theamericanconservative | While American policymakers focus intently on developments in Europe,
the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, trouble is brewing much closer
to home. Under growing stress from drug-related violence and systemic
corruption, Mexico is exhibiting worrisome signs of governmental
dysfunction. The latest shock occurred on October 16, when U.S.
authorities arrested
Mexico’s former defense secretary, General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda,
at Los Angeles International Airport on drug trafficking and money
laundering charges. Cienfuegos Zepeda was a major player in Mexico’s
military and political affairs, leading the country’s armed forces for
six years under former president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
His
disgrace is especially important because the military has been in
charge of waging the war on illegal drugs since President Felipe
Calderon made it the lead agency
for that mission in 2006. Allegations that Cienfuegos Zepeda was on a
drug cartel payroll, therefore, were especially embarrassing and
demoralizing. As the Associated Press reporters Christopher Sherman and
Maria Verza point out,
Mexico’s reliance on its military has grown under current president
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador: “He has entrusted it with not only leading
the government’s ongoing fight with drug cartels, but also with stopping
rampant fuel pipeline theft, building major infrastructure projects and
being the backbone of the new, ostensibly civilian, National Guard.”
Moreover, the military has long occupied a special status in Mexico’s
political hierarchy. An ironclad agreement has been in place for
decades that the army doesn’t interfere in politics, and civilian
political leaders, including the president, do not interfere in the
army’s internal operations. The appointment process for defense
secretary highlights the extent of the military’s clout. In contrast to
all other cabinet posts, the president does not have the latitude of
making a personal choice for defense secretary; he or she chooses from a
list of acceptable candidates that the generals submit.
The
incident with Cienfuegos Zepeda was hardly the first time that scandal
has rocked Mexico’s military and drug-fighting establishments. Genaro
García Luna, who served as Mexico’s secretary of public security from
2006 to 2012 under President Calderon, was arrested
last year in Texas on drug trafficking charges. U.S. prosecutors allege
that he took tens of millions of dollars in bribes to protect Joaquin
“El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. Another notorious incident occurred
even earlier. In 1996, the Mexican government appointed
General Jesus Gutierrez Rebello, who had overseen military operations
for the previous seven years in the narcotics-infested region of
Guadalajara, to head the National Institute for the Combat of Drugs.
U.S. officials hailed the appointment and how it symbolized the growing
role of the country’s military in the drug war. Just months later, he
was arrested for drug trafficking.
NCHV | The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) states that the nation’s
homeless veterans are predominantly male, with roughly 9% being female.
The majority are single; live in urban areas; and suffer from mental
illness, alcohol and/or substance abuse, or co-occurring disorders.
About 11% of the adult homeless population are veterans.
Roughly 45% of all homeless veterans are African American or Hispanic,
despite only accounting for 10.4% and 3.4% of the U.S. veteran
population, respectively.
Homeless veterans are younger on average than the total veteran
population. Approximately 9% are between the ages of 18 and 30, and 41%
are between the ages of 31 and 50. Conversely, only 5% of all veterans
are between the ages of 18 and 30, and less than 23% are between 31 and
50.
America’s homeless veterans have served in World War II, the Korean
War, Cold War, Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, Persian Gulf War,
Afghanistan and Iraq (OEF/OIF), and the military’s anti-drug cultivation
efforts in South America. Nearly half of homeless veterans served
during the Vietnam era. Two-thirds served our country for at least three
years, and one-third were stationed in a war zone.
About 1.4 million other veterans, meanwhile, are considered at risk of
homelessness due to poverty, lack of support networks, and dismal living
conditions in overcrowded or substandard housing.
Approximately 12,700 veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF),
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation New Dawn (OND) were homeless
in 2010. The number of young homeless veterans is increasing, but only
constitutes 8.8% of the overall homeless veteran population.
Why are veterans homeless?
In addition to the complex set of factors influencing all homelessness –
extreme shortage of affordable housing, livable income and access to
health care – a large number of displaced and at-risk veterans live with
lingering effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and
substance abuse, which are compounded by a lack of family and social
support networks. Additionally, military occupations and training are
not always transferable to the civilian workforce, placing some veterans
at a disadvantage when competing for employment.
theatlantic |I drove from Kentucky
into the mountains of Carroll County, Virginia, and, in a field along a
winding road, parked at the end of a long row of pickup trucks and SUVs.
A hundred people, most of them armed, were looking up at a man giving a
speech from the back of a flatbed truck that was painted in camouflage.
Between the crowd and me were two young men with semiautomatic rifles.
They stopped me in a manner—neither friendly nor unfriendly—that I’d
encountered at checkpoints in other parts of the world.
So-called
militia musters like this one had been quietly happening all over the
state. The legislature was still pushing ahead with gun-control
measures, and people were preparing for the possibility of more riots,
and for the election. Rhodes was scheduled to give remarks but, as
usual, he was late.
One of the young men said something into a
walkie-talkie, and a muscular Iraq War veteran named Will joined me and
explained the reason for the guards and the men posted in the woods on
the far side of the field. They weren’t worried about law enforcement—a
deputy from the sheriff’s department stood not far from me, leaning
against his cruiser. It was leftists, antifa, who might record your
license plate, dox you, show up at your home.
This was a different
kind of crowd than Rhodes had drawn to the VFW hall. Many were in their
20s and 30s and had come in uniforms—some Three Percenters wore black
T‑shirts and camouflage pants, and members of another group stood
together in matching woodland fatigues. From the latter, a man climbed
onto the flatbed and introduced himself as Joe Klemm, the leader of a
new militia called the Ridge Runners.
