Wed 10 Mar 2010 09:40
Greece and the Curse of the Free Lunch – Lessons for America?
Posted by: MalcontentCategories: Socialist Shithole
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Wed 10 Mar 2010 09:40
Thu 4 Mar 2010 10:20

Wed 3 Mar 2010 07:49
GUATEMALA CITY – Authorities arrested Guatemala’s anti-drug czar and national police chief Tuesday in a case involving stolen cocaine and slain police, acting just two days before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives to discuss the drug war.
The detentions were the latest embarrassment for Guatemala’s embattled anti-narcotics effort and came amid U.S. complaints that corruption is impeding the battle to stop the flow of drugs north through Central America.
Attorney General Amilcar Velasquez said Police Chief Baltazar Gomez, anti-drug czar Nelly Bonilla and police officer Fernando Carrillo were detained after an investigation by Guatemalan authorities and the U.N.-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity.
No charges were immediately filed.
The commission’s head, Carlos Castresana, said the three arrested Tuesday, five other agents detained in January and five more officers killed in a gunbattle with drug traffickers last year were part of a criminal network that stole drugs from organized crime.
Members of the group had stolen 1,540 pounds (700 kilograms) of cocaine from a trafficker’s warehouse in the town of Amatitlan and returned for 770 pounds (350 kilograms) more and an arsenal of weapons when they were ambushed by gangsters, Castresana said. Five officers died in the April firefight that resulted in police seizing automatic weapons and about 500 rocket-launched grenades.
“We can’t say whether it was the first or last time they had stolen drugs,” Castresana said.
He said authorities became suspicious of the slain officers after learning anti-narcotics agents blocked federal prosecutors from reaching the crime scene and noticing the national police didn’t open an investigation into the officers’ deaths.
In a brief meeting with reporters at a detention center, Gomez didn’t address the accusation that he was involved with a police group that was stealing drugs. But he denied he tried to cover up the involvement of the five dead officers.
“When that happened I informed my superiors,” Gomez told reporters. “These things happen in our country. We will appeal.”
Bonilla called the accusations a vendetta against her, but she also didn’t specifically address Castresana’s outline of the alleged crimes. “I have enemies and I was on their way,” Bonilla told Channel 7 television.
Carrillo, the arrested police officer, and his lawyer could not be immediately contacted.
At the time of the gunbattle, police said it involved members of the Zetas, a group of hit men and drug traffickers linked to Mexico’s powerful Gulf cartel. The Zetas have extended their operations into Guatemala in recent years after coming under pressure from Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s drug war.
Clinton is scheduled to discuss Guatemala’s drug war when she meets with President Alvaro Colom on Friday, winding up her tour through Latin America this week.
Officials say Guatemala has become a transshipment point for cocaine heading north from Colombia, with Mexico’s powerful drug cartels deepening their reach into the impoverished Central American country.
Guatemala has witnessed the arrests of a string of top law enforcement officials responsible with overseeing the fight against both local gangs and foreign cartels.
Bonilla is the second drug czar to be detained and Gomez, who previously served as drug czar, is the second national police chief to be jailed for alleged drug ties in recent years.
In September, National Police Chief Porfirio Perez was suspended and later detained for allegedly stealing $300,000 from smugglers. He is awaiting trial.
In one of the biggest cases involving police officials helping cartels, former anti-drug czar Adan Castillo was caught on tape accepting $25,000 from an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to protect a U.S.-bound cocaine shipment. He remains jailed in the United States.
“Where legitimate institutions are weak and fragile then you’re going to have criminal institutions moving into that vacuum, and that’s what’s happening there,” said George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia who has written about Mexico’s drug cartels.
In a corruption case reaching the highest levels of government in Guatemala, former President Alfonso Portillo was arrested in February after being indicted in a U.S. court on money laundering charges. He already was on trial on corruption charges brought by Guatemalan prosecutors.
Wed 24 Feb 2010 01:31
Of all the issues of concern to the public, immigration is possibly the most explosive – and the one about which the most lies are continuing to be told.
During the period that Labour has been in office, mass immigration has simply changed the face of Britain. The total number of immigrants since 1997 is pushing three million.
Ministers claim that immigration policy has been driven principally to help the economy. They have always denied that they actually set out deliberately to change the ethnic composition of the country.
Well, now we know for a certainty that this is not true. The Government embarked on a policy of mass immigration to change Britain into a multicultural society – and they kept this momentous aim secret from the people whose votes they sought.
Worse still, they did this knowing that it ran directly counter to the wishes of those voters, whose concerns about immigration they dismissed as racist; and they further concealed official warnings that large-scale immigration would bring about significant increases in crime.
The truth about this scandal was first blurted out last October by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Party speechwriter.
He wrote that until the new points-based system limiting foreign workers was introduced in 2008 – in response to increasing public uproar – government policy for the previous eight years had been aimed at promoting mass immigration.
The ‘driving political purpose’ of this policy, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’ – and one subsidiary motivation was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
Ministers, however, went to great lengths to keep their real intentions secret from the public – with, said Neather, a ‘ paranoia’ that these would reach the media – since they knew their core white working-class voters would react very badly.
