From RTT news:

“A prominent newspaper in Mexico’s border city of Ciudad Juarez has published an editorial requesting guidelines on media publishing from drug cartels operating in the city after one of its employees was shot dead by suspected drug operatives last week. The unprecedented editorial carried by the El Diario de Juarez newspaper on its front page on Sunday was prompted by the killing of Luis Carlos Santiago, 21-year-old photographer working for the paper, last week.”

The El Diario de Juarez reads, “The loss of two reporters from this publishing house in less than two years represents an irreparable sorrow for all of us who work here, and, in particular, for their families. We do not want more deaths. We do not want more injuries or even more intimidation. It is impossible to exercise our role in these conditions. Tell us, then, what do you expect of us as a medium?”

Click here for the original version in Spanish.

It’s limiting to see the billionaire Koch Brothers’ funding of arguments against big government and socialism as hypocritical in light of their pursuit of big government money and ties to socialism. “Hypocritical” is a rational conclusion, but in cases where you’re talking about business-funded ideology, it strikes me as a perspective that doesn’t generate any kind of serious economic outrage, doesn’t lead anywhere, except to say that there’s an inconsistency there.

When a business interest funds an ideology the point is to use it to get richer and more powerful.

Along the way, there is a visionary dimension as well; the person might actually believe in what they are funding and not make the connection that their income isn’t in sync, they might knowingly fund a cause in spite of their business that they may personally have come to detest, or sometimes it’s an interesting way to project a defense of your own sins; much in the way that slave owners of the past frequently talked about their moral duty to teach their slaves not to be so lazy, and used corporal punishment. Looking at the Kochs’ approach, my sense is that it’s mostly to get rich and powerful, with a dash of sin projection tossed in, and a sprinkle or two of genuine belief.

So now for the juice promised in the headline: my colleague Yasha Levine has penned a very devastating article for the New York Observer on 7 ways the Kochs make their money that really doesn’t jibe with the ideology that they pour tens of millions into every year (to further their power and wealth). More devastating than Jane Mayer, whose only real punch in her New Yorker feature on the Koch brothers I thought was to link to David Koch being on the National Cancer Advisory Board while his company lobbyied to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen. The Kochs produce 2.2 billion pounds of it a year. (Most folks are going to miss that, because in typical East Coast elite journalism fashion, it was buried deep near the end of the article).

Levine’s article lands real punches. Thanks to Levine, here’s what we know:

1.  — “In 1998, Koch Industries entered into a lucrative partnership with two state-owned companies-one Venezuelan, the other Italian-to open a massive $1 billion nitrogen-based fertilizer plant in Venezuela called Fertinitro. … For Koch Industries, whose role in the partnership is to unload half of the 6 million tons of fertilizer produced by Fertinitro every year on the American market, that equals up to $123.6 million in subsidies every year.” Get that? A billion-dollar double partnership with two state-owned companies.

2. – “Two years before founding the influential Cato Institute, Charles Koch bought a supertanker from a communist regime.”

3. — “For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador … has something in the neighborhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit.”

4. — “In 2006, Koch Industries acquired pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific for a $21-billion cash payment, allowing the Koch brothers to tap into a whole new area of government largesse: the ability to log public forests for private gain and have taxpayers cover the operating costs.”

5. — “Just two weeks ago, Koch Industries got into the ethanol business by buying two ethanol plants in Iowa. Other than defense, ethanol is possibly the most subsidized industry in America.”

6. — “As far as libertarians are concerned, eminent domain is a socialist tyranny straight out of the Leninist playbook, as it recognizes the government as the real owner of all land and vests it with the power to expropriate private property for alleged public good. … Charles Koch is clear on this. “Countries that clearly define and protect individual private property rights stimulate investment and grow,” he writes in his book The Science of Success. “Those that threaten and confiscate private property lose capital and decline. .. Koch Industries oil pipeline recently built in Minnesota shows that Charles Koch does not see an is anything wrong with the government confiscating private property, as long as he stands to make a profit. Completed in 2008, the 304-mile line now carries crude oil from the Canadian border to a Koch Industries refinery near the Twin Cities area via a two-foot-wide pipe. ….  “1,000-plus landowners who were forced to handover their private property so that Koch Industries could run its pipeline…”

7. — “Before Fredrick Koch suddenly developed a pinko paranoia and helped start up the John Birch Society, he was making piles of cash laying the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure in the 1920s and early 1930s.”