He was a 29-year-old former
marine and spoke with a boom that brought the crowd to attention. “I’ve
seen this coming since I was in the military,” he said. “For far too
long, we’ve given a little bit here and there in the interest of peace.
But I will tell you that peace is not that sweet. Life is not that dear.
I’d rather die than not live free.”
“Hoo-ah,” some people cheered.
“It’s
going to change in November,” Klemm continued. “I follow the
Constitution. We demand that the rest of you do the same. We demand that
our police officers do the same. We’re going to make these people fear
us again. We should have been shooting a long time ago instead of
standing off to the side.”
“Are you willing to lose your lives?”
he asked. “Are you willing to lose the lives of your loved ones—maybe
see one of your loved ones ripped apart right next to you?”
After
he finished, Rhodes rolled up in his rented Dodge Ram and parked in the
grass beside me. He walked to the flatbed but didn’t climb it. Then he
turned and faced the crowd. His speech meandered back to revolutionary
times, evoking the traditions of a country founded in bloodshed. He
urged them to build a militia for their community.
Rhodes stayed
at the muster long after most people had left, meeting every last
person, his history lessons stretching on and on. Eventually the
conversation turned to the problems in the area—the drug overdoses and
mental-health crises and the desperate state of the local economy. The
people there seemed to believe that taking up arms would somehow stave
off the country’s unraveling rather than speed it along.
When the
protests erupted in Kenosha a month later, many of the demonstrators
brought guns, and vigilante groups quickly formed on the other side.
They called themselves the Kenosha Guard. There was a confrontation near
a gas station like the one at Pepperoni Bill’s, and a teenager
allegedly opened fire and killed two people. A man affiliated with
antifa allegedly gunned down a Trump supporter in Portland later that
week, and Rhodes declared that “the first shot has been fired.”
By
then, some writers popular on the militant right had been warning that
wars don’t always start with a clear, decisive event—an attack, a coup,
an invasion—and that you might not realize you’re in one until it’s
under way. Civil conflict is gradual. The path to it, I thought, might
begin with brooding over it. It could start with opening your mind.
Counterpunch | Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025],
the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S.
forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to
respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report
there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer
groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD];
Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”
In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds”
against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the
agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown”
weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted
armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical”
weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent
“societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”
Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”
“KNOWLEDGE DOMINANCE”
The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the
express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and
actions.
A U.S. Army document
on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as
potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from
drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the
possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the
commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space
Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the
international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion
and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army
Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.
“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is
becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action
are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also
said
that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP
3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and
information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch
operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and
defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related
actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from
Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”
“ATTUNED TO DISPARITIES”
The lines between law enforcement and militarism are blurred, as are
the lines between military technology and civilian technology. Some
police forces carry military-grade weapons. The same satellites that
enable us to use smartphones enable the armed forces to operate.
In a projection out to the year 2036, the British Ministry of Defence says that “[t]he clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants will be increasingly difficult to discern,” as “the urban poor will be employed in the informal sector and will
be highly vulnerable to externally-derived economic shocks and illicit
exploitation” (emphasize in original). This comes as Boris Johnson
threatens to criminalize Extinction Rebellion and Donald Trump labels
Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists.
In 2017, the U.S. Army published The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare. The report reads:
“The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state
resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant
poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for
dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered
populations.”
Forbes | Mexican drug cartels are using weaponized consumer drones in their latest gang war, according to reports in El Universal and other local news media.
A citizens’ militia group
in Tepalcatepec, Michoacán, formed to protect farmers from the cartel,
found two drones in a car used by gunmen belonging to the Jalisco New
Generation Cartel (CJNG), a group estimated to control a third of the drugs consumed
in the U.S. The drones had plastic containers taped to them filled with
C4 explosive and ball bearing shrapnel. The militias say that they have
heard explosions, and believe that the drones are the latest weapons an
ongoing gang war.
“The CJNG has been involved with such devices since late 2017 in
various regions of Mexico,” says analyst Dr. Robert J. Bunker, Director
of Research and Analysis at C/O Futures, LLC.
“This cartel is well on its way to institutionalizing the use of
weaponized drones. None of the other cartels appear to presently even be
experimenting with the weaponization of these devices.”
In 2017, Bunker reported on the arrest of four CJNG members with a drone carrying a ‘papa bomba’ (potato bomb) , an improvised hand grenade. In 2018 an armed drone attacked the residence
of a senior official in Baja, California. The official was not at home,
and the attack seems to have been intended as a warning. Three CNJG drones with explosive were recovered this year , part of an arsenal for use against the rival Rosa de Lima cartel.
Bunker says that suitable consumer drones are now easy to acquire and use, but that the challenge is weaponizing them.
“The limiting factor is not so much the availability of military
grade explosives—commercial or homemade explosives can be
substituted—but the basic technical knowledge necessary to create
improvised explosive devices or IEDs,” says Bunker.
nakedcapitalism | The
racial categories of white and black were developed around 1600.
Probably a little after by wealthy Americans who used it to keep divided
Black slaves, poor often indentured Whites, and the often enslaved
Indians. These people were
not disposable because they were useful as workers, but who often
worked and even socialized frequently. As a group they had potentially
considerable political power during the 1600s. This was deliberately
dealt with. The Blacks were brutally suppress with
(the category of Black indentured was eliminated. There was no Southern
style chattel slavery for Blacks at first). The Whites were placated
with some very modest reforms. The Indians (labeled as savages) were
just driven off at gunpoint. This is also where
the Southern Slave Patrols started to terrorize and keep down the slave
population as well as keep down any poor whites. Where they started
asking for people’s papers.
