Death by Video

Fairly unrelated, but I think it is an important point to make:

Mexico's elections are more transparent than those in the United States.

This election in Mexico was stolen-- enough evidence is in to show that.

But it's possible to spot the fraud, and people are doing it, and possibly stopping the election from being stolen.

Most of this, I have to say, is due to the greater political consciousness of people in Mexico-- there are places in Ohio that should have been surrounded by angry citizens and votes protected in 2004, and though it looks like our votes are counted I try not to think how deep the political corruption must go in Massachusetts-- but millions of U.S. votes are uncountable from the outset, cast on electronic machines without a paper trail, and most of the rest are counted on private machines far less open and secure than the 130,000 sites where the actas are counted.

I make these points mostly to head off anyone who thinks the stolen election can be blamed on allegedly unique Mexican corruption-- pick your target but the blame goes to some mixture of inequality, capitalism, and government that is not limited to any one country.

And also to re-iterate how far we have to go toward democracy, everywhere.

It was the precinct president transferring presidential ballots that had accidentally been placed in the congressional ballot box, and vice versa. This was approved by the poll-watchers. The tally for the precinct was signed by the representative of López-Obrador's party, the PRD.

The PRD citizen network coordinator, Manuel Camacho Solís, said that his party has to be more careful about what they present to the media. He admitted that the showing the "ballot stuffing" videos was a mistake, but that he did not believe it was done in bad faith.

I'm not sure about that. They had to know that their own representative signed off on the tally. Why didn't they call him and ask what had happened? Why wasn't he presented along with the video?

When confronted with the facts, López Obrador said that many of his poll watchers have been offered bribes and that not all of them were righteous. He also argued that transferring the ballots was an illegal act that could not be validated by a poll-watcher's signature. The precinct president said that's not true. The PRD poll-watcher told the press that nothing improper had occurred.

So this is what López Obrador offers the nation as proof of fraud -- that his party is so corrupt that its own militants sold out the election to the opposition because they were bribed?

Thank you for the opportunity to address absurdity of this game of "gotcha" that Televisa, TV Azteca, the IFE, and now you, Jules, have entered in another soon-to-be-failed effort to distract from a systematic electoral fraud to prevent a full recount of the votes.

Your account of the facts is not accurate, and is apparently unaware of Mexican election law. It is illegal to open one ballot box and remove ballots to place them into another. Even if, as the authorities claim, the party representatives on the scene all approve it, it is still illegal.

Furthermore, your extrapolation of a suggestion that some "poll watchers" by one party could be corrupted (are you arguing that they are always uncorruptible?) into a universal claim - "that," in your words, "his party is so corrupt that its own militants sold out the election to the opposition because they were bribed?" - is schoolyard stuff, unworthy of serious discourse.

It is absurd, first, because the many evidences of dishonest vote counting and other frauds are not mainly in the realm of corrupt or inept poll watchers. What you are trying to suggest - that one possible incidence can therefore be applied nationwide - is intellectually dishonest. To, beyond that, claim that this particular kind of corruption is what "sold out the election" nationwide - shunting aside or wishing away all the other kinds of hard proofs of various patterns of different kinds of fraud - is also knowingly false.

This growing news story and scandal is not about whether PRD or PAN or PRI, or Obrador or Calderon, ought to be president. It is, rather, about whether the authorities of IFE responsible for conducting honest and transparent elections are, in fact, electoral delinquents and changed the tally illegally.

I will repeat the documented facts, particular to Guanajuato, that your smokescreen attempts to cover up with rhetorical games: In the electoral cesspool that is Guanajuato, 640 of 6122 precincts showed serious enough irregularities to provoke election-night challenges. During the July 5 first hard count, the corrupt Guanajuato elections authorities allowed only eight of those 640 precinct ballots to be counted by hand. The shift in just those eight districts lowered Calderon's margin of victory by 253 votes - about 31 votes per precinct. Had the other 632 challenged precincts been counted with similar results, that would lower Calderon's margin by more than 19,000 votes. If all the state's 6,122 precincts were to be recounted and were to show similar tampering, Calderon would lose 189,782 votes, or 77 percent of his alleged national margin of victory, in just one state with just five percent of the electorate.

Guanajuato has always been an electoral cesspool. It was when the PRI governed (cause Vicente Fox and his PAN party to challenge the 1991 gubernatorial results with tactics that included highway blockades and the taking of the international airport and government buildings, including the halls of Congress), and the change in parties has not ridded Guanajuato of its culture of electoral corruption.

Oh, and you must have missed this morning's revelations by national university investigators that more votes were cast in Guanajuato then there are voting-age citizens in the state: 301,933 more voters than all the 18-and-above aged citizens in all of Guanajuato. This is based on the hard data of the government census agency known as the INEGI.

