im in sicily right now and just got back from the beach, gooooood times man. you dont even know, anyways ive been on the computer for a while so i prob wont write much. well i got a really nice tan, but im a little burnt. omg haveing so much fun  here right now i dont want it to stop, someday i might just move here. actually i just realized that its prob about 4 am in america--- o well, its 13.06 here.. whatever that means. i cant wait to buy ming and le mazda shitand everyone else of course, there going to love it, i think im going to get a tattoo here, but i dont know what i want - A rose pour Rosa...? maybe maybe. today i friggin saw this kid at the beach that i ditched last year, (i was suposed to meet him in town but instead i went to the beach for 3 days lol) and he came to the bach with his girl friend and sat right next to me...WWWTTTFFFF haahaha. o well, i never even really liked him.. what a loser.  im so fucking tired. yesterday i hung out with a bunch of 30 year old men that look like there 22.. shit how the hell was i suposed to know! they all look l20 years younger.. lol one guy was like 42. i mean they were funn of cousre. too bad im liveing with my nonna, next year ill be able to come by myself , THAX GOD. i miss my little town and want to go to the beach anymore,

                   peace

                           MARIA WHERE IS MY WINE?!?

STARBURY SHOES – A REAL ALTERNATIVE?

How much do you have to pay to wrap your soles in soul? Pro basketball player Stephon Marbury has opened a new bidding war at $15 – the cost of his contentious sneaker and apparel line, the Starbury, which he debuted last August through discount retailer Steve & Barry’s. Given the evident popularity of the label – it’s being expanded from 50 products to 200, and another elite player, Ben Wallace, recently signed on to the concept – it would seem that Marbury’s aim to create a stylish, affordable, quality athletic shoe (with legit cache) for kids who live below the poverty line is a slam dunk in both branding and social justice circles.

But as much as Marbury deserves respect for the alturistic effort (which builds on previous, somewhat higher-priced attempts by fellow ballers Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon), the back-story behind the shoe’s production remains as tightly stitched up as that of the majors. Just as Starbury shoes are designed by the same firm that develops footwear for Nike, Reebok and Converse, the product itself is also made in China – the main difference on this side of the pond being that there are no $70-million endorsement deals (à la LeBron James) to inflate the retail price beyond reason.

If Marbury were truly trying to revolutionize the shoe industry for the better, the sweatshop workers in China would be just as important to the equation as the poor kids in the American projects for whom he’s putting his foot down.

For a decade now, Jim Keady has been trying to kick Nike’s ass using their shoes as ammo. The former professional soccer player’s crusade against the apparel titan began when he was canned from a coaching gig at St. John’s University for refusing to wear Nike’s products, as required by the school’s $3.5 million endorsement deal – a stand he took after learning what was happening in overseas sweatshops while researching his masters thesis. Accompanied by his professional and personal partner, Leslie Kretzu, he famously tried to shed light on the issue by living on $1.25 US per day for a month amongst Nike factory workers in Tangerang, Indonesia, in 2000.

In the interim, however, Nike has recast its malevolence by trumpeting corporate social responsibility and pledging to monitor for improprieties in its subcontracted factories around the third world. But concrete proof of improvements has been elusive. “They shifted the debate onto monitoring to obscure the need to talk about wages and trade unions,” explains Keady. “And that’s what we’ve got to get it back to.”

In April, Keady’s Educating for Justice (educatingforjustice.org) – which, among other activist efforts, gives multimedia presentations about the sweatshop issue to about 50 US schools annually – sent a letter to Nike asking them to publicly disclose the alleged living wages they pay their factory workers (read it here: myspace.com/behindtheswoosh), as well as encouraged students to do the same. By May, some students had received letters from Nike’s VP of Corporate Responsibility that outlined their intended policies and the blue sky-scope of their operation’s monitoring efforts, but failed to answer their request for cold, hard facts that would, as Keady wrote in his letter, allow “consumers and investors to eliminate any potential information asymmetry that may currently exist in the marketplace.” Given past reactions to his attempts at diplomacy, Keady was doubtful he’d even get the same non-response.

