An interesting article about remittances to Mexico and the nation's lawless cartels.

 

How are we going to dismantle the cartels?

By Silvio Canto, Jr. www.americanthinker.com

We posted about the Mexico cartels during 2024. We may be posting more in 2025 after listening to President Trump talk about dismantling them. Time will tell.

We can tell you this about the state of the cartels. My friend Allan Wall posted this:

It’s important for jobs to be created in Mexico.

But what if criminal gangs are one of the biggest employers in the country?

A recent study has found that, taken collectively, the Mexican drug cartels are now the fifth largest employer in Mexico.

From ZME Science: “Mexican cartels now boast an estimated 175,000 members, making them the fifth largest employer in Mexico, right between the grocery chain Oxxo and telecoms company América Móvil.”

Working for a cartel means that you may be selling illegal drugs on the street, bringing someone over the border, working in one of many companies funded by laundered money and maybe others. It’s a diverse operation to say the least.

The cartels are the fifth largest employer because of the power of cash. No one knows for sure how many dollars go south because of cartel operations, but it's billions. It's enough to create jobs and keep a few politicians happy about their local economies.

So how are we going to dismantle the cartels? It won't be easy and will require the full participation of the Mexican government.

Mexico receives $65 billion in remittances and the cartels are the fifth largest employer. What a strange way to run an economy.

 

Mayorkas is definitely the one of the worse government officials ever appointed and must be held accountable for his horrific actions and inactions!

 

Mayorkas's Failures

By Charlton Allen www.americanthinker.com

On December 22, 2024, during an interview on “Face the Nation,” Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, dismissed the trafficking of children at the border as "outside the responsibility of DHS." This stunning remark followed a scathing Inspector General's report that exposed systemic failures and the federal government’s inability to account for 300,000 missing migrant children. The report underscores a breakdown that extends beyond DHS to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), both of which report directly to President Biden and Vice President Harris. This is not just a bureaucratic failure -- it is a collapse of leadership at the highest level.

To grasp the scale of this tragedy, consider that 300,000 children is equivalent to the populations of St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Pittsburgh. Imagine an entire city of children vanishing without a trace. Some of these children are dead. Others endure horrific abuse. Yet, Mayorkas shrugs off responsibility as though these children simply disappeared.

The Inspector General’s report laid bare the federal government’s inability to track children after their release from custody and its gross failure to vet sponsors. Speaker Mike Johnson called this a “moral failing,” rightly pointing to the administration’s dangerously misplaced priorities.

Policies of Empathy, Results of Chaos

The Biden-Harris administration portrays its border policies as compassionate, but the reality tells a different story. By dismantling Trump-era measures like Remain in Mexico, the administration broadcast to the world that the U.S. border was open. Predictably, human traffickers and cartels took full advantage, leading to a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions.

HHS, overwhelmed by a surge in unaccompanied minors, resorted to hasty, negligent vetting processes. In one case, more than 50 children were released to the same address.

In another, a child was abandoned in an empty field, left utterly alone.

This isn’t compassion. It’s neglect and abuse, masked by hollow progressive rhetoric.

Lost and Exploited

A New York Times investigation uncovered the exploitation of these children in industries ranging from shadowy operations to household-name corporations. In California, they stitch "Made in America" tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. In Michigan, children produce auto parts for Ford and General Motors.

This isn’t just a hidden issue in construction or agriculture. It is systemic exploitation, implicating major corporations. The government’s abandonment of 300,000 children has created a moral catastrophe that tarnishes both public and private institutions.

The Homeland Security Act and DHS’s Obligation

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 tasked DHS with enforcing immigration laws, securing borders, and combating human trafficking. Efforts like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Blue Campaign, established in 2010, were designed to uphold these mandates. The Blue Campaign collaborates with NGOs, private organizations, and law enforcement to prevent trafficking and protect victims.

Mayorkas’s deflection of responsibility defies this mandate. The administration’s reckless border policies amplified this crisis, and the question remains: who will take responsibility for these missing children?