This blockbuster disclosure gives gale force to the accusations that the IFE voter list - known as "el padrón" - had been corrupted not only to remove 900,000 voters days before the election without explanation (leading to many elderly ladies and gents in PRD strongholds like Mexico City, in particular, arriving to vote but finding they had been erased by IFE from the voter rolls), but also to Marcos' report that the names of Mexicanos who had gone to the United States, as well as dead people, were used to cast votes in their absence (Guanajuato, of course, is one of the states that has lost the highest percentages of its population to immigration toward the other side). This also corresponds with the most interesting disclosure that the ink used this year to stain thumbs of those who had already voted was not indelible, leading even TV Azteca and Televisa news anchors to demonstrate, on TV, on election day, that they had successfully washed off the "indelible" ink shortly after voting.  Vote early and often, indeed.

In any case, your wishful hopes and smokescreens meant to put the brakes on a full recount are crashing down on the reefs of reality. That you ally yourself with the efforts by those in power to prevent that recount will not prevent it from happening. It is coming soon to 130,000 precincts, some of them near you. And then we will all be able to see if the ballot boxes have remained unsealed and if IFE counted the votes correctly. Then we will see who has been truthful and who has been bullshitting. I have no doubt which of us is on the right and honest side of history.

That said, thank you for posting your opinions here. Errant though they are, you have free speech (and an ample readership) on the Narcosphere, including the right to be wrong. But to claim that one (still improper, despite your flailing claims) incident can be therefore be extrapolated to claim that all has been proper is as absurd as claiming that one errant Narcosphere entry - yours - proves errancy in all the others. Your claims are in error. The larger context and body of work here disproves them.

Finally, it is this kind of stonewalling routine by IFE authorities, the Commercial Media and, now, you that is fomenting the social unrest to come, to an extreme way beyond what a single candidate or his party would otherwise be able to convoke. You, and those in the same line of argument, are building your own Frankenstein monster. Have fun when it awakens.

They do everything just right. They always tell the truth.

Gosh, they are wonderful.

Unfortunately for your extended reply to a rather brief comment, López Obrador did accuse his own party members of corruption.

He should bring charges against them, the traitors.

Or is corruption only relevant if carried out by members of other parties?

The ink is real bad, I'm sure, but don't they also prick the voter ID to make sure it can't be used again?

Manuel Camacho Solis? Isn't he part of the PRD high command? It just shows you how corrupt Mexican TV is. They have really famous people like Manuel Camacho Solis and Andrés Manuel López Obrador secretly working as their sock puppets. When the networks want to smear the PRD, they just put them on live TV and let them kick each other around like Punch and Judy.

You won't find any defense of the PRD or any other party here. (Wasn't it you, just a few days ago, asking aloud about what a "straw man" is? And didn't you also take me to task for not supporting any candidate during the election season? C'mon, at least be consistent with your own arguments and try not to have it both ways; consistency with one's previous statements and coherence are the first duties of honest commentary).  

At stake are not partisan concerns, but, rather, that the vote tallies have been rigged by IFE and each day provides more hard evidence.

The PRD is not the electoral authority. IFE is. Its delinquents belong in prison. Interestingly, the IFE board, this week, held an emergency special meeting with the only agenda item being the granting of two-week bonuses to its officials. A little incentive to keep quiet. That is called hush money. Once more, the criminals are rewarded as the people are robbed.

My point about the not-so-indelible ink was not that anybody voted using the same credential more than once; rather, that it made it possible for a political operative to vote various times using different IDs (of dead people, of Mexicans that immigrated to the US) as in the cases of 311,000 Guanajuatense "voters" on the IFE lists that no longer live in Guanajuato but who mysteriously appeared, like phantoms, on Election Day.

That is what the indelible ink is supposed to prevent: one person using bought, stolen, rented or invented voter IDs to vote more than once under different names in different polling places. It was put there for a reason: precisely because of the long history and culture of corruption in which that tactic was used in past years, and, now, again in 2006. That's the only possible way that 311,000 more people could have voted than there are adults in the state of Guanajuato. How convenient for the delinquents that the ink turned out to be "delible" - just like the results.

That's why the PRD never, never engages in corrupt acts to get its way and the PAN and the PRI always do. It balances out. It's like freaky statistical patterns that look like genius at work. The larger a number is, the more likely it will have freaky artifacts, because "randomness" includes harmonies. If a set of large collected numbers is too random, it raises suspicion that it's been manipulated.

Well, this seems to be turning into a really massive conspiracy with thousands of people involved, many of whom were paid by the PRD to represent them but sold themselves instead to Bush. This is inconsistent with my statement above that all perredistas are honest. But, hey, it takes all kinds.

