If the men in Arlington Cemetery were alive today, what would they see - and say?
My brother-in-law George is a retired cop who’s married to the widow of a man who died in Vietnam.
The last time we were together, he asked me, with a touch of sadness, “What was it all for?” I knew what he meant, and I thought of the graves in military cemeteries representing 246 years of lives lost and blood spilled to defend America.
Between 1775 and 2019, 666,441 Americans died in combat from Concord to Kabul.
But that’s only part of the honor roll of sacrifice and heroism. There are the soldiers who survived but came home bearing physical or psychological wounds – in some cases suffering for the rest of their lives. And there are the widows, orphans and gold-star families.
All of this should occasion an outpouring of gratitude. It still does in some quarters, but less every year.
On paper, we have a military second to none – a defense budget of $693 billion in 2019 (36% of the world’s military spending), an active-duty force of 1.35 million, with 800,000 in the reserves, 800 military bases outside the United States, ships, planes, tanks and missiles that could rock the planet.
In 1939, when World War II started in Europe, our army was ranked 19th in the world, smaller than Portugal’s. Three years later, we had mobilized to fight a two-front war. By 1945, our enemies had been reduced to rubble. Germany signed terms of unconditional surrender in Reims and the USS Missouri steamed into Tokyo bay.
Then, we rebuilt Germany and Japan, kept the peace in Europe, fought off totalitarian onslaughts in Korea and Vietnam and went to war with jihadist terrorism in the Middle East.
And yet. And yet. Where are we today?
We have the weakest president in my lifetime. Given that I lived through Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, that’s saying a lot.
The greatest international threat to our security is Communist China., Not only does the President refuse to confront Beijing, but his family seems to be in the PRC’s pocket. Imagine that, prior to Pearl Harbor, one of FDR’s kids got hundreds of thousands in “consulting fees” from Nazi Germany.
Lenin said capitalists would sell Bolsheviks the rope they used to hang us. At the Wuhan lab we subsidized China’s development of bio weapons which killed 600,000 Americans.
After 10 days of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian terrorists, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said we must treat our best friend in the region and a gang sworn to our destruction with something approaching parity. We’re going to lead an international effort to rebuild Gaza, while Israel awaits the next Hamas offensive.
Defending America is about more than guns and bombs. Thanks to the radical Left’s control of both this administration and the culture, anti-Americanism (a treason chic) is the new normal.
Critical race theory – “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” the urgent need for “racial equity” – is taking over our educational institutions, from public schools to colleges and universities.
Under Biden, the U.S. military is training recruits to loathe the nation they’re expected to defend. Earlier this month, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier was relieved of command of a unit of the U.S. Space Force for speaking out about critical race theory’s rapid advance in our armed forces.
Lohmeier – who will soon be in charge of a weather monitoring station in Greenland – told an interviewer that the “intensive teaching that I heard at my base (claimed) that at the time the country ratified the United States Constitution, it codified white supremacy as the law of the land.” If you disagreed with that, you condemned yourself as a racist.
This complements the on-going purge of patriots from the military, with monitoring for extremism and the so-called Capitol Hill insurrection as the excuses.
In Biden’s new action army, we also have transgenderism inclusiveness training (“Before I take that hill, Sarge, I need to ask --Which pronoun do you prefer?”), the fight against Islamophobia, so-called, and the president of the United States boasting about flight suits for pregnant pilots.
On the home front, there’s the war on the police that’s turned our cities into shooting galleries with urban homicide rates soaring in the wake of police budgets slashed and following last year’s “mostly peaceful” protests.
While killing domestic energy production, Biden just approved the pipeline which will carry Russian oil to Europe. The president thinks national security is irrelevant, unless there’s a way for Hunter to make money off it.
The border is wide open, with a tidal wave of gang members, guns and drugs flowing in. While Alejandro Mayorkas, the standup comic who heads Homeland Security, assures us that the border is closed (who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?), the man Biden picked to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wants to shred the Second Amendment. And the social media giants that helped elect Sleepy Joe want to eviscerate the First Amendment – even banning the last president of the United States.
If the men in Arlington Cemetery were alive today, they would look in dumb disbelief at what America has become in the third century after our founding.
Let’s honor the men who made the ultimate sacrifice for a country that no longer exists -- and those who may be called upon to do so themselves to get it back.
A middleman like that would not last very long in the world of drug traffic, yet we’ve tolerated it in drug policy for decades. That the extradition and trial of El Chapo Guzmán —the signal achievement of U.S. drug policy over the last twenty years—did nothing to curb illegal drug supply. In fact, we have acclimated ourselves so thoroughly to the drug war’s failure that none was even suggested.