“Nike has a $1.63 billion marketing and advertising budget; they’ve got the best ad firms and public relations films in the world,” says Keady. “So, when you’ve got that kind of money you can craft any kind of message you want, and anybody that studies marketing or public relations knows that even if something is a lie, if you say it long enough and passionately enough to enough people, it’s going to start being believed as the truth. Which is what Nike’s done – they’ve lied to the consuming public for years.”

– Eric Rumble

hey guyyyys

yea so right now im sitting in gabas room puttin on makeup and gettin ready for the show were going to go see later. listening to crazy italien music and just chillin. so bacically ive been saveing a ton of money for this summer so i can buy myself lots and lot of awesome shit. vladimir is being a dickwad, and ive been painting lots of pictures, but i like it..  havent loged in in a while, hopefully ill take more pictures soon to show you. ANYWAYS no political updates for today...

BUZZ ME FOOL....

(promise to buzz back (-;)

♥cant wait!

 summer '07

Largely unnoticed by the outside world, Ecuador is a country in quiet turmoil. After “20 years of a long and sad neoliberal night,” as stated by the president himself, it may finally awaken to a new socialist beginning. Much lauded by those cheering on Latin America’s ongoing scramble to the left, Ecuador’s recently-elected Rafael Correa is the continent’s newest head of state to join in the “socialism of the 21st century.” With Bolivarian rhetoric galore, particularly by those watching up north, Correa is easily seen as a revolutionary. Within Ecuador’s frustrated borders, however, the sensation is not so animated. There is no doubt that the people crave drastic change, but with 1,097,833 ballots (more than a tenth of the electorate) deliberately nullified by the voters themselves, often profanely, it becomes evident that the situation in Ecuador is not one of eager, poor peasants following a righteous King.

The absurdities of the political world are the same in any country. Ecuadorians recognize this issue with a straight response, “Aquí más,” or “Here, more.” From the liberal tropical coast, to the conservative mountainous region, as far as the inflammatory oil-ridden Amazon, it seems that there is one potent, albeit often unrecognized, unifying factor that manages to hold Ecuador together: disdain and distrust toward their government. The latest Gallup poll found that 92% of the population believes that government corruption is rampant. And not without reason; the last 20 years of presidency have seen enough scandal, corruption and flagrant abuse of power to drive over 60% of the population (87% among the indigenous) into poverty, up an afflictive one-third from 1995.

Of course, these are only numbers, but the statistics represent a caustic reality that has become increasingly difficult to avoid. Child malnutrition among the indigenous is 59%, easily seen outside the up-market McDonald’s in the form of a ragged five-year-old shoe shine boy, accompanied by a slightly older sister with an infant strapped to her back. Inside, the more fortunate children climb about a plastic palace, throwing colorful balls amidst fits of laughter – all under the watchful eye of both the handicam of a loving parent and the armed guard stationed at the door between classes. It is difficult to determine what appears more incongruous, the McDonald’s or the dejected kids. One thing that is certain: the upper class seems to be doing a bang-up job of ignoring the entire situation.

It must also be confessed, however, that in the absence of McCharities, McDonald’s itself gives a decent quantity of money yearly to Hogar de Christo, a local NGO that aims to assist street children. Whether or not trashy fast food restaurants (which have semi-successfully reinvented themselves to embody a bizarre form of western chic) should be present in Quito is questionable. But this does indeed point toward the deplorable circumstance in Ecuador that a silly ketchup-stained fast food clown is taking a more active social role than the national government.

Like most South American nations, Ecuador has a turbulent past. The discovery of oil in the 1970s, in addition to a flourishing banana trade, saw Ecuador headed toward a similar standard of living as Chile. All this extra dinero paved the way for big government, and by the 1980s, Ecuador naïvely adopted the majority of the IMF and World Bank’s Policy recommendations, as did most of the developing world. With more money heading away from social spending and into ill-famed austerity measures, in addition to falling global oil prices, governmental incompetence became abruptly obvious. By 1987, then-president León Febres Cordero was ousted from power. As a supporter of compliance with international creditors and pro-US policies, he was kidnapped and beaten by rogue members of the military in protest. There is little doubt that the implemented measures helped push Ecuador into the economic crisis of the 1990s.