When my Irish great whatever grandfather stepped off the Coffin Ship around 1850, he was barely considered human, never mind white, and about on par with the black community. This was true for decades as were the “Irish need not
apply signs” and the creation of the Paddy Wagons. Would you consider him having White Privilege?
It was only after the development of political
power over multiple generations that the Irish-Americans were given the
status of being both human and white, which only really happened during
the early 20th century. Similarly with the Italians,
Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Greeks, and so on.
Then there are the
Jews. The Italians only finally became real whites after the Second
World War although I do not think that they were quite as abused
as the Irish. Going up to an individual in these
groups at anytime before the 1960s and saying that they have White
Privilege would have had them laugh at you in your very face. Today,
they have been giving the category of White with its very real privilege
of being treated like a human being, so long as
you are not poor. But in the past?
During the Antebellum South and after
Reconstruction when a poor white farmer or laborer even got friendly
with a black person, the local wealthy white landowner and his hired
goons would often beat up the offending white man. After Reconstruction,
the allied white and black reformists in the South were literally
extirpated via guns and the rope. If they were lucky and in the
government, they were merely deposed, and run out of town by armed white
supremacists during actual coups. Much like the American
led coups in the Americas and elsewhere.
When a leader, especially a black one, becomes
successful in his leadership and starts to bring up class and poverty,
to suggest crossing class and race as well as mentioning our common
humanity they often wind up dead like MLK and Fred
Hampton. Working just on racism is much less dangerous.
Actually in the South and Southwest during the 19th
century Blacks, Hispanics, and the very, very occasional White who were
too successful as business owners were sometimes lynched for just that
reason. To destroy the opposition.
There are a number of ways to destroy reformists
movements besides murder especially those that threaten the power and
money of the elites. Hell, you can find elite co-option, police and goon
squad assassinations in the labor movement,
equal rights movement, even in feminism (no murders, but plenty of
false arrests and beatings). All of these movements were captured by
elitists who expunged first the non-whites, then the socialists, then
the working class from what became their movement.
Any economic benefits from these “reforms” only accrued to the Upper
Class Whites.
Why do cries of racism become so strident and the
very real problem of racism become something that must be solves right
now, today when cries of poverty and want are also raised. Every single
time? Do you think that the current debates
about racism just happened right after Bernie Sanders near success and
the rise of an actual American Left fifty years after it was destroyed
is a coincidence? Really?
If this was really and truly about racism or even
poverty, why are the Native Americans, trapped on their Reservations
with the highest poverty, drug use, rape and murder statistics of any
group of Americans, bar none, not mentioned. They
have the most police brutality as well and some of the reservations,
due to legal loopholes, are happy hunting grounds for rapists coming
from outside of some of the reservations. Their leaders usually do not
have political power and wealth and they are isolated
and beaten down at least compared to the national political leadership.
So just under three million people are ignored and targeted.]
People are finally taking some notice of the
shrinking middle class and of the increasing homeless population. If you
wanted, I can take to some of the skosh less then fifteen thousand
homeless in San Francisco. Or the over one hundred
thousand throughout the state. At least half of whom are White. Are
there any real protest over them? We can look at the millions wasted
every year by San Francisco with cushy jobs being created, but not much
progress. However, there are fine demonstrations
on racism, which is good because racism and also police brutality with
no mention of the increasing poverty in this country. Even now large
sums of cash are used to “deal” with the problems, nationally. Problems
that always get worse.
So cui bono? At least half of any negative
statistic one could name, with the possible exception of prison, which
IIRC only one-third are White. Unemployment, poverty, drug use, police
brutality and police murders. Poor and struggling people
are much easier to manipulate, aren’t they?
However, when there are protests about those issues
it very often morphs into one about just racism. Let’s tear down some
statues. Yah! When ever there is smart, hardworking, talented, and
dedicated reformist or a successful non-profit
making progress dealing with those issues, including racism, money from
somewhere drops from the sky like manna. So long as small concessions
are made. Or a slick person applies for a job there. Always has money
somehow and eventually takes over or at least
co-opts the organization. Or cushy jobs are offered elsewhere to
certain people. In the old days like the 1960s and before, if that
didn’t work s*** would happen, sometimes fatally. Sometimes nothing
needs be done because often college educated are already
brainwashed into uselessness by Neoliberal propaganda. The wealth and
power of the Haves remain protected.
As an aside, Social Darwinism and Eugenics were
created and spread by very wealthy people and foundations in the United
States. Much like racism. If one doubts this, I can recommend some books
I have. A good start would be War Against
the Weak by Edwin Black.
So, in two part harmony, the Black Misleadership
Class starts it latest performance along with the Backup of the White
Misleadership Class (what else should I label Pelosi, Schumer, and
McConnell? Or the leaders of the entire state of California?).
Racism, the horror! And the police, oh my! Screaming, shouting (a
whisper about poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment.) Perhaps
Obama pops out and says some soaring nonsense or some very poor white
fool is interviewed. A fantastic tempest in a teapot
with nothing every actually getting done.
Then some Alt-Right creeps pop out and start saying
you are White or not, and that’s all that matters! There is no American
nationalism, only White Nationalism. White Power! Join us! (and don’t
forget the Jews!) Finally, lies like the 1619
Project or propaganda like White Fragility are published.
