Mutual Corruption with Mexico

The U.S. & Mexico Trade Jobs & Cash for Drugs & Votes

(Illustration courtesy Photobucket.com and Ronbosoldier.blogspot.com)

CORRUPTION FIESTA

It’s really hard to tell whose form of corruption is worse, the United States’ or Mexico’s.  America (del Norte) wants to influence Mexico’s elections (pliancy), use their cheap labor, and farm their migrants for Democratic votes.  Mexico, on the other hand, wants to colonize us, keep expat votes, export violent gangbangers to cities all over America, keep huge remittances flowing, and benefit from our drug dollars.  Together, the two countries have created the rather well-deserved appearance that nothing will be done to stop the flow of  drugs, gangs or aliens – even as we’ve recently reached a critical mass with all three.

Arguably, both countries have (slowly) failing governments, and important elections pending over the next two years.  In the meantime,  both are losing control over sovereign territory, bodies are piling up in Mexico — with some spillover here — and illegal aliens are being touted here as victimized, legal immigrants.  Cartel-related crimes are on the rise in both countries — just ask an Arizonan or Texan — and the response is just expensive, dramatic symbolism.  Logrolling gridlock.

MUTUAL COMPLACENCY

Anything more than casual observation of our “neighbor to the South” must lead to what poet T.S. Elliot referred to in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” as “an overwhelming question.”   The elusive part of this is that none of the actors involved, on either side of the border, dare ask it.  To ask, you see, is for this diversity of actors to risk exposing their own inherent interest in having the chaotic status quo continue.  And the question?  Quite simply:  Where does this lead?

With at least 23 of it’s 31 states and the Federal District surrounding Mexico City under siege by DTO’s (Drug Trafficking Organizations — not to be confused with gangs, which are there in abundance and working for the DTO’s) and close to a million of its citizens illegally crossing our border each year, and another half-million or so Mexican gangbangers flooding our cities — why the complacency?  Why the political paralysis – on both sides of the border – over the seven million or so Mexicans who’ve illegally invaded our country?

LA CAUSA — TAKE BACK THE LAND!

A lot of ink has been spilled over speculation that Mexico is becoming a “failed state.”  Others are concerned that too many Mexicans here legally and otherwise have no intention of ever assimilating into our culture, but are content to colonize us until their numbers are sufficient to use the electoral system to reclaim most of the US Southwest as Mexico, restored to its status prior to the Mexican-American war of 1846-48.  In other words, the natives that were once conquered and colonized by Europeans, are colonizing us with a clear plan of re-conquest — The Reconquista.

If this sounds absurd and not a little bit paranoid to you, contact your local lobbyist for the National Council of La Raza, or the National MEChA.  They’ll angrily confirm all of the above, and then demand free tuition, medical care, and amnesty.  Of course, there’s always the indigenous peoples of North and South America who have organized to take both back from the European (ancestry) “illegals” and their “anchor babies.”  That would be the Mexica Movement, a small but determined group that rejects even the names “La Raza” and “Hispanic” due to their European origins.

[These folks aren't concerned about the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American war in 1848.  Nope.  They want things restored to pre-1492.  They are really upset about Christopher Columbus and the smallpox epidemic that killed indigenous people who had no immune defense against the disease -- hence the accusation of European genocide.  As if Columbus invented germ warfare and deliberately killed the people whose labor and cooperation he needed.  Sorry, just an interesting footnote.]

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC MOTIVES FOR STASIS

Our business community is happy to have workers who are used to earning the equivalent of $4.5o/hr in their home country, our unions are eager to have millions of new members (if we taxpayers will foot the bill for the labor contracts that supply fresh jobs), and the Democrats know full well that every naturalized Mexican (and quite a few phony ID’d illegals) will pull the ‘D’ lever at election time.

The Mexican government gets to continue receiving dollar remittances for years to come, while granting dual-citizenship and absentee voting rights to a population of 30 million Mexican-Americans and another seven million or so amnestied and naturalized that won’t have to push up the unemployment stats in Mexico, or angrily lobby for essential Mexican government reforms.

Meanwhile, American consumption of the recreational drugs that Mexico either produces or transports continues unabated, allowing the threats and bribery that go hand-in-hand with prohibition to slowly destroy trust in our institutions and exacerbate racial hostility.  Drug money is now funding hundreds of American police departments through legal (but probably unconstitutional) pre-trial property confiscations, and fighting the possibility of addiction is now a massive employment program at every level of our government.  So it’s small wonder that you don’t see American  politicians voluntarily raising  the possibility of drug legalization.

MIGRATION

The tsunami of folks (sometimes whole families) who used to be called illegal aliens, then ‘immigrants,’ and now “Displaced Foreign Travellers,” (feel free to laugh)  is wreaking havoc on our border states, and has been occurring for so long that even a large increase in the pace and volume causes no concern among the American population.  Parts of those states have become “no go” zones for American citizens — too dangerous.  Gang shootouts occur in these areas regularly.  Many are in our national parks, where the warning signs were posted by the United States Bureau of Land Management.  Did you know that the counterfeit identification card business is worth in the area of a billion dollars a year?

But maybe our concerns are misplaced.  The 195 U.S. cities currently occupied by Mexican street gangs with no known legal occcupation may turn out to be just be a bunch of misguided kids working their way through a bad situation by selling drugs and killing folks you don’t know.  It may be that the international drug cartels who earn billions supplying these kids with drugs for resale will never become the murderous problem here that they have at home.  After all, we’d hate to have to see our armed forces shooting and arresting our police forces just because the police and the judiciary and the legislators and the bureaucrats couldn’t help but accept the free money offered by the cartels.  You yourself wouldn’t, of course, until the cartel mentioned that if you don’t accept the bribe, they’ll torture and kill your family — then, you.  A really effective sales pitch. One, by the way, which the army isn’t immune to, either.