You've read the accusation, I'm sure, that the PDR had to pay poll watchers 200 to 300 pesos each. So this would seem to indicate that they had ample voters in those districts, right, but they were all working double shifts at the maquiladores and couldn't get away on Sunday to poll watch. Well, whatever. What you can expect from hired poll watchers? They just sell themselves to the highest bidder.

In Guanajuato these traitor zombies were physically appearing again and again at polling stations with newly scrubbed fingers and fresh photocredentials with the right pictures but dead people's IDs. The PRD precinct workers did not notice this because they were on the take. It was like The Night of the Living Dead. They all turned into vegetables and voted for Calderón.

The problem with your arguments is that you snap at suppositions and then wield them as if they were established facts. It's better to wait a day or so before repeating the latest accusation. Otherwise you get stuck with having to explain that the ballot stuffing video wasn't really ballot stuffing, maybe, but it was illegal. The simple fact that it was a deceptive argument that blew up in AMLO's face is ignored.

If the Bushbots in the IFE controlled the computer count with secret source code tricks, why would they need zombies out there with authentic, but utterly fake voter IDs? That's inconsistent, too.

The 311,000 extra votes may or may not exist. But if other qualified statisticians examine the claim and find it to be false, you'll dismiss them as paid shills. Or you will go on to something else. It will become irrelevant.

Reminds me of Sumate.

A culture of corruption - which is what your former favorite party, the PRI, created and what your current favorite party, the PAN has continued - does not require a "conspiracy." It only requires that there not be adequate safeguards in place to prevent those who, if given the chance, do play unfairly.

By the way, I'm sure the PRD or any other party, would do the same. I'm not arguing that the PRD or any party is pure. I've argued the opposite all year long: that there is a political culture of corruption.

To the contrary, I am demonstrating with facts that the system is corrupt and the IFE in particular is rotten to the core. However, in this case, one of the unfair equations that led to this crisis is that the nine-member IFE board excluded the PRD from having even a single representative on it. The Fox administration made sure of it when grafted the PRI and the PAN votes in Congress to put exclusively PRI and PAN members (including two Banamex executives) on the IFE board. All of this is a matter of public record.

What they created was a very flawed system with some safeguards in place that worked, others that didn't, and enough holes to drive through a million-vote fraud "ant style," which is to say, a little bit here, and a little bit there, adding up to more than a million votes.

I have not been here making arguments about algorithms or computer programs. I repeat: I'm agnostic; it could be the case or could not. To the contrary, all the evidence I've shared here has been of "old fashioned" vote stealing. In two weeks, you have factually contested only one case, of one precinct, saying it was "not improper" and now you seem to acknowledge that it was indeed improper. So far you are batting zero in any dispute over the facts.

All you have been able to do is put words in the mouths of others and then argue against what neither I nor anyone else here has said. You've been intellectually feeble from start to finish. You're embarrassing yourself in the process.

Sumate, in Venezuela, based its entire argument (in claiming fraud in 2004)  on two things: supposed exit polls and computer algorithms. And they were shot down by facts on each point. I have not used either argument here. Instead, I am relying on facts, just like I did when countering Sumate's bogus arguments in Venezuela, only this time you are playing the role of Sumate in your hysterical denial of the evidence. What I have shown you and others is:

• a pattern of miscounting and withholding of votes that benefited Calderon in the PREP results. July 2, and in the IFE official count on July 5;
• an inexplicable resistance by IFE throughout the country and especially in PAN-dominated states to allow hand counts with eye witnesses. Indeed the regional disparity between the different political parties (in which PRD did not have poll watchers or much organization in the fraud centers of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Querétaro and Nuevo Leon, among other PAN or PRI states) is one of the strongest arguments for why a recount is absolutely necessary to create public belief in the result.

(Obrador doesn't need "ample voters in those districts" - your bogus claim - to change the national result. To the contrary, just two unfairly disqualified Obrador ballots in each precinct would change the result. Or two votes added to Calderon that don't exist in the ballot boxes. Or two taken away from Obrador. Each of these kinds of vote-stealing has been proved beyond all doubt in the PREP count. And each time a closer look has been allowed, the correction has lowered Calderon's vote and raised Obrador's; proof that your random error argument is false, because if it were true, the results would not have changed each time in only one direction.)

• I have also shared my computations demonstrating how this clear uni-directional pattern, if applied nationwide, indicates the likelihood that more than one million votes were shaved from Obrador or added falsely to Calderon.
• a voter list so padded that it led to more votes than there are citizens in PAN-dominated regions.
• the illegal opening of sealed ballot boxes by IFE officials (in the Tabasco case, with a PAN operator illegally present).
• the discovery of ballots and ballot-boxes in garbage cans and dumps, all from places where Obrador won; and no such discoveries in places where Calderon won.
• I've made no zombie argument here (once more, you are drooling fantasies to distract from your absolute disrespect for the hard facts); I've argued, instead, that delinquents partial to one side were able to vote on behalf of non-existent "voters" particularly  in those regions where there was no opposition witness on election day. When someone votes in a second, third, or fourth polling place, it is a different set of people there; your flailing argument presumes, errantly, that someone would be in all places at once to notice it.

