Have you seen this article by Zach Carter, titled Wall Street Is Laundering Drug Money And Getting Away With It ?
A damning article on how Wachovia laundered $380 billion in drug money was discovered by Bloomberg's Michael Smith. Wachovia execs looked the other way as "the bank was moving money behind literally tons of cocaine from violent drug cartels." If it were not for internal whistleblowers this would have never seen the light of day.
But as the violence in Mexico gets worse day after day, the drug cartels grow stronger. The only thing stopping these profits, the only thing that will make the violence stop, is to put them out of business.
How?
By legalizing Marijuana first, as the cannabis plant is 60% of the cartel's profits. After that, legalize all drugs as the American tolerance for legalization will have grown.
If not, you'll have more of this:
The first successful car bombing by a drug cartel brings a new dimension of terror to a Mexican border region already shocked by random street battles, bodies dangling from bridges and highway checkpoints mounted by heavily armed criminals.
"The attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaida playbook," should mean that we really are in another war, and then it's a war we don't have to be in.
"It's a lot like Iraq," said Claudio Arjon, who owns a restaurant near the scene of the attack and was surveying the damage from behind police lines Saturday morning. "Now, things are very different. It's very different. It's very ugly."
Things get complicated when it isn't just the drug dealers profiting off of drug money. So we see why the issue of legalization is a hard one to get up and running. But as more Americans are aware of the violence right there on our borders, or by the fact that people know marijuana isn't the evil drug as once said. Then more eyes open to the fact that so called illicit drugs should be legalized and sold in the same manner as tobacco and alcohol.
If not, then things will get worse. Since the Drug War started, the state of our country has been getting worse. It's a major drain on our society and our economy, but that's only for those who don't profit from the corruption and drug trade.
Car bomb in Mexican drug war changes ground rules
Police said Friday that La Linea drug gang — the same group blamed for the March killing of a U.S. consulate employee and her husband — lured federal officers and paramedics to the site of a car bomb by dressing a bound, wounded man in a police uniform and calling in a false report of an officer shot.
The gang then exploded a car holding as much as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives, killing the decoy, a rescue worker and a federal officer. A regional military commander said a cell phone might have been used to detonate the bomb.
The gang promised to strike again, with graffiti painted on the wall of a Ciudad Juarez shopping center. "What happened ... is going to keep happening against all the authorities," the message read. "We have more car bombs."
This deserves way more attention than what it's been receiving. Don't expect the MSM to really cover and expose this Drug War to bring light the need to end it. We are losing, the drug lords aren't playing any games, but our politicians are. Too many are afraid of being soft on crime or drugs to really address this problem. They won't have a choice when Americans are murdered and American businesses are destroyed.
When a police department takes such a direct hit as that, and then they promise more, expect police officers to retire or quit. Because I'm sure some will begin to think that it isn't worth it.
Civilian Ciudad Juarez residents also were emotionally shaken by the bombing, which scattered debris over a 300-yard (300-meter) radius and blew out the windows of a nearby home.
Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, has become one of the most dangerous cities in the world, with more than 4,000 people killed since the beginning of 2009.
Police said Thursday's attack was in retaliation for the arrest of a top leader of the La Linea drug gang, Jesus Acosta Guerrero, earlier in the day.
So many people have been dying right there, south of the border, and nobody either knows or cares.
Meanwhile in the northeastern border city of Nuevo Laredo, 12 people were killed and 21 wounded in running gun battles between soldiers and cartel gunmen on Friday.
Gunmen blocked some streets with hijacked vehicles at the height of the battles, which occurred at least three points in the city, prompting the U.S. Consulate to warn American citizens in the city to remain indoors.
Our nation desperately needs the money and we've done more harm to drug users and non-drug users than the actual drugs themselves:
"If alcohol was a new drug," Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association
"The lethal dose of alcohol divided by a typical recreational dose (safety ratio) is 10, which places it closer to heroin (6), and GHB (8) in terms of danger from overdose, than MDMA ("Ecstasy" – 16), and considerably more dangerous than LSD (1000) or cannabis (>1000)."
Justice Policy Institute
"The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."
Justice Policy Institute
"The number of people in state prisons for drug offenses has increased 550 percent over the last 20 years. A recent JPI report found that the amount spent on "cops and courts" – not rates of drug use -- is correlated to admissions to prison for drug offenses. Counties that spend more on law enforcement and the judiciary admit more people to prison for drug offenses than counties that spend less."
"How to Construct an Underclass, or How the War on Drugs Became a War on Education,"
"But while drug-free schools remain a fantasy, their policies are contributing to an uneducated underclass that just gets larger, more despairing, and more entrenched. This underclass now includes five million young adults between sixteen and twenty-four who are both out of school and out of work, with few skills and fewer prospects. It includes most ex-prisoners, half of whom lack a high school education, and most of whom are jobless one year after release. And it includes Black Americans and other racial minorities who have never remotely attained the standard of well-being common throughout the developed world."
Transparency International, "Global Corruption Report 2001: Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico"
According to the international monitoring group Transparency International, "Mexico's police and armed services are known to be contaminated by multimillion dollar bribes from the transnational narco-trafficking business. Though the problem is not as pervasive in the military as it is in the police, it is widely considered to have attained the status of a national security threat."
U.S. Department of the Treasury. "2007 National Money Laundering Strategy"
In its 2007 U.S. Money Laundering Threat Assessment, the U.S. Department of the Treasury described the movement of cash smuggled from drug transactions: "Cash associated with illicit narcotics typically flows out of the United States across the southwest border into Mexico, retracing the route that illegal drugs follow when entering the United States.82 Upon leaving the country, cash may stay in Mexico, continue on to a number of other countries, or make a U-turn and head back into the United States as a deposit by a bank or casa de cambio. Illicit funds leaving the United States also flow into Canada, which, like Mexico, is a source of illegal narcotics."
Quality Data for Journalists and Researchers at Common Sense for Drug Policy
You can also check out the Drug War Clock at DrugSense.org
Money Spent on the War On Drugs this Year:
$10,989,394,978 Federal
$16,868,730,052 State
$27,858,140,383 Total
As of 1:21:35AM, Sunday, July 18th, 2010
Legalize all drugs, sell and tax the hell out of them to create revenue for our country. Some states are considering doing this, one major being California. But this is really a hot topic, nobody really likes to touch.
When you say, "Legalize all drugs," people look at you like you are a pot head, or like you're crazy. But for some reason, people expect everybody to suddenly start smoking crack, or meth.
They think everyone will show up to work being high, everyone will become pot heads and become pot-couch potatoes.
If you don't drink alcohol, are you against it being sold in stores?
Alcohol kills over 80,000 people a year, which crushes all illicit drug use at around 17,000.
But it is sold responsibly in stores, why can't drugs get the same treatment. Prohibition didn't work for alochol, it is not working for drugs.
Time to try something new.