Accordingly, a report about immigration by a government advisory unit, which formed the core of a landmark speech in 2000 announcing the loosening of border controls, went through several drafts before it was finally published – and the Government’s true intentions about changing Britain into a multicultural society were removed from the final version.
After revealing all this, Neather subsequently tried to backtrack, saying that his views had been twisted out of all recognition by the media. They hadn’t been.
Nevertheless, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary at the time the immigration policy was changed, said he had read press reports of Neather’s remarks with incredulity since they were ‘the reverse of the truth’.
Now we know, however, that they were indeed the truth. We know this only because details of the advisory unit’s report which were excised from the final published version – just as Neather said – have been emerging into the public domain through Freedom of Information requests.
The pressure group MigrationWatch obtained an early draft which revealed that the Government’s intention was to encourage mass immigration for ’social objectives’ – in other words, to produce a more ethnically diverse society – but that on no fewer than six occasions this phrase was excised from the final version, published some three months later.
Now we further discover, from what was removed from seemingly another early draft, that the aim was not just to implement this policy of mass immigration without the knowledge or consent of the British people.
It was done in the full knowledge that the people actually wanted immigration reduced.
And we also discover that those who expressed such concerns were dismissed with utter contempt as racists – and it was further suggested that ministers should manipulate public opinion in an attempt to change people’s attitudes.
Well, they have certainly tried to do that by hanging the disgusting label of ‘racism’ round the neck of anyone who dares voice such concerns.
Thus the eminent and decent Labour MP Frank Field found himself smeared as a racist for daring to suggest that the rate of immigration should be reduced.
What bullying arrogance. The real prejudice is surely to believe that opposition to mass migration can never be based on any reasonable objection.
The implications of this covert policy are quite staggering. Ministers deliberately set out to change the cultural and ethnic identity of this country in secret.
They did this mainly because they hated what Britain was, a largely homogeneous society rooted in 1,000 years of history. They therefore set out to replace it by a totally new kind of multicultural society – and one in which the vast majority of newcomers could be expected to vote Labour.
They set out to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. They set out to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place.
And they then had the gall to declare that to have love for or pride in that authentic British identity, and to want to protect and uphold it, was racist.
So the very deepest feelings of people for their country were damned as bigotry, for which crime they were to have their noses rubbed in mass immigration until they changed their attitudes.
What an appalling abuse of power. Yet even now they are denying that this is what they did. Yesterday, the Immigration Minister Phil Woolas blustered that the advisory unit report had not been accepted by ministers at the time.
But the fact is that mass immigration actually happened. The only thing ministers hadn’t accepted was that the truth about their intentions should be revealed to the public.
Surreally, Mr Woolas further claims that the Government has brought immigration down.
But the reductions he is talking about have taken place on the separate issue of asylum. The impact of the Government’s new points scheme upon the record rate of immigration growth has been negligible.
The truth is that these early drafts of the advisory unit’s report have blown open one of the greatest political scandals of the Labour years. At no stage did Labour’s election manifestos make any reference to a policy of mass immigration nor the party’s aim of creating a multicultural society.
What we have been subjected to is a deliberate deception of the voters and a gross abuse of democracy.
There could scarcely be a more profound abuse of the democratic process than to set out to destroy a nation’s demographic and cultural identity through a conscious deception of the people of that nation. It is an act of collective national treachery.
Now we face imminently another General Election. And now we know that in their hearts, Labour politicians hold the great mass of the public, many of them their own voters, in total contempt as racist bigots – all for wanting to live in a country whose identity they share.
There could hardly be a more worthy issue for the Conservative Party to leap upon. Yet their response is muted through their own visceral terror of appearing racist.
The resulting despair over the refusal of the mainstream parties to address this issue threatens to drive many into the arms of the truly racist British National Party.
If that happens, the fault will lie not just with Labour’s ideological malice and mendacity, but with the spinelessness of an entire political class.
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The U.S. government is doing the exact same thing to the American people as the Labour Party has done to the British people: allowing our borders to stay open (especially to Mexico) to change the U.S. into a multi-cultural society, though, the Mexican culture is the dominate culture over other immigrant cultures and is rapidly replacing the American culture. One only need look at Mexico today to see what America will become soon.
We are labeled racists and xenophobes for wanting one common (English) language, for flying Old Glory, and for saying the pledge of allegiance to the United States of America. The U.S. Nationalist, the Patriot, is now labeled an extremist and a threat to national security, but tens of millions of non- assimilating illegal and legal immigrants…not so much.
Instead of asking immigrants to assimilate, we bend over backwards to accommodate them.
We have reached critical mass.
Wed 17 Feb 2010 09:18
By Terry Easton
Greece is one of the famous European “PIGS”: Portugal, Ireland, Greece & Spain, the EU countries riddled in debt and run-away government spending. We have “PIGS” right here in the United States. California is the best example, because it is facing a perfect storm of out of control spending, deficits and a dysfunctional government. What is happening in Greece today is a forecast of what will happen in California later this year.
