The Field on the Narcosphere

By Al Giordano

Congrats to everyone who did the heavy lifting of going door to door, joining phone banks, doing data entry, and organizing your communities to make the people's voice heard.

Tonight history was made - by you.

As readers here know, I never doubted this would happen, and I said so repeatedly. While some spent the summer and fall whipped by the commercial media into Chicken Little frenzies, others went out and got it done. You know who you are.

Nor do I doubt that the US Senate is next to do it.

Not since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has any US government help for the workers and the poor this sweeping been made law.

There are still a few more slips twixt the cup and the lip, there will be more pushing and shoving on the Senate side, but if organizers keep organizing, this will not fail.

Enjoy the video...

Update: And I'd also just say... what Booman said.

Al Giordano

With the agreed-upon November 5 deadline for restitution of Honduras President Manuel Zelaya approaching, the White House has just sent in a big gun. US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis - arguably the most progressive member of the Obama cabinet - was appointed today to be one of four members of the "Verification Commission" that is charged with making sure all sides comply with last Friday's agreement signed in Tegucigalpa to end the coup d'etat.

The agreement's timeline is clear as day:

October 30, 2009

1. Signing and entrance of the Accord into effect.

2. Formal delivery of the Accord to Congress for the effects of Point 5, “Regarding the Executive Power.”

November 2, 2009

1. Formation of the Verification Commission.

After the signing of this Accord and no later than November 5

1. Formation and installation of the National Unity and Reconciliation Government.

Other members of the verification committee are former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, President Zelaya's UN Ambassador Jorge Eduardo Reina Idiaquez and coup regime lackey Arturo Corrales Alvarez, who will no doubt be outnumbered by the other three if he tries to join the anti-democracy extremists of the coup regime in stalling implementation of the agreement.

Lagos is a particularly interesting addition to the Verification Commission. In 1972, Chilean President Salvador Allende nominated him as ambassador to the Soviet Union and Congress refused to vote on his nomination. After the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile he was forced into exile to Argentina and then the United States. He returned to Chile to lead the resistance against the coup regime of General Augusto Pinochet, including the successful "vote no" referendum of 1988 that brought down the then fifteen-year-old coup regime.

That the White House chose Secretary Solis - obviously not from the State Department, but a cabinet member on equal footing with Secretary Hillary Clinton - sends a clear message that it means business (and perhaps that the hemming and hawing that characterized State's mixed-message behavior toward the Honduras crisis all summer long has come to its overdue conclusion). Solis is strongly allied with labor union organizations in the US, which have their own alliances with many of the unions that make the backbone of the Honduran Civil Resistance.

In addition to speaking Spanish, both Solis and Lagos know plenty about how civil resistance works and how to combat the stalling tactics of those in power. Solis already bested the stalling tactics of Republicans in the US Congress earlier this year that attempted to block her nomination. Lagos has already dismantled one coup regime. He now gets the chance to dismantle another.

By Al Giordano

The newsroom now has a new accessory: a whiteboard, just like Dr. House’s.

In a little over 48 hours comes the Sunday night deadline for completed applications to the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism 2010 session to take place next February 3 to 13 on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

And over the next two weeks, the names of 24 scholarship recipients who will attend that ten-day intensive training session on Journalism and Civil Resistance are going up on that whiteboard.

They'll be learning and producing quality news reports, viral videos and a documentary side by side with 48 professors (a good number of whom graduated from or taught at this school in previous years), collectively with hundreds of years experience doing investigative journalism and/or winning civil resistance campaigns.

As of tonight, two days before deadline, completed applications have already come in from communicators in the following lands: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Perú, the United States and Venezuela. And, lo’ and behold, there are some gi ft-wrapped items postmarked Australia, India, Great Britain, Pakistan, Spain, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia… Already, we have promising candidates from every populated continent on this earth. (And the final 48 hours, in past years, has been when the bulk of them come rolling in.)

