Grandstanding aside, Canada remains Uncle Sam's faithful lapdog

Here's a couple of news stories you may have missed this week, because after all, the most important news event in the world is whether the US elevates the privileged shit-bag Kavanaugh to the supreme court or whether some other privileged shit-bag gets the nod.

This week we signed on to Trump's plan to double down on the "war on drugs." Yup, it's been a losing effort for fifty years but count us in! Scootch over, Mr. Duterte, and let Justin slide into the pew beside you!

We're also taking a leadership role in toadying to American policy viz. Venezuela. Yup, we're gonna send Maduro to the ICC! That is quite hilariously portrayed as a snub to 45, who just the day before had made some derogatory remarks about the ICC.

Get serious! Getting rid of Chavez/Maduro and restoring the oligarchs to power has been a goal of Washington since 1999. The New York Times reported recently that there have been "informal" meetings between Venezuelan military commanders and Pentagon officials re: the possibility of a coup.

Justin and Chrystia aren't standing up to Trump; they're running interference for him.


Hard to imagine this obsequious toadying won't be rewarded with a spectacular NAFTA "win" in the very near future.

This amigo presides over a failed state

When the wildly over-hyped "Three Amigos Summit" played out in Ottawa last summer, the news consuming public was treated to a tsunami of bullshit about how great NAFTA has been for all concerned and how photogenic the two most recently elected amigos were.

We haven't heard much about Mexico since, probably because when you spend virtually all your news resources smearing one Donald J. Trump, there's really not much room left in the schedule to broadcast actual news.

Frankly, I had no idea that three Catholic priests were murdered in Mexico in September in the space of a week, or that fifteen priests have been murdered in the past four years, until I accidentally stumbled over the story at the Guardian. But I sure was acquainted with Mr. Trump's potty-mouth, which has been by far the biggest story in American media for the past few months.

That British website certainly indulges ample anti-Trump fear-mongering on its own account, but at least they still find the energy to report other stories.

That's quite an interesting stat plopped in there near the end; over 97% of crime in Mexico is either never reported or never investigated. A further stat the story doesn't mention; of the less than 3% of crimes reported and investigated, over 90% are never solved.

Those are failed-state kind of numbers, are they not?

Two Amigos and a Stooge

It's a big week in Ottawa. Yup, the "Three Amigos" festival is in full swing! That's where the leaders of the three NAFTA partners get together to tell one another how great they are.

NAFTA. What a grand boondoggle that was!

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

I'm sure I wasn't the only working-class Canadian who had trouble understanding why creating a level playing field between five dollar a day Mexican labour and twenty dollar an hour Canadian labour wasn't going to turn out well for our side.

And, although our mainstream economic pundits still can't bring themselves to admit it, it hasn't. But here's what's really messed up; it hasn't worked out for the Mexicans either! Or the Americans for that matter.

You don't want to over-generalize of course. It goes without saying that NAFTA has been good for some folks in all three countries. It just hasn't been good for average folks in any of them. The one percenters have done quite well by it though.

So what you're seeing in Ottawa this week is two leaders of more or less developed nations getting together with the leader of what is, for all practical purposes, a failed state. It's not really "Three Amigos" we're watching here; it's two Amigos and their crooked and perhaps slightly retarded cousin.

Here's a brief synopsis from Business Insider of the kind of hanky-panky that would have got the other two Amigos impeached, if not jailed. In Mexico corruption is taken for granted. "Show me a poor politician and I'll show you a poor politician" is a popular maxim.

And you can't pin all the failure on Nieto - he's had a lot of help. NAFTA, crafted when Nieto was still in short pants, set the stage for an influx of jobs from the northern partners on the one hand, but at the same time it threw millions of peasants off the land by flooding Mexico with subsidized US agricultural products, especially corn. So industrial jobs grew in number but due to the oversupply of labour the pay went down. So much for the rising tide lifting all boats.

Not that the tide actually rose all that much. When NAFTA was created a peso was worth thirty cents. Now it's worth a nickel. There goes your rising tide!

The other thing that's been killing Mexico is the exorbitant level of violence. Think we've got a problem with MMIW here in Canada? We certainly do, but in Mexico they call their missing and murdered women a "pandemic of femicide." Not only that, but the record of law enforcement in Mexico is exponentially worse than ours; less than two percent of crimes ever result in a conviction.

