North America

Mexico Under Siege - The Drug War at Our Doorstep

9,728 - The estimated number of people who have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since the start of 2007, shortly after Mexican president Felipe Calderon declared war on drug traffickers. That's more than the fatalities in the Iraq war.

See the LATimes' complete series, including interactive map, multimedia gallery, video Q&A, chronology and more.

U.S. Fortifies Hawaii’s Defenses Against North Korean Arms
By Thom Shanker | NYTimes

efense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Thursday that he had ordered the military to deploy missile interceptors and radar to protect Hawaii from a North Korean long-range rocket.

The defense secretary’s disclosure came as Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the military’s commitment to “vigorously enforce” the latest United Nations Security Council resolution on North Korea’s nuclear program. But he declined to confirm reports provided by other Pentagon officials that the military was tracking a North Korean freighter suspected of carrying banned materials. Read more.

From the FEMA Website:

National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) is scheduled for July 27 through July 31, 2009. NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery.

NLE 09 is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise. Tier I exercises (formerly known as the Top Officials exercise series or TOPOFF) are conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), which serves as the nation's overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises. The NEP was established to provide the U.S. government, at all levels, exercise opportunities to prepare for catastrophic crises ranging from terrorism to natural disasters.

NLE 09 is a White House directed, Congressionally- mandated exercise that includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, their deputies, staff and key operational elements. In addition, broad regional participation of state, tribal, local, and private sector is anticipated. This year the United States welcomes the participation of Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom in NLE 09. Read more.

The Great U-Turn: Global Migration Flows Reverse for the First Time Since the Depression as Work in the Rich World Dries Up
By Patrick Barta and Joel Millman | WSJ

Brígido de Jesús González lived in Queens, N.Y., for the past 20 years, working as a landscaper to support his wife and kids back in El Salvador. But with the recession clobbering his business, the illegal immigrant decided to pack up and return to his native country -- for good.

"I was thinking [of opening] a mechanic's shop for cars, or maybe a gas place, where my neighbors can come and fill up their propane tanks," says Mr. González, 50. The new businesses could be a good way to help his two sons, who now live in New York, if things get worse north of the border. "I can give them jobs if they want to come home," he says.

The developed world, which for decades has offered a difficult but promising path to upward mobility, appears to be losing its allure. Unemployment is rising, and backlashes against foreign workers are mounting.

The result is potentially the biggest turnaround in migration flows since the Great Depression, economists say. Read more.

Obama Administration Announces National Strategy to Reduce Drug Trafficking & Flow of Bulk Cash and Weapons Across Southwest Border | Press Release

Today, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Department of Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Director of National Drug Control Policy Gil Kerlikowske released President Obama’s strategy to stem the flow of illegal drugs and their illicit proceeds across the Southwest border and reduce associated crime and violence in the region.

The National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy directs federal agencies to increase coordination and information sharing with state and local law enforcement agencies, intensifies national efforts to interdict the southbound flow of weapons and bulk currency, and calls for continued close collaboration with the Government of Mexico in their efforts against the drug cartels. The strategy is an important component of the Administration’s national drug control policy and complements the Administration’s comprehensive efforts to respond to threats along the border.

Mohawks close Canada border crossing | UPI

Canada-U.S. border station on Indian territory that straddles Canada and upstate New York
was closed Tuesday by protesting Mohawks.

Canadian border guards abandoned their posts at the Seaway International Bridge near Cornwall, Ontario, Monday night after some 400 Mohawks camped out near their buildings, Sun Media reported.

The Indians who live on the Akwesasne First Nation reservation are opposed to a new law that allows Canadian border guards to carry 9 mm handguns as of June 1, the report said....

"There is no need for them to be armed," White said. "Within the same border facility are Mohawk security officers and they provide a peaceful and respectful approach to any confrontation that may arise." Read more.

Tomgram: Mike Davis, Road Trip in the Plague Years | TomDispatch.com

Mike Davis, the last American autodidact, regularly tosses visitors in the shotgun seat of his four-wheel drive and heads for the backlands of San Diego or the Mexican border for a uniquely personalized road trip through the small wonders of our world. I've experienced this myself. Now, you get to join Davis in the shotgun seat of a car belonging to someone else -- a Mexican artist he first wrote about at TomDispatch back in September 2003 -- and get the same treatment, as well as a small sense of what a world, now the picture of hell to many of us, actually looks like through local eyes from the other side of the border. Davis, whose book Planet of Slums should be on every bookshelf on the planet, landed memorably on Bill Moyers Journal for his last TomDispatch piece. Tom

A Day Without Tourists
Tijuana Versus the Plague
By Mike Davis

"Since everyone is dumping on Mexico these days, you might as well help me do the real thing."

