Mexican Drug Crisis and Gun Laws

Mexican drug cartels have been funneling dope into this country for decades. Using violent gangs such as MS-13 as street troops, the Mexican Mafia has expanded its reach into over 200 U.S. cities. Some areas in this country are so overrun, and the police are so overwhelmed, that the police have signed “truces” with these gangs and abandoned whole regions to their rule.

The same occured in Mexico going way back. In essence, entire Mexican states are in the hands of Mexican drug cartels and the only “rule of law” that applies is whatever the drug cartels allow.

It is true that the cartels and Mexican Mafia have our police out-gunned with “assault-style” weapons — but this is not the whole story.

The whole story, albeit abbreviated, goes like this:

The United States armed, equipped and trained an anti-drug force in Mexico and provided them with everything from machine guns to military helicopters. The anti-drug force then got a better deal from the drug cartels, and defected wholesale.

The same has occured with Mexican military units. These units are corrupted wholesale, and defect en masse to the cartels; bringing their military weaponry with them. Meanwhile, the cartels control many ports of entry so they can get an unlimited supply of weapons from whatever country they wish. It turns out they have imported as many as 20 million select-fire full-auto-capable AK-47 machine guns from China.

These AK-47s are not the same thing you can buy from your local gun shop in some states. The AK-47s that you can buy over the counter are specifically designed so that they cannot be converted to fire full-auto. They are semi-automatic only, like the popular Remington 7400 hunting rifle; only much less powerful.

The AK-47s being brought into Mexico from China, on the other hand, are fully automatic weapons. They are capable of laying down suppression fire and similar techniques typically used in modern military tactics. Such rifles, if manufactured after 1986 (which these certainly are), are completely illegal for any civilian in the United States to own under any circumstances. Period.

Either way, due to defections from U.S.-equipped forces, defections from their own police and military forces, and unlimited access to military weaponry from China … the drug cartels are better equipped and better trained than Mexican law enforcement, and certainly better equipped and trained than civilian law enforcement in the United States. After all, how many police departments can field a helicopter gunship?

Even though police officers are fond of referring to us non-police as “civilians,” the simple fact of the matter is that they are civilians as well. Despite their militarization, they are neither trained nor equipped to go head-to-head against a military force.

That’s not their fault, because that was never intended to be their purpose. The purpose of civilian law enforcement is to preserve peace within a community, and serve and protect the community at large. And for this purpose, most police are equipped in spades.

When dealing with a military force that is invading our country and killing our citizens, our Congress and President have both the power AND the obligation to deploy a force that is entirely trained and equipped to deal with such threats: The United States Army.

The situation in Mexico has killed thousands upon thousands of Americans in aggregate — far more than Saddam Houssein would ever dream of killing in his wildest imagination.

Clearly the incompetence, corruption and instability of the Mexican government — combined with the side-effect of thousands of dead American citizens — makes Mexico a worthy candidate for “regime change.” Let’s drop the 101st Airborne division — The Screaming Eagles — onto these cartels.

The Mexican cartels are used to corrupting local politicians, machine-gunning innocent people and outgunning police. If faced with a genuine military force the first thing they would do is scream and the second thing they would do is DIE. Problem solved.

The Mexican cartels provide the top-level brains and funding for the expansion of the Mexican Mafia and the various street gangs (such as MS-13) working under its umbrella. Without the cartels, you have a snake with its head cut off. Something that our civilian law enforcment can address.

So the problem we are seeing with violence from the Mexican cartels is entirely solvable if we apply an appropriate solution to the problem. That is, you fight a military force WITH a military force.

Instead, Hillary Clinton proposes that we fight the problem by restricting Americans’ right of self defense.

Huh? Come again?

Never forget that our government no longer represents us. In fact, it fears and hates us. It fears us more than it fears an armed military force that is, quite literally BEHEADING our citizens! Our government sees us as an impediment rather than an asset.

A logical response to the knowledge that our citizens are being killed in cross-border incursions would be to deploy our military. A second response might be to arm our citizens who are proximate to the border.

But such responses assume a government that actually serves our citizens — which is something we haven’t had since our first dictator — Abraham Lincoln — decided to squash the South in their peaceful bid for independence.

Instead we have a government that will capitalize on any excuse or any source of confusion to justify disarming our citizens and thus leaving them even MORE vulberable to assaults.

Recall that there is a major difference between the AK-47s that the Mexican drug cartels are importing from China and the AK-47s that a civilian can buy in America. Although the carbines appear similar, the tactical differences are night and day.

Hillary Clinton seizes upon the ignorance of the public on this issue to describe the problem as one in which American gun owners, having access to “assault weapons” are somehow funneling them to cartels in Mexico. And so she is calling for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” in America as a solution to the problem.

Of course, it won’t solve the problem. It will simply disarm the people she fears and hates the most: American citizens.

AIG Reaction Provides a Teachable Moment

by John Young

The surreal situation surrounding the AIG bonuses provides an opportunity to discuss the importance of principles and ideas, as well as an opportunity to discuss an important aspect of ethics.