And yet, surprisingly, the IMF cannot hoard all the blame. When economic policy author Vice President Alberto Dahik Garzoni, entrenched in corruption charges, fled the country in 1995, politicians campaigned noisily against foreign monetary interventions, an effective salsa dance to distract attention from the blatant government corruption. Emerging from the diversionary smoke in 1997, Abdalá Bucaram Ortiz was elected to office. Remember this name. Serving less than six months, the president – nicknamed “El Loco” (the madman) – dined with penis-chopper Lorena Bobbit, recorded a pop song, and stole an estimated $100 million from the public purse during his brief time in office. Congress declared him “mentally unfit” for presidency, and he fled to Panama with rumored trash bags of cash and paintings from the Palacio´s walls. Following a very competitive game of presidential musical chairs, head of Congress Fabian Ernesto Alarcón Rivera assumed a brief interim Presidency. Not accredited for much, he was arrested on corruption charges a year after stepping down, replaced in 1998 by elected Jamil Mahuad Witt.

Witt’s first order of business was to freeze bank accounts nationwide in an attempt to control the mushrooming inflation as Ecuador’s currency, the sucre, which was becoming imminently worthless. It is widely assumed that he and his inner circle removed millions of dollars before implementation of the freeze. Next up was a tremendously unpopular military arrangement, PLAN Colombia, granting the US use of a northern Ecuadorian airbase for sketchy operations in southern Colombia. By 2000 he began to lose national control as indigenous launched massive protests in response to his proposed dumping of the sucre for the US dollar as national currency. As the unrest turned to instability, the military dispelled Witt to replace him with Gustavo Noboa. Somehow oblivious to the pulse of the entire country, Noboa proceeded with “dollarization” then eventually fled in exile to the Dominican Republic, successfully avoiding the traditional post-presidential corruption charges. Jamil Mahuad Witt now gives courses in political ethics at Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government.

Amassing loads of left-wing support, including the powerful Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE), former coup leader Lucio Gutiérrez was elected popularly in 2002. Standing on a revolutionarily aggressive platform, he pledged to eliminate rampant corruption and nix the free trade negotiations with the US echoing popular sentiment. After just three months of nationwide breath-holding, he, too, broke alliances and pursued the free trade deal. By 2004, he was accused of embezzling public funds to support the campaigns of allied candidates. Predictable. Yet, the debauchery of this political soap opera continues. Accusing (possibly justly) the Supreme Court of bias, he dismissed the majority of its members with irrefutable intentions of dropping charges against the exiled Abdalá Bucaram Ortiz, (El Loco) obliviously expecting to gain political support. A big behind-the-scenes player in this lunacy, Bucaram promptly returned to the coastal city of Guayaquil, descended from a helicopter into a crowd of supporters, burst into song, and rode a horse through a park to the sea.

Disgusted with the government in its ridiculous entirety, Quito, and much of the country, erupted into progressively violent demonstrations. Contributing to the national sense of déjà vu, the military refused to restore order, and after a week of near-anarchy, Luis Gutiérrez was forced to flee the besieged National Palace by helicopter.

And today, Ecuador is holding its breath once again. The last few months saw vicious campaigning from two combatant poles, Ecuador’s richest man, billionaire banana mogul Álvaro Noboa and social populist Rafael Correa. They have certainly lived up to their descriptions. As Correa danced on stage, whipping his belt in the air (symbolizing his slogan “Dale Correa,” a play on his name translated as “Give them a belting”), Noboa was busy handing out wheelchairs, computers, televisions, and cash in exchange for votes. While some voters indeed cherish their new TVs, most Ecuadorians, no longer able to stomach this sleazy nonsense, elected Correa’s radical socialist stance.