Election fraud is a blood sport. The media told everyone that the election would be razor close and that gave more motive for partisans everywhere to squeeze every last advantage. In the partisan heat of a campaign, it is human nature to commit electoral crimes in every place and time where safeguards are not in place to stop it.

In fact, in just three reports, I have offered other hard evidences not mentioned in this summary, and your silence in the face of each of them simply ratifies their factual truth.

Your problem is that you, just like the IFE, fear that a recount will demonstrate everything I've documented to be not only true, but confirmed, and then all hell breaks loose.

Your stated motive is that you fear the consequences of a full-blown citizen revolt.

I find that you also have an unstated motive that is very pendejo and related to your overglorified view of yourself and the history of how you have been a Johnny-One-Note on this theme for years. It is the following:

You have always vehemently argued the existence of a Mexican middle class that aspires to the same things that middle class gringos want. I've never argued against that. But your emotional investment in what you consider your personal discovery causes you to over-estimate its size and to invest yourself in the idea that if a "majority" elects Calderon it proves your grand theory.

The hour has arrived for a wake-up call: First, it is not your discovery. Analysts have spoken of "Wal-Mart" voters in Mexico for years. In fact, it is not a distinctly Mexican phenomenon, but, rather, one of demographic realities under capitalism.

In 1984 a very good friend of mine, UMass professor Ralph Whitehead, received much attention from journalists and pundits for his theory of "the new collar voter;" economically conservative, socially liberal or moderate, with some expendable cash, and its shifts between Democrats and Republicans in different elections. Some candidates, like Gary Hart, made that theory their gospel, and were able to make inroads by appealing to that vote. In that 1984 Democratic primary campaign, Walter Mondale was able to stop Hart's gains simply by understanding how to reach a larger group of voters that were not as economically comfortable.

During this time, some of the "new collar" political consultants (one of them being Joe Trippi, who repeated the same error in overestimating that kind of voters' numbers with the Harold Dean campaign in 2004, twenty years later) became so invested in their fantasy that the new collar voter was a majority trend that the rise and fall of their candidates (like Hart) became, correspondingly, the rise and fall of the consultants and pundits that had so attached themselves to the belief that that sector of voters was larger than it turned out to be in reality.

I remember talking with Ralph - who the pundits called "the father of the new collar voter" - regularly during those years, and how he just laughed at the way that some players tried to make franchises or reputations off his theory. He knew that this sector was no more than a swing vote in certain circumstances, and he had the maturity and judgment not to overestimate it nor become a one-hit-wonder building his entire spectacular terrain around one simple concept.

Whenever I have watched the Jules Siegel championship of Mexico's Wal-Mart voters over the years, I've found it mildly humorous. First, because the existence of this sector is nothing new, not in Mexico or anywhere else. Second, because it represents a minority, not a majority, of voters. But you have deluded yourself into thinking that this sector is somehow the dominant electorate in Mexico. Get real. It is not.

And the proof that deep inside, emotionally, whether you are conscious of your own fantasies or not, that you know it is not true is your evident fear of a recount in Mexico in 2006.

The Wal-Mart voters are not a majority. But they do have more access to the levers of corruption, as well as their role in staffing the Commercial Media where their bias, like yours, defends the interests of a minority class against that of a majority class, and thus their success this year in almost pulling off the election fraud of the century. You and your Wal-Mart voters are, demographically speaking, the Mexican Sumate. So it is interesting that you bring up Sumate, because you are behaving exactly like them: You feel personally offended by the concept of the poor electing a government that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will better serve them.

The only parallel between Mexico 2006 and Venezuela 2004 is that the defining electoral phenomenon in each case is that economic class (and, I dare say, class struggle). The poor, like it or not, are still a majority in both countries. You have been more tolerant of it in Venezuela because you don't live there. And in neither case are they going to let those who have more (or the pundits that glorify those who have more) steal from them the electoral victory that they won, in each case, by casting more votes than the yuppie minority.

To quote Phil Ochs: "I'm all for the blacks and hispanics, as long as they don't move next door, so love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal." That was the sixties, when race was the defining zeitgeist. Today the zeitgeist is one of class. And you are not alone among those who think themselves liberal but when the fight emerges on your home turf you suddenly join the fascist wave of those who oppose the most harmless and normal expression of authentic democracy, which is a full, open, transparent recount, by hand, of the votes.

