The Long Crisis

Archive for the ‘New America’ Category

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is one of the most violent cities on earth. About 5,000 people have been slaughtered in Ciudad Juarez in the past 27 months. It is a destroyed city where 25 percent of the houses are abandoned and 40 percent of the businesses have closed. There were 2,600 murders last year and killings have increased this year.

Even though the Mexican government of President Felipe Calderon has sent a large number of Mexican Army troops into Juarez to assist local police in reducing violence, drug related violence continues to escalate. One major problem facing law enforcement efforts is that many politicians, army troops at all levels, and the police are on the drug cartel’s payroll. The huge sums of money controlled by the drug cartel are totally corrupting as they find their way into every level of society on both sides of the Mexican – United States border.

The U.S. approach to the killings in Mexico is to continue with the same failed policies of the War on Drugs. The US government never looks at an economic reason, just as the consequences of our free trade treaty (NAFTA) are never brought up. The effects wrought by NAFTA launched one of the largest human migrations in the world as poor Mexicans fled collapsing industry and agriculture. With NAFTA American corporations simply had a huge market for American crops and products, such as corn and chickens, as well as a source of very cheap labor. Border Patrol statistics show that the number of Mexicans entering the U.S. illegally skyrocketed within two years of the passage of NAFTA.

Even after 40 years of the war on drugs the American market has become the largest market for illegal drugs in the world. The war on drugs has actually brought larger amounts of higher quality drugs to the market at lower prices. The profits to Mexican drug cartels in supplying this market are estimated to be on the order of $30-$50 billion a year. The drug cartels have become stronger and more violent in defending and expanding this source of income.

In an America that allows other drugs, such as tobacco, alcohol, and an abundance of prescription medicine happy pills to be freely distributed the war on drugs such as marijuana and cocaine really doesn’t make any sense. One unintended consequence of the war on drugs is that America now has the largest prison population in terms of the percentage of Americans incarcerated of any nation in the world.

Many of those incarcerated are non-violent offenders who have been arrested for possessing small amounts of illegal drugs for personal use. The annual cost of housing low level nonviolent offenders in local, state and federal prisons is in the multi-billions of dollars. In an economy where local and state governments are struggling to meet expenses, the cost of incarcerating low level drug offenders is not inconsequential.

It really is time for the United States to take a realistic view as to how NAFTA and other economic factors play into the explosion of violence in Ciudad Juarez, and other Mexican and American border towns. The violence is no longer confined to just Mexico. Drug related violence is now a serious problem in many American cities as is the corruption that the flow of drug money brings.

For additional interesting information about why the war on drugs is such a failure, yet the American government refuses to admit that failure, take a look at this article about the consequences of the drug trade in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. and how drug related income has become so important to the Mexican economy as Mexican farming and business communities struggle under changes brought about by NAFTA.

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A Lebanese Muslin man, Ali Hussain Sibat, charged with sorcery and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, is scheduled to be beheaded on Friday, April 2, 2010, the man’s lawyer said Wednesday. The United States State Department and president Obama seem to have little if anything to say on the issue as the US continues to kowtow to a nation that routinely violates human rights.

Sibat, the father of five young children, is the former host of a popular call in entertainment show that aired on the Beirut based satellite TV channel “Sheherazade.” According to his lawyer, Sibat would predict the future and give out advice to his TV audience.

Sibat’s attorney told CNN her client was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police (known as the Mutawa’een) and charged with sorcery while visiting the country in May 2008. Sibat was in Saudi Arabia to perform the Islamic religious pilgrimage known as Umra.

Saudia Arabia is considered by the United States to be one of its strongest allies and friends in the Mideast region. This stated “friendship” even survived the fact that 15 of the 19 hard core airplane hijacking al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were from Saudi Arabia. What a friendship.

The United States responded to the attacks by launching the War on Terrorism. It invaded Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaeda terrorists. So let’s get this straight. The majority of the terrorist were from Saudi Arabia but due to the special friendship extended to Saudi Arabia by the United States we attack the Taliban in Afghanistan rather than by going directly to the source of the terrorist network. There is no doubt that much of the funding received by Al Qaeda originates in Saudi Arabia. Now, some nine years after the 9/11 attacks we are still fighting the Taliban while continuing to Kowtow to Saudi Arabia.