Yes, racism does exist, and as a percentage of all
the ills of our American nation, Blacks get it the worse excepting the
Native Americans, of course. White Privilege is a real thing. But just
as the categories of White and Black, of racism
were deliberately created in the 17th century, for benefiting the
powers that be, I wonder about Identity Politics and Cancelling. That
blend of Nazi racialism and Maoist thought control. I wonder how racism
and its pernicious child Identity Politics has been
created, nurtured, fed a steady diet of hate, and then used as a weapon
upon those who would care about everyone regardless of there supposed
identity. I also wonder what would happen if I approached the man
sleeping on cardboard, perhaps in the usually three
month rainy season, or that family living in their car/van/RV on some
out of the way road, that the do have White Privilege, which the do and
usually means being treated as a human being. I also wonder about my
nose.
commondreams | After the FBI took to Twitter Monday with a message that allegedly
aimed to honor "the life and work" of Martin Luther King Jr., a chorus
of critics promptly urged the bureau to "sit this one out," pointing to its history of spying on King and trying to convince the civil rights leader to kill himself.
Each year on the national holiday dedicated to King, progressives criticize and work to counter
the whitewashed public narrative of a man who, particularly in the
years leading up to his April 1968 assassination, passionately condemned
the "evils" of capitalism, militarism, and racism.
The FBI, during both the Obama and Trump administrations, has
provoked a wave of criticism for posting shoutouts to King on social
media, given the bureau's past treatment of him. Monday was no
different.
Some critics expressed anger and disbelief. Rewire.News senior legal analyst Imani Gandy wrote in response to the FBI, "You've got to be fucking kidding me."
Journalist David Corn posed "a sincere question," asking:
"Has the FBI ever apologized to King's family for wiretapping King,
blackmailing him, and trying to get him to commit suicide?"
Crawford also noted that "the FBI's surveillance of black Americans
isn't just history. [In 2018], we learned the FBI has been spying on
black activists, labeling them 'Black Identity Extremists.' The feds also use powers obtained through national security laws like the Patriot Act to target people in the racially biased drug war."
"More disturbing: The FBI that spied on King and today classifies
Black civil rights activists as 'extremists,'" Crockford continued, "is
now partnering with Big Tech to amass unprecedented surveillance powers
that history has taught us will be used to target communities of color,
religious minorities, dissidents, and immigrants."
FBI director Christopher Wray testified
before Congress in July 2019 that the bureau has stopped using the term
"black identity extremism." However, some groups and individuals on
Monday shared critiques of the FBI's current practices alongside
denunciations of the bureau's past behavior.
The London-based advocacy group CAGE, which works to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror, tweeted
Monday that the FBI still tries "to suppress dissent" and uses "dirty
tactics that would make Edgar Hoover proud. But [is] happy now to co-opt
MLK to try to cover up the above."
thegrayzone | AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which
has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap
exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods
and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security
threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating
Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug
cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government.
The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance,
were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads
throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug
trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right
counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists
in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These
same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani,
to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed
direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump
administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are
creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”
“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.
townhall | Donald Trump is talking about labeling the Mexican drug cartels that
own our failed state neighbor as “terrorist groups,” and this is yet
another step toward what is increasingly looking to be an inevitable
confrontation. They just butchered several American citizens, including kids, which cannot go unanswered. They
murder thousands of Americans a year here with their poison, which
cannot go unanswered. But are we Americans even able to answer a bunch
of pipsqueak thugs anymore? Let’s put aside the question of if we should use our military against Mexico (I discussed it here in 2018, to the consternation of liberals and Fredocon sissies) and look at what might happen if we did escalate.
None of it is good.
It’s
not a matter of the prowess of our warriors. Our warriors, unleashed,
would lay waste to anything we point them at. But the question is,
“Would we ever unleash them? Would we let them do what it takes to
achieve the goal of eliminating the cartels?"
Of course not. We
haven’t decisively won a real war since World War II (except the Gulf
War, unless you accept the arguable premise that it was an early
campaign in a still-continuing Iraq conflict). And there’s a reason we
don’t win. We don’t truly want to, as demonstrated by our
unwillingness to do the hard things required to win. Could you imagine
the Democrats siding with America in a war on Mexican drug cartels? If
you can, you’re higher than Hoover Biden at a strip club on a Saturday
night.
Again, this is not to say whether a war on the Mexican drug cartels is a
good or bad idea. Nor is it to say we do not have the combat power to
do it – we do. It’s just to say that America is culturally and
politically unwilling to do what it takes to win, or to accept the
losses that would come with a military campaign against the drug
cartels.
unz |I
suppose that by now everyone has heard of Trump’s offer to send the
American military to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the
face of the earth,” which he asserts can be done “quickly and
effectively. “
Trump
phrased this as an offer to help, not a threat to invade, which is
reassuring. AMLO, Mexico’s president, wisely declined the offer.
While
the President seems to have made the offer in good faith, he has little
idea of Mexico, the military, or the cartels. The American military
could not come close to wiping them off the face of the earth, much less
effectively and quickly. Such an incursion would be a political and
military disaster. The President needs to do some reading.
If
AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few
Americans are aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin
America, and for that matter in most of the world. They don’t know of
the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators imposed and
supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American
War, detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz,
Patton’s incursion–the list could go on for pages. The Mexican public
would look upon American troops not as saviors but as invaders. Which
they would be.
The
incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump
would do well to ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by
overestimating its own powers, underestimating the enemy, and
misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The is
exactly what Trump seems to be doing.
He
probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have
all these beautiful advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things
with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed with garden trowels
couldn’t possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious:
Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.
You
know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That
sort of cakewalk. Let’s think what an expedition against the narcos
would entail, what it would face.
To
begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the
narcos spread unevenly across it. You can’t police a nation that size
with a small force, or even with a large force. A (preposterous) million
soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success
would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it
wouldn’t.
ronpaulinstitute | Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump, who has the unilateral power to
send the United States military to bomb and invade other countries, as
several of his predecessors have done, stated at Twitter that he is
ready to send the US military to Mexico to defeat drug cartels.