It's sad to see you reveal yourself as just another one of those people. You are not at all unique in it. You're just another one of them. And with it, you have painted yourself into the same corner as the rest of the "traitors to democracy" that Vicente Fox now embodies.

You started out as Jules. But you have become Vicente Fox. If I didn't have a soft spot for "the old Jules" that we used to know, it would be pretty damn funny.

Saddest of all, you have reduced yourself to making only hypothetical arguments when you flail phrases like "But if other qualified statisticians examine the claim and find it to be false, you'll dismiss them as paid shills. Or you will go on to something else. It will become irrelevant."

And yet even without that hypothetical thing - a product only of your fantasies - having happened, it is already irrelevant to you, disregarded based on a shallow and interested hypothesis without any evidence or proof. That's called fascism, Jules; the closed mindset that is basic to authoritarianism's maintenance, where it no longer matters to its adherents that an election fraud occured, it must be denied using every feeble mental gymnastic available. Is that the legacy you really wish to leave?

...whatever you're trying to say. As for the old Jules and the new Jules, I am still the same guy who caused you to have hysterics in 2000. As usual, you pile on the motives and the insults and wave your arms and so on and so forth.

The poor didn't elect any government in 2006. They voted all over the place. It's a three way race. There was no winner, except in a technical sense, with Wal-Mart Mexicans in the majority, if we accept your argument that the PRD represents the poor.

Your behavior is predictable because you always perform in the same way. The reaction to the dumb video goof by AMLO is typical. You aren't fighting over details; you are fighting over the principle of law. No wait, the principle of the rights of the poor. The principle of the right to defend posters of Stalin.

How about defending posters of Hitler?

I am having to repeatedly slap myself in the face to make sure that I am not hallucinating.  

My preferred theory right now is that the two of you cooked this all up together as a vehicle for Al Giordano to slap down the absurdities that you, Jules Siegel, are propagating in this debate.

Right out of the gate here:

That's why the PRD never, never engages in corrupt acts to get its way and the PAN and the PRI always do.

Of couse they don't!  The PRD and AMLO aren't corruptible like other men, Jules.  Which is why Narco News has so consistently and steadfastly stood in their corner, as a quick glance through this handful of shamelessly partisan rants makes clear.  It's called loyalty man.

The 311,000 extra votes may or may not exist. But if other qualified statisticians examine the claim and find it to be false, you'll dismiss them as paid shills. Or you will go on to something else. It will become irrelevant.

Good closer!  You got him square in the jaw that time.  No question but that Al Giordano is waiting on the pronouncement of "qualified statisticians" to prove to the nation that the election was as clean and pure as the driven snow job that the corporate media started pummeling us with before the pinche *&^%#^% votes had even been counted once.

Which is all this is about!  Counting the votes!  Why is that so much to ask?

DEMOCRACY!  

LIBERTY!  

JUSTICE!

In answer to...

"How about defending posters of Hitler?"

Interesting choice of questions. That's exactly what the ACLU did, years back, in Skokie, Illinois, when it defended the right of the Nazis to march. It's one of the things that defines commitment to free speech: defense of the right to say even that which we disagree with. How about you? Would you ban posters of anyone? If so, who? And... how?

I even defend your right to "hang your poster" freely here; heck, I provide you the uncensored space to do so, where you are read exactly for what you say. It is a hubris particular to the way your ego is structured that you fantasize that you cause me or anyone else here hysterics. To the contrary, I appreciate your playing of Mrs. Teasdale to my Groucho Marx, as a manner of deepening my arguments based on facts, while keeping it all entertaining enough for others to follow.

Anyway, defense of the rights to speech and the rights of the poor to speak through the ballot box is the same thing. I would hope that a guy who puts writing for soft-porn mags on his resume would understand the importance of defending all speech.

As for the economic trends in voting in Mexico 2006, you are demonstrably wrong when you claim that the vote was, economically, "all over the map."

Just look at any map of how Mexico voted: the poor south and centers went one way and the wealthier north went another.

There is a direct correlation between per capita income and the choice. It can be read by state (Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, with the poorest per capita income, went overwhelmingly to Obrador; Nuevo Leon, Guanajuato, etcetera, with the higher per capita income, went overwhelmingly to Calderon).

Another observation came today from Fox's press secretary, when saying, as evidence that social programs no longer buy votes, that among the 100 impoverished municipalities targetted by anti-poverty programs, 77 of them voted for Obrador.

You can see the difference in how the vote was cast at every level: wealthier precincts in any given city voted for Calderon, poorer ones voted for Obrador. The class divide is exactly what has occured here, except that the PRD had to share the majority poor vote with the vestiges of the PRI, whereas Calderon received the votes in the upper one-third of economic strata. I remind you, not any candidate got anything close to a "majority" so you ought to check your assumptions and revise them. It is ignorant to claim that if 30-something percent of voters went for the Wal-Mart candidate that you therefore have "Wal-Mart Mexicans in the majority."

