Corruption is as American as apple pie

 Al Jazeera English

On September 22, influential United States Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on corruption charges along with his wife, Nadine. It is the second time Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has faced such charges.

As per the indictment from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Menendez and his wife received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in the form of gold, cash, a luxury vehicle and assorted other goodies. In exchange, the Democrat from New Jersey allegedly used his position of power to benefit the three businessmen as well as the government of Egypt, the home country of one of the men in question.

As the old saying goes, power tends to corrupt.

According to US mythology, of course, corruption is entirely the business of other, less civilised nations – particularly enemies of the US – that lack the proper commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and all that nice and noble stuff.

But here’s a news flash for those sectors of the domestic audience scandalised by the Menendez revelations: Corruption is about as American as apple pie. (And a related newsflash: Menendez or no Menendez, the US has spent decades flinging billions of dollars at Egypt’s repressive apparatus – which should constitute a scandal in itself.) READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A day in the life of the American dream

Al Jazeera

The day after my father died in August in Washington, DC, I was taking out the trash in my parents’ apartment building when I was intercepted by a garrulous 60-year-old janitor from El Salvador – we’ll call him César – who in the very short time he had known my dad had reportedly clocked double-digit hours of conversation with him.

Hearing that my dad had succumbed to prostate cancer after his doctors had pushed counterproductive but highly lucrative chemotherapy treatments on him, César offered his condolences and proceeded to tell me of his own latest run-in with the US healthcare system. This transpired after he had a heart attack in the street and bystanders called the cops on him, assuming he was drunk.

He eventually ended up at the hospital, where he was presented with an $80,000 bill in exchange for the luxury of not dying. While hospitalised, he received a phone call from his employer, who informed him that he was fired for having a heart attack rather than showing up to work.

Having resided in the US for 20 years as an undocumented worker, César would just as soon return to El Salvador, he said, but his adult son still clung to the notion of “el sueño americano”, or the American dream. He shrugged with a smile of resignation and launched into an energetic recounting of another misadventure in the so-called land of the free. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Mexico will elect a female president, but Mexican women will still lose

 Al Jazeera English

It is official: Mexico will elect its first female president next year.

One of the two top contenders in the June vote is 61-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, a close ally of current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and a member of his National Regeneration Movement (MORENA). The other is 60-year-old Xochitl Galvez, the candidate for the opposition Broad Front for Mexico coalition.

On the surface, of course, the prospect of a female head of state would appear to be an undeniably positive milestone. But will the arrangement actually do anything to resolve the existential challenges faced by women in Mexico?

Unlike the coalition headed by Galvez, which includes tiresomely right-wing forces, MORENA identifies as leftist, meaning that Sheinbaum appears better positioned to guide the nation in a more progressive direction in terms of women’s rights. And yet her mayoral reign in the Mexican capital, which lasted from 2018 to June this year and coincided with the bulk of AMLO’s presidency, was not exactly empowering for women.

After all, you cannot really claim female empowerment during an epidemic of femicides, which skyrocketed 137 percent in Mexico from 2015 to 2020. At least 10 women and girls are killed every day in the country although pretty much all statistics relating to femicides are presumed to be underestimates given that many crimes go unreported or are reported as regular homicides. Tens of thousands of women are missing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump is back and the liberal American media are loving it

 Al Jazeera English

On August 14, the evening of former US President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment of 2023, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hosted former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss the indictments and the general domestic state of affairs.

In the Georgia case, Trump stands accused along with 18 others of attempting to subvert the 2020 election. Maddow’s 9pm show drew an unprecedented 3.93 million viewers.

One clip from the interview, posted to MSNBC’s social media networks, is titled “Hillary Clinton laments political system that rewards theatre over results”. In it, she explains that Trump’s successor Joe Biden is “not a performer in a political theatre sense”, which renders it more difficult to disseminate news of his alleged achievements as president across the “splintered information ecosystem” that dominates in the US – where most Americans “don’t get their news from MSNBC” but rather from “social media, if they get any news at all”.

Clinton wagers that, since talking about national infrastructure and other critical matters is “boring”, media venues choose to “talk about, you know, Donald Trump or one of these other people who do nothing but give us negative messages, [be]cause that is so much more exciting”.

Never mind that this is exactly what, you know, Maddow and Clinton were doing. READ MORE AT AL JAZZERA ENGLISH.