This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United
States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of
the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!
Making clear he is talking about a US military action, Trump declared in
another Tuesday morning tweet that “the cartels have become so large
and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”.
The
truth, however, is that the drug war waged by the Mexico government,
with the help of the US government, ensures the continued existence of
powerful and dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. Similarly, when the US
had alcohol prohibition, there were dangerous criminal enterprises that
thrived from satisfying people’s demand for prohibited products.
Eliminating
drug cartels can best be accomplished by ending, not growing, the drug
war. Indeed, this is the course of action the Mexico government seems
poised to pursue. Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who
Trump referenced at Twitter, released this year a plan for Mexico to end its drug war. And the Mexico legislature appears to be preparing to take a major step toward ending the drug war — approving legislation to legalize marijuana countrywide.
I
am guessing Obrador will not make the phone call Trump suggests.
Obrador has available another, better avenue for dealing with drug
cartels.
courier-journal | Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the
world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you
love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.
And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.
Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco
Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his
head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted
list.
El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S.
with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and
fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover
stings, busts and lengthy investigations.
The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s
unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more
than 300,000 people since 2013.
CJNG’s rapid rise heralds the latest chapter in a generations-old
drug war in which Mexican cartels are battling to supply Americans’
insatiable demand for narcotics.
A nine-month Courier Journal investigation reveals
how CJNG's reach has spread across the U.S. in the past five years,
overwhelming cities and small towns with massive amounts of drugs.
kctv5 | As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking
Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.
“About
100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug
train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings
said.
Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.
A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.
“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.
Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.
Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.
Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.
“We switched from meth labs to Mexican cartels,” Cummings said.
kmbc | Two Mexican nationals have been sentenced in federal court for their
roles in a conspiracy that distributed more than 14 kilograms of heroin
in the Kansas City metropolitan area, some of which is believed to have
resulted in overdoses and deaths.
Julian Felix-Aguirre, 46, and
Martin Missael Puerta-Navarro, 38, were sentenced in separate hearings
before U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner on Wednesday. Felix-Aguirre
was sentenced to 24 years and seven months in federal prison without
parole. Pueta-Navarro was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in
federal prison without parole.
fox4kc | "No where is immune," said Erik Smith with the Drug Enforcement
Administration. "There are people who become dependent on controlled
substances and have need to satisfy that addiction, and any place there
is a consumer, an addict or user, somebody will supply that drug for
that."
The DEA special agent in charge said feeding the demand for drugs in Johnson County goes well beyond teenage drug dealers.
Smith said Mexican cartels really are living here in Johnson County.
"Historically, a decade ago, two decades ago, a lot of cartels would
limit themselves to the inner city," he said. "But as they become more
established and they become more wealthy, it's quite common to see them
branching out into suburban areas including Johnson County."
propublica |On Sept. 11, 2001,
when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, DEA agents
were among the first to respond, racing from their headquarters, less
than half a mile away. A former special agent named Edward Follis, in
his memoir, “The Dark Art,” recalls how he and dozens of his colleagues
“rushed over … to pull out bodies, but there were no bodies to pull
out.” The agency had outposts in more than 60 countries around the
world, the most of any federal law-enforcement agency. And it had some
5,000 informants and confidential sources. Michael Vigil, who was the
DEA’s head of international operations at the time, told me, “We called
in every source we could find, looking for information about what had
happened, who was responsible, and whether there were plans for an
imminent attack.” He added, “Since the end of the Cold War, we had seen
signs that terrorist groups had started relying on drug trafficking for
funding. After 9/11, we were sure that trend was going to spread.”
But other intelligence agencies saw the DEA’s sources as drug
traffickers — and drug traffickers didn’t know anything about terrorism.
A former senior money-laundering investigator at the Justice Department
told me that there wasn’t any substantive proof to support the DEA’s
assertions.
“What is going on after 9/11 is that a lot of resources move out of
drug enforcement and into terrorism,” he said. “The DEA doesn’t want to
be the stepchild that is last in line.” Narco-terrorism, the former
investigator said, became an “expedient way for the agency to justify
its existence.”
The White House proved more receptive to the DEA’s claims. Juan
Zarate, a former deputy national-security adviser, in his book,
“Treasury’s War,” says that President George W. Bush wanted “all
elements of national power” to contribute to the effort to “prevent
another attack from hitting our shores.” A few months after 9/11, at a
gathering of community anti-addiction organizations, Bush said, “It’s so
important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the
work of terror. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in
America.” In February 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy
turned Bush’s message into a series of publicservice announcements that
were aired during the Super Bowl. Departing from the portrayal of
illegal narcotics as dangerous to those who use them — “This is your
brain on drugs” — the ads instead warned that getting high helped
terrorists “torture someone’s dad” or “murder a family.”
In the next seven years, the DEA’s funding for international
activities increased by 75 percent. Until then, the agency’s greatest
foreign involvement had been in Mexico and in the Andean region of South
America, the world’s largest producer of cocaine and home to violent
Marxist guerrilla groups, including the FARC, in Colombia, and the
Shining Path, in Peru. Both groups began, in the 1960s and early ‘70s,
as peasant rebellions; before long, they started taxing coca growers and
smugglers to finance their expansion. The DEA saw the organizations as
examples of how criminal motivations can overlap with, and even advance,
ideological ones.
WaPo | Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”
He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from.
So
if you’re wondering why Sessions has endured the humiliation of being
demeaned and abused by President Trump and stayed on as attorney
general, one big answer is the policy change he announced this week,
that he is rescinding an Obama-era directive that instructed federal
prosecutors not to prioritize prosecuting businesses like dispensaries
in states that had legalized cannabis. Sessions is finally getting the
chance to lock up all those hippies, with their pot-smoking and their
free love and their wah-wah pedals and everything immoral they
represent. He’ll show them.