Like the rest of the Euro-PIGS, Greece is a member of the Euro Zone.
When the Euro currency was adopted on January 1, 2002, many economists said that the currency union would crash and burn within a decade – when the first real monetary crisis arose. That crisis has now arrived. Originally adopted as the common currency of 11 European nations, it now serves as a straight-jacket for its 16 current members. Here’s why.
There are two ways a government can manipulate its economy. It can change its fiscal policy by spending more on government make-work and socialist entitlement programs. When it does this, it has to raise taxes or borrow money to pay its bills.
If the country is the United States, England, China or Japan, for example, it can also use its central bank, here the Federal Reserve, to change its monetary policy by creating more “reserves”: by printing up more money. The central bank can then buy up the IOU’s of the government and inflate its way out of the debt by enabling the government to pay back its debts in the future using money that’s then worth a lot less.
The out-of-control Greek socialist government (and its “progressive” former center-right government) have been on a spending spree to mostly pay for union-controlled government jobs and their expensive benefits. (Over 10% of Greeks are government employees). In other words, the Greek government is a spendthrift.
Sound familiar?
If a government controls the printing up of its own currency, when it racks up huge budget deficits like the Greeks have done, the country’s bond rating collapses. The Greek government deficit is running 12.7% of its GDP, and its national debt will exceed 125% of its GDP by the end of 2010. People and banks who might lend it money to buy its bonds fear that it won’t have the money in the future to pay them back.
So Greece is forced to raise its bond interest rates – which measures the risk that the lender will be exposed to. For Greece, this is very high indeed: over 2.5% above what Germany pays.
So, Greece must stop its irresponsible government spending, or raise its taxes to crippling rates, or print more money to pay off its future bills. Throughout history, the politician’s solution has always been clear: create more money. The Greek Drachma would then drop versus the dollar or pound, and this devaluation of their currency – and loss of buying power – would partially equalize the problem by buying time to allow a more responsible future government to stop the run-away spending.
Hard times would follow as everyone would be forced to tighten their belts and spend less. Right.
But there’s a problem here. Greece doesn’t have Drachmas anymore.
It uses Euros, and the printing of these is controlled by the European Central Bank – based in Frankfurt, Germany. So Greece is dependent upon “the kindness of strangers”: the EU governments and the European Commission in Brussels bailing them out with massive loans. Greece now owes €300 Billion ($419 Billion), for a population of just 11 million. And their northern neighbors, especially the Germans, have been pinching and saving and working hard over the past decade while the Greeks have been living in a Mediterranean fantasyland Utopia of spend, spend, spend.
Think the German’s are going to bail out Greece? What will they get in return? Unless they informally take over the Greek government and force the Greeks to live the hard-working frugal lifestyle of northern Europe, they know their money will be wasted. This creates the problem economists love to call “moral hazard.” Bailouts always work that way.
This is the Achilles heel of Greece. It’s a dysfunctional underachiever married in a monetary union to a virtuous overachiever, Germany. And no divorce is legally allowed.
Next to fall will be Portugal, whose budget deficit reached 9.3% of its GDP in 2009, with a projected debt-to-GDP ratio of 85% in 2010. Portugal also owes over $400 Billion with a similar population size of 11 million. Then we have Spain, a country with 47 million people and a national debt of over $1.2 trillion, suffering almost 20% unemployment. Interestingly, Greece, Spain & Portugal all had military dictatorships running their countries until the 70’s. Then came the good-time socialists.
Like dominoes, if Germany doesn’t prevent the first one from falling over, the next one will likely topple, and on it goes through Ireland and possibly Italy. The Euro will be dead. But if Germany does bail out Greece, this will likely simply prolong the agony and take the pressure off the socialist Greek government making real positive changes. The moral hazard rot will set in throughout Euroland, and…the Euro will probably disappear.
Belt-tightening and fiscal responsibility is tough to do for socialists as nary a one has ever understood real-world economics. And surely not one in 100 have heard of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and the other great Austrian School thinkers. The creation of fractional-reserve funny-money central banks in the early 1900’s set the downward ball rolling. And it’s moving faster and faster every quarter.
California is Greece writ large.
The state has nearly 37 million people and a spendthrift dysfunctional legislature which is dominated by big-union lobbyists and special-interest groups. These have forced cockamamie laws like mandating the poison MTBE to be added to the gasoline to “improve the air” (but destroy the drinking water) and bankrupting the two great investor-owned power companies PG&E and Southern Cal Edison (thank you Enron!).
The result? Gasoline costs, on average, 50 cents more per gallon than in the rest of the United States. And electricity, which used to cost 6 cents a kilowatt hour, now costs from 12 cents to 42 cents per kilowatt hour for the homeowner. State sales tax is a tad under 10% and income state taxes exceed 11% for the top taxpayers. More taxes, please?
Add to the economic burden mandatory union laws, a bloated bureaucracy, and a socialist welfare system supporting legal residents and several million more illegal aliens (including between 26% to 44% of prison inmates).
Top it off with anti-growth, anti-industry, anti-farming and anti-energy regulations and a passion for wasting money in unionized schools and you have the perfect fiscal storm.