For those who haven’t been following the news, let’s set the stage.

AIG is a huge multinational insurance company that provides various types of insurance throughout the world. One aspect of its business is the provision of insurance to banks so that they are made whole in the event that a debtor defaults on a loan. Like practically all insurance companies, AIG works on two principles. First, it wants to collect more in premiums than it pays out in claims; and second it invests available funds in order to grow them against the day when a large number of claims may come due.

It turns out that AIG made a number of bad decisions in insuring certain loan packages for banks, combined with bad decisions regarding where to invest their own money. This put AIG in eminent danger of going out of business. Because of the pivotal role that AIG plays in the banking industry, if AIG went out of business, the effects would have been devastating. Therefore, the Federal government opted to provide AIG with taxpayer funds sufficient to take an 80% ownership stake in the company and keep it from going under.

Meanwhile, now that AIG is solvent from the cash infusions, AIG management opted to fulfill its pre-existing contractual obligations to its employees by providing them with fairly substantion bonuses amounting to, on average, $1M apiece within the very division largely responsible for AIG finding itself en extremis.

Democrats in Congress have responded by putting forth a tax law intended to deprive these employees of fully 90% of their bonuses

The brokers at AIG make poor sympathetic figures. After all, they are involved in a pretty sleazy industry to start with, and intimately intertwined with an upside-down system in which people who place bets on stocks make factors more income than the people whose hard work actually gives those stocks their value. In short, to the average person, it appears as though the brokers at AIG probably haven’t done an honest day of real productive work in their lives.

As a result, it is very easy for the Obamunists to seize upon these brokers as poster children for the application of outright communistic interference. This is no different than when Ted Kennedy points to the one out a million legal gun owners who kills an innocent person as justification for draconian restrictions on our right of self-defense while completely ignoring the millions of times every year that legally owned guns are successfully used for self-defense without ever harming anyone. (In fact, legally armed citizens with carry permits kill fewer innocent people by accident than police.)

The technique used by the Obamunists of the world is to capitalize on the revulsion we may feel for a particularly unsympathetic example in order to create laws and set precedents that apply to an entire group of people, the overwhelming preponderance of whom should be left alone.

It is here that it is important for us to separate, in our minds, the actual people involved in a situation from the underlying principles at issue.

The underlying principles at issue are the terms of employment between an employee and an employer. While there are reasonable rules applied to these agreements; particularly when it comes to compensation beyond the minimum legal wage and payment for overtime, government has very little to say.

There are a wide array of fields in which objective performance of an employee is so important to an employer’s bottom line that performance and compensation are intimately tied together. One example is food service in a restaurant. In this case, a waitress works for a minimal hourly wage, counting on her performance in that task to provide her with additional compensation in the form of tips.

The same applies to a sales-woman. Usually, sales professionals are provided with a minimal “base” salary, but receive additional compensation based upon a formula that gives them a percentage of the money they made for their employer. This works to the benefit of both the employer and the employee. For the employer, it minimizes the risk of shelling out money for an unproductive employee. For the employee, it means that the more effectively she works, the more money she takes home. When a sales-woman enters into an employment contract of this type, she is counting upon her commissions and bonuses to make up the difference of a salary that would otherwise be insufficient.

This same principle applies to traders on Wall Street or working in the derivatives department at AIG. Employees take a calculated risk that through sheer performance, they will make up the difference in an otherwise insufficient salary. Their performance bonuses are usually based upon measurable and objective criteria that are spelled out in a contract.

If the AIG personnel had known, in advance, that they would not be receiving performance bonuses they would have either gone to work for another company or they would have demanded higher salaries.

For Chuckie Schumer to come in after the fact and impose a special tax that effectively renders the terms of their compensation agreement null and void is manifestly unfair because it changes the rules in the middle of the game. It is no different, in principle, from taxing a waitress 90% on her tips because Congress deems them somehow “excessive” or taxing a sales-woman 90% on her commissions. The fact that this tactic is being applied — at the moment — to unsympathetic figures doesn’t make it right. It will have established a principle that will allow the Obamunists to run amock and eventually tax to death anyone whose business even remotely touches government and whose performance-based compensation is deemed somehow “excessive.”

Naturally, this is terribly disingenuous. If you really want an eye-opener just take a look at the MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR that former members of Congress usually earn after they leave Congress and join forces with the VERY INDUSTRIES THEY WERE ENTRUSTED TO REGULATE while in Congress. But I digress.

So the first problem is that effectively nullifying the terms of the AIG employment contract after the fact provides an open avenue to implement seriously destructive tax policies in the future that will destroy incentives for achievement. This is not acceptable.

The second problem lies in the effective nullification itself. While such nullification doesn’t violate the letter of the Cosntitution, it certainly nullifies the spirit. Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution states:

” No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts …”

In fact, using a strict constructionist view of the Constitution as would be applied by James Madison, Article I Section 8 — which enumerates the powers of Congress and in so-doing limits them — gives Congress no power to pass such laws either.

