[This piece is cross-posted from PBS.org Mediashift / Knight Foundation blog, Idealab, as a follow-up to an article there which I based on polls reported at Narco News predicting a reform win in the Venezuelan Constitutional referendum.]

A previous post of mine  had an inflammatory headline unjustified by the text: "Lies about Venezuela:  If NYT.com ran Related Content".

I was guilty of looking at Jens Erik Gould's article, "Venezuela's Fateful Choice," through a frame: that major media  coverage overwhelmingly seeks to portray the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and bad.  My own view (frame) that the New York Times has that overall frame overrode a good analysis of the article.  I apologize specifically to the reporter.  Gould's article, while (despite the headline) primarily about accusations that the Venezuelan government lacks financial transparency, was not by itself part of the anti-democratic, pro-elite frame which I accuse the New York Times of employing against Venezuela.  (Broadly, this frame or lens is applied by major U.S. media against the world.)

Interesting, this coming out of Colombia.  Just lip service for Colombians or?

Colombia's vice president said on Sept. 9 that a US-backed program to fumigate coca fields is failing to stem cocaine trafficking and called for anti-drug efforts to shift away from the practice.

[...]

"After a five-year frontal attack against drug trafficking, the results aren't the most successful or the ones we hoped for," Santos told a news conference.

He said Bogota is committed to fighting drug cartels, but "at the end of the day, the benchmark is whether the street price of cocaine in New York, London or Madrid rises or the quality falls. So far, we haven't found any statistics that bear this out."

Read it all at the Asheville Global Report

From Chris Fernandez to the BinaryFreedom mailing list:

In Oajaca (Oaxaca in old Spanish) Mexico people from all over the world are joining the struggle to help the  native people against the capitalist machine and the US influence  in Mexico, police brutality and even military horror has been the topic for 1 year already, but this time they screw with the wrong people, 4 Spaniards from Barcelona got arrested and tortured, but it happens that one is a lawyer, another a reporter, another a well known teacher and another is a scientist.

From the Black Agenda Report:

The Green Party, once perceived by many Blacks as a club for white counterculturalists, now champions an end to racially selective administration of justice in the U.S. By making Black and Brown mass incarceration a top priority, the Greens engage a public policy-created crisis that impacts all aspects of African American life. While the Democrats, including Barack Obama, make occasional feeble noises about the fact that half the U.S. prison population is Black, the Greens call for an end to the so-called "drug war" as "a war on youth and people of color."

Read more.

The Moment of Truth with Jeff Dorchen: First They Came for the Latinos

About a mile or so west and a little south of my house on the south side of Chicago, there's a mall called the Discount Mall in Little Village.  [...]   Nearly everyone who patronizes the mall is of Latino heritage. I guess that makes it a good place to look for illegal immigrants. You would also find a lot of legal ones, and many just plain U.S. citizens.

However, you could just as easily find the same percentage of illegal immigrants to legal immigrants to just plain U.S. citizens at lunchtime in what residents of Chicago call The Loop, the downtown business district. So, let's say you threw a Gestapo-style cordon of Federal Agents carrying high-powered rifles and wearing bullet-proof armor around a block of lunch places and storefront businesses on Wabash between Madison and Monroe and didn't let anybody in or out of that cordoned area while you checked everyone's “papers.”  [...]

What? Why not? Oh, I see—because totalitarian police state-style behavior tends to upset people who work for banks, law firms, city, county and state offices, foreign consulates, and stylish department stores. [...] Yes. It's a little out of place in an open society, a democratic republic such as the United States of America, to cordon off a section of the public thoroughfare as if it were a block of apartments in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Read the whole truth.

Sean Donahue wrote an article on Colombia, published in the Maine newspaper "The Times Record" – impressive work getting information usually found few places but on Narco News in front of more folks.

"Paramilitarism has not been dismantled, it has simply been 're-engineered.'" (Amnesty International)

Imagine that you work bundling cut flowers in Colombia. After years of working 10- and 12-hour days for very little pay, you and your fellow workers finally form a union to fight for better conditions and better pay and you are elected president. Your manager calls you into his office and tells you that unions only bring trouble and that you should really consider your family's safety.

Two important articles for Latin America are at the top of COA News' page today:

• Bolivia Pulls Out of World Bank Trade Court




• Wall Street Journal Claims Chavez Oil Policy "Aims to Weaken US"

The fight between different branches of the U.S. government to decide CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles' fate begins to look like a scripted professional wrestling match, as a US court orders the release on bond of the accused killer of 73 people in a 1976 airline bombing, and other terrorist acts, jailed only on immigration charges.

This is off-topic but I have to post it, the author Maher Osseiran is so persistent in his attempts at simultaneous publishing.  Impeachment is the process for reclaiming democracy, he writes,

but the cause for impeachment needs to be a crime that is on the books, a crime that is apolitical (outside politics), a crime that is easy for everyone to understand and accept; shoplifting would be a good example, but a crime that is much more heinous which would stop Bush in his tracks.

There is such a crime; the crime is high treason with intent.

There is ample evidence that the Bush administration was the closest of any to capturing Bin Laden on September 26, 2001, but deliberately decided not to.

Read Taming the Beast.

Kevin Pina reports finishing work on his film "Haiti: We must kill the BANDITS" on the policies and reality of the coup regime and MINUSTAH occupation as he and other journalists he worked with observed them in Haiti.  The People's Weekly World wrote about the film.