Take a stroll through IFE's own results and check the poor states, cities and towns against the wealthier ones; it is the most obvious and stark defining factor of the election.

The only variable is how much of the poor, region by region, voted for PRD and how much voted for PRI. But the PAN got defeated by landslide margins in every impoverished region. And the PRD got defeated by landslide margins in every wealthy one. That is objective fact. Its the same as Venezuela, except that you seem to want to believe that Mexico has more economically comfortable people.

And this leads us to another factor that is emerging: a great number of the PRI voters are also upset about the Election Fraud. And I think you will see heavy social unrest in those regions, too (look at what happened in Comalcalco, Tabasco, where PRD and PRI combined got 95% of the vote; a near riot the other night when IFE officials started unsealing ballot boxes illegally), if the State persists in trying to shove a fraudulent result down the nation's throat.

But that's not how it's playing out, just yet.

Almost 2/3rds of Mexico voted against López Obrador. >36% is a minority, not a majority, in any mathematical system I know about.

PRI_1982 did not invent the "Mexican culture of corruption," nor did Porfirio Díaz. No political party invented it. A lot of it is merely corruption according to the standards of cultural imperialism.

It's really tiring and frustrating discussing these things online with you. You tend to lay out so many badly interpreted facts and outright falsehoods, that I'd have to spend many hours refuting you. Any time I check one of your statements out, there's something wrong with it. So you'll have to forgive me if I say ta-ta, Al. I need to do go something that will put some food on the table.

I myself would not allow myself to be associated in any way with any group that proudly displayed posters of Hitler or Stalin, although I might defend their right to do so. I would take it as prima facie evidence that either they were bad people or they were stupid clowns.

Maybe that's because I am an old geezer who remembers to well how the American communists among my elders felt about the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Only time will tell what happens next. Be prepared to be surprised.

Jules,

A reader just sent me this link...

http://www.myleftwing.com/showComment.do?commentId =131545

So, since six a.m., according to that link, you've been dogging another English-language reporter who is uncovering the electoral fraud in Mexico, Greg Palast, with one set of arguments (calling him racist and doing your Mr. Mexico Know-It-All act against someone who doesn't live here, something that you've had the sense not to attempt here), and then you come over here with a whole different set of silly arguments.

You seem to be on a one-man spin and disinfo campaign to detour the critical international press (those of us who are actually investigating, not just debating) that questions authority.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is how you are "putting food on the table." It does seem to be your full-time job these days, and not just here.

(Here comes the "he questioned my integrity!" rant: Yep, I'm doing that now: nobody's integrity is above questioning, no matter how much they huff and puff, and putting out false "voices of the left" to the English-speaking world is a tactic used against democracy in Venezuela, why not here, too? Maybe Mexico now has its very own version of Phil Gunson or Erik Ekvall!).

That you spend all your time - since six a.m.! - doing this instead of actual reporting and investigating - skills that you used to have - speaks volumes about the dishonesty of your claim that you don't rebut facts because you don't have time.

But, lo and behold, your signature is all over the Internet (not just here or on the "My Left Wing" blog, but also on Daily Kos and Alternet - where else have we missed it? - ever since the election), on the same Johnny-One-Note crusade of defending IFE and the current Mexican government and opposing a full recount.

At least Palast and I are also doing real reporting in between indulging your insincere questions. But evidently you're just on a kamikaze disinfo mission. Which brings me back to one of my original points when you started this two weeks ago: you are betrayed, most of all, by your own sloth. I hope stalking authentic journalists, at least, pays well. But shouldn't the work rightfully go to a Mexican?

...as I do, I welcome the competition, but at the moment, I'm working on material for the United States.

And, yes, I've been spending too much time fooling around on the Internet since the election, but we all have our vices. What you and Palast consider investigation and reporting, I consider disinformation, so I guess we're King's X on that.

As far as my integrity and spin and who's paying me and all that sort of stuff, ah well, up to your old tricks, Al? So did Subcommandante Marcos pay you for your work on the Other Campaign tour, or was it the PAN, hoping to chip a few votes off the PRD score?

Have the last word now. You earned it. It's your site. You deserve it. Because you will just say one more thing that will make you look like an utter fool, as usual.

Mexico has a complete set of laws and and electoral institutions and even an electoral court that will now hear the claims of all parties. While this is going on, there will be many political talking points issued by all involved.

It's absurd to argue that only those of the PRD and anyone else who believes the election was a fraud are valid, and to discard any answers by those who have different points of view.

I've written to Dan Feder and aske dhim to do that, but I want to make sure that the record is here that it was at my request. I don't feel that I can be associated with this forum any longer. I am not on anyone's payroll or beholden to anyone at all. I write what I want to write because I believe it and I feel the need to speak. There is no other motivation.