The Hypocrisy of the Left

Where is the progressive outrage now? The same voices that condemned Trump-era family separations as inhumane have fallen silent in the face of this far greater tragedy. The speeches, protests, and emotional appeals are nowhere to be found.

By claiming to care deeply about immigrant children, the Biden administration cloaks itself in empathy. Yet its policies created the conditions for this disaster. Worse, many progressives will rediscover their outrage against President Trump, eager to blame him for crises they ignored. It’s a sickening truth: these children only seem to matter when they serve as political tools.

Mayorkas: The Worst Cabinet Official Since McNamara?

To call Mayorkas unfit for his position is an understatement. He presides over the most porous border in modern history, with over 2.4 million illegal encounters in fiscal year 2023 alone. Untold millions more likely crossed undetected, slipping into the country without notice. His department has failed to enforce border security, empowered traffickers, and abandoned children -- with countless others lost due to DHS’s negligence.

When historians assess this era, Mayorkas will likely be remembered as the worst cabinet official since Robert McNamara, who escalated the Vietnam War, or Albert Fall, whose corruption led to the Teapot Dome scandal. Like McNamara’s disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War and Fall’s corruption that eroded public trust, Mayorkas’s tenure is a crisis of competence and integrity. His legacy will be measured not only by administrative failures but by the lives irrevocably harmed by his negligence.

Mayorkas Must Be Held Accountable

Restoring dignity and justice for these children demands accountability and a national commitment to never repeat these failures. These children deserved better -- and so does America.

Congress must act decisively. Investigations, oversight hearings, and legislative reform are essential. Holding Mayorkas and others accountable must remain a priority beyond Inauguration Day.

The loss of 300,000 children is not a statistic. Each is a life stolen by systemic failure. Alejandro Mayorkas failed them. The Biden-Harris administration has failed them. And they have failed us all.

 

Please read and study each paragraph of this fabulous article - then read and re-read the last paragraph - to sense our future.

 

The Best or the Worst of Times?

By J.B. Shurk www.americanthinker.com

Now that Christmas Day has passed, I have put down my beloved copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and picked up his masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities.  As I have argued before, that novel’s opening sentence perfectly captures the contradictions of our time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And you thought that I struggled to locate a terminal period for some of my longest sentences!  In Dickens’s defense, it is one hell of a sentence!  It is also a sophisticated description of the tumultuous events that accompany transformative eras such as our own — what many have come to regard as a “Fourth Turning,” when crisis and social upheaval dominate life for a generation.  

Will we be able to “Make America Great Again”?  Will this be the beginning of a new American “Golden Age,” as President Trump suggests?  Or will we soon endure economic collapse and war the likes of which none of us has ever seen?  As 2024 comes to an end, it is fair to say that uncertainty is only accelerating and that the prospects for peace and prosperity are running neck and neck with their opposites.  

We are surrounded by creature comforts that our relatives living during the First World War would have struggled to imagine.  Flat-screen televisions with enough high-definition detail to transport us onto athletic fields of live sporting events or into realistic scenes of whatever shows we happen to be watching.  Handheld computers that allow us to track down information and interact with strangers from all over the world.  Online markets that link buyers and sellers who never would have found each other even twenty years ago.  For most of human history, the wealthiest kings and queens never lived as luxuriously as many of the poorest people in the West live today.

Yet there is a darkness burbling beneath all this technological magic.  Even before our televisions were “smart,” the programs on their screens provided manipulative actors the means to “program” what we believe.  I refer not to the glitzy celebrities, but rather to those agents in boardrooms and committee rooms who use those celebrities to push messages we don’t always consciously see.  Situational comedies have made us laugh for eighty years, but their product placements have subtly influenced what we buy.  Their storylines have subtly influenced our opinions regarding politics, morality, and war.  We turn on televisions to be entertained, but corporations and governments use television to shape our thoughts and keep us under their control.  Mass propaganda does not work without our willingness to disengage our brains and let the “boob tube” do our thinking for us.  There’s nothing “smart” about that.