Well done, Yasha. Bravo New York Observer for having the guts to say this in the New York media market. (Will it appear in print?) Compare what New York Magazine did for the Kochs: Uber-investigative journalist Charles Lewis casually told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman last week that the “fawning” profile on David Koch they published was essentially “planted” as a kind of prebuttal to soften the blows of Mayer’s profile. Levine and his partner Mark Ames were there to document the birth moment of the Tea Party, when no one else was paying attention, and the first to tie it to… the Koch-funded Freedom Works. Credit to them both on this.

Levine’s case is lock-tight — the Kochs make a fortune through state government welfare — American and Venezuelan — in all kinds of ways. Forget “hypocrisy” — I want to cut off the Kochs’ access to our money, common wealth and private property, which they in turn use to fund an ideology that makes it harder for normal people to get their own fair share and enjoy on some kind of human, as opposed to billionaire-inhuman, scale.

Campaign journalism in this country  tends to have a mean fun-hating streak. The higher stakes the election, the greater a crime it is for candidates to have a history of brushes with fun in their lives. Florida’s Senate race is one of the KEY RACES this November,  and many outlets that would normally publish articles putting the Democrat in a positive light have made a calculation that realistically, prag-matic-ally, it’s a good idea to support independent candidate Charlie Crist in the race, not the billionaire Democrat Jeff Greene. That way, Republican Mario Rubio, most evil of the candidates, is less likely to get elected in the three-cornered-hat race.

Simple as that, as far as I can see.

And it’s the approach I see oozing from Huffington Post’s article about how Jeff Greene did typical male billionaire things on his typically Florida-billionaire yacht: Strippers, booze — and vomit. Vomit, some of the hardest evidence of fun you can find in this fun-starved country. And so, we learn that Jeff Greene’s yacht had a reputation of being “vomit caked.” Get it? That means he didn’t just take his boat out once for fun, he had lots n’ lots of parties on it. Lots of his brand of fun. And Greene’s shopping trip to Cuba in his yacht is another chance to take a pointless whack at him: “Florida is filled with Cubans who don’t exactly taking a liking to American billionaires taking jaunts down to Cuba to go on shopping excursions.”

It’s placebo politics to look at elections like this, and it’s part and parcel of this country’s war on fun. Greene’s idea of fun might not be your  idea of fun, but so what. In this context, it doesn’t really matter. Would Greene be more likely vote to extend unemployment benefits than Crist? Would a shopping trip to Cuba piss off the average Cuban-American more than Crist saying he didn’t support the stimulus bill Washington passed last year? We don’t know, because it’s finger pointing time at fun-having, yacht-owning, Ukrainian-stripper-hiring Jeff Greene.

Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl is stinking rich, but boring, and therefore not a target. John Kerry is stinking rich, the richest senator in fact…. and he owns a yacht, but he knows how to keep his fun sails trimmed. He knows to keep his yacht controversies over tax haven issues; to try and deprive his own home state $500,000 in revenues for its coffers. That’s wrist-slapping material; that’s small stuff. That’s not “vomit-caked” fun.

Big news in medialand.

FROM THE AP:

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose so-called “net neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.

The ruling also marks a serious setback for the FCC, which is trying to officially set net neutrality regulations. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski argues that such rules are needed to prevent phone and cable companies from using their control over Internet access to favor some online content and services over others.

The decision also has serious implications for the massive national broadband plan released by the FCC last month. The FCC needs clear authority to regulate broadband in order to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including a proposal to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities.

The court case centered on Comcast’s challenge of a 2008 FCC order banning the company from blocking its broadband subscribers from using an online file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent. The commission, at the time headed by Republican Kevin Martin, based its order on a set of net-neutrality principles it adopted in 2005 to prevent broadband providers from becoming online gatekeepers. Those principles have guided the FCC’s enforcement of communications laws on a case-by-case basis, and now Genachowski is trying to formalize those rules.

Here’s the link to the Court’s decision

Check out Mark Fiore’s latest cartoon video — it’s spot on:

“Learn to Speak Tea Bag: “You too can speak Tea Bag, and what better time to learn than now? The pathway to health care reform is through appropriate language!”

Lucky visitors to the upcoming SXSW film festival in Austin this weekend have a chance to see the opening of a new documentary about psychedelic pioneer Dr. Sasha Shulgin titled, Dirty Pictures:

“Shulgin’s alchemy has earned him the title “The Godfather of Psychedelics,” and a reputation as one of the great chemists of the 20th century.