WaPo | Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will rescind a Justice Department memorandum
— known as the Cole Memo — that granted protection to state-legal and
regulated marijuana companies. In doing so, Sessions has not only
brushed aside science, logic and the prevailing public opinion, but he
has also contradicted the opinion of the president he serves and his own
party’s governing values.
Sessions’s decision empowers U.S.
attorneys to begin prosecuting an industry that has complied with state
laws and regulations and has, since 2013, been granted an effective
waiver from federal intervention. During this time, the legal marijuana industry has become a multibillion-dollar venture, employing tens of thousands of Americans from coast to coast.
This decision to reignite the drug war comes as little surprise. Sessions once said
that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He has shown a deep ignorance
of the realities of the drug war, which has been ineffective and costly
and has disproportionately affected minority communities. And he has
committed to numerous claims that have been dispelled by science, such
as cannabis’s gateway effect and the idea that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.
yournewswire |John Homeston, a retired CIA agent, has admitted this week on
National Russian Television (NTV) that the CIA was behind the creation
of the 1980s hip hop scene and financed major hip hop acts including
NWA, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.
The government at the time spent “big money, serious money” on this covert operation destined to “further division” and “corrupt the American youth to nihilist, anti-establishment and anti-American ideologies”, he explained in a half hour interview broadcast on national television.
Famous hip hop songs of the legendary hip hop outfit NWA were even
scripted by a team of psychologists and war propagandists of the CIA. “F#ck the police,” and “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off / Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,”
and other nihilist and anti-establishment lyrics were intended to
unleash a wave of cynicism towards authorities, promote the use of heavy
drugs, and entice the youth with revolutionary, counter-establishment
ideas.
The retired CIA agent claims the social engineering maneuver was “extremely successful.“
“We understood at the time that music was a powerful means of propaganda to reach the youth,” explained the 77-year-old man.
“Our mission was to use teenage angst to our advantage and turn
Generation X into a decadent, pro-drug and anti-establishment culture
that would create uprisings and further division within society. We even
infiltrated mainstream radio to promote their music and reach millions
of people everyday,” he admitted, visibly proud of the accomplishment.
“For many of us in the CIA, infiltrating the 1980s hip hop scene
was one of the CIA’s most successful experiments of propaganda to date,” he acknowledged during the interview.
“You could say Frankenstein’s monster got up off the table and started goose-stepping.”
counterpunch | The New York Times recently
published a list of 25 men “accused of sexual misconduct” since the
Harvey Weinstein revelations first came out in early October. The list
is a who’s-who of “players” in the entertainment, political, media and
corporate worlds. Even scandalous stories about Bush-the-elder are
finally coming out after decades of suppression. In being outed, many
of the male predators have lost their jobs or contracts, some of their
marriages ended, high-priced defense lawyers have been retained and a
few say they are seeking professional counseling.
Many of those identified as being or having been a sexual aggressor
are being subject to public shaming. For a while, their lives might be
miserable, under a public magnifying glass as to how he could have done
what he is “accused” of doing and, therefore, who really is this
man? However, for some, the price to be paid may be far harsher,
including an arrest, trial and (if found guilty) jail as a sex
offender. Prosecutors in New York, Los Angeles and London are
sharpening their legalistic claws as they seek criminal indictments
against Weinstein. Who will be the next player to fall?
Since the Reagan-era of the 1980s, the U.S. has engaged in two
domestic wars – a war on drugs and a war on sex. Both have roots dating
from the 1920s Prohibition campaign; both rejected the 1960s-70s
countercultural insurgency. Both have been played out at federal and
local levels — and both are failures!
The country’s drug-addiction “epidemic” has shifted from black to
while, from the inner-city or urban ghettos to the suburbs and rural
heartland. Throughout the country, low-level drug offenses are being
decriminalized, criminal penalties are being lessened and the
traditional ethos of harsh punishment is being undercut by calls for
restorative justice.
When launched, the war on sex drew politicians, law enforcement and
people of good intentions, conservative and liberal (including anti-porn
feminist and gay-rights advocates), into alignment with the religious
right. They joined forces in a campaign to forcefully suppress what was
broadly conceived as a domestic security threat, violation of the
sexually acceptable.
The sex offender was – and remains — a perfect target for moral
outrage. He (mostly) is someone who crossed a moral line and committed
an unpardonable offense. If he cannot be executed for his affront to
civil and religious decency than, at least, he can be shamed or
stigmatized, imprisoned, placed in indefinite detention and listed on a
sex-offender’s registry.
The 25 men identified by the Times are “players” in the
entertainment, political, media and corporate worlds. Others will
surely be added to the list. Their outing is a friction point in the
seismic shift in American social values now underway. Those so far
identified come from the celebrate sector, not most people everyday
life. Unfortunately, misogyny is endemic to American life, but gets
little local media or public attention until it becomes a media
spectacle like what’s happening today. Its all-to-often considered a
private matter, rather than a social practice.
WaPo | In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S.
history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement
Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies
suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.
A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug
distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to
agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the
flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington
Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.
The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by
the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against
drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and
pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry
worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress,
pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.
The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino,a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress. It passed after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.
For years, some drug distributors were fined for repeatedly ignoring
warnings from the DEA to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of
millions of pills, while they racked up billions of dollars in sales.