In spite of using every slight-of-hand trick known to politicians, the California legislature still couldn’t balance its $119 billion 2010 budget. It’s shy $20 billion. Today. But by the end of the year, it will likely be in the red by as much as $40 billion. Meanwhile California’s roads are falling apart as the state has seized the gasoline highway taxes to pay instead for its government salaries and socialist spending programs.
In 2010, the California government now owes a staggering debt of $3.3 trillion. This is 220% more per person than the out-of-control US federal government owes. Like Greece, California is broke, and is having a problem selling its government bonds into a skeptical market. Also like Greece, the rating agencies have knocked down its credit rating, making the cost of borrowing money more expensive. This creates an ever-downward spending-borrowing spiral. Finally, like Greece, California can’t print up its own money to inflate its problems away. Like ancient Greece, is California too doomed to fall into slavery?
Oh, what to do?
Perhaps like modern-day Greece, California can turn forlornly to Big Brother to bail it out. In this case, that’s Washington.
But Federal money comes with federal strings, and California will have to give up its political control over its own destiny when this happens.
Moreover, the Feds don’t have the money. With wacky healthcare trillion dollar spending schemes and wackier “cap and trade” kill-jobs schemes, and failed “stimulus” schemes, Washington’s professional politicians-for-life are worried about being caught out by an increasingly angry voting public. This includes, Republicans, Independents and even Democrats – whose blue-collar workers are increasingly finding themselves in the unemployment lines.
Then there’s Texas.
Why should the hard-working people in Texas bail out the Mediterranean spendthrifts in California whose motto is fun, fun, fun and spend, spend, spend? They won’t. And Texas votes will matter big-time in the next national election.
Finally, California is not the only state in deep financial trouble. What about the other 40+ states which are also suffering a fiscal meltdown? Should the federal government bail them out too? That’s another $250 billion in 2010, and every year forward. And what about “Moral Hazard”? It will infect every hemorrhaging statehouse just as it has infected Washington.
So where goes Greece will likely go California. Two peas in a socialist pod.
Will the Germans bail out Greece and save the EU from the abyss for another few years? What will Washington do? My bet is that they’re going to “kick the can” down the road one again. Then it won’t be our children whose future lives we will have destroyed. It will be our grandchildren — if our children, like the Europeans, can afford to even have a future.
Wed 17 Feb 2010 06:20
Pathos-laden open borders disingenuous tripe LA Times
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest proposals to close California’s budget shortfall would end public assistance for most new legal immigrants, eliminating emergency cash, food and medical aid for those who don’t yet qualify for federal welfare.
The proposal would represent an about-face for the state. In 1996, Congress denied access to welfare for most legal immigrants who weren’t citizens. California and other states established programs to fill the gap.
Now, officials say the state can’t afford the price tag. Schwarzenegger’s plan would save $304 million but leave tens of thousands of elderly, disabled and impoverished people with no safety net in a deep recession.
“How are we going to live?” asked 70-year-old Yong Hak Cho, who emigrated from Korea four years ago and is raising two grandchildren in Los Angeles. “Immigrants pay taxes like anybody else. So why do they want to eliminate programs for us? It is unfair and it is un-American.”
State officials say the cuts are painful but necessary, and there was no attempt to single out any population group in the proposed budget.
“The fact that we have to close a $20-billion budget gap, on the heels of a $60-billion gap last year, means that we have had to make the difficult decision to propose curtailing or eliminating many state-only programs, and these fall into that category,” said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the Finance Department.
When families petition to bring relatives to the U.S., they are required to sign affidavits agreeing to support them financially for up to 10 years. But many of these families have fallen on hard times. Affidavits are not required for people entering the country under various other programs.
Federal benefits have been restored to some recent arrivals, but most are not eligible for supplemental security income, food stamps, transitional assistance for needy families or Medi-Cal until they have lived legally in the U.S. for five years. Exceptions are made for refugees and a few other categories.
Only a few other states still provide cash or food aid to new, legal arrivals. Advocates for stricter immigration controls say that a waiting period to receive benefits is appropriate.
“Five years is a legitimate time to ensure that people who have come here the right way are willing to assimilate and be loyal tax-paying Americans,” said Barbara Coe of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform.
The proposed cuts include:
* Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants, serving about 8,500 low-income elderly and disabled people. The projected savings is $107.3 million.
* California Food Assistance Program, which provides benefits to about 37,000 low-income immigrants, for savings of $56.2 million.
* Calworks benefits for about 24,000 new legal immigrants, for savings of $22.5 million. The program provides cash, job training, child care and other services to help families transition from welfare to work.
* Full-spectrum Medi-Cal services for 48,570 new legal immigrants and 65,000 undocumented people who tell the state they are known to immigration officials and their deportation is not being sought. The projected savings is $118 million. Pregnant women and children would still be covered.
The Legislature last year rejected proposals to eliminate some of the same programs, but many recipients have seen their benefits reduced.
UCLA professor of public health Alex Ortega said immigrants are frequently targeted in tough economic times because they can’t yet vote, do not speak English well and are often poor.
