"Senior Mexican officials have begun a sweeping review of the military's two-year occupation of this dangerous border city, concluding that the U.S.-backed deployment of thousands of soldiers against drug traffickers has failed to control the violence and crime, according to officials in both countries.
The war on Mexoco's powerful drug cartels has been the defining policy of Calderón's administration, involving unprecedented cooperation with American political and law enforcement authorities. Failure in a high-profile battleground such as Ciudad Juarez would represent a major defeat for Calderón and for U.S. officials determined to curb the multibillion dollar flow of drugs across the border.
"There is an almost unanimous consensus in the city that the strategy hasn't worked," said Hugo Almada, a sociology professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez who earlier this month organized a peace march of more than 3,000 people.
"The most terrifying question that everyone asks is, 'If the army comes in and can't control the situation, what happens to us now?' " Almada said. " Washpost
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This, of course, relates directly to my prior post on the possible use of US forces against the cartels. Yes. I know that if many Americans were not the sort of people who want to soak themselves in cocaine and heroin, then Mexico could be left to its own fate, but we are what we are and the large scale drugs trade is sapping the country's strength (ours). Targets? We should be primarily inerested in the "big" people to include corrupt officials and bankers. There will be some collateral damage (dead innocents). There always are. A border war against the drug lords is inevitable. We should get on with it and make sure that the damage that we inflict injures all the syndicates more or less equally. pl
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"He grew up amid extraordinary privilege, a wealthy Nigerian banker's son who attended top international schools and had traveled to the United States. But sometime some time this year, according to relatives' accounts, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became an enemy of the West.
"You can admit it now: Maybe in your teens, or in college, you experimented. Hiding in your dorm or your parents' basement, you took hit after hit. Your friends began wondering why you'd changed, but it was too late: Ayn Rand was in your bloodstream.
My own dealer was a libertarian teaching assistant who introduced me to "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" in graduate school; soon I was subscribing to Rand-inspired newsletters and quoting Howard Roark and John Galt -- Rand's two most famous creations -- on the virtues of selfishness and individualism. It took the better part of a year to get over it, but, like so many others, I eventually realized that architects shouldn't go around blowing up buildings and that, above all, you can't really divide all humans into capitalist geniuses and collectivist looters. " Washpost
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Ayn Rand and Jean Jacques Rousseau have much to answer for.
Rousseau for his inspiration of the line of thought that lead inexorably to Lenin, etc.
Ayn Rand has inspired the flowering of an unbridled selfishness that corrupts endlessly.
Investment bankers, unashamed of their looting of the economy, they are the new heroes of popular imagination. "Greed is good," Gordon Gecko proclaimed. "We do the Lord's work here," the head of Goldman Sachs announced. Can anyone doubt that the endless corruption of US Congressmen in the lobbying trade is inspired by other than Ayn Rand's obsession with self above all else?
All those people who spend their lives in the service of others are thought to be "suckers" by the Ayn Rand crowd, suckers or those who not clever enough to be truly venal.
The country is largely served by people who are depised by the "objectivists." How long can that last? pl