Of course, I’m not the sort to be content just looking at or shaking the boxes: I’ve opened each and every one of the early applications already and begun studying them. And I get even more excited beholding the talents of conscience to choose from for the class of 2010. Thinking about the works its members will do – with us, and with others, just like those that came before them - for years to come is one of the best parts of this job.

The board still has a lot of white space on it, waiting to be filled with 24 names.

Maybe one of them will be yours.

English language applications are still available for the next 48 hours by sending an email to app@narconews.com. Spanish language applications can be received by emailing sol@narconews.com.

Don’t miss the Sunday night deadline (midnight pacific time). The door to the future of the Authentic Journalism renaissance remains open ‘til then.

By Al Giordano

US officials and commercial media organizations are popping champagne corks prematurely over a reported US-brokered “deal” to return Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to (limited) power, but the two sides that reportedly signed the agreement already disagree over what exactly it says.

Reuters reports that coup “president” Micheletti has agreed to step down:

”I have authorized my negotiating team to sign a deal that marks the beginning of the end of the country’s political situation,” Micheletti told reporters on Thursday night.

He said Zelaya could return to office after a vote in Congress that would be authorized by the country’s Supreme Court. The deal would also require both sides to recognize the result of a Nov. 29 presidential election and would transfer control of the army to the top electoral court.

If approved by Congress, Zelaya would be able to finish out his presidential term, which ends in January. It was not clear what would happen to other elements o f the agreement if Congress votes against Zelaya’s restoration.

(Bold type mine, for emphasis.)

But Micheletti’s claim that a Congressional vote to restore Zelaya would require Supreme Court authorization is a flat out lie, according to a source with Zelaya inside his Brazilian Embassy refuge in Tegucigalpa: “That is what the golpistas have put out, but that is NOT the accord… The Supreme Court gives its non-binding opinion to the Congress, but the key is that all of this takes time, time that the golpistas want to keep taking.”

While there is some healthy distrust already over whether Congress will gin up on its end and really vote to restore Zelaya, that probably will be easier to accomplish than many believe. Two words: Pepe Lobo. The National Party candidate for President, Lobo is leading in the polls. He obviously wants very much for the November 29 “elections” to become internationally recognized elections. His party holds 55 of 128 seats in Honduras’ unicameral legislature, just ten short of a majority. There are at least 22 Liberal Party members that have publicly indicated they want Zelaya back as president, plus 11 minor party legislators most of whom are likely to go along with such a deal. Faced with such a patchwork majority, look for most of the 62 Liberal Party members in Congress to fold and go with the flow. The Congressional vote is not likely to prove a stumbling block to implementing this agreement.

The real problem could be the authoritarian Supreme Court. Micheletti’s invention of a non-existent clause in the agreement, one that requires the court’s approval of it, points to where the stalling tac tic will come from. This is the same Supreme Court that carried out the coup d’etat on June 28 and has micro-managed the regime’s affairs all summer and fall on a level that would not be appropriate or legal in most countries. Because Honduras’ 1982 Constitution is such a self-conflicted document with many articles that contradict each other, the court has been cherry-picking which laws to discard and which to interpret, often badly.

What the summer of 2009 in Honduras has demonstrated is that democracies need not only worry about excesses of executive branch power. In this case, it is the judicial branch that proved the primary and most dangerous usurper of democracy.

If Micheletti keeps insisting that this so-called “agreement” requires Supreme Court ratification, look for this game to go into extra innings before any resolution can happen.

On the other hand, if Secretary Clinton and her team of negotiation babysitters got their ducks and supreme court members in line ahead of time – reflecting a level of attention to detail that they haven’t displayed all summer long – then, yes, this deal would be likely to succeed.

The devil will be in the details, and their implementation. Until it’s clear that the Supreme Court or Congress won’t stand in the way, there is no deal.

And I’ll repeat: The problem won’t likely come from Congress, but, rather, a continuance of the real problem all along: the despotic, arbitrary and anti-democracy tendencies of the Honduras Supreme Court.