“They have all the factors that contribute to being vulnerable,” Ortega said.
Community activists say the budget proposals will leave many without a lifeline.
“These are elderly, often frail individuals who rely on this support to buy their medicines, pay rent and eat a basic diet,” Hala Masri, a policy advocate for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, said in an e-mail.
Cho is so worried that he has considered returning to Korea. But he said, “I have no roots there . . . I am American now.”
The $835 in aid the family receives each month doesn’t even cover rent.
After working 21 years at a U.S. military base in South Korea, Cho went back to school to learn how to repair computers. When that did not yield a job, he enrolled in English classes and became certified as a security guard. Then his son-in-law died of cancer. His daughter works long hours at a Chinese restaurant, so he took in his two grandchildren, 11 and 8.
Cho now works part-time at a community center, advising other immigrants. His wife works for a program providing in-home care to the frail and disabled, but that too is slated for cuts.
“I will have to find some other work,” Cho said, staring at his tea cup on a chilly morning in Koreatown. “What company would hire an old person like me?”
The California Immigrant Policy Center argues in a new report that the savings from the proposed cuts would be offset by increased homelessness and costly emergency room use.
“Not only are these cuts not fair, they are not smart,” said Reshma Shamasunder, who runs the advocacy group. “They are not going to save us money in the long run.”
Teddy Lechadores, 70, who emigrated legally from the Philippines in 2007, relies on Medi-Cal to pay for dialysis. He also sees doctors for his prostate cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure, and needs eight prescription medicines.
“If I were in the Philippines I would have been dead now,” Lechadores said.
He was laid off last month from a security guard job. He now makes $160 a week for doing maintenance and office workat the Pilipino Workers Center west of downtown. His bank account is overdrawn, he sleeps at the center and keeps most of his belongings in his 1996 Acura, which was damaged recently when someone rear-ended him.
“I’m down to nothing,” he said as he looked through his Medi-Cal forms on a recent afternoon. “Medi-Cal is very, very important.”
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My gawd! It’s bad enough the 48 thousand legal blood sucking immigrants, but 65, 000 illegal aliens on the tax payer teat. And that’s 65, 000 known to ICE, but aren’t being sought for deportation. For fuck sake!
“Immigrants pay taxes like anybody else. So why do they want to eliminate programs for us? It is unfair and it is un-American.”
These ‘no-income’ immigrants do not pay state/federal taxes.
Those that do work and pay taxes get the Earned Income Tax Credit. That means they get back much more than they ever paid in.
Had enough yet?
Sun 7 Feb 2010 07:37
By Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau
MEXICO CITY – For months, the leaders of Tancitaro had held firm against the drug lords battling for control of this central Mexican town.
Then one morning, after months of threats and violence from the traffickers, they finally surrendered.
Before dawn, gunmen kidnapped the elderly fathers of the town administrator and the secretary of the City Council. Within hours, both officials resigned along with the mayor, the entire seven-member City Council, two department heads, the police chief and all 60 police officers. Tancitaro had fallen to the enemy.
Across Mexico, the continuing ability of traffickers to topple governments like Tancitaro’s, intimidate police and keep drug shipments flowing is raising doubts about the Mexican government’s 3-year-old, U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels.
Far from eliminating the gangs, the battle has exposed criminal networks more ingrained than most Americans could imagine: Hidden economies that employ up to one-fifth of the people in some Mexican states. Business empires that include holdings as everyday as gyms and a day-care center.
And the death toll continues to mount: Mexico saw 6,587 drug-related murders in 2009, up from 5,207 in 2008 and 2,275 in 2007, according to an unofficial tally by the respected newspaper Reforma.
Cartels have multiplied, improved their armament and are perfecting simultaneous, terrorist-style attacks.
Some analysts are warning that Mexico is on the verge of becoming a "narco-state" like 1990s-era Colombia.
"We are approaching that red zone," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime at the Autonomous Technological University of Mexico. "There are pockets of ungovernability in the country, and they will expand."
For the past decade, he said, parts of Mexico have been sliding toward the lawlessness that Colombia experienced, in which traffickers in league with left-wing rebels controlled small towns and large parts of the interior through drug-funded bribery and gun-barrel intimidation.
In the latest sign of the cartels’ grip, on Wednesday the National Action Party of President Felipe Calderón announced it was calling off primary elections in the northern state of Tamaulipas because drug traffickers had infiltrated politics.
And in Chihuahua, the government is redeploying troops from the embattled city of Juarez to the countryside because of fears that the cartels are cementing their control in smaller border towns.
Even Calderón, who a year ago angrily rebutted suggestions that Mexico was becoming a "failed state," is now describing his crackdown as a fight for territory and "the very authority of the state."
"The crime has stopped being a low-profile activity and has become defiant . . . . plainly visible and based on co-opting or intimidating the authorities," he told a group of Mexican ambassadors last month. "It’s the law of the ‘bribe or the bullet.’ "
In places like Tancitaro, population 26,000, the battle already may be lost.