Of course, the Congress-critters know this; so they are doing an end-run by using their powers under the 16th Amendment (income tax) to effectively render a private agreement null and void without declaring it to be so.

This is akin to a car-jacker arguing that he committed no crime because the victim of his behavior was driving a tractor-trailer rather than a car.

So this very dangerous tactic by our Congress puts the income of all Americans at risk (or, at least, the 50% of us who pay taxes), opens the gateway to communist policies that will suppress achievement and violates the Constitution.

On these basis alone, Congress shouldn’t even dream of passing a 90% tax on the bomuses of AIG executives, no matter how lowly we may regard them.

But now let me get to the real meat of the issue — the combination of Constitutionalism and Ethics.

At the time of our nation’s founding, it was thought that the greatest threat to the loyalty of our representatives would come from foreign states. Thus, Article I Section 9 states in part:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

From the above, it is abundantly clear to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that it was the intention of our founding fathers to prevent the corruption of our legislators and other public servants. Naturally, the partisans of foreign states (such as China and Israel) who are also citizens of the United States get around this restriction and adversely affect the loyalty of our legislators; but the issue of corruption by large corporate entities is far more pervasive and insidious.

At the time of our nation’s founding almost any concentration of wealth of any consequence was in the hands of either governments or the aristocracy composing those governments, and nobody dreamt of the existence of behemoth corporations with greater monetary throughput than entire states. Some of the corporations in this country are financially larger than some first-world nations. But this outcome — and its next consequence — were not foreseen.

With great wealth comes the ability to share some of that wealth with others. And if the wealthy entity shares strategically with legislators, it can secure special privileges that allow it to quash competition and grow to a size beyond all sense and reason — to the point that it becomes so big that if it fails our entire economy will collapse. That’s exactly what happened with AIG.

A quick perusal of financial contributions by AIG yields stunning information not provided on the daily news. In all honesty, I don’t personally find it stunning at all, because I’ve been talking about this for a long time. Either way, it turns out that AIG contributed gargantuan gobs of money to political campaigns for decades under a wide variety of names. I count 23 obvious ones, ranging all the way from AIG Global Investment Corporation through AIG SunAmerica. Just since 1990, AIG has dumped nearly $10 million into Congress. This is just money for campaigns, and doesn’t count the bribes that come in the form of special so-called “consulting assignments” that members of Congress receive after leaving.

Certainly, AIG got their money’s worth. But let me cut to the chase.

The only reason that AIG became “too big to fail” in the first place is simple corruption. Because it became so big, when it reached the point of failure, our Congress violated our Constitution wholesale by giving them hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and even taking an ownership stake in what was supposed to be a private enterprise. Then, when the company sought to provide employee retention bonuses, all hell broke loose in Congress with Chuckie Schumer and the other Obamunists vowing to levy a 90% tax on the recipients.

There is an important ethical principle here. Notice that when you do the wrong thing, it leads to crisis after crisis in which you must either undo what you previously did or commit further immoral acts. This is the way of the world, and there is no escaping this.

When our Congress was faced with a faltering AIG, it had three choices. It could allow it to fail — thus throwing us into an immediate global depression; it could bail it out — thus breaking the U.S. Constitution and guaranteeing our children a dismal future; or it could have undone the wrong it committed by allowing AIG special privileges that allowed it to grow so big by breaking it up into its 23 or so constituent parts so that the strong parts could be saved and just the weaker divisions would fail.

By failing to put right their initial mistake, Congress created yet another debacle — the image of a bunch of slimy derivatives traders receiving nearly $200M in bonuses where the money for paying those bonuses came from taxes being paid by people who can barely afford to put food on the table. Rather than taking the opportunity to right that wrong, they instead jumped to yet another outrage: a wholesale jump to embrace communist principles by taxing those whom they deem to make “too much money.”

This is no different, ethically, than the woman who has an affair on her husband only to discover that the one circumstance necessitates other wrongs just to sustain the first one until she discovers that she has wrapped herself in a cocoon of lies and deceptions that necessitate her destroying her children’s stability even though that was never her intention in the first place.

Many of our members of Congress are very bright individuals. But they have become so impressed with themselves that they believe they can evade the natural consequences of their behavior forever, when they cannot. The further they go without righting their multitude of wrongs, the more difficult making the right and honest choices will become until they have painted themselves into a corner and wrapped themselves in a straightjacket whose material is spun from their own deceptions.

The politicians are using this relatively small issue of a few bonuses at AIG to distract us from the big-picture issue of why our money had to go to AIG in the first place.

Very few of them, if any, have asked themselves what they are going to do about the wave of inflation that is bearing down upon the shore of our economy caused by the meteoric Deep Impact of incessant money printing to fund the stimulus. For smart people, they really are pretty stupid. But, then again, for anyone who has watched Congress for a while, this isn’t exactly shocking.