Update: Pepe Lobo weighs in, exactly as we predicted he would:

"We are willing to be cooperative in Congress with the agreement of the negotiators," Porfirio Lobo, a National Party lawmaker who is favored to win the Nov. 29 presidential elections, said Friday. "The best decision for Honduras will be taken."

(And it's worth noting, once again, how embarrassingly clumsy and wrongheaded the La La Land prognostications are from a certain golpista corner of the Ugly American diaspora of the expat community in Honduras. Last night, the anonymous blogger who calls herself La Gringa told her gullible readers: "presidential candidate Pepe Lobo is asking the Nacionalistas to abstain." The sheer stupidity and inability to deduce what is in Lobo's best interests is staggering, but also typical.)

Update II: Statement from the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d'Etat:

1. We celebrate the coming restitution of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales as a popular victory over the cruel interests of the golpista oligarchy. This victory has been won through more than four months of struggle and sacrifice by the people, that in spite of the savage repression unleashed by the repressive corps of the state in the hands of the dominant class has known how to resist and grow in conscience and organization becoming an uncontainable social force.

2. The Dictatorship's signature on the document that establishes "the return of the executive branch to its status prior to June 28" represents explicit acceptance of what in Honduras had been a coup d'etat that must be removed to return to institutional order and guarantee a democratic environment in which the people can make use of its right to transform society.

3. We demand that the agreements that are signed at the negotiating table be ratified expeditiously by the National Congress. In that sense, we alert all our compañeros and compañeras nationwide to join in the pressure actions so that the document is complied with immediatley.

4. We reiterate that the National Constituent Assembly is an absolute aspiration of the Honduran people and a nonnegotiable right for which we will continue struggling in the streets, until achieving the refoundation of society to exist in justice, equality and true democracy.

"AFTER 125 DAYS OF STRUGGLE NOBODY GIVES UP"

Tegucigalpa, M.D.C. 30 de octubre de 2009

(Translated by Narco News.)

Update III: I've now uploaded a .pdf copy of the agreement signed in Tegucigalpa.

Update IV: And now, in English.

By Al Giordano

Prior to October 20, just a week ago, the “conventional wisdom” among Washington DC-centric pundits and bloggers was that the so-called “public option” on the upcoming national health care bill was dead in the water.

Since October 20, the same voices have shifted to a presumption that the public option – in which the US government would create its own health program (much like it already has for members of Congress) to compete with private insurance companies, bring their prices down, and offer another option to citizens – is now a done deal and the remaining question is what kind of public option will be approved by Congress.

What changed on October 20 to so radically shift the beltway CW?

315,023 phone calls – deployed by Organizing for America, President Obama’s grassroots political arm – that flooded the US Capitol switchboard in a single day: that, and that alone, is what shifted the ground beneath the health care debate. Those that participated in organizing that warning shot know it even while many who did not lift a finger for it look for other explanations for this positive shift in the discourse.

Opponents have framed the public option as a stealth first step to a national “single payer” plan of universal national health care administrated by the government, and they may well be proved right about that in years to come. Meanwhile, the fact that the President, years ago as an Illinois state senator, supported a single payer solution, has been bandied about by some proponents this year as evidence that he either sold out “the base” (what some white college educated progressives call, um, some white college educated progressives) or that his attention to practical realities somehow indicate that he lacks a political backbone.

It’s been an entire summer of silliness from both of those camps; from the “Obama is a socialist” club to “Obama is another Bush” chorus, the infantile nature of so much of US politics has been on full display with the health care debate as its fulcrum.

Although during this same Summer of Shove of 2009, the President was repeatedly clear on his desire for a public option in the health care law that has eluded every administration since that of Harry Truman in the 1940s and 50s, he was accused again and again of not really wanting it or seeking it. Daily Kos blogger Brooklynbadboy offers an entertaining inventory of pundits and bloggers who “declared the public option dead.”