And let's not forget about those 43 student-teachers who just "disappeared." Yup, they were last seen in police custody, and then they were gone! Nobody knows a thing.

I know we've got our quarrels with the cops here in the northern Amigostans, but nothing on that scale!

Then you've got the ever-popular war on drugs. About ten years ago W and Nieto's predecessor signed the Merida Initiative, whereby the US would give the Mexican government lots of guns and money and the Mexican government would get really serious about fighting the cartels. Can't say the Mexicans haven't held up their part of the bargain; at least 165,000 civilians dead in the ensuing ramped up war on drugs.

Just how violent is Mexico? We Canadians like to think of ourselves as a peaceable kingdom compared to our gun-happy neighbours in the USA. Well guess what? Cross the Rio Grande and the murder rate is 400% higher than in the US!

Anyway, at least for this week, they're all just three happy "Amigos," living large on the public dime in Ottawa, pleased to be doing the photo-ops together. And Justin's already made a beautiful gesture to help those Mexicans set things right.

They'll no longer need visas to visit Canada.



 

Corruption in American politics is so deeply embedded that we barely notice the ripples on the surface

It was a busy day. In between planning home renovations and napping, I had occasion to peruse a few of my favourite news sites.

I like the Guardian. Nice middle of the road perspective, generally speaking. One of the first stories to catch my eye was a missive by Kevin Watkins about corruption in Africa.

Kevin built his story around certain revelations revealed in the "Panama Papers." Seems a whole lot of those African despots are crooks out the ying-yang. Yup, same old same old. African leaders are crooks... no news there! Hey, even my hero Dan Gertler got a passing mention in the story!

Elsewhere in my day, I read a story that Junior forwarded, about HRC's collusion in the Honduras coup of 2009. Not only does Hillary compromise the entire USA intelligence apparatus with her private (as in wide open to every semi-competent intel service in the world) e-mail accounts, but then she posts in her e-mails all the back-stabbing anti-democratic shenanigans that America's Secretary of State is conniving in!

Heck, that's corruption and incompetence on a scale that would leave those African despots wide-eyed with wonderment!

But wait, we're not finished yet...

A little further on in the Guardian, I come across this American crime thriller. Seems a certain Guerrero Chapa has been the de facto leader of the Gulf Cartel since 2003. As I'm sure you appreciate, Cartel leaders have many enemies; the law (but maybe not so much), rival cartels, ambitious underlings, and so on. Ten years after becoming the de facto leader of the Gulf Cartel, our man Chapa gets rubbed out in true gangster fashion while shopping with his wife in Dallas Texas.

But here is the sentence, dropped incongruously many thousands of words into our story, that caught my eye;

Guerrero Chapa lived legally in the US and was an informant for American authorities.

Say what?

The leader of the Gulf Cartel lived legally in the US and was an informant? The leader of a Mexican drug cartel is allowed to live legally in the US and continue running his cartel in return for what? Information on rival cartels? Which would make the entire "War on Drugs" infrastructure complicit in the drug trade they have allegedly been doing battle with, would it not?

How far up the hierarchy do you figure that rot has spread?

No wonder that after forty years of a supposed "war on drugs" your kids can still buy dope at their school playground.

And we're not done yet. Those drug cartels are small fry compared to the big dogs like Lockheed Martin. Here's a story from Sputnik about how the military-industrial complex has been cleaning out the US treasury while lining its own offshore accounts to the tune of billions while fobbing off unworkable crap like the F-35.

And it's all done in the name of the flag and patriotism and defending our freedom, don't ya know! Hell, they'll be lucky if they get approval to fly those duds over a NASCAR invocation, nevermind taking on an actual enemy.

But we see none of that. We're too busy rooting out corruption in Africa!

Harvard debate team gets beat up by convicts

And I'm not talking about what you're thinking about... no, those Harvard dweebs didn't get beat up in an alley off Quincy Street; they got beat in a debate!

There's a story that should shake up some stereotypes!

On the other hand, there's more to this story than meets the eye...

First off, I'm guessing the cons had way more time available for practice.

Secondly, this upset is due to what many refer to as America's "prison crisis."