Sometimes an opportunity for reform comes along that is "strategic" in that it changes the playing field for efforts to win other reforms in the future. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act - establishing the right of American workers to organize unions and bargain collectively - was a strategic reform. It increased the power of people previously excluded from power, and thereby reduced the power of corporate interests. But the right of workers in America to organize has been steadily eroded by unpunished abuses by anti-union employers. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is easy to justify on the basis of guaranteeing the basic human rights of working Americans. When the Employee Free Choice Act is signed into law, millions of private sector workers will have greater protection from having their rights violated. What difference would that make? Ask Steve Arney.

Electoral Sham in Haiti
By Stephen Lendman

Few people anywhere have suffered more for so long, yet endure and keep struggling for change. For brief periods under Jean-Bertand Aristide, they got it until a US-led February 29, 2004 coup d'etat forced him into exile where he remains Haiti's symbolic leader - for his supporters, still head of the Fanmi Lavalas (FL) party he founded in 1996 to reestablish links between local Lavalas branches and its parliamentary representatives.

From then to now, nothing has been the same. UN paramilitaries occupy the country. Washington effectively controls it. President Rene Preval got a choice - go along or pay the price. He submitted knowing what awaits him if he resists. Nonetheless, he's disappointed bitterly.

Study: 4 Million Kids Have Illegal Parents
Children Often Struggle In Poverty, Report Says
Hope Yen | WBAL

Growing numbers of children of illegal immigrants are being born in this country, and they are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty than those with American-born parents, a report says.

The study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center highlights a growing dilemma in the immigration debate: Illegal immigrants' children born in the United States are American citizens, yet they struggle in poverty and uncertainty along with parents who fear deportation, toil largely in low-wage jobs and face layoffs in an ailing economy.

What Can Obama Do in Latin America?
By Greg Grandin | TomDispatch.com

What if Barack Obama had picked the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel or Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodman to advise him at the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this week? Unlikely, to say the least, but 75 years ago President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did something just like that, tapping a former Nation editor and fierce critic of U.S. militarism to advise his administration on Latin American policy. As a result -- consider this your curious, yet little known, fact of the day -- anti-imperialism saved the American empire.

FDR took office in 1933 looking not just to stabilize the U.S. economy, but to calm a world inflamed: Japan had invaded Manchuria the year before; the Nazis had seized power in Germany; European imperialists were tightening their holds over their colonies; and the Soviet Union had declared its militant "third period" strategy, imagining that global capitalism, plunged into the Great Depression, was in its last throes.

Camp Lejeune Historic Water Update

Dear Registrant: 

I'LL HAVE A "DRAUGHT DODGER!"
Canadian Parliament votes again to let U.S. war resisters stay
by Mike Ferner | April 1, 2009

Two days ago, for the second time in 10 months, Canada's House of Commons told Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government, including Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, to stop deporting U.S. soldiers resisting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vote united the three opposition parties, the Liberals, the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democratic Party in a close 129-125 vote.

Last week, the War Resisters Support Campaign rallied for former Army soldier, Kimberly Rivera, the first female U.S. soldier to go to Canada. Nearly 100 people filled the chairs and lined the aisles at the Steelworkers hall in Toronto for Rivera, her husband and three children, the youngest born in Canada six months ago.

Bilderburg Group Meeting May 14-17, 2009

Bilderberg will return to its 1993 crime scene when it attempts to meet secretly in Vouliagmeni, Greece, May 14-17. Bilderberg will return to the grounds of Nafsika Astir Palace hotels in Vouliagmeni, 20 miles outside Athens, and meet behind guards at the Westin Nafsika.

High on the Bilderberg agenda will be how to manipulate the global economic crisis for their selfish interests. They will pressure both European and North American nations to pull back from “protectionism” in the later meetings of heads of state. Since the international financiers and high officials of government see themselves as “citizens of the world” and scorn “nationalism,” their only loyalty is bankrolls, not their country. They love free trade, essential for world government.

Read more here.