the guy by the door …

Mexican President Felipe Calderón visited his alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some folks were not happy to see him:

Some believe he stole the election:

[Click no to fraud] With Nobel Laureates Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz^[1] on the board^[2], The Center for Economic And Policy Research is hardly a radical think tank. They found evidence of voting irregularities.^[3]

Two of the poorest of the Mexican states were represented. From Chiapas:

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN
or to us gringoes, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. They’re opposed to neo-liberal globalization. Probably don’t like the late Larry Summers either.

Representing Oaxaca, APPO Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). They were formed in response to repression of labor organizing. Mumia Abu-Jamal writes.

I’m guessing at this point Calderon is being escorted out of the building.

The anarcho-syndicalists as well as the APPO are showing their flags. I have no idea what’s up with the Betsy Ross flag.

Caldergóne.

I have no idea what was said inside. I gave up trying to get into those things after the entire Kennedy School bought David Kaye’s Escherichia coli about Iraqi WMD, “We were all fooled.” All except the guy by the door. The proof is in the vault of the Clerk of the City of Cambridge.

Just prior to Calderón’s visit, Larry Cox of Amnesty International USA issued an open letter urging him to “…commit during your visit to ending serious human rights violations in Mexico…” Calderón is a KSG alum. Thanks to STOP TORTURE, we know about Alberto Gonzales. Today’s revelation is about Antonin Scalia HLS ’80. What are we teaching these people?

A better world IS possible – precisely BECAUSE it is NOT INEVITABLE. What we do matters. All of us. Running around with flags in the cold, cold, dark is not nothing, but it is not a plan. What constitutes a vision seems to be in the mind of the beholder.^[4] The idea of a direction, allows for the possibility that folks might agree on something more than running around in the dark with flags. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s not looking too good for the Education Establishment as a vector for the urgently necessary progressive change.

^[1]In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz criticizes the methods of globalization used by the late Larry Summers during the “transition” of the Russian economy and later while Treasury Secretary.

²Note that Harvard Labor Economist Richard Freeman is also on the board. Most labor economists are paid by management to figure out how to “contain labor costs” i.e. increase profits at the expense of a lower standard of living for labor. Freeman seems to care about labor, but since Marty Feldstein is the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research and still has significant sway in Harvard Economics, it’s a tough row to hoe.

³In an earlier edition, I said they had found “voting regularities.” This was not a conscious snipe at the legitamacy of all electoral processes. However, my subconscious, if it exists, I cannot vouch for. A further apology: the post got too long to see the footnotes and get back easily. I’ve added bi-directional links to the superscripts. Hope that helps. I cribbed the basic hack from historian Roy Rosenzwieg and his bunch at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. But from the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ file, I had to ‘title’ some links and play with the typography especially when a superscript is attached to something already carrying a link. Mousing over the links will usually tell you something about the link that does not appear in the status bar. In some other cases I’m just being ‘high spirited’.

⁴I stole that from Noam. It started out, with respect to Iranian nuclear intentions, “Intention is in the eye of the beholder’. Vision is slipperier. For example, the Project for the New American Century is some people’s idea of a vision. The medium is not the same as the message. Content matters.