In the past year, gunmen killed seven police officers, murdered a top town administrator and kidnapped others, said Martin Urbina, a city official. The reasons were unclear – most of the town leaders are in hiding and could not be reached for comment – but the drug traffickers were apparently demanding the removal of certain police officers, Urbina said.
When the traffickers kidnapped the two officials’ fathers on Nov. 30, it was the last straw.
"If someone comes and puts a pistol to your head, what are you going to do?" said Gustavo Sánchez, who was appointed by the Michoacan state governor as interim mayor after the mass resignation. "It’s happening in all of the states, not just here."
In Vicente Guerrero, in Durango state, 34 of 38 police resigned after the police chief and four officers were kidnapped. The victims have not been found.
In the border town of Puerto Palomas, the police chief fled to the United States and asked for asylum in March, saying Mexican officials could not protect him. In October, traffickers killed the town administrator in Puerto Palomas.
In the northern town of Namiquipa, traffickers killed the mayor and two top town officials last year. Police there are woefully outgunned, police Chief Jesus Hinojosa said. There are only 15 weapons for 39 police officers.
Often the cartels target city officials they believe are cooperating with federal authorities, said Juan Manuel Bautista, the City Council secretary in the western town of Novolato, where traffickers have killed 25 police, two city councilmen and a town administrator in the past two years.
Other times, they are simply lashing back at the most convenient targets, he said.
"In these small-town governments, everyone knows your business and who you are," Bautista said. "If they want to take revenge on you, it’s easy."
Even when governments replace police chiefs, mayors and town councils, it’s often only a matter of time before the replacements are bribed, intimidated at the barrel of a gun or killed, and the scenario repeats itself, said Bernardo Gonzalez Arechiga, an expert on crime at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Advanced Studies.
In May, federal officials arrested 10 mayors in Michoacan state on charges of protecting smugglers.
In June, Mauricio Fernández, a mayoral candidate in the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia, was recorded telling a meeting of supporters that he had negotiated a truce with the Beltrán Leyva gang as a way of guaranteeing security in the town. Fernández later denied any contact with the gang. He easily won the July 2 election.
The attempt to dismantle the cartels has created a new appreciation for how deep their financial networks go, said Joel Kurtzman, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in Santa Monica, Calif
In many towns, smugglers pay for playgrounds and other things the government cannot afford. Bank loans are expensive and hard to get in Mexico, a lingering effect of the country’s bank crises during the 1990s, so traffickers have stepped in to provide small-business loans.
In many towns, smugglers pay for playgrounds and other things the government cannot afford. Bank loans are expensive and hard to get in Mexico, a lingering effect of the country’s bank crises during the 1990s, so traffickers have stepped in to provide small-business loans.
"What people did not recognize in Mexico was how deeply ingrained in both the economy and society the drug trade was," Kurtzman said. "So it’s not as if the drug traders are unpopular – they’re looked at in many cities like Robin Hoods."
Since 2006, the number of Mexican citizens and companies on the U.S. Treasury’s blacklist of suspected drug smugglers has nearly doubled, from 188 to 362.
They are as varied as a day-care center in Culiacan, a gym in Hermosillo and an electronics company in Tijuana. There are meat packing plants, horse stables, dairies, hotels, a mining company and gasoline stations.
Dozens of those companies are still operating because Mexican prosecutors lack few legal tools to shut them down, Buscaglia said.
In March, the financial magazine Forbes included Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán in its list of the world’s billionaires for the first time. Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, was listed at No. 701 with a net worth of about $1 billion.
In fact, Guzmán’s cartel and other gangs probably bring in $3.8 billion just to Sinaloa state alone, said Guillermo Ibarra, an economist who used bank and government statistics to compile an estimate this year.
That is 20 percent of the state’s economy, twice as much as all of its factories put together. The drug trade employs about a fifth of the state’s 2.6 million population, either directly or indirectly, he said.
"It trickles down to construction, to car sales, you name it," Ibarra said. "Drug money ends up everywhere."
The cartels’ criminal activities also are becoming more diverse, Buscaglia said.
La Familia Michoacana, which produces methamphetamine at clandestine laboratories in Michoacan state, has broadened into prostitution, protection rackets and software piracy.
Street vendors in Mexico now sell music CDs and DVDs stamped with "FM," the gang’s logo.
Likewise, the Zetas, once the elite hit men of the Gulf Cartel, now run kidnapping-for-ransom rings in Mexico City and steal gasoline from government pipelines. Pemex, the state-run oil company, says it lost $747 million in stolen fuel in 2008.
The cartels also have found ways to defend their core drug business by moving marijuana farms to U.S. national parks, finding new smuggling routes through Africa and into Europe, and strengthening their supply lines in Central America.
Drug prices and purity in the United States, the main measure of trafficking, shows the crackdown is having only mixed results.
Cocaine prices in the United States jumped from $132 a gram to $182 a gram from September 2007 to September 2008, the latest date for which the Drug Enforcement Administration has released numbers.
But during the same period, methamphetamine got stronger and cheaper, dropping from $213 per gram to $184 per gram.
To offset tighter border security, Mexican traffickers are setting up marijuana farms on public lands in California, Washington and Oregon, a U.S. Department of Justice report said in July. The number of marijuana plants seized in the United States soared from 3.2 million in 2004 to 8 million in 2008.
