalik
Corporate Crime Reporter Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
May 30, 2007 James Ridgeway Franklin Lamb Terrence E. Paupp Uri Avnery Alan Maass Rock and Rap
Confidential Ralph Nader Nirmal Ghosh Jean Daniels Tom Barry Website of the Day
Stephen Soldz Eliza Ernshire Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Mike Whitney David Swanson John Holt Cynthia McKinney Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day
Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Dr. Susan Block Jeeni Criscenzo Douglas Valentine Website of the Day 
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Weekend
Edition Mexico's Rightwing Tries to Claim Leftist Painter's SoulFree Frida Kahlo!By JOHN ROSS Mexico City. The battle for the possession of Frida Kahlo's soul erupted this June 13th on the alabaster esplanade of Mexico's maximum house of culture, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a rococo wedding cake of a palace that is slowly sinking into this mega-city's subsoil. The occasion for the artful free-for-all was a visit by freshman president Felipe Calderon to cut the ribbon at the Mexican government's official homage marking the centennial of the painter and her feverish oeuvre. Kahlo's work is considered one of Mexico's most lucrative national treasures. But many here in Mexico City are convinced that Calderon stole the presidency last July 2nd from the wildly popular former mayor, the leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and availed themselves of the opportunity of the opening of the magna Frida show to display their convictions. In anticipation of Calderon's arrival, several thousand AMLO supporters crowded onto the steps of Bellas Artes to reclaim Frida from Mexico's rightist president, some indeed dressed as replica Fridas. "Frida belongs to the left" they shouted, "Calderon! Don't prostitute our Frida!" The arty, angry mob of Kahlo's defenders was met by metal barricades, phalanxes of vizored robocops, tear gas, and truncheons. There were sharpshooters up on the roofs surrounding Bellas Artes' glass dome, now stained nicotine-brown by the capitol's unquenchable traffic flow. The President had to be escorted into the palace by a flying wedge of federal police and his elite military guard. Inside Bellas Artes, 3000 "special
invitees" had been wanded by metal detectors and installed
under the rotunda to offer hosannas to the President but the
press was barred from what Calderon's press office insisted was
an "acto privado" (a private act.) In fact, the inauguration
of the Kahlo The stringent security precautions were invoked by another fracas outside Bellas Artes just two nights earlier when Calderon arrived for a recital by the internationally celebrated cellist Yo Yo Ma. "Bootlickers!" "Cucarachas!" AMLO's people had spat at the elegant concert goers in an outburst of open class warfare. "Ratas!" screamed an elderly protestor, lightly dusting the expensive gowns and "smokings" (tuxedos) of the culture vultures with what she claimed to be rat poison. Inside the concert hall, Calderon was greeted with a chorus of boos as he was seated in the presidential box. "They didn't all come from the cheap seats either" one witness e-mailed La Jornada columnist Julio Hernandez, "plenty of the ricos in the orchestra booed too." Calderon's two trips to Bellas Artes were touted by the President's press office as his "cultural debut." After six months of leading a tough talking but largely ineffectual military crusade against the nation's powerful drug cartels, Calderon's handlers are trying to create a softer image. His attendance at the Yo Yo Ma concert and the Kahlo centennial (which will be followed by a 50 years-since-his-death show featuring her husband Diego Rivera) were designed to put a more human face on the shrill, fast-talking president. June 13th - the hundredth anniversary of her birth - was not the first "bronca" (melee) that Frida Kahlo has unleashed at Bellas Artes. When Frida passed on to the Big Easel in the Sky at the age of 47 53 years ago, Rivera, an outspoken member of the Mexican Communist Party, and his comrades rolled her casket into the fine arts palace where she lay in state proudly draped by a red flag with a prominent hammer and sickle emblazoned upon it as her fellow militants intoned "The Internationale" in tribute, a scandalous breach of political decorum back in the Red Scare 1950s. The next day, President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, a Cold War ally of Washington, summarily fired the director of Bellas Artes. Kahlo's leftist credentials are still in working order. She followed her larger-than-life husband (20 centimeters taller than the diminutive Kahlo, 20 kilos heavier, and 20 years older) into and out of and back into the Mexican Communist Party although their flirtation with Trotskyism and Leon Trotsky himself when he was offered asylum in Mexico in 1937 (Kahlo's interest proved more than flirtatious) incited fellow muralist David Alfaro Siquieros to try and take Diego out with a machine gun. When Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 by the Stalin-sent hit man Ramon Mercador in his Coyoacan home five blocks from Frida's "Casa Azul" (Blue House), Kahlo was arrested and held for questioning - she and Rivera fled to San Francisco soon after her release. In the 1940s and early '50s, Joseph Stalin, often fondling a dove of peace, was a frequent motif in Frida's paintings and drawings. She wore a corset decorated with a hammer and sickle and by 1954, the year her pain-wracked, morphine-saturated body gave up the ghost, she had begun to incorporate Mao in her work. Her last public appearance was in a wheelchair (her leg had been amputated) at a march outside the U.S. embassy to protest the CIA's overthrow of the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala at which she purportedly carried a "Yanqui Go Home!" sign. Given her militancy on the anti-Yanqui Left, Frida must be spinning in her sarcophagus these days. The tab for the magna exposition of her life work at Bellas Artes is being picked up by Wall Street - the show's patrons, Alfredo Harp Helu and Roberto Hernandez, are president and CEO of Banamex, now owned lock, stock, and barrel by Citygroup. In fact, Harp Helu's foundation which specializes in the preservation of archives, has been given