In 2004, Wal-Mart de Mexico built a supermarket within a mile of the pyramids of Teotihuacán, an important cultural landmark in Mexico. How did they do it? By paying a $52,000 bribe! For the rest, check out an important and well-reported piece in yesterday’s New York Times: “How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico”
A poster general for American decline, David Petraeus will be a footnote to history, a man out for himself who simply went a bridge or a book too far. George W. and crew were the real thing: genuine mad visionaries who simply mistook their dreams and fantasies for reality.
But wasn’t it fun while it lasted? Wasn’t it a blast to occupy Washington, be treated as a demi-god, go to Pirate-themed parties in Tampa with a 28-motorcycle police escort, and direct your own biography… even if it did end as Fifty Shades of Khaki?
In his 1987 Princeton dissertation, David Petraeus wrote this on perception: “What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred.” On this and other subjects, he was certainly no dope, but he was a huckster — for himself (given his particular version of self-love), and for a dream already going down in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he was just one of many promoters out there in those years pushing product (including himself): the top officials of the Bush administration, gaggles of neocons, gangs of military intellectuals, hordes of think tanks linked to serried ranks of pundits. All of them imagining Washington as a battlefield for the ages, all assuming that the struggle for “perception” was on the home front alone.
Until recently, here was the open secret of Petraeus’s life: he may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him.
Don’t miss Andy Kroll’s new piece at MoJo, where he writes:
“GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, the wonky Wisconsinite who has proposed privatizing Medicare and cutting other entitlement programs, was left red-faced a few weeks ago when he was spotted sharing two $350 bottles of wine at a posh French restaurant in Washington, DC. His drinking buddies: a hedge fund manager and a University of Chicago economist.”
Read it (and weep) at: Activists Bash Paul Ryan’s $350 Pinot Splurge with Faux Wine Tasting | Mother Jones)
Writing about the Guardian’s brilliant work on the News Corp scandal, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman writes: “It’s a testament to investigative reporting—expensive, time-consuming, risky, stressful—at newspapers. If you think investigations aren’t under pressure at institutional news organizations, you’ve probably been caught on the news hamster wheel yourself.”
(via The News Corp. Scandal is a Triumph for Investigative Reporting : CJR)
photo credit: This image has been posted to Flickr by the copyright holder, the World Economic Forum
Columbia Journalism Review’s tireless Ryan Chittum writes:
“Shahien Nasiripour scored a foreclosure-fraud scandal scoop for The Huffington Post on Monday, reporting that audits of the mortgage industry conducted by HUD’s inspector general found five giant banks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial—defrauded taxpayers and violated the False Claims Act. HUD sent the findings to the Justice Department, which will now have to decide what to do next.
On Tuesday, Felix Salmon criticized The New York Times and Wall Street Journal for giving big play to the New York attorney general’s renewed interest in mortgage securitization while ignoring the HuffPo scoop. I thought maybe it slipped by the print deadlines. But three days later, those papers have yet to run anything about the news.
What gives?”
From a recent article in The Australian:
The treatment of Southeast Asian children as commodities extends from the mainstream media to bars and brothels.
Experts agree that a pernicious popular and private culture of impunity regarding sexual abuse and trafficking of children still exists in the region and is worsening. According to law enforcement agencies and academic specialists, trafficking and prostitution of young children is on the rise. Thailand today is functioning more as a trafficking hub for child prostitutes and “illegal immigrants” from neighbouring poor countries such as Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
A new study backed by the French Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia, “The Trade in Human Beings for Sex in Southeast Asia”, edited by Pierre Le Roux, says sex trafficking of women and children, “already widespread internationally, continues to escalate”. “Thailand is an emerging epicentre of both sex trafficking and sex tourism”, the study says, noting that the first sex tourists are local and regional, followed by the smaller but persistent group of foreigners from outside Asia.
Some figures suggest as many as 250,000 women and children are trafficked annually in Southeast Asia.