CBP Seizes Multiple Rifles at Border Crossing into Mexico File Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection/Tucson Sector 3:06
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized a load of smuggled semi-automatic rifles during an attempt to cross into Mexico from Texas. The officers seized eight rifles and magazines.
CBP officers assigned to the Del Rio Port of Entry on May 25 observed a 2021 Dodge Ram 3500 pickup truck and trailer approaching for an exit inspection, according to information obtained from CBP’s Office of Field Operations. The officers referred the driver to a secondary inspection station.
CBP Officers in Del Rio, Texas, seized eight rifles and magazines during an exit inspection. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
Secondary inspection officers conducted a non-intrusive inspection of the truck and trailer. The inspection revealed anomalies in the utility trailer carrying a load of furniture.
Officers then conducted a physical inspection of the trailer and found a small cache of semi-automatic weapons hidden in a futon. The cache included eight rifles and magazines along with two rifle scopes.
“Our CBP officers continue to do outstanding enforcement work,” Port Director Liliana Flores, Del Rio Port of Entry, said in a written statement on Saturday. “This interception is just one example of the work they do to protect our communities on both sides of the border.”
The officers seized the weapons and turned the case over to ICE Homeland Security Investigation special agents for further investigation.
The following day, CBP OFO officers assigned to the Laredo Port of Entry arrested a U.S. citizen male attempting to enter the United States from Mexico on a bus, officials stated.
Officers assigned to the Lincoln-Juarez International Bridge carried out an immigration screening on bus passengers arriving from Mexico. During a biometric inspection, one of the passengers, Samuel Daniel Gomez, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, was determined to have an active warrant.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office in Houston issued the warrant for Gomez on a charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14, officials reported. Court records obtained from the Harris County District Clerk’s Office indicated the Pasadena Police Department filed a criminal complaint against Gomez on April 30. Details of the case were not available.
CBP officers arrested Gomez and turned him over to the Webb County jail where he awaits extradition to Houston.
“Effective utilization of our national law enforcement databases allows officers to identify and apprehend wanted fugitives who attempt to make entry into the U.S., bringing those charged with these heinous crimes to justice,” said Acting Port Director Eugene Crawford, Laredo Port of Entry.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team . He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Face .
Why the U.S. Should Use Trade Policy to Stem Illicit Drug Imports The “War on Drugs” is a failure, but we still need to stop the flood of illegal imports like fentanyl. We used to stop the drug flow through trade negotiations. It can work again.
May 28, 2021
AP U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, testifies before the Senate Finance Committee, Wednesday, May 12, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, during a hearing to examine President Joe Biden's 2021 trade policy agenda. (Pete Marovich/The New York Times via AP, Pool)
T his spring, the new U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai acknowledged the obvious: Trade deals present negotiators with an opportunity to combat global warming. Incorporating emission reductions into these talks is a position long advocated by many environmentalists, who point out that global trade fuels and exacerbates climate change. What Tai didn’t say is that global trade also deeply affects the traffic in illegal drugs to the United States.
For decades, the American government has waged a “war on drugs,” to no avail. It may be that something as simple as trade presents the superior tool to achieve the common-sense goals of drug policy.
Actually, Congress used trade to pursue such goals in the decades before 1956, at which point heroin was declared contraband. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 extended the prohibition of heroin to other “Schedule I” substances deemed to offer no medical value, such as cocaine and marijuana. This statute, best known for enshrining drug prohibition at home, also ratified the United Nations Single Convention, a treaty mandating that all signatories prohibit these same drugs in their own countries.
Since that time, the global regime of drug prohibition set in place by the Controlled Substances Act has utterly failed. We stand in the midst of the most lethal drug crisis in U.S. history, and the deluge of illegal drugs only grows worse . Despite the money and manpower invested in prohibition, today heroin—to take one important example—is more potent and more plentiful than ever. Worse yet, heroin is often adulterated, or totally displaced, by stronger chemical cousins such as fentanyl .
Global drug prohibition is not simply futile; it is a failure , rich in incentives for the wrong things. Traffickers over-produce supply to compensate for interdiction; they increase potency to keep a product competitive as middlemen dilute their shipments. Each law enforcement operation coaches drug dealers on how to evade detection or avoid more serious charges; every high-profile arrest and extradition persuades other traffickers to invest more in bribes to public officials.
Yet none of the drug reformers who catalogue these appalling failures offer an alternative proposal to curtail illegal drug supply. Instead, to explain the staggering number of drug overdose deaths in the U. S., they point to the hardship that drives what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call the “deaths of despair.” Though essential, this demand-focused analysis is inadequate unless it covers supply. The work of economist Christopher Ruhm is particularly important to consider. He demonstrates that, although crippling economic conditions prevail in many places, overdose deaths concentrate most where dangerous opioids do. To reduce overdose fatalities, we must reckon with an inescapable fact: drug supply matters.