While American tourists clamored to shake 43-year-old Correa’s hand, the Congress – publicly perceived as the wealthy, racist, elite – will not be as easily swayed. Neither, with over 100 corporations operating in Ecuador, will the US giggle nervously when Correa snaps his belt on stage. The new preseident has already irked Wall Street, proposing to halve payments on Ecuador’s massive $16.8-billion debt service, to reserve money for direly needed social programs. First on the agenda is the tattered “public” school system, which students must currently pay to attend. Correa has also stood firm against the notorious free trade agreement, TLC (Tratado Liberación Comercial), which would threaten an already dilapidated economy in innumerable ways – most noticeably, the potential to flood Ecuador with cheap subsidized produce that would destroy any remains of an indigenous marketplace. As a final aggravation to Uncle Sam, Correa will not renew the detested Plan Colombia. Too often seen as Ecuador’s Guantanamo Bay, the “Plan” holds much of the blame for the some 400,000 Colombian refugees that have fled to Ecuador. (He did, meanwhile, concede to a possible reconsideration if the US permits an Ecuadorian military base in Miami.)

Without a single party representative in Congress, Correa’s battle within the country will likely be more bloody. Presidents have served as convenient scapegoats, allowing lawmakers to remain unaccountable for their consistent failure to represent the interests of the Ecuadorian people. Aware of this situation, Correa hopes to avoid the inevitable grand finale of exile or death, and has proposed a new governmental Constitution. In the spirit of Bolivian President Evo Morales, Correa also plans, after halving his own salary, to re-negotiate oil contracts with foreign interests who have offered to take four out of five barrels of Ecuador-produced oil.

To bring about this kind of reform in the face of such colossal corruption is both painstaking and dangerous. Correa understands that he must circumvent much of the existing national government to do so. Pledging a “citizen’s revolution,” he has threatened to evoke the same type of demonstrations previously used to oust presidents, to force this transformation upon an otherwise obstinate and ineffectual congress. A populist revolution, in other words.

As easy as it is to idolize Latin America’s recent left-wing ascent from afar, it is vital to understand, especially in the case of embattled Ecuador, exactly where this rhetoric comes from, and what significance it holds for the people of Latin America. Too often nations are observed by the negligent western media’s reporting of particular governments, rather than the actions of the people. In Ecuador’s case, the people are no longer concerned with left or right wing. To date, these political directions have indicated no true bearing on the future of the nation. Protests continue. Flaming indigenous roadblocks draw attention to governmental neglect. Children march in solidarity, and university students take to the street whenever they can. Ecuador has been through hell the last few years, and the people are ready for change. There is one responsibility for those of us observing from a distance: to watch what is unfolding. Correa very well could be the catalyst to bring Ecuador’s people out of the mud, but if he is not, we should be ready to shout with them.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and leaders of the Maritime Self-Defense Force review its fleet on board the naval vessel Kurama at Sagami Bay off Kanagawa Prefecture, 29 October 2006. A total of 48 warships and helicopters participated in the review. AFP photo / Kazuhiro NogiWhen Shinzo Abe became Prime Minister in September, he chose for his Cabinet a motley crew of young, conservative, and hawkish politicians – in other words, people much like himself. Political pundits and the media all predicted that Japan’s relations with China and South Korea, already strained due to previous Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s insistence on visiting Yasukuni Shrine, a war memorial that glorifies Japan’s military past, would suffer further.

But a funny thing happened. Just weeks into his tenure, Abe paid a visit to China and South Korea in an attempt to shore up relations. While he was literally en route from Beijing to Seoul, North Korea announced it had successfully tested a nuclear weapon. After years of belligerent, war-mongering rhetoric from Japan’s right-wingers towards North Korea, some of whom now held senior Cabinet posts, a shudder ran through East Asia and in Washington D.C. What would Japan do now? Was the Korean War, which had ended in an uneasy truce, but no formal peace treaty back in 1953, about to flare up again? Would this be the last, final battle of the old Cold War, which had never ended in East Asia, or the beginning of nuclear Armageddon?

