COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Monday, June 09, 2014

Drug cartels overwhelming US borders with children to divert attention from drug smuggling operations


Questions and answers about children at US border
POSTED: 11:27 AM MDT Jun 09, 2014 
UPDATED: 11:29 AM MDT Jun 09, 2014

SAN DIEGO -
About 700 unaccompanied minors mostly from Central America were sleeping on plastic boards at a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona, this weekend, the vast majority flown from South Texas.
It is the latest illustration of how a wave of immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala has overwhelmed U.S. border authorities.
President Barack Obama called the surge a crisis last week and appointed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to lead the government's response. Here are some questions and answers.
  
WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM?
Illegal border crossings soared for several years in South Texas, which recently surpassed Arizona as the busiest corridor. The Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector made 148,017 arrests from Oct. 1 to May 17, far higher than the 62,876 caught in Tucson, Arizona, which is the second-busiest crossing point.
The dramatic shift is taxing U.S. authorities because Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans make up about 75 percent of those caught in South Texas, the traditional entry point for Central Americans.
For decades, the vast majority of people who crossed the border illegally were from neighboring Mexico and could be deported the same day on a short bus ride to the nearest crossing. Central Americans are sent home on U.S. government flights, a more daunting challenge.
An unusually large number of those crossing in South Texas are unaccompanied children, many seeking to join parents who are already in the U.S. illegally.
Authorities arrested 47,017 unaccompanied children on the border from October through May, up 92 percent from the same period a year earlier. A draft Border Patrol memorandum estimates that number could reach 90,000 in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up from a previous government estimate of 60,000.
  
WHY NOW?
Rampant crime and poverty across Central America is a big reason. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, with 90.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The World Bank says nearly 60 percent of Honduras' 8 million people live in poverty.
Some Republican lawmakers and administration critics say lax enforcement practices encourage children to make the perilous journey. They cite an opinion by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, in December that blasted authorities for releasing a Salvadoran girl to her mother, who hired a smuggler to transport her daughter and was in the country illegally.
"(The government) has simply chosen not to enforce the United States' border security laws," the judge wrote.
The government has released some immigrants but refused to say how many. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says it will make "appropriate custody determinations."
  
WHAT'S BEING DONE?
The Obama administration has asked Congress for $1.4 billion to help house, feed and transport children and plans to temporarily house more than 1,000 at military bases in Ventura, California; San Antonio, Texas; and Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Immigration officials, by policy, do not keep children in detention. They are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement to be housed in shelters until they can be reunited with parents or guardians.
A Homeland Security official said Health and Human Services turned to the Border Patrol to house children temporarily at the Nogales warehouse starting May 31 because they were overwhelmed. About 2,000 vinyl-covered mattresses were ordered, and the official expected the population there to double to 1,400.
On Sunday, about 60 children arrived at the Nogales shelter and the same number left after they were moved to other locations, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Carlos de Leon, Guatemala's vice consul in Phoenix, said portable showers arrived Friday and a contractor was brought in to serve hot meals Sunday.
"It's not a shelter, but the conditions are getting better," said de Leon, who visited Sunday and reported there were 280 Guatemalan children.
Tony Banegas, Honduras' honorary consul in Phoenix, said the first toothbrushes and toothpaste were expected Monday. Children who had not bathed in days were rotating through four showers. He said there were 236 Honduran children there on Saturday, including an 8-year-old.

The government has also been flying families from South Texas to Arizona and El Paso, Texas, and releasing them at bus stations. ICE has only one detention facility for families - an 85-bed center in Pennsylvania.

21 comments:

  1. A word on sarcasm - Of all approaches to making peace with life's little indignities (including three ex-wives), nothing surpasses sarcasm. It does have one flaw: it is hard. Sarcasm demands that the target of ones rapier wit remain blissfully unaware, while everyone else gets it.

    To learn from the master, I recommend Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal…” (I would give the full title if it were not about a full page in length). His “Gulliver’s Travels” is also excellent when read as the political satire it was. Today, it would probably be proscribed by Homeland Security if anyone there could read.

    As the matter of fact, “The Wizard of Oz” (L. Frank Baum) began life as a scathing political satire, filled with period sarcasm. It is a commendable work for the would-be intellectual pugilist who is not a gold-bug.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Sarcasm is an art.
      Try finger painting, its more in keeping with your abilities

      Regardless if you would still like to attempt developing your sarcastic ability, your chances of success would be greatly increased if you were intelligent, or at the least not mentally incapable of detecting and reproducing sarcastic remarks.

      Just because you cannot make your very own sarcastic comments, you can still pass as having some grasp of this art by being able to recognize sarcasm when it is produced by someone else, and be able to retain it in memory long enough to use it at a later time when that particular sarcastic remark would be relevant.