You would not know it to listen to prohibitionists, who seem content to live with abject failure on the matter of supply—provided we acknowledge that, in theory, they strive for something else. Stuck between the inertia of the drug war and an incomplete vision for its reform, mainstream politicians and Washington think tanks devote no discernable effort to crafting alternative tactics to manage illegal drug supply.
Donald Trump shrewdly capitalized on this silence from the political establishment, tying his support for a successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Mexico’s willingness to “do much more on stopping drugs from pouring into the U.S.” True to form, Trump never did more than talk. As the Senate Finance Committee put it , Trump “did not follow through on his threat” to condition NAFTA renewal on a reduction in illegal drugs, though they went on to note that his gambit made the U.S. a “less reliable trading partner in the eyes of many nations.” But the Senators upbraiding the former president might be surprised to find that trade, not punishment, was once the standard for U.S. drug policy.
Before widespread use of the federal income tax, calibrating the tariff, the major source of revenue for the federal government, was a cornerstone of partisan alignment. Tariff hearings sometimes attracted hundreds of public witnesses. In 1930, Chairman Willis Hawley registered (and heard) over one thousand—the initial stage in crafting the famous Smoot-Hawley tariff, signed into law by President Herbert Hoover later that year. Hawley’s crowded hearing room carried with it a recognition that trade policy was not solely the preserve of financial elites; it also shaped the lives of millions of ordinary Americans.
Not surprisingly, tariffs and trade played an outsized role in the formulation of early drug policy. These interventions typically took the form of a quota, where shipments counted were capped, then tracked via a tax collected (and stamped) all along the points of distribution, up until the product’s end-user. This provided authorities with a paper trail to inspect to ensure the legality of any particular package. Congress opted for this regulatory approach because its power to tax structured many federal policies, but more so, when it came to the drugs at issue—opium or its derivatives, or cocaine—because the finished product relied upon imported raw materials. Simply put: Drugs were a trade, and it made sense to treat them as such.
Narcotics import policy was often negotiated in the context of a dedicated global conference. Absent a relevant round of negotiations, sometimes a change to drug policy was tacked onto tariff legislation. Congress propped up its most important drug policies as stand-alone tax-and-tariff legislation (the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act; the 1922 Narcotic Drug Import and Export Act ). With these tools, lawmakers hoped to contract the supply of these drugs to only that which was medically necessary.
Surprisingly, the United States sometimes relied on trade policy to implement non-financial aspects of its drug policy—as in 1947, when it threatened to cease pharmaceutical exports to Cuba if the government there failed to expel notorious organized crime kingpin Lucky Luciano who used the island nationas a platform for organized crime. Luciano was sent packing the next day.
Surveying this pre-prohibition history, we don’t need to call a thousand public witnesses to tell us that trade matters. It was predictable that NAFTA, which loosened trade restrictions,would usher in a record heroin supply. Likewise, it was inevitable that prohibition would spawn an entrenched and sophisticated underground drug network from seed to sale. Markets carry opportunities, not all of them welcome; they also come with costs.
That said, a lucrative underground economy hosting violent criminal networks presents a substantially different policy target than the drug companies against which the policymakers of the pre-prohibition era squared off. Nevertheless, drug traffic is still first and foremost a trade. That’s how supply should be conceptualized, and the context in which it should be handled.
Any trade talks with a source country, like Mexico or China, should set drug supply reduction goals, along the same lines as environmentalists urge that these negotiations incorporate emission reductions. These should be scaled, graduating over time. Reductions should not be measured by attempting drug interdiction at the border, because all this does is encourage suppliers to produce more, as well as provide an incentive to bribe border officials (a non-trivial problem ). Instead, to measure progress, American policymakers should look to the price and potency of drugs on the street, first and foremost in those places ravaged by overdose deaths.
Failure to meet reduction goals would invoke trade penalties, either in the form of additional tariffs on imports—or, in dire instances like the case of Lucky Luciano, withholding of exports.
In theory, this approach mirrors the activism of the environmental groups on trade negotiations over the course of the past decade. The inclusion of climate change policy objectives in trade negotiations can be characterized in familiar terms: rewards and punishment, or carrots and sticks. For example, the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement eliminates tariffs for items known to benefit the environment, so-called “green” goods, services, or technologies. Less frequently, agreements contain measures to “discipline” or penalize fossil-fuel subsidies. The vibrant debate among academics regarding whether and how best to use trade levers to tame global emissions simply has no parallel in the drug policy discussion, but it should.
Applying these same tools to drug policy allows negotiators to vestthe “winners” of global trade in any given source-country to care more about the cost of their success—in effect, deputizing an influential set of ambassadors to pursue reform in their own country, using the power already at their disposal.