Among them are those like the whiny voice of blogger Jane Hamsher - still bitter that Obama beat her candidate Clinton in the primaries - who on August 17 declared, “Many people are rightly upset that the White House is sending stronger and stronger signals that they are willing to jettison a public option.  What was once the defining feature of the Obama health care plan has now been dismissed with a bipartisan flourish.” Then on September 10 repeated, “the White House has been trying to get out from under th e burden of supporting the public option for weeks.” Then on September 18 re-repeated, “President Obama has been desperate to ditch the public option for weeks.”

Such prattling has been duly featured at the Huffington Post along with daily “reports” (read: rumors based mainly on the statements of unnamed sources inside the beltway, but played as hard news) to feed the HuffPo editorial line, which goes like this: Obama doesn’t want a public option on health care and so “the base” (white college educated progressives, especially of the blogging tendency) has to “make him do it.”

That narrative has been a good example of the typical self-aggrandizing attempt by a certain tendency to insist that the story is about them (most of whom already do have health insurance, by the way, and don’t mix very much with we hoi polloi that do not).

I’ll offer an alternative view, informed by my study of Obama’s political modus operandi and my bias and experience that community organizing usually proves a thousand times more effective on any matter than poutrage blogging or its corresponding activist circle jerk: Almost none of those complaining voices participated in Organizing for America’s October 20 day of action that had set a goal of 100,000 phone calls to Congress demanding health care and exceeded that goal three times over. If any of the poutrage bloggers even mentioned it, much less promoted it or urged readers to join in that show of grassroots muscle, I didn’t notice, and probably you didn’t either.

The poutrage bloggers are evidently hostile to the entire idea of community organizing; that ordinary people can make extraordinary things happen by reaching outside of the beltway, recruiting each other, and deploying such human forces strategically and surgically to impose public opinion onto Washington from outside of it. History now reflects that those 300,000 plus phone calls to Congress on October 20 marked the turning point in the quest for a public option on a Capitol Hill where some key Senators had to be dragged kicking and screaming into getting out of its way. Suddenly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who only began publicly touting the public option after his and other senators’ phone lines were lit up – is being proclaimed by some as the hero of the story who somehow got out in front of the White House in its favor.

Suddenly Reid – the schlamozel of so much poutrage blogging before - is their standard bearer, only because he serves their narrative that seeks to reserve credit for themselves for the coming public option health care program, and glances jealously at the President and his allied Organizing for America, who they see as competition over credit for organizing the the members of the poutrage club did not do.

Which brings us to the next media sensation in the debate as health care legislation rounds third base and heads toward the home plate: What is looking increasingly like an “opt out” provision in the bill which would gain the remaining stragglers among Democratic US Senators who have been hostile to the public option all summer long. It is a compromise – as legislation always involves – that would allow individual states (presumably via state legislatures, although the final bill hasn’t been written yet) to “opt out” of the public option on health care.

“Opting out” is perhaps not the right term for what would happen if, say, Oklahoma’s - or another state's - legislature and governor availed themselves of that provision. What they would really be doing, in effect, is prohibiting their own citizens from benefiting from the national public health care program, imposing only private insurance company options upon those citizens.

What nobody has mentioned so far – so let me please do so – is the political trap an “opt out” provision would set for health care opponents, particularly those in the Republican Party.

Let’s imagine that after more than 60 years of failure, Congress finally, this fall, approves a health care bill and that it has a public option but also with the “opt out” provision for states. Americans throughout the land – particularly the tens of millions without any health insurance at all and the many more who are unhappy with their private sector health plans – will feel a great wave of relief and hope for improvement of their own families’ daily lives.

Any state legislature and governor that then decides to “opt out” – thus denying their own citizens the option to sign up for national government sponsored health insurance – will then have provoked a lasting political storm upon themselves. It will become very personal, as people realize that Governor Smith or State Senator Jones directly denied their children what other Americans have won.

In the 26 states – 24 of them west of the Mississippi – that have statewide referenda processes, any state that opted out would be subject to public referendum campaigns aimed at reversing the opt-out. These would be a community organizer’s dream and an anti-public option politician’s nightmare. Even in those states without referendum processes, the public ire would be focused on those state legislators and governors that denied their own citizens access to what citizens in other states will have: a federal health insurance option to compete with those offered by the big insurance companies.