Their product is also improving, the report said: Marijuana potency in 2008 was the highest it has ever been.
The cartels also are expanding into new territory.
Since 2008, Mexican drug smugglers have been arrested in Australia, New Zealand and the African nations of Sierra Leone and Togo. U.S. prosecutors say the Gulf Cartel has struck deals with the New York mob and the Ndrangheta Mafia of Italy to smuggle cocaine into Europe.
In the United States, cartel operatives have been detected in 195 cities, as distant as Anchorage, Alaska, and as small as Ponca City, Okla., a report by the U.S. Justice Department said.
In Arizona, the Sinaloa Cartel has operations in Phoenix, Tucson, Douglas, Glendale, Naco, Nogales, Peoria, Sasabe, Sierra Vista and Yuma. The Gulf Cartel also has some operatives in Nogales, and the Juarez Cartel has outposts in Phoenix, Tucson and Douglas, the report said.
Buscaglia said his research has turned up links to Mexican traffickers in 47 countries worldwide.
"Mexico has become an exporter of instability," he said.
At the same time, the cartels are acquiring weapons that are "increasingly more powerful and lethal," the U.S. Government and Accountability Office said in a June report.
Five rocket launchers, 271 grenades, 2,932 assault rifles, a submarine loaded with cocaine, and an anti-aircraft gun complete with blast shield were all seized by Mexican authorities between March 2008 and August 2009.
In September, traffickers fired an anti-tank rocket at soldiers while trying to free a comrade who had been detained.
The gangs also are getting better at carrying out coordinated, military-style operations.
On July 11 and 12, La Familia launched 15 attacks in eight cities on police stations and a police bus, killing 14 officers.
And on May 16, Gulf Cartel gunmen freed 53 prisoners in a commando-style raid on a prison in Zacatecas state.
Calderón and the Obama administration insist that the Mexican government still has the upper hand against the cartels.
"We have a serious problem, but the good news is that we’re confronting it, and better yet, we’re making progress," Calderón told the ambassadors last month.
But in the past year, doubts have been growing.
A report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command warned in January 2009 that Mexico was ripe for a "rapid and sudden collapse" because of the drug cartels. And in a report to the West Point military academy, former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey said the cartels could "overwhelm the institutions of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of northern Mexico" within eight years.
Former President Ernesto Zedillo, writer Carlos Fuentes, former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda and the former chief of Calderón’s National Action Party have publicly questioned the president’s strategy.
In Colombia, the government was able to re-establish control in rural areas by eliminating a "demilitarized" zone that had been granted to the leftist guerrillas, renewing attacks on them and spraying coca fields with pesticides. The United States has helped with $5.8 billion in aid since 2000.
But in Mexico, the government needs to focus on the prosecution of crimes instead of flooding the streets with troops, Buscaglia said.
Only about half of detainees are ever convicted, and most are low-level thugs, not the money launderers, accountants and managers who keep the cartels running.
Of the more than 53,000 arrests since the crackdown began, only 941 are in Sinaloa, despite the fact that that state is the heart of one of the biggest smuggling empires, Buscaglia said.
The government also needs laws allowing authorities to shut down suspected money-laundering operations and seize their assets without going through a criminal trial, he said.
Only three things could change the balance, said Ray Walser, an expert on Latin America at the conservative Heritage Foundation: a massive increase in U.S. drug aid, a large addiction-treatment program in the United States or the legalization of drugs in the United States.
None of these measures seems to be on the horizon, Walser said.
"The problem that Calderón has in winning this war will be that he can’t offer the citizens courts, mayors and policemen that are safe and honest and not corrupt," Kurtzman said.
"As a result, this is likely to remain a stalemate with a lot of killing on both sides for a long time."
Wed 3 Feb 2010 04:10
In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. While Great Britain’s maritime power and its far-flung empire had propelled it to a dominant position among the world’s industrialized nations, only the United States challenged Argentina for the position of the world’s second-most powerful economy.
It was blessed with abundant agriculture, vast swaths of rich farmland laced with navigable rivers and an accessible port system. Its level of industrialization was higher than many European countries: railroads, automobiles and telephones were commonplace.
In 1916, a new president was elected. Hipólito Irigoyen had formed a party called The Radicals under the banner of "fundamental change" with an appeal to the middle class.
Among Irigoyen’s changes: mandatory pension insurance, mandatory health insurance, and support for low-income housing construction to stimulate the economy. Put simply, the state assumed economic control of a vast swath of the country’s operations and began assessing new payroll taxes to fund its efforts.
With an increasing flow of funds into these entitlement programs, the government’s payouts soon became overly generous. Before long its outlays surpassed the value of the taxpayers’ contributions. Put simply, it quickly became under-funded, much like the United States’ Social Security and Medicare programs.
The death knell for the Argentine economy, however, came with the election of Juan Perón. Perón had a fascist and corporatist upbringing; he and his charismatic wife aimed their populist rhetoric at the nation’s rich.