I think that those kinds of smears are outright McCarythism. You're part of a political organization that is on record with views that I vehemently oppose. I don't know what your financial relationship with them is and I am sorry I raised the issue above, but I think it is a fair question to ask. Are you an independent journalist? Or are you a propagandist for a cause and subject to its discipline?

That's all I have to say about it. The only reason I will ever look at this site again will be to make sure my name is not in that right hand column.

...I thought there wasn't any crisis over the Mexican election? What the hell do you call the past week? And it worth noting that your attack comes, not from the left, but from the right. At least the political stripes are showing clearly. PRD perfect? No way! Collaborators exist in all countries. But parties aren't the issue. The issue is rich and poor....and the absurdity of your argument that the poor and displaced of Mexico are slowly, gradually realising a dream that allows them to drift up an income/class ladder. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mexico, like America and the most of the world in the past 25 years, has seen a growing income/wealth stratification that increasingly concentrates more and more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer pople. And that is just raw economic statistics, supported by the right-wing press as well. .... but no matter really

...because you're not reading any of this, as you've promised us. You've had your swan song and are off in a huff!

Gotterdamerung

Like the electoral authorities that he defends, now Jules wants the record erased and censored.

That's what he wrote the following in email exchange...

From: Jules Siegel <siegel@cafecancun.com>
Date: July 13, 2006 7:35:23 PM GMT-05:00
To: webmaster@narconews.com
Subject: Please remove my name from your masthead

I really can't be associated with the site any more in good conscience. Al has accused me of being on the take one time too many. I'm not going to get into a discussion with you of his political positions nor his motives, but they are also part of my decision to make this request.

Thanks for your cooperation.

--
JULES SIEGEL Apdo. 1764, 77501-Cancun, Q. Roo, Mexico

To which the editor responded politely (with a copy to the publisher)...

From: Daniel A. Feder <dan@narconews.com>
To: Jules Siegel <siegel@cafecancun.com>
Cc: "Alberto M. Giordano" <narconews@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 13, 2006 9:31 PM
Subject: Re: Please remove my name from your masthead

Jules - sorry, but that list is an automatically generated record of all people who have contributed to the Narcosphere via their reporters' notebooks. It is not a "masthead" of staff members, but rather a directory of the content on the site. You're free to post anything you like or never post again, but the stuff that's already up there is part of the permanent content now and gets processed and organized just like any other content.

-dan

To which Jules replied with a threat...

From: Jules Siegel <siegel@cafecancun.com>
Date: July 14, 2006 5:09:59 AM GMT-05:00
To: "Daniel A. Feder" <dan@narconews.com>
Subject: Re: Please remove my name from your masthead

It says "Reporters Notebooks"

 I'm not one of your reporters. I don't have any "notebooks" on your site. Please remove my name or I will bring the matter to the attention of your ISP.

By "ISP," he means "Internet Service Provider." If Jules doesn't have the right email address to carry out his lame threat, here it is: support@voxel.net. It won't be the first nor the last time our Internet Service Provider got a complaint. It comes with the turf of having lots of readers. Voxel is the same valiant company that got hundreds of pages of threats from Banamex in 2000 seeking to silence us and Voxel told the richest banker in Mexico to pound sand. I'm sure they'll be quaking in their boots when the mighty Jules screeches at them.

One a certain level, I don't blame Jules. I'd be embarrassed, too, if I had used a public space to implode in a tantrum.

But the Narcosphere has never been censored and we're not going to start now. Jules has to live with the circumstances he agreed to when, of his own free will, he posted here. Everybody here receives equal treatment.

Jules posted 27 comments since the Mexican "election" and they are preserved for, ahem, future generations.  The historical archive of his comments shall remain.

Like any one who signed up for a copublisher account, he may edit his own Reporters' Notebook entries, even into oblivion, as he did in recent hours. But as an online newspaper that a lot of people have tried to censor or hack, we maintain very regular backups and have a full record of the dates, times and texts that posted under the category clearly marked as Reporters' Notebooks.

What Jules thinks is a "masthed" (huh? Did he put that on his resume?) is in fact an archive, in reverse chronological order, listing who last posted a notebook entry: it appears on the right side of the page. We're not going to enter into his Watergate-style cover-up and erase the evidence that he did once post notebooks here.

The comments are indelible, like this one, posted recently by Jules:

"I used a number of vulgar and very insulting terms that were the verbal equivalent of kicking someone hard in groin and  again several times in the face when he/she/it collapsed to the floor, and then urinating on the semi-conscious victim."

Or this one...

"When I insult people they feel it. My Mayan horoscope says, 'This is one who knows how to hurt with words.' It is a vice I struggle to control."