WAR AT OUR DOORSTEP — BARBARIANS RULE

So the killing in Mexico — which now includes large numbers of random citizens unconnected to the drug trade —  has become pervasive, and anonymous, and without accountability.  Having a problem in Mexico?  Calling the police to complain could be fatal.  Practicing  journalism, likewise. Oh, and you might not want to actually show up for that office you were just elected to.  A lot of deceased Mayors and Governors stumbled on that realization the hard way.  Since law has broken down, the country is no longer a safe place for women…for anyone, really.  So the Mexican armed forces are fighting the cartels, and there is no fallback if that doesn’t work.  Up North, we used to call our harassment of drug users and dealers “the war on drugs; in Mexico it’s actually a war:  They’ve had an official count of over 28,000 killed in less than four years, and fresh killing and discovery of bodies from old killings occurs daily.

Maybe a government that can’t protect its citizens hasn’t really failed. Let’s not be harsh.  President Calderon assures us that the violence will abate after a while, that it is really occcurring because of the success of the military in putting down what our Secretary of State Clinton referred to as a narco-insurgency.  Back in the U.S., we shouldn’t panic that we are in a sort of “drug bubble” in which everyone, ultimately, wants a piece of that free money that you can only get through the sale of illegal drugs.  Can’t happen here, right?  Or is there some kind of tipping point.  A point where all of these diverse agendas come together, separately, with a grotesque unintended consequence that no one knows how to undo. Like, when there’s no one left to trust.  Nah!

OPEN BORDER KUMBAYA

We’re probably thinking about this all wrong.  We need a positive attitude.  Here goes:  Mexicans don’t think we stole a huge part of their country.  The gangs and cartels really just shoot each other (and an occasional innocent bystander).  And Mexicans mostly want to adopt our American culture; read, speak  and vote strictly in english, and avoid living in ethnic ghettoes that mimic their home towns in Mexico.  Our businessmen will be happy to go back to paying much higher wages, our unions will calmly continue their well-deserved shrinkage, and the Democrats will abandon any notion that they have to import voters (and campaign funds) in order to be successful at the ballot box.

Which bring us to a happier place.  The gentle, cooperative merger of the two countries.  Given Mexicans’ historical aversion to “Yanqui imperialism,” we obviously couldn’t annex Mexico.  Whether they like us or not, we’re certainly not going to war with them again (hell, given the  military equipment owned by the cartels, they just might win!)  And I don’t think they would volunteer to become a territory, like Puerto Rico — which didn’t, of course, volunteer.  What to do…what to do?  How about this:  The Emily Litella Strategy.  We just disband our border controls, say “never mind — and bienvenidos.” I think that would be the world peace thing to do, don’t you?

It’ not as if we were proud of our racist, imperialist, exploitational country to begin with, is it?  Nope.  Let’s have someone with ancient roots on this continent step in and try to repair some of the damage we’ve done with our greed and ignorance.  Let’s just hope that, in time, the proper inheritors of this foolish nation will forgive us.  Oops! we’ll be gone; so,  please forgive our despised memory.

A FEW ALTERNATIVES TO MUTUAL COLLAPSE

JUST DO SOMETHING!

But that’ll take a while to effectuate; so, while we’re waiting to be replaced,  I’d like to suggest a few interim measures to alleviate some of the righteous tension that seems to have accrued on both sides of the Southern border.  Let’s join Mexico in legalizing drugs — all of them. Mexico decriminalized personal use amounts of recreational drugs in the summer of ’09.  Small amounts of marijuana, meth, coke and heroin are no longer prosecuted.  This keeps corrupt cops from filling the jails with small drug-busts and shaking down the already-terrified citizens.  But that only helps with that small part of the problem.

Our continuing purchase of their drugs is the unsolved problem.  It’s time to man-up as a nation and admit we are responsible for the slaughter of innocents and worldwide devastation because of our drug prohibition policies. I think we are smart enough to create regulations, just as we do with alcohol, to mitigate addiction.  The free money created with illegality just unleashes a horde of drug salesmen on society, increasing the addiction we had hoped to prevent.  And, because the Black American community stands in the street to sell drugs to the white community, we are exacerbating our race relations as we disproportionately jail the blacks.  Abroad, we arm our enemies, as well as armies of criminals, with our recreational drug spending.  We really can’t afford to have Mexico go down, or to continue the pretense that prohibition is a beneficial policy.  If we don’t change, those currently benefitting from this suicidal policy will act surprised to find themselves living in a world returned to barbarism.

At the border, we need to have a massive, organized, guest worker program, so that most of those people working here — or searching for work, can come in legally, without risking their lives, and being preyed upon by their own people.  Then we can take our time fencing the border, because only Jihadis and other criminal types will still have an incentive to cross illegally.  We will save billions in both drug and border enforcement, and our government, at every level, will earn their share of the billions in tax revenue to be collected through the sale of recreational drugs (I know…the prohibitionists say there will be no net gain in tax revenue from legal drug sales).

It’s not intelligence that prevents these measures from enactment; it’s self-interest, coupled with political cowardice.  The tipping point, though,  should be when your policies are arming your enemies, destroying your friends and menacing the democratic institutions that so many have worked and died for. There are other ways to protect borders; other ways to curb addiction; other ways to be virtuous.