This targeted group "swiftly expanded to cover most of the propertied middle classes, who became an enemy to be defeated and humiliated."
Under Perón, the size of government bureaucracies exploded through massive programs of social spending and by encouraging the growth of labor unions.
High taxes and economic mismanagement took their inevitable toll even after Perón had been driven from office. But his populist rhetoric and "contempt for economic realities" lived on. Argentina’s federal government continued to spend far beyond its means.
Hyperinflation exploded in 1989, the final stage of a process characterized by "industrial protectionism, redistribution of income based on increased wages, and growing state intervention in the economy."
The Argentinean government’s practice of printing money to pay off its public debts had crushed the economy. Inflation hit 3000%, reminiscent of the Weimar Republic. Food riots were rampant; stores were looted; the country descended into chaos.
And by 1994, Argentina’s public pensions – the equivalent of Social Security – had imploded. The payroll tax had increased from 5% to 26%, but it wasn’t enough. In addition, Argentina had implemented a value-added tax (VAT), new income taxes, a personal tax on wealth, and additional revenues based upon the sale of public enterprises. These crushed the private sector, further damaging the economy.
A government controlled "privatization" effort to rescue seniors’ pensions was attempted. But, by 2001, those funds had also been raided by the government, the monies replaced by Argentina’s defaulted government bonds.
By 2002, ".government fiscal irresponsibility. induced a national economic crisis as severe as America’s Great Depression."
In 1902 Argentina was one of the world’s richest countries. Little more than a hundred years later, it is poverty-stricken, struggling to meet its debt obligations amidst a drought.
We’ve seen this movie before. The Democrats’ populist plans can’t possibly work, because government bankrupts everything it touches. History teaches us that ObamaCare and unfunded entitlement programs will be utter, complete disasters.
Today’s Democrats are guilty of more than stupidity; they are enslaving future generations to poverty and misery. And they will be long gone when it all implodes. They will be as cold and dead as Juan Perón when the piper must ultimately be paid.
Sun 24 Jan 2010 05:22
CARACAS, Venezuela—Venezuelan cable-television providers stopped transmitting a channel critical of President Hugo Chávez on Sunday, after the government cited noncompliance with new regulations requiring the socialist leader’s speeches be televised on cable.
Radio Caracas Television, an anti-Chávez channel known as RCTV that switched to cable and satellite television in 2007 after the government refused to renew its over-the-air license, disappeared from TV sets shortly after midnight.
RCTV was yanked from cable and satellite programming just hours after Diosdado Cabello, director of Venezuela’s state-run telecommunications agency, said several local channels carried by cable television have breached broadcasting laws and should be removed from the airwaves.
Mr. Cabello warned cable operations on Saturday evening that they could find themselves in jeopardy if they keep showing those channels.
"They must comply with the law, and they cannot have a single channel that violates Venezuelan laws as part of their programming," he said. Several channels haven’t shown Mr. Chávez’s televised speeches when he orders all media to air them–a requirement under new regulations approved last month by the telecommunications agency, Mr. Cabello said. RCTV didn’t broadcast a speech by the president to his political supporters during a rally early on Saturday.
The station’s removal from cable and satellite television prompted a cacophony of protests in Caracas neighborhoods as Chavez opponents leaned out apartment windows to bang on pots and pans. Others shouted epithets and drivers joined in, honking car horns.
"They want to silence RCTV’s voice," said Miguel Angel Rodriguez, the channel’s most popular talk-show host. "But they won’t be able to because RCTV is embedded in the hearts of all Venezuelans."
The U.S. Embassy in Caracas expressed concern about the decision. "Access to information is a cornerstone of democracy and provides a foundation for global progress. By restricting yet again the Venezuelan people’s access to RCTV broadcasts, the Venezuelan government continues to erode this cornerstone," embassy spokeswoman Robin Holzhauer said.
Venezuela’s telecommunications agency has said in the past week that under new rules, two dozen local cable channels including RCTV must carry government programming when officials deem the measure necessary, just like channels on the open airwaves already do. Mr. Chávez often uses the measure to force all the country’s TV channels and radio stations to broadcast his speeches.
Mr. Cabello said Saturday that other violations committed by cable channels include failing to warn viewers of sexual and violent content as well as broadcasting more than two hours of soap operas during the afternoon, which should be mostly dedicated to children programming.
He didn’t specify which TV channels have purportedly violated the law, but RCTV said it was the target. It accused the agency of pressuring cable providers to drop channels that are critical of the government.
The agency "doesn’t have any authority to give the cable service providers this order," RCTV said in a statement. "The government is inappropriately pressuring them to make decisions beyond their responsibilities."
In denying RCTV a renewal of its over-the-air broadcast license, Mr. Chávez accused the station of plotting against his government and supporting a failed 2002 coup. In August, Mr. Chávez’s government forced 32 radio stations and two small TV stations off the air, saying some owners had failed to renew their broadcast licenses while other licenses were no longer valid because they had been granted long ago to owners who are now dead. Officials said they planned to take more stations off the air.
Government figures say that as of 2008 about 37% of Venezuelan homes received cable television.
Mon 18 Jan 2010 06:18