All political hell would break loose in any state where the legislature and governor opted out of national public health care, because they won’t really be opting out, but, rather, would be slamming a door on their own constituents. In those states, entrenched legislators once thought to be permanent in their seats would become electorally vulnerable. In the 2010 and 2012 elections many will be unseated by challengers who vow to return the stolen public health care option to the people. Such a dynamic would surely fall more heavily on Republicans, but also on some conservative Democrats as well.

The “opt out” clause, on a policy level, is a distasteful compromise, but on the level of electoral politics it is pure political gold, especially for pro-public health care Democrats. It could lead Republican legislatures and governors in key states to be replaced by Democratic majorities. It would become the battle cry to register millions of non-voters from the most marginalized sectors of society – those without any health insurance at all, first and foremost – to inundate the polling places in years to come.

In sum, as the various compromise options on getting a public health care option through the US Senate go, the "opt out" public option is the one that most sets a trap for opponents for years to come. It is a dare, really: Go ahead and try to deny your own state’s citizens what millions of Americans have now won for their families and themselves. You’ll be sorry if you do.

It is a long distance runner’s strategy, made possible on a single day – October 20 – by the unsung organizers that flooded the Capitol switchboard. And should that be the result of the final legislation that comes through Congress, it will set in motion a chain reaction of political firestorms that offer state-by-state organizing opportunities to continue to change the political map in the United States for the better, and bring the entire country, step-by-step, closer to a future single payer health care plan.

Update: And right on cue, another embittered Clinton '08 supporter (indeed, the rocket scientist staffer behind the then-Senator's lackluster "online" campaign, outgunned and outmaneuvered at every step by Obama's), Peter Daou, unwittingly reveals that, yes, it's all about who gets credit! Ha ha. His spiel is titled, "Don't Bother Waiting for Bloggers to Get Credit for the Public Option." Hey Peter, don't break your typing arm by trying to pat yourself on the back. And notice that he doesn't even mention the 315,023 phone calls generated to Congress a week ago? He could have just as well typed, "LA LA LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING!"

Update II: Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, sees and hears the same train comin' down the track.

By Al Giordano

A company called the Audit Bureau of Circulation measures how many actual newspapers are sold by US dailies and has just released its September 2009 six-month report. Newspaper companies pay the Audit Bureau to conduct this measurement to be able to show potential advertisers how many readers - especially the upscale kind - their ads will potentially reach.

The latest audit brings, not surprisingly, very bad news for the American newspaper and its corporate model of journalism.

Of the 25 most widely read newspapers in the US, all but the Wall Street Journal – treading water at 2,024,269 readers, the Journal is now the de facto top daily in the country (but that, with only a tiny elite of 0.6 percent of US residents reading its pages) – have lost significant readership since a year ago, according to the Audit Bureau.

USA Today’s circulation dropped 17.5 percent in one year to 1.9 million, sinking it to second place. Reportedly the paper can no longer afford to artificially boost its circulation numbers by providing a free copy at your hotel room door and then counting you as one of its “readers.”

The “big three” dailies are in an ever-faster free fall: The third place New York Times’ readership fell 7.3 percent and is now at under a million readers a day. Fourth place Los Angeles Times, now at 657,467 readers, lost 11 percent of its customers. And the fifth ranked Washington Post, at 582,844 readers, lost 6.4 percent.

The sixth and seventh place finishers – the New York tabloids, the News and the Post - hover near half-a-million readers apiece. That means in what used to be a “newspaper town” of the Big Apple, if we combine the entire circulations of the Journal, the Times, the News and the Post, even including their national circulation, together they don’t reach even four million readers in a metropolitan area of 18 million.

It’s over. The advertiser-funded model of daily newspapers is now circling the drain.