What crisis?

Sure, America may lead the world in the rate of incarcerating (mostly black) twenty year olds who sold a quarter ounce of weed to a narc, but without that massive talent pool, this story would never have been possible!

While have-not states like Kentucky are burning their grow-ops, have-more states like Washington and Colorado are taxing them

This photo-essay at Bloomberg is ironic on several levels.

First off, it's got great thought-provoking photos like this one;



Yup, that's a law-enforcement official dousing a pile 'o pot with gasoline, the better to set it aflame.

Dude! If you wanna burn weed, stick it in a pipe or something!

What a waste!

So here's some food for thought. Have you ever thought that the reason some states (like, just to arbitrarily pick a couple of high-performance states out of the air at random; Colorado and Washington) habitually show up at the high end of the quality-of-life indices, and other states (again, completely random; Kentucky and West Virginia) habitually show up at the bottom, might have something to do with the average IQ of the denizens of those states?

Now I don't mean to offend my relations in Kentucky, but they got a lot of somewhat dopey folks among them, which I think might be at least partially the result of a) cousins marrying cousins, and b) marrying at age 15.

Meanwhile, over in your have-more states of Colorado and Washington, instead of spending money fighting the weed 'o wisdom, they're MAKING money taxing it! Oddly enough, these states also vastly out-perform the have-nots in educational achievement etc.

Coincidence?

I think not...

This is what Darwin was talking about.

Why is so much journalism crap?

Stephanie Nolen is no unpaid intern. In fact, she's a respected veteran in the journalism profession.


In today's Globe and Mail she's got a two-page feature about the horrific gang violence gripping El Salvador. By the time I finished the story, I was convinced that there is indeed an epidemic of gang violence in the country.


Here are some questions that Nolen carefully avoids:


Is the gang violence in El Salvador related to gang violence in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala?


Is the gang violence related to the militarization of the police forces?


Is the gang violence related to the "war on drugs?"


Are these latter two questions related to American meddling in these countries for the past 100+ years?


In two pages, our reporter doesn't go anywhere near these obvious questions. Instead, you turn the page under the impression that gang violence just spontaneously erupted after a few illegal immigrants were repatriated from the US.


That's very shallow journalism.

Trump, El Chapo, and USA 2016

What Donald Trump is doing here is positioning himself as the go-to guy for that constituency that still believes in the War On Drugs.

By default, that also makes him the de facto candidate for the prison-industrial complex.

The War On Drugs and the prison-industrial complex are inseparable twins. One's not gonna last long without the other. The astronomical rise in the prison population since Richard Nixon declared the War On Drugs is what's made the current success of the privatized prison-industrial complex possible.

"El Chapo" and every other so-called drug lord is 100% the product of America's War On Drugs. In spite of that so-called war, Joaquin Guzman and his ilk have been more than successful in supplying the American market with drugs.

Obviously, America has a near-insatiable demand for the stuff. You can't blame that on Guzman.

Nor can you blame Trump for making political hay out of these realities.

These problems would be solved by legalizing drugs.

Christian soldiers of the drug cartels have chopped off more heads than Islamic fanatics of ISIS

The most brutal theatre in America's "War on Drugs" has long been Mexico, especially after W made Mexican president Felipe Calderon an offer he couldn't refuse back in '06. It's been up up and away ever since for the body count... even after Calderon himself had second thoughts and opined that it might be a good idea to consider the legalization of drugs.

And you've got to respect the Christian bona fides of those cartel soldiers; check out how the cartels deal out drugs and violence with religious fervor.

It's a mystery why the "War on Drugs" still has oxygen after years and years and decades of abject failure... then again, it's not much of a mystery at all. The War on Drugs continues to be highly profitable for any number of stake-holders; law enforcement, the military, drone-builders, gun manufacturers, the penal-industrial complex... holy shit, the US economy would go broke without the war on drugs!

So this story can only mean good news to the drugs war profiteers; seems the Jalisco Cartel shot down a Mexican military helicopter at the weekend.

Well!

That has caused the Mexican government to declare "all-out war" on the cartels. Apparently they've just been pussy-footing around till now...

Finally!

You can rest easy folks... the war on drugs will be won for good any day now.


Or not.