      If at first you don't succeed, try something within your grasp.

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  2. I don't know what to say about the children. Doubtless, our resident actuary will.

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  3. Il Divo: Adagio in G Minor
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77SFM7Fksc


    lyrics: The Doors

    We can invent Kingdoms of our own
    grand purple thrones, those chairs of lust
    & love we must, in beds of rust

    Steel doors lock in prisoner's screams
    & muzak, AM, rocks their dreams
    No black men's pride to hoist the beams
    while mocking angels sift what seems

    To be a collage of magazine dust
    Scratched on foreheads of walls of trust
    This is just jail for those who must
    get up in the morning & fight for such

    Unusable standards
    While weeping maidens
    Show-off penury & pout
    Ravings for a mad staff



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  4. Tamaulipas and Coahuila the two Mexican states that border Texas are in turmoil. The Zeta and Gulf cartels are in the midst of a war. The Federales are targeting both of them, selectively.

    There does not seem to be any corroboration that I can find in sources from Mexico that would indicate the influx of Honduran and Guatemalan children are part of the cartels drug smuggling operations.

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    1. REYNOSA.- A total of 60 Mexican Army soldiers have died in the first 18 months of this presidential term while taking part in operations implemented against organized crime and drug trafficking.One in three has lost his life in Tamaulipas.

      Jalisco and Michoacan are states that have also seen soldiers fall, six in each case from December, 2012, until now. Next are Durango and Chihuahua with five (deaths) each, Sinaloa with four, and the rest in seven other states.

      Two attacks have resulted in the greatest number of deaths for the military. In both cases, the criminals had an advantage because they were ambushes, not direct confrontations.

      Delete
    2. Philly.com

      he conversation sounded prescient.

      On the line was a business associate warning Salvador Lemus to get a new cellphone. But Lemus, a longtime Chester County resident, spoke like a man with nothing to fear.

      "My phone, my phone - nobody can track it," Lemus allegedly said. "I have 20 years with my number."

      At that point last month, detectives had spent a year monitoring Lemus, a drug kingpin they said was unlike any other caught in county history.

      On Wednesday, they announced his arrest, along with dozens of others, all part of a drug ring that they said had ties to a notorious Mexican cartel and that moved at least $60 million in cocaine through the region over two decades.

      The arrests turned a spotlight on what one expert said was an unusual pipeline directly linking a brutal international trafficking network to a pastoral suburb best-known perhaps for growing mushrooms.

      "This will have echoes all the way back to Mexico," District Attorney Tom Hogan said, standing beside a board displaying the faces of those arrested by his office in recent weeks and of a dozen or so people yet to be picked up. "They will be talking about this in the drug cartels, saying, 'You know what, southern Chester County is not such a great place for us.' "

      Atop the ring, he said, was Lemus, a 65-year-old East Marlborough Township resident known among ring members as El Viejo, "The Old One."

      Arrested May 1 and jailed after failing to post $1 million cash bail, he faces more than 600 conspiracy, possession, and drug-delivery charges that could land him behind bars for life, officials said. Also charged were his son Francisco Lemus; nephew Mario Hernandez-Garcia; and his wife, Jovita Lemus.

      A legal U.S. citizen, the elder Lemus has several homes in Mexico and allegedly traveled there regularly to build his connections. Though he was not a member of La Familia cartel, officials said, his son has direct ties to it - and their operation had access to its cocaine.

      Their pipeline was fed from the Guanajuato region of Mexico and drug hubs including Houston, Phoenix, Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago, officials said.

      Once here, those drugs hit the streets across the region, from Baltimore to Philadelphia to Cumberland County, N.J., officials said.

      The yearlong investigation - dubbed Operation Telarana, Spanish for "spiderweb" - started with a few criminals agreeing to work as confidential informants in return for leniency, Hogan said.

      It ended up with hundreds of secretly recorded phone calls and scores of suspects.

      According to investigators, Lemus' distributors - some who sold directly to the streets and others who were intermediaries selling to other dealers - worked in blue-collar jobs. Some were landscapers; others worked on the farms that cover Kennett Square, the small borough where about half of the mushrooms in the U.S. are grown.

      "It's much harder to spot them because they're bleeding into the landscape," Hogan said. "They're regular working folks. It's not until you drill into this that you get to see exactly how they're working."

      It was easy to go unnoticed in a community that has long been a magnet for Mexican immigrants, many drawn first by work on the farms but who stayed to become legal residents and start families.

      From 2000 to 2010, Kennett Square's Latino population doubled, from 1,470 to 2,963, accounting for nearly half of its residents. During the same time in Chester County, the fastest-growing in the state, the Latino population more than doubled.