exclusive control over a hither-to unopened treasure trove of 26,000 "intimate" Kahlo-Rivera items - drawings, correspondence, and priceless memorabilia that will be exhibited incrementally at the Casa Azul, now a museum and the touchstone for international Fridamania. The much-ballyhooed Kahlo centennial show is more hype than homage - Bellas Artes expects 300,000 visitors during the summer tourist season. About a third (120 of some 300) of Kahlo's paintings are on display, many of them still-lifes that seem to have been knocked off for street sales in her Coyoacan neighborhood and portraits of wealthy patrons that she hustled for ready cash. But to be sure, Frida is everywhere in the main gallery - with her heart in her hand, with her other Frida, with monkeys, with parrots, with flowers, cradling baby Diego in her arms Perhaps more intriguing than the paintings, which have been so universally reproduced that they seem almost overly familiar, is a floor full of photographic evidence of Frida's life. Taken by such luminaries as Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, and her own father Guillermo Kahlo, a German Jewish immigrant (her mother Matilde was ominously surnamed Calderon), the photos show a more relaxed Kahlo, often at play. Although the iconic Frida dominates this mammoth Fridarama, the political Frida is hardly in evidence, consigned to a fourth floor cubbyhole and marginalized by Calderon's curators in an apparent ploy to white out Mexico's - and Kahlo's - red past. By most accounts, Fridamania sprung whole from the womb of the feminist surge in the U.S. in the 1970s. Critic Raquel Tibol, no friend of the flagrantly bi-sexual Kahlo, attributes the phenomena to "Lesbian chic." Kahlo's intense suffering - polio at six, a horrendous streetcar accident that drove a metal rod through her spine at 18 - and her courage as an artist, made her an overnight icon for the burgeoning Chicana movement and Chicano identity politics. In the get-rich-quick "80s and '90s, Kahlo's tortured paintings became a hot investment item. She opens at $7,000,000 on the international art market. The commodification of Kahlo has been brutal. She has become a doll, a perfume, a brand of tequila, a line of clothing (Frida jeans), designer sneakers (Converse), even a pizza parlor in San Francisco's Mission District ("Frida's Pizza.") The Bellas Artes centennial is dotted with booths vending Frida pins and Frida lighters and display cases glittering with Frida accessories. Fridamania peaked with Salma Hayek's 2002 biopic of the same name. Although both Jennifer Lopez (Jay-lo) and Madonna (she travels with a portrait of Frida giving birth to herself) were dying for the role, Hayek, the daughter of a Lebanese-born Veracruz politico, grabbed the property and starred, directed, and financed Hollywood's first Frida flick. "Frida" was universally dissed in Mexico where audiences don't really cotton to Hollywood "Latino" extravaganzas in which the actors speak English with "Hispanic" accents. When "Frida" opened in Los Angeles, Chicana activists protested with signs that charged "Salma promotes racism" and "We are here to defend Frida from Salma's treason." For most Mexicans, the real Frida is Ofelia Medina, a leftist soap opera star, who played the tempestuous painter in an impressionistic 1984 Paul Leduc art-flick, "Frida, The Natural Life." Since then, Medina has taken Frida on the road, performing one-woman shows in Europe and the U.S. A long-time supporter of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, Medina was not impressed with Hayek's version of Frida, which she characterized as "lite." "They shaved off Frida's mustache," Ofelia complained indignantly. Nonetheless, "whoever wants to be Frida is Frida. But she - or he - must be on the left" Medina cautions. Also among Frida's daughters is Jesusa Rodriguez, a Mexico City actress and cabaret entertainer who devises shows with multiple Fridas - Rodriguez was AMLO's M.C. at mammoth rallies after last year's election was stolen -, and Lila Downs, the Oaxaca-born, Minnesota-raised pop singer who performed the "Frida" soundtrack at the 2003 Oscars. "Frida was really anti-Yanqui" muses Downs, who wears Kahlo's trademark "tehuana" blouses and pulls her black hair back severely in the classic Frida-style, "I don't think she would have sat through Salma's movie." The Left does not have the exclusive franchise on Frida's soul. Feminists and lesbians venerate Saint Frida and even the Jews want a piece of the action. Her father Guillermo was a Jew from Baden-Baden (little Frida was raised Catholic) and the painter lost relatives in Hitler's concentration camps. Her diaries have been translated into Hebrew and Israeli Frida expert Gaddit Ankori claims Kahlo spoke Yiddish. The Jewish Museum in New York cashed in on Hayek's movie and mounted a Kahlo exhibit in 2003. With her penchant for suffering, Frida seems as Jewish as she is Mexican. Now Mexico's right is filing a claim on Kahlo's soul. Although the Calderonistas have done their damndest to whitewash her red roots, the shadow of the hammer and sickle hovers over Bellas Artes these days. President Calderon prefers to view Kahlo not as a political activist but as a heroic cripple who "overcame adversity", sort of a charity Telethon idol. In his remarks at the centennial exhibit's "private" inauguration, the President championed Frida as "an example of how we can overcome adversity so that Mexico can move forward" and warned the leftists marching outside "all that impedes the nation's progress should be left behind." "Free Frida! Free Frida!" the Fridas out on the Bellas Artes esplanade responded, "If Frida was alive today, she would be out here in the street with us." John Ross is back in Mexico City hot on the trail
of Brad Will's killers and re-immersing himself in the real world.
Write him at johnross@igc.org.
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CounterPunch Books of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy  Click Here to Buy! How the Press Failed The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!  Buy End Times Now! CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order!  Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn   Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed        Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