Royal Canadian Navy announces this month's victory in War on Drugs

Here it is.

Six hundred kilos of cocaine will never blight the playgrounds of Seattle and Vancouver. Not quite as glorious a triumph as last month, when the RCN was chuffed to announce its role in the seizure of 5200 kilos of cocaine.

My understanding is that all this drug interdiction work has no significant impact on the availability of drugs. At best, it works as a price-support mechanism. Is this a reasonable allocation of Canada's limited financial resources?

Here's a suggestion. Let's bring HMCS Whitehorse and the rest of the fleet back to Canada. Instead of chasing phantom drug ships, let them crack down on freighters dumping toxic sludge in English Bay.

Reading shoddy journalism is like eating cardboard

You feel full but you're still hungry.

Dong Choo at the corner store is charging me $4.50 for the weekend edition of the national newspaper of record these days. That's quite a jump from the twenty five cents I used to shell out for the Saturday Globe and Mail when they first got me hooked fifty years ago.

Like all addictions, the addiction to newsprint leaves you at the mercy of the pushers. I'm not blaming the Donger for this 1700% increase in the price of my fix - he's just the low man on the totem pole, trying to break even and put away enough to send Dong Jr. to business school.

Concerned friends and family often ask why I don't just give up the habit. After all, there's pretty much nothing in that $4.50 newspaper that I can't find on the Globe and Mail website for free.

These people don't understand the addiction. There's a quality-of-life distinction between sitting in your favourite chair, with a cup of coffee at hand, staring at a laptop screen vs. turning the pages of a newspaper.
The two or three hours spent lost in those pages is easily worth the $4.50 price of admission.

At least so long as I don't stumble over too much crap like this.

Jeffrey Simpson has some serious schlep at Canada's newspaper of record. As such he is what's known as an opinion maker. He's one of the guys (and they're mostly guys; sorry gals) who determine what's on the national agenda; what literate people will be talking about.

I've had a soft spot for all things Mexican since my old pal Jim drove down to Tijuana in his Econoline van back in '70 and came back with ten kilos of very nice Mexican bud. Mexico has been on my radar ever since.

Since those innocent days of Jim's Tijuana adventure, we've witnessed the rise and the further rise of ruthless drug cartels in Mexico. Any free-lancing schmuck who heads to Mexico today looking for a deal on weed is going to end up dead or in jail. Drugs have become a multi-billion dollar business in Mexico. The cartels move more money than any single bank can launder. They've beheaded more innocents than Islamic State. They have corrupted banks and politicians not only in Mexico but throughout the region.

That's why former Mexican president Vincente Fox has called for the legalization of drugs.

That's why seven former world leaders and dozens of other A-list worthies have called for the decriminalization of drugs world-wide.

That's why five Nobel-winning economists have declared the global war on drugs a "catastrophic failure."

That's why I find it incomprehensible that Jeffrey Simpson can spin 800 words of fluff about what ails Mexico without once mentioning drugs, cartels, the war on drugs, etc.

It's enough to make me want to take my paper back to Mr. Choo and ask for a refund.

But it's not his fault.

He's just a lowly minion in the Korean corner store cartel.

A tale of two navies

Two navies. Two headlines on the same day.

Chinese navy helps hundreds of foreign nationals evacuate war-torn Yemen. According to the story, Canada was among the nations requesting assistance in evacuating their nationals from that country.

But wait, doesn't Canada have its own navy?

Yes, but they're otherwise preoccupied.

Canadian navy helps intercept cocaine near Costa Rica. It's a matter of priorities, and the brain trust in Ottawa obviously isn't going to let a few "Canadians" of dubious authenticity distract them from the War on Drugs.

After all, any supposed Canadians in Yemen are more than likely just "Canadians of convenience" who expect Canada to bail them out of every jam just because they managed to get their hands on a Canadian passport. Let the Chinese navy save them if they must.

The Royal Canadian Navy has bigger fish to fry.

The would-be Warrior King who cannot find his big-boy war pants

Defence Minister Jason Kenney and his parliamentary secretary James Bezan were spinning yarns last week about the Royal Canadian Navy's derring-do in the Black Sea. Those darned Ruskies tried to intimidate our brave men and women in uniform, but nosiree, we stared 'em down, we did!