Well, this would not be the first time on the Internet that someone entered a public forum, made an ass of himself, and then revealed that he didn't post comments to shed light on issues of public importance but, rather, was on a fantasy personal power trip.

What happened here with Jules is what generally happens in those situations: Once the person realizes that he was unable to "hurt with words" - because mature people don't let words hurt us, nor do we delude ourselves that other mature people will let ours hurt them - he stomps off in a huff and makes lame, impotent, threats.

The illusions of self-importance are what get fractured, and fragile egos go looking for some other place on the Internet where, hope springs eternal, people will "share the hurt" that the person inevitably inflicts upon himself again.

What is to be expected from someone who, in one breath,  accuses others of "McCarthyism" and in the next accuses another (in this case, an anarcho-syndicalist) of being a "Stalinist"?

The hypocrisy in style corresponds to the hypocrisy in substance: One who defends an official cover-up of a massive electoral fraud will, eventually, call for other censorships and cover-ups.

As I said when this thread began two weeks ago, "People reveal their true characters at times of moral crisis."

Or as the late, great New York drag queen Jackie Curtis used to say about such people, "oh, dahling, don't worry about those people. They're with the slow class."

Here's hoping that Jules finds a forum that matches his fantasies. He wasn't ready for Prime Time here, so he's stomped out in a rage. But it's a big Internet out there. There's always, um, Alternet! And, despite his hollow vows, it wouldn't shock me if Jules hasn't finished crapping on himself here. I suppose it will depend on what his "Mayan horoscope" instructs. After all, it's a wise man that rules by the stars... and a fool that's ruled by them.

I’d like to add one observation to all of this, which is really just from personal experience – though not directly related to Mexican politics.

In my family’s history, a few generations back, you’ll find a gene pool connected to the Chicago machine. From what I’ve been told, there were a lot of strange jobs connected to working for that machine, which kept a certain political class in power for decades – until Harold Washington broke the chain for a bit by building a real coalition. Now it’s back to a Daily routine, as we all know.

Anyway, the point I was going to make is that the Chicago machine was, and is, a “liberal” party creation, just like the Bush machine is a “conservative” party creation. I would suggest, though, that all machines operate under similar laws of political physics. To articulate a few: First, they don’t aspire to represent the people, but rather only to accumulate power, so they are inherently anti-democratic. Second, they utilize the “machinery” of democracy to make their anti-democratic power grab appear legitimate.

So, back to my gene pool…. When I was a very little young’un, hearing stories about my family history, I always wondered why my grandfather (who worked as a precinct captain in Chicago under his brother, who was a Ward captain) before every election, would go out and round up the winos and get them down to the polls to vote – often more than once --for machine candidates. Of course, in between elections, everyone who worked for the machine, on that odd-job city payroll, made sure the streets were paved for those who voted the correct way, etc. However, even as a little kid, that just didn’t seem to fit with my idea of democracy. But then, some people might say that is what made Chicago the city that works, right? (Or so it would seem, until you took a drive through Cabrini-Green and vast swaths of the South Side, or those streets of desolation in between the towers of the Gold Coast.

But one thing I never wondered about is why my father walked away from all that the machine offered him as a result of “family” connections, in disgust, and at great personal sacrifice, turning down a full college ride to go pound spikes on the railroad. You see, he did believe in integrity and democracy. And I guess I grew up to pursue similar values, as children often follow in their parent’s footsteps.

I guess my point here is that the whole argument about whether Lopez or Calderon won the election is not the point. I naturally assume Fox used his “machine” to help assure his “family” continued in power, as is the objective of all “machines.” I also suspect Lopez would do the same, should he be annointed to head the Mexican “machine.”

The real question for me is how do you break the machine. And the only way I can think that through to an answer is to look at what my dad did, and multiply that simple act of courage and integrity by millions of people, so that the machine no longer has leverage over any of us.

I remain an idealist in that sense, hoping for the day when democracy is no longer a cruel joke that is used to prop up the power of this machine or the next machine.  

And whether that goal is attainable is really in our hands, not in the vote tally for liberal or conservative machine apologists, whether they be of the ilk of Lopez or Calderon.

Regardless of what you think of Harold Washington as a person, or his agenda and track record overall, I propose that he proved, for a brief moment in Chicago’s history, that the machine could be beaten. And I think his formula for that success — building a coalition, as Washington said, to fight the “good fight with unseasoned weapons and a phalanx of people”  — can work on a global scale with the realization that all politics is local; in fact, it is all about individual choice and courage and integrity. That, in the final analysis, is what I figure will determine Mexico’s fate in the days to come, and our future in the states in the years ahead.

And maybe, one day, we can all celebrate the birth of authentic democracy in the wake of realizing:

“We have destroyed the dinosaur.” — Harold Washington