The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze
suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal
agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by
the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law
review article. That powerful tool had allowed the agency to immediately
prevent drugs from reaching the street.
newyorker | When we talk about drug abuse in America, our
leaders use the language not just of war but of invasion. It is true, of
course, that many illegal drugs are produced in other countries and
imported into the United States. But our tendency to focus,
relentlessly, on the supply side of the drug problem obscures the more
intractable problem of the demand side—and of our complicity, as
voracious consumers. “An astonishing ninety per cent of the heroin in
America comes from south of the border,” President Trump said on
Thursday, in his remarks on the opioid epidemic. And this is true. But,
in focussing on this particular statistic, and promising that “building a
wall” along the Mexican border “will greatly help this problem,”
President Trump indulged the old nativist myth of drug prohibition.
This week, in the magazine, I wrote a piece about the origins of the current epidemic—a
story that unfolded not in Mexico but in Stamford, Connecticut, where
Purdue Pharma, a privately held company that is owned by the Sackler
family, developed a powerful opioid painkiller, OxyContin, and set out
to persuade the American medical establishment that it was not
addictive. As my piece relates, Purdue succeeded beyond its wildest
imaginings. OxyContin became a blockbuster drug, generating billions of
dollars for the Sacklers. Meanwhile, a generation of Americans grew
addicted to opioid painkillers. Four out of five people who try heroin
today first abused prescription painkillers. In light of such a
statistic, it would be folly to focus on Mexico and not look very hard
at the F.D.A.-approved drug pushers closer to home.
Trump
may not be particularly focussed on pharmaceutical companies, but there
are promising signs that others are. On Thursday morning, federal
agents arrested
the founder of Insys, a drug company that produces a powerful opioid,
and charged him with racketeering and fraud. And on Wednesday it was revealed
that federal prosecutors in Connecticut have opened a new criminal
investigation of Purdue Pharma—focussed on the marketing of OxyContin.
TomDispatch | As in Baghdad, so in Baltimore.
It’s connected, you see. Scholars, pundits, politicians, most of us in
fact like our worlds to remain discretely and comfortably separated.
That’s why so few articles, reports, or op-ed columns even think to link
police violence at home to our imperial pursuits abroad or the
militarization of the policing of urban America to our wars across the
Greater Middle East and Africa. I mean, how many profiles of the Black
Lives Matter movement even mention America’s 16-year war on terror
across huge swaths of the planet? Conversely, can you remember a foreign
policy piece that cited Ferguson? I doubt it.
Nonetheless, take a moment to consider the ways in which
counterinsurgency abroad and urban policing at home might, in these
years, have come to resemble each other and might actually be connected
phenomena:
*The degradations involved: So often, both counterinsurgency
and urban policing involve countless routine humiliations of a mostly
innocent populace. No matter how we’ve cloaked the terms --
“partnering,” “advising,” “assisting,” and so on -- the American
military has acted like an occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan in these
years. Those thousands of ubiquitous post-invasion U.S. Army foot and
vehicle patrols in both countries tended to highlight the lack of
sovereignty of their peoples. Similarly, as long ago as 1966, author
James Baldwin recognized
that New York City’s ghettoes resembled, in his phrase, “occupied
territory.” In that regard, matters have only worsened since. Just ask the black community in Baltimore or for that matter Ferguson, Missouri. It’s hard to deny America’s police are becoming progressively more defiant; just last month St. Louis cops taunted protestors by chanting “whose streets? Our
streets,” at a gathering crowd. Pardon me, but since when has it been
okay for police to rule America’s streets? Aren’t they there to protect
and serve us? Something tells me the exceedingly libertarian Founding
Fathers would be appalled by such arrogance.
*The racial and ethnic stereotyping. In Baghdad, many U.S. troops called the locals hajis, ragheads, or worse still, sandniggers.
There should be no surprise in that. The frustrations involved in
occupation duty and the fear of death inherent in counterinsurgency
campaigns lead soldiers to stereotype, and sometimes even hate, the
populations they’re (doctrinally)
supposed to protect. Ordinary Iraqis or Afghans became the enemy, an
“other,” worthy only of racial pejoratives and (sometimes) petty
cruelties. Sound familiar? Listen to the private conversations of
America’s exasperated urban police, or the occasionally public insults
they throw at the population they’re paid to “protect.” I, for one,
can’t forget the video
of an infuriated white officer taunting Ferguson protestors: “Bring it
on, you f**king animals!” Or how about a white Staten Island cop caught
on the phone bragging
to his girlfriend about how he’d framed a young black man or, in his
words, “fried another nigger.” Dehumanization of the enemy, either at
home or abroad, is as old as empire itself.
*The searches: Searches, searches, and yet more searches.
Back in the day in Iraq -- I’m speaking of 2006 and 2007 -- we didn’t
exactly need a search warrant to look anywhere we pleased. The Iraqi
courts, police, and judicial system were then barely operational. We
searched houses, shacks, apartments, and high rises for weapons,
explosives, or other “contraband.” No family -- guilty or innocent (and
they were nearly all innocent) -- was safe from the small, daily
indignities of a military search. Back here in the U.S., a similar
phenomenon rules, as it has since the “war on drugs” era of the 1980s.
It’s now routine for police SWAT teams to execute rubber-stamped or “no knock” search warrants on suspected drug dealers’ homes (often only for marijuana
stashes) with an aggressiveness most soldiers from our distant wars
would applaud. Then there are the millions of random, warrantless, body
searches on America’s urban, often minority-laden streets. Take New
York, for example, where a discriminatory regime
of “stop-and-frisk” tactics terrorized blacks and Hispanics for
decades. Millions of (mostly) minority youths were halted and searched
by New York police officers who had to cite
only such opaque explanations as “furtive movements,” or “fits relevant
description” -- hardly explicit probable cause -- to execute such daily
indignities. As numerous studies have shown (and a judicial ruling found), such “stop-and-frisk” procedures were discriminatory and likely unconstitutional.