In terms of the global traffic in illegal drugs, the seismic shift here involves replacing guns and badges with calculators and economists, and American-dictated policy compliance for a source-country’s own initiative. Even more important, it entails moving from output or procedurally-focused drug policy to one premised on outcomes that matter: price and potency, the truest reflection of the amount of supply in circulation.
One of the most damning features of prohibition is its inability to affect, let alone reorient itself to, exactly these measures. Drug prohibition is a procedural tool, a means to an end. As such, it is remarkably bad one: not unlike a greedy and unskilled drug dealer, taking more than his cut, while idling in his duties. A middleman like that would not last very long in the world of drug traffic, yet we’ve tolerated it in drug policy for decades. That the extradition and trial of El Chapo Guzmán —the signal achievement of U.S. drug policy over the last twenty years—did nothing to curb illegal drug supply. In fact, we have acclimated ourselves so thoroughly to the drug war’s failure that none was even suggested.
Using trade, we change the focus from performative outputs to meaningful outcomes. For ordinary Americans, the real enemyis Guzmán’s business, as opposed to Guzmánthe man, and its true nemesis is not the DEA in partnership with the Mexican military, but a methodical trade negotiator armed with data.
Such demands at the negotiating table could be construed as heavy-handed, to say nothing of the obvious limits to this approach. It’s difficult to prod China when Beijing holds more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt. In any given trade relationship, the U.S. cannot assume that it holds unilateral advantage, nor should any country be approached as supplicant.
But trade talks with source countries (or important transit countries in Central America) furnish a more iterative and targeted set of instruments than military and law enforcement action. It is the war on drugs—in many ways, a relic of the Cold War—that assumes or requires a posture of fealty from our partners. Prior to World War II, during a more multilateral era when the U.S. was one power jostling with others, American drug policy relied on taxes and tariffs, not crime and punishment. And so, it should again
It follows that the necessary partner to such efforts is the decriminalization of possession of illegal drugs, harm reduction policies like needle exchange, and the shift away from the police and prison in favor of the doctor’s office and evidence-based treatment.
It should also be anticipated that, if the U. S. were to wield the tools of trade to achieve trade-related policy objectives, others would respond in kind. For example, the Mexican government might ask corn farmers enriched by NAFTA and its successors to regard the smuggling of guns to Mexico as among their most important concerns. From the perspective of a Washington establishment accustomed to controlling the political agenda, this might be construed as a problem. From nearly any other perspective, it would be welcomed as an advance.
Finally, and somewhat paradoxically, if we take a more encompassing approach to trade agreements, we wind up enhancing the nation-state as the primary agent of policy, shifting the gaze of grievance politics away from scapegoat. For too long, the asymmetry between what we ask of trade agreements and what they actually deliver has nurtured a vilification of symptoms over and above identification of a problem. We build ineffectual walls to repel vulnerable migrants rather build policies to stem violence, corruption, and climate changes wreaking havoc in the Northern Triangle . This kind of “politics of scapegoating” replaces a policy register with only the tool of punishment
The war on drugs is the best and oldest example of this counterproductive conflation of symptom with cause, interventions over problem-solving at its source. This implicates the drug war in the growth and appeal of global authoritarianism. In the end, we can either revisit Hawley’s crowded committee room by expanding our trade priorities or face a world where democratic politics can no longer touch the problems we must address.
On closer examination, the origins of these drug cartels themselves lie in the relations between the US and Mexican governments. Before becoming Los Zetas, the original members of the violent drug cartel were a special forces unit of the Mexican Army trained in the United States at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. If HSBC is found guilty of providing material “means and resources” to these terrorist organizations then it seems there should be ample evidence and grounds to also indict the US government as well.
Texas Attorney General: Biden Giving Economic Stimulus to Cartels Through Immigration Policy
US Border Patrol agents check and search migrants from Guatemala after they turned themselves over to authorities at the US-Mexico border May 12, 2021 in Yuma, Arizona. (Photo by RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) – Despite what DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress on Wednesday, the border is not closed, and there are almost triple the number of illegals coming across the border than there were a year ago, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Thursday.
THESE PARAISTE BANKSTERS DID MIGHTY WELL UNDER THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOY, LAWYER ERIC HOLDER.
THEY LOOTED A TRILLION DOLLARS FROM HOME VALUES AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON!
Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs reports to investors have sought to boost Biden’s chances against Trump by cheering a potential “blue wave” on election day. Biden has reportedly promised Wall Street donors, behind closed doors, a return to a globalized, economic status quo that has forced working and middle-class American communities into a managed decline for decades.
“According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Overall, the Biden amnesty would likely bring more than 37.3 million foreign nationals to the U.S. — a boon for Wall Street and other corporate interests looking to inflate the U.S. labor market, reduce the cost of labor, invest in more necessary housing while adding as many consumers to the market as possible.
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