heywood on 18/11/2022 at 04:05
Summits between the EU and Latin America have been going on since 1984:
(
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%A1logo_de_San_Jos%C3%A9) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%A1logo_de_San_Jos%C3%A9
CELAC was preceded by about 10 other pan-Latin American organizations. None of those organizations did anything because the only thing the members could agree on was that they needed something to balance against US influence. CELAC has the same problem. It's too big. The economic interests and the problems affecting Mexico are not the same as Central America, and far different from the larger countries of South America and the Caribbean. It will likely end up as ineffective as OAS.
What would really serve the US interest is a regional alliance in Central America that will take on some of the issues with government stability, corruption, lawlessness, and the public welfare. The US has practically been begging governments in that region to get together and do more because this past year we had (
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-crossings-fiscal-year-2022-topped-276-million-breaking-rcna53517) 2.76 million people cross the southern border illegally, and those numbers fuel xenophobia. But the problem in much of Central America is that the corruption is just too deep.
When it comes to South America, our media pay attention to Venezuela because they're a big oil exporter and we have a large refugee population. And some of us pay attention to the health of the Amazon basin. I guess the US media liked picking on Bolsinaro's pandemic policies too. But otherwise, South America just doesn't get much coverage. For the last several years, there's been protest movements and political crises all over South America. But outside of Venezuela, we haven't been hearing about them from the US MSM. Protesters burned the capitol in Paraguay a few years ago and I don't think that was picked up. Peru has been in big trouble since the start of the pandemic and we're not hearing about that.
Pyrian on 18/11/2022 at 05:35
I heard about Peru (albeit in a "maybe don't go to Machu Picchu right now" sort of way), but this is the first I heard about that incident in Paraguay.
Cipheron on 18/11/2022 at 08:12
Here's an article by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, making the same points I've made
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https://cepr.net/celac-speaking-for-latin-america-and-the-caribbean/)
As for when I said there were no search results, i mean googling just CELAC brought up zero search results for anything US-gov related in at least the first 10 pages of results, but plenty of stuff from other governments about it. I'm even getting results in Japanese and haven't come across a single .gov website that mentions it. That article I linked in this post actually comes up for just "celac" as a search result before even one American official site mention of this. If stuff is after page 10 of google results, it doesn't exist for any reasonable purpose.
btw I came across a "summit of the americas" which is the rival US-backed summit to CELAC. Googling that exact term was completely different. The first page of search results consisted of 5 .gov domains, one link to the Council on Foreign Relations, and three separate links to youtube videos by US federal departments covering the event, along with the official .org page for the summit itself. The whole first page of search results is basically USA government press release stuff. IDK but it does sort of seem like they're treating that differently to CELAC. It feels like they SEO'd this stuff to the max.
I don't think it's really much of a "conspiracy theory" to point out how US administrations and media have a pretty weird thing with the way they cover news about stuff in the US's backyard of Latin America. It's tied up with the crappy treatment of Cuba etc.
Think about it this way: if I said 95% of the content on Fox News was self-serving propaganda to prop up the Republican Party, I'm sure you'd have no problem with that at all. But what I'm saying is that like 5% of stuff in the New York Times and Washington Post is self-serving propaganda to prop up the corporate/business/political elite of the USA. This is not an out-there conspiracy, it's self evident if you look into things.
Here for example is a Washington Post OP-ED that seeks to draw a line between liberalism and leftism, with AOC and Bernie Sanders on the leftism side, but the only examples they can give of how leftism is different to liberalism make leftism sound like Leninism or Stalinism - they even mention Lenin and Stalin - with liberalism painted as being pragmatic and principled and in glowing terms, and leftism left sounding dogmatic and rigid. "liberal" is pretty much only used here as a nicer sounding way of saying "capitalist". This is actually a propaganda piece:
(
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/12/stop-calling-bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-liberals/)
C'mon, they're concerned about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton being improperly lumped into the same category, so they solve that by making a new category and lumping both Bernie Sanders and Stalin into the same category.
heywood on 18/11/2022 at 14:06
I already said that NYT (and WaPo etc.) are evidence of the decline I was talking about.
