Show of wealth snares ex-president Fox

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Guardian

Show of wealth snares ex-president Fox
Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Friday September 21, 2007
The Guardian

In a picture of self fulfilment as well as romance, Vicente Fox and his wife, Marta Sahagun, gaze at each other beside a new lake constructed in their extensive grounds. Behind, their ranch-turned-mansion shows off gilded carpets, a desk with stone horse heads for legs, and life-sized portraits of themselves on the walls.

The photographs, published in the magazine Quien, fit perfectly with the sugary ethos of a celebrity journal that in Mexico is capable of giving the magazine Hello! a run for its money. But this peep at the post-presidential idyll has sparked outrage beyond.

"The photos show that he got rich during his six years in office, in a very shameless and cynical way," Lino Korrodi, Mr Fox's former chief campaign fundraiser, said in one interview of the former president. Leading the chorus of disapproval, Mr Korrodi claims that as a candidate Mr Fox was a terrible businessman, permanently in financial straits and keeper of a simple house with servants paid for out of campaign funds.
(snip)

At best, he was accused of living in a fantasy world dubbed Foxilandia and of ignoring the need to shore up democracy. At worst he was charged with orchestrating an electoral fraud favouring his party colleague, the current president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.




Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2173904,00.html

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[Judi Lynn]

1. I found the magazine and the photos, or some of them:

Story:
http://www.quien.com/portada/los-fox-su-vida-despues-de-los-pinos

Sorry, it's in Spanish. Scroll down to see the photos.

You recall how proudly _Bush bragged to people in another country how happy he was when he caught some fish in his lake. Well, here's his friend Vicente's lake!

~~~~ click ~~~~ ~~~~ click ~~~~

Do you think he got this idea:

~~~~ click ~~~~

from anyone in this country?

[MisterP]

2. oh, @%$#, wen I saw that last pic I heard Tom Jones's "Sex Bomb," except "Pit Stain" replaces---

[Peace Patriot]

3. Fox, Clinton, Blair--politicians who raised peoples' hopes, put on a glitzy show,

and ended up being "liberal" shills for global corporation predation.

We're seeing the results of these "neo-liberal" craftsmen now--in the vast poverty in Mexico, in the economic jitters shaking up England, and in the outright fascism that followed so smoothly and logically from Clinton/DLC-ism, here. NAFTA. The Telecom bill. Bombing Iraq's "no fly zone" and starving its children, to soften the country up for invasion and the theft of their oil. Now a ten trillion dollar deficit, shredding of our Constitution, tens of thousands of injured cannon fodder, destruction of our voting system with "trade secret" corporate vote 'counting,' and a decade lost in solving global warming.

The millions of poor and near-starving Mexicans and other Latin Americans, the half million or more slaughtered Iraqis, our own abused soldiers, and our own poor--jobless, losing their homes, unable to pay for medical care--have this in common: neo-liberalism was never meant to benefit them. It was shuckin jive. It created a few tech millionaires, to keep the upper class quiet. And the rest of it was just plain looting of everyone else's labor, savings, small assets, small farms, small businesses, and children's future, and of everything we hold in common--our infrastructure, our public lands, our natural resources--to make a tiny group of multi-millionaires into billionaires.

People fool themselves that things will get better under Emperor Hillary. They think fondly of Bill and his sweet little economic "bubble," and I suppose there is something to be said for merely decent, competent government (if you consider NAFTA decent). Bill would never have let the Katrina disaster unfold as it did, with studied "incompetence" making way for no-bid contracts to Halliburton, and all the other deliberate gross malfeasance of epic proportions we've seen with the Bushites--although Hillary will feel obliged to take the ten trillion dollar deficit out of the hides of the poor; she certainly won't let it fall on the rich. In short, she has far less to work with--in terms of a viable country--than Bill did. But she's got a lot more tools to put the fascist boot on our necks, as things deteriorate. There is simply nothing in her record or her policies that points to peace and justice and equity; everything points to more war and injustice. And with the deficit, and the dollar in trouble, and the U.S. despised throughout the world, how will mere competence be sufficient? We need greatness. Bill didn't have it. He merely had popularity. He sold the American people down the river as surely as Bush has done, just not so dramatically and visibly. And now that we're drowning in the river, our Corporate Rulers offer more of the same, and intend to shove more of the same down our throats. Hillary, like Bill, has no real greatness. She is bought and paid for.

Fooled. By Fox. By Clinton. By Blair. They were not what they seemed. They were media illusions of democracy, all the while the Corporate Rulers gaining ground and plotting our destruction.

That Fox is now a multi-millionaire, with a top-dollar ranchero--har, har on the Mexican people. He was never one of you. That Blair is now headed for his big ranchero, via the Carlyle Group and assorted predators, har, har on the Brits. Some "Labour" candidate he turned out to be. And that we are now to be ruled by Bill's wife--and I use that term very advisedly--Ms. Charlemagne--is the biggest "fuck you" of all, to the looted and exploited and lied to people of the U.S. It's like their having Kenneth Blackwell--a bought and paid for black man--steal the votes of black citizens in Ohio--that is, it is the height of cynicism that our first woman president is a corporate lapdog, and I predict that she will do more harm to women--the biggest victims of "neo-liberalism," "free trade" and global corporatism--than any president before her.

It would all be loathsome beyond endurance, if I didn't know that there are models of radical, peaceful, democratic change being created throughout South America, especially in the Andes countries of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina. There is hope. And our own people are astir, believe me. We need to act in solidarity with all these other oppressed peoples, and take back not just our country--take back the world, from the warmongers, corporate predators and destroyers of our planet's biosphere.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Dang, woulda K&R'd if I'd seen it. Accidentally duped it, and late, too. nt