Faced with the stark choice of conciliatory rhetoric and diplomacy or a possible nuclear attack, Abe did what few thought he would do: he offered words of caution. In Beijing and Seoul, he vowed Japan would work hard to re-establish trust. Unlike Koizumi, Abe was humble. And faced with the seriousness of the North Korean nuclear threat, Chinese and South Korean leaders realized that now was not the time to berate Japan over historical issues. The present was troubling enough, and Japan’s cooperation was needed to help prevent North Korea doing something rash.

This “kinder, gentler” Abe drew surprised reactions in both Japan and the US, and gratitude in the rest of East Asia. The Yasukuni controversy had, if not entirely disappeared, been mostly muted by a public that had sobered up to the fact that the overheated right-wing rhetoric was making things worse, not better, and both politicians and editors toned their anti-China rhetoric.

Foreign Japan experts in the US, few of whom are really fluent in Japanese, celebrated Abe’s, and Japan’s, new attitude as the triumph of moderate, practical politics over extremism. The business community, led by Toyota, which had become almost the second Japanese embassy in China after its executives became a trusted back channel between Chinese and Japanese political leaders, rejoiced.

By the end of 2006, China’s ambassador to Japan, Wang Yi, was telling Chinese media that the “crisis” with Japan was over, and Chinese President Hu Jintao was dropping hints that he wanted to visit Japan in 2007. After five-and-a half years of worsening relations between Japan and its East Asian neighbors under his predecessor, it appeared that Japan had, indeed, begun to turn away from the hawkish, neocon diplomatic policies pursued by Abe.

But if the rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief at Japan’s newfound realism in diplomacy, it was a very different story domestically. By New Year’s Day, Abe had forced through the Diet legislation near and dear to not only his neocon advisors but old-style, unreconstructed right-wingers, and found himself attempting, vainly at times, to convince the world Japan would not develop nuclear weapons following North Korea’s test of a nuclear device in October.

Despite the almost daily protests of thousands of concerned parents, schoolteachers, and administrators, including a demonstration in Tokyo that drew nearly 30,000 people, the Japanese Diet passed a controversial bill that would make teaching “patriotism” and “love of country” mandatory in schools. At the same time, the Defense Agency was upgraded to ministry status, reminding many older Japanese of the late 1930s, when the Army and Navy departments gained ever-larger control over the politicians and ultimately plunged the country into war.

If the patriotism bill and the Defense Agency received little attention outside Japan, the suggestion by senior-level politicians, including Japan’s controversial Foreign Minister Taro Aso, that Japan should begin a debate on whether to acquire nuclear weapons drew instant international criticism. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, among others, warned that a nuclear-armed Japan would create an arms race in East Asia. Although Abe has vowed Japan will maintain its non-nuclear principles, one of his closest friends and advisors, Tsutomu Nishioka, a right-wing academic, was among those who penned a recent book advocating that Japan acquire nuclear weapons.

Abe has said that his main task over the coming months will be to work on the Constitution, specifically Article Nine, which renouces war as a means for resolving international disputes. For decades, the “no-war’’ clause has been the pride of Japanese peace activists and liberals, and the bane of right-wingers, Conseratives, and Japan’s military ally, the United States. A two-decade campaign to revise the constitution, led by right wing politicians and media, however, has finally shifted public opinion in favor of revision.

Japan’s next big political test comes in July, when Upper House elections are held. Even moderate losses by the ruling parties will, most commentators agree, likely spell the end of the Abe administration and until the elections, it is likely that Japan’s neocons will work quietly behind the scenes and attempt to avoid highly public controversies. If there is a genuine improvement in Japan’s relations with East Asia over the first half of 2007, the neocons in the Abe cabinet will keep relatively quiet. But behind the scenes, they will continue to push the country to the right as long as they can get away with it.

_Eric Johnston

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