You keep trying to make a lazy point about media bias that everybody here already gets. Spare me, I'm not in university anymore, and it wasn't germane to the topic Starker and I started out on.
Look at how the NYT works. They have people assigned to cover the State Department. They pay attention to whatever the State Department is paying attention to. They also have correspondents in Latin America who follow what's going on and write stories, but the ones that get published cater to US interests like migration, drugs, deforestation, crime and corruption. If I had to guess, I'd say I hear or read about 3x more news stories from Africa than South America, but I don't know if that's typical. Even the news out of Venezuela isn't getting a lot of coverage right now. We barely blinked at Bolivia's socialist revolution. You implicitly assume that the US should care a lot about what happens there. Why? Just because the name of the continent ends with "America"?
Anyway, Al Jazeera is good, probably the best English language source of global news coverage about everywhere except the Middle East. The wire services are good too. US MSM has a domestic focus and can only seem to follow one or two international stories at a time.
And of course the US media is going to cover the Summit of the Americas, because we hosted it here in Los Angeles. But like I said in my post above, the summit was a joke. It was organized at the last minute and there was a kerfuffle over who would attend. Some members were still sore that Trump blew them off in 2018, others boycotted because we didn't invite Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and all the US wanted to talk about is migration and climate change. I think OAS is dead. If the Biden administration isn't interested in it, then what future President is going to be?
Anyway, South America suffered worse than the rest of world during the pandemic. Now they are dealing with inflation, a problem that many of them have struggled to control in the past. And the war is taking a toll as well, due to dependence on Russian aid and trade and gas shortages. The continent looks unstable and there could be another round of political revolutions as soon as the world tilts into recession. And the State Department is quiet about it. There are at least two explanations for that. First, they may be preoccupied by bigger things right now. Second, maybe they don't want to have their hands in the middle of South America if/when it starts blowing up. There's a lot of people here who wouldn't mind seeing China stuck with that tar baby.
Cipheron on 19/11/2022 at 04:44
I was replying to Pyrian's post #860, specifically, when I wrote my post #863, it was not intended as a reply to your post. Maybe we got crossed wires then, because you seem pretty upset and maybe think I ignored your points completely. Well I apologize then, because i didn't intend that to be a response to what you wrote. I would have addressed the specific points you made if I had.
---
Yeah, we got sidetracked, but keep in mind what I started from
Quote:
I don't actually know whether this golden era of the free press ever really existed or whether that's just the rosy history they want to present.
Traditional US news was very much "on rails" and the only real dissent was between factions of the American white collar professionals, over which version of corporate/capitalist paternalism they favored.
Point 2 is basically Chomsky's entire point of his books such as Manufacturing Consent and Understanding Power.
As for the reason I brought up UNSAUR and CELAC specifically, the point wasn't about the details, these are just examples of the types of omissions Chomsky talks about. Whether or not any omission is deliberate isn't the point. The point is that these are things you could reasonably expected a well-informed resident of the western hemisphere to at least have heard of, even if they don't know any details, like NAFTA or something. But the media is completely failing to inform people about these things.
PigLick on 26/11/2022 at 05:40
a terrible incident, but would think going around in military dress with airsoft rifles maybe isnt such a good idea during an active war?
baeuchlein on 26/11/2022 at 13:49
But... but... but they said it's just a military special operation, not a war! -whine-
Starker on 26/11/2022 at 15:16
It wasn't as much these gamers getting killed that struck me -- people posting pictures of themselves with guns and military looking gear getting killed is very much unsurprising during a war, after all, but that the FSB would then subsequently display their gamer gear and game insignia as proof of terrorist activity. It's quite similar to the earlier Sims 3 incident where the "evidence" was obviously and quite sloppily doctored.
Azaran on 26/11/2022 at 15:35
This is the type of gaffe that would have been hilarious if people hadn't died