Working from a lab in his home, and using himself and his wife Ann as test subjects, Shulgin’s discoveries have brought him into conflict with the law but made him a worldwide underground hero. The two books they co-authored, “Pihkal” and “Tihkal”, have built a foundation for cutting-edge neuroscience and medical research. DIRTY PICTURES examines the impact of Dr. Shulgin’s lifelong quest to unlock the complexities of the human mind.

I have met hundreds of people who have taken the drugs first  discovered by Shulgin, and I can’t think of one who regretted taking the leap of faith. The life of Shulgin is worth learning about first-hand, and so are his many chemical discoveries.

Dirty Pictures Trailer

Here’s a snip from a recent Indiewire interview with the director, Etienne Sauret:

Sauret on what lead him to make “Dirty Pictures”…

In 2005 a friend who runs a drug prevention center in the UK wanted to bring Sasha to London to speak at a conference. When Sasha couldn’t attend, we went to California and made a short film for the conference. While filming, I found Sasha and his wife Ann to be truly unusual and endearing. Later, when I was editing the footage, my office interns kept stopping by and asking “who IS this guy?” I never thought Sasha, a wild man with white hair, big white eyebrows and a child-like smile would be so appealing to people in their 20’s, and I thought that if Sasha could stop them in their tracks and hold their attention, making a longer film about both Ann and Sasha was worth pursuing. I soon began to realize that there was a lot more to the story that I initially imagined. Sasha’s been an underground hero for decades, sporadically doing interviews and speaking in engagements, but people generally often saw him as “Doctor X(cstasy)” and asked the same questions, which he often answered the same way. I didn’t know as much about him as some of those interviewer / fans, and this allowed me to ask questions he didn’t expect, and not ask the questions he expected. This brought out something new and fresh, even though he’s been publicly speaking about his work for years. I also deliberately avoided any in-depth research on the drug ecstacy. I was more curious about Ann and Sasha as human beings whose chosen path happened to be Psychedelics. We spent a lot of time together making the film over five years, and became very close.  So at some point it was not as much filming him as a subject, as it was being together, engaging one another in conversations, traveling together. As for our rapport, the trust evolved with time, and I think that you should give the courtesy of time to somebody you film, to get acquainted, to earn their trust. You wouldn’t just jump in and start asking questions to a friend, so why would you do that to a film subject? Also, you also have to really care for that person, because if you don’t they will sense it.

If you can’t take out the illegal drug market, at least you can take out the music genre it has spawned. That seems to be the logic of the Mexican government. As Phillip S. Smith at DrugWarChronicle writes,

Under a bill presented to Mexico’s congress last week by the ruling National Action Party (PAN), musicians could be sent to prison for playing songs that glorify the drug trade. People who produce or perform songs or films that glamorize criminality could be imprisoned for up to three years, according to the proposed legislation.

The bill is aimed squarely at narcocorridos, the norteño musical form typically featuring men in cowboy hats playing guitars, accordions, and drums, and singing about the exploits, trials, and tribulations of people in the drug trade. Corridos have been a border musical form for more than a century, but in the past, their themes tended to romance, revolution, and banditry.

These days, narcocorridos are popular on both sides of the border, with groups like Los Tigres del Norte or Los Tucanes de Tijuana pulling in crowds of tens of thousands in Tucson and Torreon, Austin and Aguascalientes. But as with gangsta rap in the US, politicians, law enforcement officials, and moral entrepreneurs have denounced the form for glorifying Mexico’s wealthy, violent drug trade.

Traffickers have been known to pipe taunting or threatening messages accompanied by narcocorridos into police radio networks after some killings. And while narcocorridos often lament personal disasters in the drug trade, they also extol successes, lionize leading traffickers, and ridicule security forces.

I looked around to find translated narcocorrido lyrics. Here’s one translated verse from Lupillo Rivera:

“A ballplayer, gentlemen, throws balls in the park. I am a ballplayer, but of a different sort. If you do not understand me, friends, allow me to explain. The little balls I throw are of pure white powder, It is a very good vitamin to get you stirred up, And a toke of marijuana will serve to relax you.”

Check out Elijah Wald’s site on the Narcocorridos – he points to Los Tigres del Norte as the pioneers: “the dominant band in the field for the last 30 years. Los Tigres are kind of a Mexican equivalent of the Rolling Stones and Willie Nelson combined, the biggest ‘roots music’ stars on the scene. Their albums sell in the millions, and their concerts can draw upwards of 100,000 screaming fans.”