Further evidence of the special relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia was given in April 2009 as during his visit to Saudi Arabia President Obama greeted the king with a full bow from the waist, a move one commentator described as a violation of protocol and not worthy of the office president Obama holds. This show of respect and servitude may not have been a complete kowtow but it came darn close.

“I am quite certain that this is not the protocol, and is most unbecoming a president of the United States,” writes Clarice Feldman in an American Thinker commentary. To see the bow watch to video. The bow (sure looks like a deep bow to me) takes place about 58 seconds in.

We should keep in mind that while the United States makes a lot of worldwide noise about promoting freedom and democracy that when it comes to protecting what we perceive as our own interests we are prepared to be quite flexible in kowtowing to Saudi Arabia and other despotic regimes around the world. Saudi Arabia has one of the most regressive, medieval in nature, cruel, and hypocritical regimes of any country in the world, yet we consider them to be close allies and good friends. Hypocrisy indeed. That is one area in which the United States is most certainly a world leader.

Nothing could provide a better example of our willingness to look the other way and give Saudi Arabia a free pass on human rights than our State Department’s silence on the Sibat beheading issue. Perhaps it’s only because Sibat is a Lebanese citizen and we are not on the best of terms with Lebanon. However, it seems to me that a nation that preaches freedom, democracy, and justice at every opportunity should not remain silent when one of its so-called friends is about to execute a man by cutting off his head for the offense of sorcery.

Sorcery? Unfortunately, I am not kidding, as outdated the term should be in the 21st century. However, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, our dear friend in the Mideast, still operates with one foot set firmly in the past of over 1000 years ago and the other foot planted in oil fields that feed an United States addiction. Apparently and sadly, our addiction for Saudi Arabian oil trumps any concern that we may have over human right issues and the fact that it was Saudi Arabian citizens that led the 9/11 attack against the United States.

As long as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has oil to sell to the United States I expect that US politicians will continue to kowtow to, support, and defend the Saudi Arabian government, no matter how repressive and depraved the royal family and government may be.

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Today a domestic terrorist flew his light aircraft into a seven story office building in Austin Texas that housed a tax office for the Internal Revenue Service. Our government officials expressed great relief that the attack was not carried out by Al Qaeda or some other foreign terrorist group and was therefore deemed not to be a terrorist act.

While they are correct in that the attack was not carried out by Al Qaeda the initial public statements were incorrect in not identifying the act as terrorism. The attack upon the IRS was carried out by something much worse, a domestic terrorist. The pilot of the aircraft had apparently earlier torched his house in an Austin subdivision and left behind a suicide note saying that he was mad as hell at his tax bill, and the national health care stalemate, and the bailout helping corporations rather than people. He opposed the federal government and our laws and flew an airplane into a federal occupied building housing an IRS tax unit to express his extreme anger at the United States government. If that’s not an act of domestic terrorism, then what is?

It is actually foolish and wrong for government officials and media talking heads to breathe a sigh of relief because the pilot was not a member of Al Qaeda. The fact that he is one of ours, a homegrown terrorist, is far worse. Consider the actions of homegrown terrorists at Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, Columbine, and now a government occupied office building in Austin, Texas. Then consider how many millions of Americans own guns, are former military members trained in explosives and warfare, are fed up with the way our government is currently working, resent the bailout of wealthy bankers and corporate executives at the expense of the tax payer, and who are mad as hell about it all and near some kind of breaking point.

It is a sad state of affairs when government officials who are charged with protecting United States citizens from terrorist acts won’t even call an act by a homegrown terrorist, such as flying an aircraft into an office building, an act of terror. Perhaps their tune will change as more facts are known. Then an over reaction will probably occur. We may not be too far removed from being required to get a government permit to travel beyond our front yards.

The fact is that the risk of domestic terrorism is far greater than that of Al Qaeda being able to launch another terrorist attack on United States soil. An additional risk, as the government attempts to prevent further acts of domestic terror, even though the government will not publicly acknowledge domestic terrorist attacks as terrorist attacks, is that individual freedoms are further eroded due to a police state mentality of surveillance and regulation.

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