Today’s Audit Bureau numbers also disprove one of the theories that newspaper ideologues have floated in recent years: that the larger “regional” papers – like the Timeses of NY and LA and the Post of DC – would emerge to gobble up the readers of other dying dailies in geographic proximity to become healthy regional giants. The data clearly demonstrates that that ain’t happening at all.

When the topic comes up, this final generation of daily newspaper editors and reporters typically takes its hands off its eyes and ears just long enough to blurt out a rant about how “bloggers” can never replace newspapers. But before one can engage them with, say, real facts (those mere props in the US daily newspaper mythology) about other news sources that are growing and thriving today (like this online newspaper you're reading right now, much more diverse in our models than blogs only), and the different methods we use to investigate and report the news, these Cro-magnons typically go back to the monkey-see monkey-do pose as if in tantrum to express that they’re not listening.

In their increasingly public ruminations about why this is “happening to them” there is zero self-reflection about the biggest factor behind their demise: That they have lost credibility with their former public. Asking “why” just isn’t done in polite company. The big dirty secret that they must deny at all costs is that they did this to themselves by abandoning the interests of the majority of the public in favor of targeting only those readers with expendable cash that advertisers want to reach.

Which is why it is particularly poetic that, for example, the Miami Herald, which had transparently become what I’ve long called “Oligarch’s Daily” in its efforts to pander to the wretched refuse of the oligarch diaspora in Southern Florida, saw its circulation fall over the last year by 23 percent to just 162,260: it now reaches only three percent of its 5.4 million metropolitan area population. Those numbers simply are not sustainable to keep fielding a gaggle of professional simulators like Frances Robles to pretend to be “journalists” in order to disinform the US public about events in Latin America. The pink slip begins its inexorable journey into hers and others’ hands. It truly is only a matter of time.

There are days when this online newspaper exceeds the daily readership of most of those US dailies, and we’re not even close in sheer numbers to those like Markos Moulitsas and Andrew Sullivan who out-gun all of them every single day in circulation.

And yet while the US version of the newspaper is dying, we’ve written about print news projects in Latin America that are growing while their north-of-the-border counterparts are shriveling up. The daily Por Esto! in less than two decades became the third largest daily in Mexico by opening its arms and doors to the larger community and hosting public assemblies to listen to its readers rather than just talk at them.

Today, Narco News correspondent Belén Fernández reports on the fast growth of Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ El Libertador (and the efforts by the coup regime to buy its loyalty and then to shut it down when it could not be bought), now with a daily readership of over 80,000 in a country of 7.5 million. By the numbers, it already enjoys a larger percent of the national population’s readership than the largest daily in the US, one which was founded in 1882.

Some of us professional journalists, allied with the lay citizenry in our distrust of the advertiser model of media, saw this coming years ago and set about building the authentic journalism renaissance from below. Our work is an international hemispheric laboratory in creating what will replace the old model of daily newspapers. We do it without investors or advertisers. That you, kind reader, are here reading these words is your first evidence that it is working.

And every time a daily newspaper of the obsolete model lays off another round of reporters, more of them come to us to study and learn the craft anew from this very different and opposite angle: from below, as opposed to the top down model that encrusted around them and doomed the previous version of their careers.

Truth is, there is a direct correlation between the space in the media sphere that gets freed up every time a daily newspaper loses circ or dies and the increased reach that we and others have as we replace them with a better more people-powered model.

So don’t mourn the American daily newspaper. Anything you liked about it will continue but from a different set of new media. The time will come when one or more of those publications, or a new one yet to come in the US, will turn to the models that work for the daily Por Esto! or El Libertador or others South of the border, kissing their slavish dependence on advertisers goodbye and throwing their lot in, instead, with the larger multitudes of society.

The garden of authentic democracy grows stronger when the weeds are pulled out of the soil. And so day in, day out, we tend to this garden, water and feed it, watching the seeds we planted and protected grow bigger and stronger than the former parasitical vines and weeds that society mistook, based only on their size, for the garden itself. It’s all good: Evolution wins again.