Turns out the tall tales were mostly just wishful thinking. The Canadians are in the Black Sea as part of NATO exercises intended to intimidate Russia, yet nobody at NATO can confirm the Canadians' story. A BBC journalist with the fleet claims Russian surveillance aircraft came no closer than 128 kilometres, while the supposed confrontation with a Russian warship never happened at all. Maybe somebody at DND got metres and kilometres mixed up, an easy enough mistake to make, especially in the heat of a close call (or possibly not that close) with Putin's evil legions.

After all, facing possible enemies isn't part of the day to day drill for our Royal mariners. The war they're fighting on the high seas is the War on Drugs. Here they are seizing six tonnes of hashish in the Arabian Sea in 2013. Here's a big heroin bust in the Indian Ocean a year later. And hold the phone, here's two headline-grabbin' busts in one week last October... and another one just last week!

We may have lost in Afghanistan, but at least we're winning the war on drugs!

Like all the best wars of modern times though, the war on drugs is never over, and it occurred to Harper's brain trust some years ago that the Royal Canadian Navy would need some new kit to keep up the good fight. The Harper gang announced a new shipbuilding program to much fanfare back in 2010, and have re-announced it to varying degrees of additional fanfare several more times since, but so far all that the new shipbuilding program has produced is this spiffy video.

Latest rumours on actual ships are that the yards might begin cutting steel by 2020.

Meanwhile, let's not forget the war on terror. Alas, the latest round in our war on terror has pretty much disappeared into that ever-threatening fog of war. When big Steve sent sixty-nine of our brave men and women in uniform into Iraq last year they were on a "training" mission to bring the Iraqi Kurds up to snuff on how to shoot guns and other war-type stuff that, after the last fifty years of fighting Iraqis, Syrians, Turks, and each other, they apparently need "training" to figure out.

And wouldn't you know it, before you can say "pants on fire," there's been a bad case of mission creep and our trainers are shooting up the bad guys and coming home dead.

That's the way we roll here in Harper's Canada. Cynically putting "our brave men and women in uniform" in harm's way just to goose the polls in an election year has become completely unremarkable where it should instead be completely unacceptable.

We've almost completed the transition from peace-makers to war-mongers.

It was therefore gratifying to see Canadians out protesting in considerable numbers against Harper's latest initiative to remake Canada as a police state, the odious Bill C-51.

Perhaps we're waking up.

Pot-smoking Mountie dies of marijuana overdose

CBC News is reporting the death of Ron Francis, the RCMP officer who made headlines last year for demanding the right to smoke medicinal marijuana on the job.

You can see the logic; if you can take an aspirin on the job, why not be able to smoke a medicinal joint?

At the same time, you can see why the general public was a little sceptical of Ron's campaign. There are just way too many scenarios in which the "pot-addled cop" meme would just frighten the public and enrage the RCMP.

So sorry to see Francis take the easy way out. And no, he didn't die of a marijuana overdose - that's been tried many times in the history of cannabis and nobody's managed it yet.

No, I think it's fair to say that Ron Francis was hassled to death by our wretchedly back-asswards approach to drugs regulation. I agree we can't have uniformed cops out in public blazing doobies, but at the same time, he could have easily been accommodated with some sort of desk duty that wouldn't have compromised public safety and at the same time taken into consideration his legitimate medical issues.

Condolences to the family and loved ones, and RIP Cpl. Francis.

So you think those ISIS terrorists are nasty? Wait till you meet the Mexican Police!

Revelations that a mass grave has been unearthed near Mexico City, presumed to contain the burned and mutilated bodies of 43 students last seen being taken into custody by Mexican police, should help us put the current Islamic State hysteria into perspective.

Although there have been many more beheadings in Mexico than there have been in the Islamic State, no one is calling for a Coalition of the Righteous to mount a crusade against Mexico.

We won't be bombing the Mexican police or the Mexican army or the Mexican drug cartel militias. After all, Mexico is our partner in Free Trade, not to mention our partner in the War on Drugs.

Which makes them good guys, no matter how many burned and mutilated bodies turn up in shallow graves, and no matter how may heads may be lopped off, and no matter how suspiciously and obviously the lines blur between police and army and drug cartel militias.

