The 9,500 workers at Volkswagen's giant plant in the state of Puebla went on strike Aug. 18 after rejecting the company's offer of a 4.5% pay raise coupled with demands for increased "labor flexibility." Talks remained stalled on Aug. 19, but the workers reportedly expected the strike not to last more than 72 hours, as was the case in 2004.

Some 60 masked and mostly armed men, including "porros" (provocaterus) and municipal police, took over the local office of the Oaxaca daily newspaper Noticias in the town of Santa Cruz Amilpas Aug. 20. The municipal government is in the hands of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), but nine days earlier, a group loyal to the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO), which is demanding the resignation of the state's PRI governor, Ulises Ruiz, had seized control of the town hall. (La Jornada, Aug. 21 via Chiapas95)

From AP via the Houston Chronicle, Aug. 21:

Volunteers plan to man Texas border

SAN ANTONIO — Hundreds of volunteers plan to keep watch over the Texas-Mexico border near Laredo beginning Sept. 11, aiding the U.S. Border Patrol's effort to stop illegal immigration.

From New Jersey's Herald News, Aug. 16, also online at DeleteTheBorder.org:

Detainee report 'too damning' to release?

Nearly eight months after the Department of Homeland Security said it would issue the first official report on the treatment of immigrants in federal detention, immigrant-rights advocates are wondering what's taking so long.

On Aug. 15, at the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, immigrant activist Elvira Arellano told supporters she would not report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office that day for deportation, as she had been ordered to do by 9 AM. Instead, she announced she would take sanctuary in the church, with the support of the pastor and her fellow parishioners, in an effort to remain in the US with her seven-year-old son, a US citizen. (Chicago Tribune, Aug. 15)

Sometimes you have to look at your opponent's propaganda to get a realistic sense of your own side's weaknesses—call it an inoculation against groupthink. A case in point is this Aug. 21 analysis of the recent court ruling on the Bush telephone surveillance program from TCS Daily (for "Technology, Commerce, Society"). For the suppoedly "libertarian" wing of the free-market right, these guys show little outrage at government snooping. But this piece does reveal why the Detroit district court's ruling is ultimately a weak defense of freedom. The note of "optimism" that this piece ends on is worrisome. Emphasis added.

Hard to say if this is more bizarre or terrifying. Talk about the banality of evil. What about the evil of banality? From Reuters, Aug. 21:

MUMBAI, India - A new restaurant in India’s financial hub, named after Adolf Hitler and promoted with posters showing the German leader and Nazi swastikas, has infuriated the country’s small Jewish community.

The growing repression in China against peasants struggling to keep their lands before the onslaught of "development"—and now against their lawyers—is clearly analogous to peasant struggles raging throughout Latin America. Note the reference to forced sterilizations of peasants in the below story, long a fave tactic against insurgent campesino communities, most recently in southern Mexico. Yet the lefty zines and blogs in the West pay no attention to the Chinese peasant struggle, leaving it to bourgeois organs such as the New York Times. The left in the West seems to fall for the charade that China is still "communist." All of the evidence points to an utterly savage capitalism reigning in the "People's Republic." But the most egregious exponents of the American idiot left go so far as to support the Tiananmen Square massacre as a crackdown on a "counter-revolutionary rebellion." What's really ironic is that these same groups cultivate similar illusions about Islamic fundamentalists like Hezbollah—even as China executes a harsh crackdown on Islamic militants in Uighurstan! From the New York Times, Aug. 18: