Heads Up, Mexico: You May be Next

The time has come, insists Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), "for the U.S. to show serious commitment to war in our own backyard." 

It's shamefully narrow-minded of Washington to confer the blessings of humanitarian mass murder on distant Bedouins while ignoring our Mestizo neighbors to the South. McCaul, a former federal prosecutor who now chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, is eager to help rectify that inequity by designating six Mexican drug syndicates -- including Los Zetas, which is led by U.S.-trained military personnel -- as "foreign terrorist organizations."

The War Down South:  U.S.-funded Mexican paramilitary police.

This would permit deportation or prosecution of anyone providing "support" to the narcotics syndicates. Of course, this wouldn't apply to the public officials in the United States responsible for the huge narcotics price support program called the "War on Drugs."

Over the past five years, an estimated 37,000 people have been killed as a result of the U.S.-funded war between the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon and various narcotics syndicates. Several months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that Washington should invade Mexico for the supposed purpose of ending the violence.  The only trivial impediment to that plan, Perry observed, is that Mexico's government would have to "approve" of the invasion.

As if to answer the question, "What kind of Latin American political figure would `approve' of a U.S. invasion and occupation of his country?" Colombian-born Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos offered a very public endorsement of the proposal. 

It's worth pointing out that between positions with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and his present gig at the Post, Schumacher-Matos taught a course at Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies, which is one of several academic nurseries in which the Establishment cultivates tomorrow's Quislings.

Schumacher-Matos piously chastises Mexico's political class for being "too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines." Only if Mexican somehow emerge from "their nationalistic stupor" will they see the light of reason and welcome the presence of  their new overlords -- "American military specialists stationed within [their] borders to help the country build powerful electronic intelligence systems and train modern military and police forces to replace its suffocatingly hierarchical, outdated ones."

Although Mexico "is our neighbor and supposed longtime ally, the Mexican army has never -- never -- participated in a joint military exercise with the U.S. military," Schumacher-Matos points out, inviting us to sorrowful contemplation of the shame of it all. To substantiate the point, he cites a recent study by Roderic Ai Camp of the Woodrow Wilson Center, oblivious to the irony of mentioning Wilson's name in connection with proposed U.S. military intervention in Mexico.

"What is getting in the way of deeper cooperation with the U.S. military is that the Mexican military, political and intellectual leaders, abetted by U.S. intellectuals, still have their heads in the Mexican and American wars for the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th," Schumacher-Matos scolds. "They talk of imperialism and hegemony -- which are irrelevant today."

This isn't "imperialism" that we're discussing, insists this Rockefeller-suckled sock puppet: It's applied humanitarianism of the kind that has turned places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya into havens of peace and prosperity.

Elements of Schumacher-Matos's prescription are a bit outdated.  The "electronic intelligence systems" he describes are already operating in Mexico; huge amounts of money are being poured into training and equipping Mexican military and police; and U.S.-trained paramilitaries are actively involved in the Drug War -- on both sides of the conflict.

U.S.-trained Mexican Stormtroopers.

 "The U.S. agents generally provide intelligence and training, while Mexicans do the hands-on work," explains a recent AP dispatch from Mexico City. Brad Barker, president of a "private" mercenary firm called HALO Corporation, told the AP: "Yes, we're tracking vehicles, yes, we're tracking people.... There's been a huge spike in agents down here."

For the nonce, however, the huge and growing population of U.S. military and intelligence "advisers" infesting Mexico have to "play down" their role, in order "to avoid rubbing nationalist raw spots."

The division of labor used to maintain the fiction of Mexican independence was displayed in joint operations staged to murder Arturo Beltran-Leyva, the admittedly vicious head of a narcotics operation (an offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel) he co-founded with his four brothers. On December 11, 2009, a team of U.S.-trained Mexican Special Forces operators, acting on intelligence gathered by their American "advisers," attacked a Christmas party, slaughtering several guests, wounding numerous others, and terrorizing scores more while Beltran-Leyva fled.

Name the "good guy" in this photo. Yes, this is a trick question.

Several days later, U.S. agents tracked the fugitive to an apartment in Cuernavaca. This time 200 special forces troops laid siege to the building, surrounding it with tanks and helicopter gunships.

The outcome was predictable, and proudly memorialized in trophy photos of Beltran-Leyva's dead, mutilated body that were given wide circulation by the Mexican government.


This assassination was hailed as a significant "victory" in Washington's drug war in Mexico. Indeed, from the perspective of the people who manage that war, it was an ideal victory -- the kind that helps perpetuate the conflict, rather than bringing it to an end. As the AP points out, in the year following the killing of Beltran-Leyva, arrests of drug cartel leaders were up, cocaine seizures expanded, and extraditions of drug suspects to the U.S.  increased -- "and yet, killings jumped to a record high ... and more heroin and marijuana are being produced in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S." 

As with all other "successful" government programs, Washington's narco-war in Mexico is a breeder reactor for larger and even more profitable problems. The escalating violence by Washington and its puppet government in Mexico City is provoking retaliatory violence against American assets.

Washington's proxy war in Mexico has killed tens of thousands of Mexicans, as well as a small but growing number of U.S. citizens. What really prompted the ire of Rep. McCaul, however, was the murder last February of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata by a hit team employed by Los Zetas. This episode, in which a Federal Agent was assassinated by a cartel led by U.S.-trained Mexican paramilitaries that led McCaul to demand that Mexican drug syndicates be classified as "foreign terrorist organizations."

(Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars.)

 While Mexican President Calderon has “boldly declared war against the cartels," McCaul declares, "the Mexicans are losing the war – and so are we.”

Of course, the most effective way to destroy the criminal syndicates -- as a growing number of war-weary Mexicans understand -- would be to de-criminalize narcotics, which would mean an immediate end to the grotesquely inflated profits that sustain the cartels. 

McCaul and his ilk, however, prefer to take the contrary approach -- continued escalation of the conflict with no imaginable end. "We can't afford a failed state in Mexico, and we must secure our borders," intones McCaul.

Let's briefly examine this familiar piece of thought-stopping boilerplate.

Since the housing bubble burst four years ago, immigration from Mexico is down dramatically. The chief threat to "border security" at present is the violence being churned up in Mexico through Washington's drug war. If the threat of "spillover" narcotics violence is the main problem, ending the drug war is the obvious solution -- yet ideologues like McCaul have a way of resisting the obvious.

For those who understand that the state is always and everywhere the chief enemy of liberty, prosperity, and peace, the term "failed state" is a pleonasm. When employed by spokesmen for the Imperial power elite, however, the term is invoked as a prelude to military intervention in order to impose a government-exercised monopoly on force -- which in practice has meant becoming local franchises of a U.S.-dominated global political system. 

Interventions of this kind are justified as a form of preventive counter-terrorism. Accordingly, whenever U.S. politicians and policy-makers suggest that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "failed state," they are tuning the atmosphere for even more forceful intervention in that country's domestic affairs.

It shouldn't surprise us to learn that a growing number of Mexicans are weary of being on the receiving end of Washington's armed benevolence.

"We are fed up with this war that nobody asked for," exclaimed Ciudad Juarez resident Leticia Ruiz, one of thousands of Mexicans who attended protests on April 6 demanding an end to Washington's drug war in Mexico. 

"We're sick of you politicians," declared Javier Sicilia, a noted Mexican author whose 24-year-old son was murdered by cartel hit-men. "In this badly planned, badly executed and badly led war, you have put the country into a state of emergency."

The horrors being visited on Mexicans in this unnecessary war are of little concern to the ruling elite on either side of the border. As Hillary Clinton admitted in a moment of stunning candor, de-criminalization of narcotics and de-escalation in the drug war simply aren't possible, because there is "too much money" to be made through prohibition. One illustration of this can be seen in the fact that when the global finance system went into cardiac arrest in 2008, laundered narcotics proceeds were the only liquid capital available for inter-bank loans. 

Many law enforcement agencies in the United States have become addicted to drug war subsidies, both in the form of funds stolen and redistributed through taxation and in the form of direct highway robbery by way of "asset forfeiture." The Texas legislature has sought to expand that symbiosis between the criminal underworld and the even more disreputable political "overworld" by expanding the use of highway checkpoints -- for seatbelt enforcement, license and insurance inspections, and drug and weapons searches -- in order to harvest revenue to make up for shortfalls in tax revenue. 

Significantly, Rep. McCaul points out that his proposal to designate drug cartels as "terrorist" organizations would "intensify southbound inspections to seize weapons and cash." In practice this would mean an escalation in Washington's unremitting war against privacy and private property.

Rep. McCaul himself illustrates another reason why there is no official interest in ending the drug war. As the Houston Chronicle points out, McCaul "unveiled [his] legislation as he raises his profile in Washington for a possible bid for statewide office" -- specifically, the Senate seat being vacated next year by Kay Bailey Hutchison.  Being a dutiful drug war drone is a prescription for job security -- and in many cases, the key to a lucrative political career. Despite growing public disenchantment with this murderous charade, there is no political profit in working to bring it to an end.

No hyperbole is involved in describing Mexico as another front in the Regime's war with -- well, practically everybody. This is illustrated by the fact that several months ago, beginning with a September 2010 installment of Oliver North's "War Stories" agitprop series, the Fox News Channel has been referring to the proxy conflict in Mexico as America's "Third War" (which would mean, of course, that the ongoing campaign in Libya would be the Regime's fourth war).

Like other spokesmen for the War Party, Rep. McCaul has promoted a unified field theory of global conflict in which Mexico is emerging as a haven for Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the U.S. Although there's no evidence of an Islamist/Narco-terrorist alliance, undisguised U.S. military intervention in Mexico could conceivably provoke a nationalist backlash that would serve the War Party's propaganda needs nearly as well.

The Empire's Clone Army: Mexican narcotics troops.

For decades, some elements of the Right (occasionally abetted by people who should have known better) have peddled the notion that Mexico has created a vast and well-organized "fifth column" within the United States dedicated to La Reconquista -- the re-conquest of territories seized by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War.

In this scenario, non-assimilated Mexicans by the millions join in a campaign of violence orchestrated by the Mexican government with the help of foundation-funded anti-American groups on this side of the border.

Whatever revanchist sentiments may exist in Mexico are the residue of Washington's seizure of roughly half the country through a war of aggression. Washington's proxy narco-war has done nothing to palliate those feelings. About the only thing that could vindicate the alarmist fantasy of a nationalistic uprising on the part of Mexicans living on the U.S. side of the border would be direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico. I'm just cynical enough to believe that this would be considered a selling point to the people who profit on the misery inflicted by Washington's drug wars, both here and abroad.

A quick note ....

My apologies, once again, for postponing the  promised Maryanne Godboldo report. The delay reflects the unusual difficulties I'm having in contacting some of the key figures in this story. I appreciate your patience. 

Thank you so much for helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Addicted to the Warfare State

La Reconquista? BLM travel advisory in AZ.

(See corrections and clarifications below, 7/12)


 (Updated below, 7/10)

Which is the more serious threat to life, liberty and property: The illicit violence practiced by a handful of furtive armed drug smugglers in the Arizona desert, or the increasingly brazen militarization of U.S. law enforcement in the "war on drugs"?  

According to some hyperventilating commentators, drug smugglers -- with the guilty acquiescence of Barack Obama -- have seized control of a huge swath of Arizona, thereby asserting alien sovereignty over what was once American soil. If this were true, points out libertarian journalist (and Arizona resident) J.D. Tuccille, the Narcotics lords would preside over a kingdom "populated by rattlesnakes and cholla."

What has actually happened is a minor but politically exploitable increase in criminal activity in one of the many drug smuggling corridors that have long existed in the southwest, channels of illicit commerce created in order to serve a huge market that persists despite decades of prohibition.

While Mexican bandits supposedly exercise dominion over reptiles and cacti, National Guard units throughout the country are actively involved in transforming nominally civilian law enforcement agencies into a full-blown domestic army of occupation. Last year, according to Albany, New York Fox affiliate WXXA, the New York State National Guard "assisted in more than 2,000 arrests ... and had almost $150 million in drug, property and weapon seizures."

While they do engage in the occasional isolated shoot-out, the drug gangs supposedly controlling a section of Arizona aren't terrorizing innocent families in late-night or early-morning armed raids. Nor are they detaining -- and sometimes killing -- motorists at checkpoints. They're not plundering people in roadside shakedowns.  Criminal violence of that kind is carried out every day by police -- often with hands-on military assistance -- as part of the "war on drugs."

According to Col. Alden Saddlemire of the New York National Guard, the martial language used to describe this domestic campaign is literal, not metaphorical. "The war on drugs is an ongoing war," Saddlemire told WXXA. "It's a domestic fight [we] firmly believe in."

Occupying Army: No, these guys aren't Mexican narco-terrorists.

Prohibition always results in the criminalization of markets. Thus it's hardly surprising that America's vast market for prohibited mood-altering substances is being served by violent and ruthless people.

That violence, however, is mostly self-contained. The same cannot be said for the violence -- both implicit and overt -- carried out in the name of drug enforcement, which in practical terms is little more than a price support program for the narcotics cartels. 

According to official propaganda, the National Guard Counterdrug Program (NGCDP)  "operates in all 54 states and territories to support local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies..... [The program] currently operates 125 OH-58 Kiowa helicopters to support federal, state and local Law Enforcement Agencies' demand for aviation support in Counterdrug operations."

Guard pilots and support personnel are actively involved in "area surveillance and reconnaissance; vehicle/fugitive surveillance and tracking, cover/force protection during RAID/Sweeps" and cannabis eradication operations.  

One must hack through a dense thicket of acronyms in order to uncover what's really happening here. The  NGCDP -- that's National Guard Counterdrug Program -- "recently realigned CD RAID Detachments into Security and Support Battalions," the mystified reader is told without being informed that "CD RAID" refers to Counter-Drug Recon and Aerial Interdiction Detachments.

We're not in Mayberry anymore.

We then learn that although "mission focus" remains on "LEA support to CD operations" -- that is, assisting Law Enforcement Agencies carry out Counter-Drug programs -- "HLS/HLD missions will take on a larger role than before." That singularly opaque clause refers to Homeland Security/Homeland Defense operations. 

Deprived of semantic camouflage this is an admission that the escalation of the military's role in the "war on drugs" will segue into larger, and increasingly overt, domestic military role in "homeland security." 

The NGCDP is eager to dispense all kinds of military hardware -- complete with "technical support" personnel -- on any "civilian" law enforcement agency that puts in a request.

You want night vision goggles? Forward-Looking Infrared gear (which was used to such dramatic effect in the murderous final assault on the Branch Davidians)? Thermal imagers, surveillance aircraft, mobile gamma-ray automobile inspection units? Just give the National Guard a holler, and they'll be happy to help.

Wish list: A National Guard menu for police militarization.

Sure, this means some swivel-hipping around that pesky Posse Comitatus Act, but it's pretty much a dead letter anyway.

Once the Guard is seamlessly integrated into the domestic counter-drug effort, they'll be ready to carry out whatever other homeland security missions that arise:  mass arrests of protesters and perfectly harmless civilians during political conventions, confiscation of firearms during disasters or other emergencies, or even -- as Gen. George S. Patton once recommended -- the use of total war tactics (summary mass detentions, summary executions of conspicuous troublemakers, the use of toxic gas and white phosphorous munitions) against organized dissident groups.

All of this has been done already, on a limited scale and in specific circumstances. Because of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror," the infrastructure is now in place to institutionalize those once-exceptional abuses, if -- make that "when" -- our self-appointed rulers choose to do so.

Some who are properly alarmed over all of this have invested their hopes in Sheriff Richard Mack's campaign to educate and mobilize county sheriffs to resist federal usurpation of state and local authority. Sheriff Mack is an admirable man, and his campaign is worthwhile -- but too many sheriffs have already been bought off by the Feds.

One example among many is Sheriff Tom Bosenko of California's  Shasta County, who allocated $340,000 to create a special marijuana suppression unitlargesse.

Paul Babeu, the Sheriff of Arizona's Pinal County, has pioneered a new approach to federalizing local law enforcement: He has actually invited the Feds to occupy Arizona on the pretext of defending the state from the illegal immigrant "invasion."

Sheriff Babeu -- a PR-fixated political ally of arch-neocon John McCain -- is consciously carving out a media-friendly persona as the heir to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It was Babeu who induced a paroxysm of populist outrage by declaring that the Obama administration had effectively surrendered a swath of Arizona to Mexico.

“It’s literally out of control,” Babeu insisted in an interview with Fox News. “We stood with Senator McCain and literally demanded support for 3,000 soldiers to be deployed to Arizona to get this under control and finally secure our border with Mexico."

Pinal County -- Sheriff Babeu's jurisdiction -- is well inside the border with Mexico.  Pima County, which actually shares a border with Mexico, is the responsibility of

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who also takes a hard line on immigration enforcement but doesn't share Babeu's siege mentality or appetite for media attention.

Sheriff Dupnik is one of several Arizona law enforcement veterans who believe that the problems associated with illegal immigration are being inflated into a politically useful "crisis."

Retired Mesa police officer Bill Richardson, who worked in counter-narcotics task forces in several Arizona counties, believes that Babeu -- like Arpaio and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (chief sponsor of SB 1070) -- is "fanning the flames of fear, that the undocumented are the root cause of crime in Arizona. In fact, they are not."

Whether or not this assessment is accurate, both immigration (legal and illegal) and violent crime have been steadily decreasing in Arizona over the past decade -- a period encompassing Babeu's entire law enforcement career.

Richardson, a long-time Arizona resident with decades of law enforcement experience, points out that Babeu -- who relocated to Arizona after losing a mayoral race in North Adams, Massachusetts in 2001 -- was a police officer in Chandler for just 5 1/2 years (during which time he served as head of the local police union) before being elected Pima County Sheriff.

Two of those years were spent in National Guard deployments -- one of them in Iraq, the other on the southern border as part of a joint effort with the Border Patrol called "Operation Jump Start."

Babeu, who enlisted at 21 and currently holds the rank of Major in the National Guard, often campaigned in uniform as a perennial Republican political candidate in Massachusetts. He was successful once, winning a spot on the Berkshire County Commission and a leadership role in the County GOP.

After three unsuccessful bids for higher office, Babeu followed his parents (long-time Republican activists themselves) to Arizona, which had a more congenial political climate. (Joe Arpaio, interestingly, is likewise a transplanted Massachusetts native.)

Babeu, who refers to McCain as his "hero,"  is hard-wired into the neo-con-dominated Republican media apparatus, and he clearly has aspirations above and beyond his current position.

Just as importantly, 41-year-old Babeu -- who is both a county sheriff and a National Guard major -- literally embodies the ongoing merger of the military and law enforcement. He is the fons et origo of the notion that Obama, in an act of high treason, surrendered sacred American soil to Mexican drug gangs -- which isn't strictly true, of course, but is irresistibly potent to political opportunists.

Immigration, Babeu insists, "is the number one issue that faces Arizona." This could be considered the truth in the sense that it is the most useful issue for candidates looking to build a political career, and opportunistic incumbents -- including Senator McCain, who once supported amnesty for illegal immigrants but has re-cast himself as a flint-eyed border guardian in his ongoing re-election campaign.

As the current issue of Harper's magazine documents, the most serious problems besetting Arizona have little if anything to do with immigration, and everything to do with the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered depression.

J.D. Tuccille points out that concern over immigration is most pronounced in Phoenix, rather than in the southern part of the state. Phoenix somehow survived the immigrant onslaught, but it may be doomed as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble.

Ken Silverstein of Harper's points out that 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater," and unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent or higher. The latter figure can't be explained as a case of immigrants "stealing" jobs from natives, since the housing implosion led to a dramatic contraction of the immigrant labor pool.

Forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix there's a town called Maricopa that didn't exist ten years ago: It was created at the height of the Fed-induced housing frenzy. It's entirely possible that Maricopa won't exist a decade from now: It was a town built entirely on fraud.

"They weren't building homes," explains the consistently quotable Jay Butler, an associate professor of real estate at Arizona State University. "They were building mortgages that they could put into mortgage-backed securities in order to sell them to investors in China and France." Amid a pervasive atmosphere of moral hazard, mortgage loans were extended to practically anybody with a pulse and the ability sign the necessary documents. The results were utterly predictable.
 
Four years ago in Maricopa, speculators were buying whole tracts of houses and builders were demanding a 12-hour turnaround on building permits in order to meet existing demand. Today, that future ghost town registers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent. 

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash."

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which are in de facto default, sitting on more than $4 trillion worth of bad debts.)  

When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors in are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions. Given the dim prospects for an economic rebound, it's profoundly doubtful that many of those homes will ever be re-sold. And the coming commercial real estate crash will be at least as devastating for Arizona, a "branch office" state with little local industry apart from agriculture. 

As her state descends into economic ruin, Governor Jan Brewer -- hailed by Republican conservatives nation-wide as a heroine for signing SB 1070 -- is working diligently to impose a drastic sales tax increase on the state. Borrowing a familiar leftist trope, Brewer has claimed that people will "die" unless the regressive tax increase is enacted in the midst of a deepening economic contraction. 

As Governor, Brewer (who, like Babeu, is allied with McCain) has done nothing to reduce the size and expense of the state government. The timely and welcome distraction provided by the controversy over SB 1070, notes Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, saved Brewer "from a nasty primary challenge" arising from her $3 billion sales tax increase. 

Now, however, some opinion polls place her just five points behind President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 match-up -- solely on the strength of her perceived role as a proponent of "secure borders." 

Brewer's reputation was enhanced by an open letter to Obama in which Brewer demanded a "border surge" involving at least 6,000 troops. And it wasn't noticeably injured when she made the risible claim that the "majority" of illegal immigrants are working as "mules" in the employ of drug cartels -- a claim immediately and decisively shot down by T.J. Bonner of the National Border Patrol Council. 


Displaying gallantry through heroic understatement, Bonner said that Brewer's demented claim "doesn't comport with reality." This isn't surprising, given that Brewer and her allies aren't in the reality business. Like narcotics pushers, they're in the business of promoting altered states of consciousness for profit -- such as the perception that Arizona is about to be devoured in a Mexican anschluss. 

Brewer persisted in her reality-aversive treatment of the immigration issue by repeatedly making the horrifying and entirely unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants had committed "beheadings" in Arizona.

"We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings," stated Brewer in an interview with Fox News. While it's true that some drug-related murders in Mexico have involved beheading, there's not been a single documented case of that kind in Arizona. This didn't deter Brewer from reiterating that claim -- citing unspecified "law enforcement agencies" as sources -- in a subsequent interview.

Following up on those interviews, the Arizona Guardian reported that six county medical examiners, including four from border counties, "say they have never heard of such attacks." Which is to say that this is another terrifying claim that doesn't "comport with reality."It is, however, extremely useful for Brewer's brand of what Mencken described as "practical politics" -- "keep[ing] the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

If Brewer and her allies were interested in reality-based solutions to narcotics-related violent crime, Brewer and her ilk would agitate for the repeal of drug prohibition and an end to the subsidies and military aid to Mexico that are fueling the narcotics wars in that country. Instead, they're doing their considerable best to keep their constituents hopelessly addicted to the domestic warfare state. 

(Note: This essay is an expanded version of the original.)  


                                                        Comments, Corrections, and Clarifications, 7/12

"As a resident of Arizona for more than forty years, I assure you that Maricopa did exist more than ten years ago, as did many other small `intersection communities' on the outskirts of the Phoenix Metro area that became developers and mortgage brokers havens," writes an accomplished and well-informed reader from Arizona. "`No industries other than agriculture'? I guess that you are not keeping up with the role of copper in the world marketplace. Arizona is the largest source of copper in the western world. Not to mention the thriving aerospace and electronics, banking and IT industries in the state.... Arizona is [also] in the lead exporting not only copper, but also cotton, alfalfa, beef, and computer chips."


"Errors on such basic facts are not acceptable for someone in your position," he concludes. "It does not change the basic correctness of your thesis, but certainly causes one to pause and consider how deeply familiar you actually are with Arizona as it really is...."

I appreciate the corrections, especially with regard to Arizona's copper industry, which was a significant oversight on my part. My intent in describing Arizona as a "branch office" state was not to deny or minimize the current role of IT and other tech-related employers, but rather to underscore the vulnerability of the state to a commercial real estate collapse in the likely event that out-of-state firms are forced to cut back as a result of the ongoing worldwide contraction. And, for what it's worth, I don't regard "banking" as a viable industry, for reasons made vivid in the rapid expansion, and even more rapid catastrophic collapse, of Maricopa. 


Responding to my observation that "the drug gangs supposedly controlling a section of Arizona aren't terrorizing innocent families in late-night or early-morning armed raids.... [n]or are they detaining -- and sometimes killing -- motorists at checkpoints.... [or] plundering people in roadside shakedowns," another reader (who didn't specify his place of residence) contends: "Well, yes, as a matter of fact they are. This fact in no way lessens the hideous increase in the growth of the police state, but you shouldn't misrepresent the border crime problem."

 

I've consistently acknowledged the serious problem of violent crime at the U.S.-Mexico border, which I believe is largely driven by the politics of domestic prohibition and Washington's insane subsidy of Mexico's narco-state. Ending those policies, in my view, would help mitigate the problem of violence at the border. It probably wouldn't solve it outright, but problems rooted in human depravity aren't amenable to political solutions. 

                                       UPDATE: A Daring Drive through "Re-conquered" Arizona



Boldly risking certain death by decapitation at the hands of ubiquitous Mexican drug smugglers, "Real News Tucson" drives through the section of southern Arizona supposedly ceded to Mexico. Oddly enough, the only trouble they encounter comes at a Border Patrol checkpoint two dozen miles inside the border, where they are definitively told by a BP agent that the notion part of Arizona has been surrendered to Mexican control -- and are therefore inaccessible to Americans -- is "false information."

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Dum spiro, pugno!