Counterpunch |LS: Is the war on drugs also a war on blacks? Let me give you
some framework for this question, because John Ehrlichman, a former top
aide to Richard Nixon, supposedly admitted that: “The Nixon campaign in
1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar
left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we
couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by
getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up
their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (1) And I
can quote from H. R. Haldeman’s diaries in this respect, of course. In
the early stages of his presidency, more specifically on April 28, 1969,
Nixon outlined his basic strategy to his chief of staff: “[President
Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem
is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this
while not appearing to.” (2) So, is the war on drugs that started under
Nixon also a war on blacks? And if so, what does this tell us about the
United States?
DV: America is a former slave state and a blatantly racist society,
so yes, the war on drugs, which is managed by white supremacists, was
and is directed against blacks and other despised minorities as a way of
keeping them disenfranchised. The old Bureau of Narcotics was blatantly
racist: not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group
supervisors (Grade 13) and manage white agents.
I interviewed former FBN Agent William Davis for my book about the FBN, The Strength of the Wolf.
Davis articulated the predicament of black agents. After graduating
from Rutgers University in 1950, Davis, while visiting New York City,
heard singer Kate Smith praising FBN Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show.
“She described him as a black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a
federal narcotic agent,” Davis recalled, “and that was my inspiration. I
applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon
found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold
positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or
give direction to whites. The few black agents we had at any one time,”
he said bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities
heaped upon us.”
Davis told how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the
1930s, created a patent medicine. But McCree made the mistake of
writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that prosecutors in the South
were calling black agents “niggers.” As a result, the FBN’s legal staff
charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine.
McCree was fired with the intended ripple effect: his dismissal sent a
clear message that complaints from black agents would not be tolerated.
In an interview for The Strength of the Wolf, Clarence
Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police
in the 1970s, explained to me the racial situation from local law
enforcement’s perspective. “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because
it was easy,” he said. “We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us
to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man
we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no
money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no
expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case. So
rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can
make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in.
We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no
interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”
Anyone who thinks it is any different nowadays is living in a fantasy
world. Where I live, in Longmeadow, MA, the cops are the first line of
defense against the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the nearby city of
Springfield. About 15 years ago, there was a Mafia murder in
Springfield’s Little Italy section. At the time, blacks and Puerto
Ricans ere moving into the neighborhood and there was a lot of racial
tension. The local TV station interviewed me about it, and I said the Al
Bruno, the murdered Mafia boss, was probably an FBI informant. The next
day, people I knew wouldn’t talk to me. Comments were made. Someone
told me Bruno’s son went to the same health club as me. In a city like
Springfield and its suburban neighborhoods, everyone is related to or
friends with someone in the Mafia.
A few years before Bruno’s murder, I had befriended the janitor at
the health club I belong to. By chance, the janitor was the son of a
Springfield narcotics detective. The janitor and I shot pool and drank
beers in local bars. One day he told me a secret his father had told
him. His father told him that the Springfield cops let the Mafia bosses
bring narcotics into Springfield and in exchange, the hoods named their
black and Puerto Ricans customers. That way, like Giarusso said above,
the cops keep making cases and the minority communities have a harder
time buying houses and encroaching on the established whites in their
neighborhoods. This happens everywhere in the US every day.
LS: Is it ironic to you that the whole drug trade wouldn’t exist
as it does today if the drugs were not illegal in the first place?
DV: The outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction
from a matter of “public health” into a law enforcement issue, and thus a
pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal
justice and social welfare systems to prevent despised minorities from
making political and social advances. The health care industry was
placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of
despised minorities, the poor and working classes. Private businesses
established civic institutions to sanctify this repressive policy.
Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political
indoctrination promoting the Business Party’s racist line. Bureaucracies
were established to promote the expansion of business interests abroad,
while suppressing political and social resistance to the medical,
pharmaceutical, drug manufacturing and law enforcement industries that
benefited from it.
It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations
of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire
regulation of the industries that profit from it. Briefly stated, they
profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say
that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the
government to unleash and transform their economic power into political
and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or
cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource,
upon which all of the above industries – including the military –
depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a
matter of national security. Read my books for examples of how this has
played out over the past 70 years.
LS: In what form and fashion is the Phoenix program alive today in America’s homeland?
DV: Karl Marx explained over 150 years ago how and why capitalists
treat workers the same, whether at home or abroad. As capitalism evolves
and centralizes its power, as the climate degenerates, as the gap
between rich and poor widens, and as resources become scarcer, America
police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics
to use against the civilian population. The government has enacted
“administrative detention” laws, which are the legal basis for
Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion
of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic
method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with
those conducting “anti-terror” operations, and the Department of
Homeland Security has established “fusion centers” based on this model
around the nation. Informant nets and psychological operations against
the American people have also proliferated since 9-11. This is all
explained in detail in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime.
LS: How important is mainstream media for the public perception of the CIA?
DV: It’s the most critical feature. Guy Debord said that secrecy
dominates the world, foremost as secret of domination. The media
prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the
CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing.
What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling
capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic
audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media
outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But
when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts
democratic institutions.
Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on
double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media
self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of
information requires media complicity. This was one of the great lesson
defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly indoctrinated and well
rewarded managers who run the government and media will never again
allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians.
Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, and
Syrian children killed by marauding US mercenary forces and cluster
bombs.
On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture,
and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper
story is the key. Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already
become the template for providing internal political security for
America’s leaders.
LS: Is the CIA an enemy of the American people?
DV: Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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