      Lemus also allegedly operated drug fronts to launder the proceeds, including a landscaping company in the Baltimore area. Local auto shops were also opened to store and distribute cocaine, Hogan said, without giving names.

      He said the group likely moved about 2,000 kilos of cocaine over 20 years with a wholesale value of $60 million.

      Delete
    3. Nation's Largest Cocaine Smuggler Revealed: The DEA
      Salem-News.com

      Written statements were provided to a U.S. District Court in Chicago, confirming the alliance between the DEA and Mexico's largest cocaine cartel.

      (WASHINGTON, DC WHDT World News) - For decades, it has been rumored the United States government was secretly sponsoring the smuggling of cocaine into the country. Federal officials have long denied such speculation, pointing out the billions of dollars spent intercepting drugs. Newly released documents, and testimony from Justice Department and DEA officials now show the stories of government running cocaine are true.

      An investigation conducted in Mexico found the American government allowed that country's largest drug cartel, Sinaloa, to operate without fear of persecution. That groups is estimated to be responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the country through Chicago. In exchange, the leaders of Sinaloa provided the DEA information on rival gangs.

      The drug cartel working with the federal government is run by . He is considered to be the world's most powerful drug trafficker. In addition to Chicago, his group also maintains cocaine operations in several major cities around the country.

      Written statements were provided to a U.S. District Court in Chicago, confirming the alliance between the DEA and Mexico's largest cocaine cartel. The written testimony, combined with other evidence, shows DEA officials met with leaders of the Sinaloa cartel more than 50 times between 2000 and 2012. This would mean DEA-authorized drug smuggling goes back to at least the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, and continued for year under Barack Obama.

      Delete
    4. http://www.salem-news.com/articles/january252014/cia-drugs.php

      Delete
    5. We got our weapons in Texas and Arizona, walked them right across the border.
      The ATF made sure the local police did not interfere.

      The US media called it "Fast Furious", we called it part of the deal.

      Delete
    6. To BIG to Prosecute.

      “As a result of HSBC Bank [anti-money laundering] failures,” a December 11, 2012 Justice Department statement reads, “at least $881 million in drug trafficking proceeds–including proceeds of drug trafficking by the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico and the Norte del Valle Cartel in Colombia–were laundered through HSBC Bank USA.” The DOJ proceeded to call the bank’s failures “stunning,” “astonishing” and “blatant.”

      According to court documents and US prosecutors, in 2008 Mexican authorities told HSBC Mexico’s CEO that a local drug lord referred to the bank as the “place to launder money.” “The practice was so unchecked …that on some days drug traffickers deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars at HSBC Mexico accounts.”

      The DOJ “stopped short of indicting HSBC,” because, “HSBC would certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”


      Source: Janine Jackson, “’El Chapo’ and El Banco,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Blog, February 25, 2014,

      http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/02/25/el-chapo-and-el-banco/.

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  5. Replies
    1. A practical idea. As a matter of fact, in one of my previous lives working on an over the horizon radar surveillance system , we needed extensive antenna fields that were tuned in arrays for very specific target areas. The contractors hired to cut the grass on the antenna fields were careless and often disturbed some of the cables that supported the individual antennas. We replaced them with sheep on our English and German sites and goats for the sites in Italy, Greece, Spain and Cyprus.

      In Detroit, the goats would need protection.

      Delete

    2. Chivos son buenas para comer

      Delete
  6. Save The Goatees !!

    http://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVjmHoJZTx2QAtWsPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTBsa3ZzMnBvBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw--?_adv_prop=image&fr=yhs-aztec-default&va=Handsome+men+in+goatees&hspart=aztec&hsimp=yhs-default

    ReplyDelete
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    1. usted no puede fijar estúpido

      Delete

  7. The Guardian has an alarming story detailing the central role that Wachovia played in money laundering for Mexico's lucrative drug trade.

    The newspaper's investigation shows how the bank - now owned by Wells Fargo - moved $378.4 billion from powerful drug cartels into currency exchange houses in Mexico That's one-third of Mexico's annual GDP.
    ...
    Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

    As The Guardian points out, this case is likely just the tip of a massive iceberg, illustrating the key role that the international banking sector plays in the multi-billion drug trafficking industry.


    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-wachovia-laundered-billions-in-mexican-drug-money-2011-4#ixzz34EIR7t5L

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  8. Realizamos movimientos interiores de dinero y nos movemos las drogas, pero no nos ocupamos en los niños.

    ReplyDelete
  9. May his "government" collapse into the detritus from which it was formed.

    http://news.yahoo.com/failed-peace-talks-israel-divided-193306869.html

    ReplyDelete
  10. We need Single Payer Universal Daycare, obviously.

    ReplyDelete