The politics of beheading; Saudi Arabia lops off 19 heads in three weeks but we're going to war with ISIS after they lop off one?

But hey, they were marijuana dealers or something...

So that's OK.

Beheading marijuana dealers is just part of the war on drugs, which is, these days, just the poor cousin of the war on terror.

But the CIA-sponsored Islamic Republic beheads a guy, and we're to drop everything and rush to a new war in the Middle East?

That just doesn't add up.

Drugs war finally turns corner with arrest of kingpin Guzman

It's been a long time coming, but the drug warriors have finally got their man.

'El Chapo' Guzman is, according to media reports, the biggest drug lord of them all. His organization reputedly runs hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States every year. The capture of Guzman means that the supply of drugs in America will dry up in a matter of weeks.

Or not. What we have here is a nice headline and a good story. That picture of the three Mexican marines frog-marching Guzman to a helicopter while he's got his hands cuffed behind his back and a gun held to his head just screams photo-op, doesn't it?

The authorities have captured Guzman before, so we've got a case of deja vu all over again. Last time he spent seven or eight years running his empire from a high security Mexican prison. There was absolutely no impact on the supply of drugs on America's streets.

Nor will there be this time round.

After 40+ years of WAR ON DRUGS heroin cheaper and more accessible

Don't take my word for it; that's a headline ripped from Bloomberg.

Unfortunately, the story that follows doesn't make the logical conclusion; that the war on drugs has been, at best, a forty year boondoggle, and at worst, the most dysfunctional and counterproductive program of social engineering in history. Instead, it hints that just a little more fine-tuning of police efforts will stem the tide...

The spark for the story was provided by the tragic death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman on the weekend, and the story does indeed spell out that heroin has new popularity among the white classes, ie the middle and upper-middle. It's not just the world of glassy-eyed brown-skinned criminals getting high, it's your banker, your broker, and your favorite actor.

The difference of course is that these white junkies aren't looking to steal your purse or jack your car. Another difference is when they get busted, white folks go to rehab while brown folks go to jail. And boy do they ever!



You'll notice that graph starts to trend inexorably upwards right around the time President Nixon declared the war on drugs in the early '70's and it's been up, up, and away ever since!

It's not cheap keeping millions of folks in jail, and the cost of incarceration is just the tip of the iceberg. What happens to those people when they get out? They've been stigmatized out of many legitimate employment opportunities and are therefore far more likely to turn to crime. The war on drugs perpetuates a criminalized underclass.

Which is not to say that the war on drugs has not been very good to a few segments of society. Prison guard unions and the for-profit prison industry spring to mind; two groups who will be happy to inform you that all society needs to do to turn the corner in the war on drugs is spend more money and build more prisons.

I think society has given that strategy more than enough time. It's not working and there's no reason to think it ever will. After forty years of fighting drugs, they are cheaper and more accessible.

It's time to try something different.

Terror threats multiplying like rabbits- Chair of Homeland Security Committee

OK, Mike McCaul didn't invoke that particular cliche, but he did manage to reference spiderwebs and wildfires.

Apparently the War on Terror is succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams. At least in the wildest dreams of all those War on Terror profiteers who have been making hay while the (terror) sun shines. Having terror threats increase while you're pocketing billions in profits allegedly fighting terror threats has got to be good news, at least as long as Joe Taxpayer buys into the bullshit.

Looks like the War on Terror is following the War on Drugs down the road of institutionalized idiocy. After fighting the War on Terror for over a decade we see terror threats multiplying. After fighting the War on Drugs for over four decades, drugs are cheaper, more potent, and more available than ever.

Hey, what's not to like?

JUST KEEP THOSE MONEY FAUCETS CRANKED WIDE OPEN!!!

Why Trey Radel is not Rob Ford

First of all, lets get this out of the way; both of them blamed booze for their cocaine/crack cocaine use.

Yup, booze will do that to you. That's why we will never make any headway in the WAR ON DRUGS till we include booze in that war. Booze is obviously the gateway drug.

Have a sip today.

Sniff a line tomorrow.

Smoke a rock the day after...

Both of them are tough-on-(black)crime phonies too.

That's how they're the same.

How they're different is that Radel has worn the knees out of his suit pants with all the grovelling he's been doing.

Rob Ford hasn't.