These handheld computers that we call phones are similarly Janus-faced.  On the one hand, I have felt fortunate to live during a time of intellectual nirvana, when no branch of knowledge lies beyond my reach.  Esoteric subjects that once required me to seek out small collections in far-flung libraries are now instantly available in the palm of my hand.  If knowledge is nourishment, then the rapid evolution of the internet combined with inexpensive mobile computers has given us an incomparably delectable feast.  

On the other hand, we now see how those who manipulate us for a living will use the tantalizing smorgasbord of information at our fingertips to poison our minds and keep us in the cages they built for us long ago.  For a while there, it seemed as if we had broken free from those cages.  Governments’ monopolies over both mass communication and the availability of information appeared to have been shattered, as if Prometheus had stolen fire from the globalist gods and given it to the eight-billion-strong human rump that the infinitesimally small number of planetary “elites” prefer to keep in the dark. 

Now that fire is slowly dying.  Libraries and newspapers are retreating behind paywalls.  Sources of information that conflict with governments’ preferred “narratives” are disappearing from corners of the internet.  Government censors work with secretive “non-governmental” organizations to bankrupt independent news sites and criminalize dissent.  Once-contrarian websites (such as the Drudge Report) have started toeing the Establishment line — as if they were quietly taken over by ideological enemies or their owners were threatened into submission.  “Misinformation” and “disinformation” — words that meant little to Westerners two decades ago — have been elevated to national security bogeymen on par with nuclear weapons, so that governments can justify censorship on an industrial scale.  We live both in a “Golden Age” of free speech and access to information and an unstable cauldron of viewpoint discrimination, intellectual suppression, “woke” bowdlerization, and State-sanctioned propaganda.

In this stomach-churning stew of technology-enabled propaganda and censorship, our favorite devices are also our jailers.  Our “smart” phones and televisions spy on our conversations, monitor our movements, record our social interactions, and scrutinize our purchases.  Our daily “selfies,” retinal and fingerprint security verifications, and health-tracking apps collect our biometric information while logging changes in our physical and psychological well-being.  Technology companies and their government partners have complete access to our phone calls, text messages, emails, and social media histories.  Our digital contacts provide intelligence agencies with a tidy list of our “known associates.”  And these same devices that permit corporate and government spies to watch everything we do simultaneously allow those agents to bombard us with a constant stream of propaganda in the form of fake news (actual “disinformation” in government parlance).  

Yet the best and worst features of modern technology merely distract us from a far more serious problem.  For more than a century, the Federal Reserve System has printed paper money and constructed an unsustainable world of unfathomable debt.  We cannot avoid the financial tribulation headed our way; we can only delay its arrival, just as Ponzi-scheming bankers and profligate politicians have done for decades.

In order to postpone economic collapse, the fraud-inducing Fed and its fraud-enabling partners in government have (1) placed downward pressure on wages by encouraging women to join the workforce, (2) decoupled from the gold standard, (3) imposed the petrodollar upon global markets to stimulate artificial dollar demand, (4) offshored entire industries to slave-labor nations, (5) regulated markets, (6) spent recklessly, (7) started wars, (8) used COVID lockdowns to contain inflation, (9) imposed “climate change” taxes, and (10) completely opened U.S. borders to illegal aliens willing to work for slave wages.  

These policies were never about feminism, “free trade,” health, security, or multiculturalism.  They were implemented to slow the catastrophic (and mathematically inevitable) inflation naturally resulting from a century of money-printing.  Nevertheless, the U.S. dollar has lost 99% of its value since 1971.  We have “fundamentally transformed” from a society in which a single breadwinner could earn enough to support a large family to a society in which two parents must work multiple jobs even for a small family to stay afloat.

As 2024 ends, we should be filled with determination and hope.  But we have much to do if we are to survive the consequences of a century of government malice, predation, and foolishness.

 

Deportation is cruel - what is extremely cruel is th Biden/Harris open border policy - that is what is evil and cruel!

 

WaPo: Deporting families together is ‘ugly’ and ‘cruel’

By Olivia Murray www.americanthinker.com

A large part of Trump’s appeal to the common man, even the moderates and many people who have always been reliably Democrat, is that he’s not pro-crime. And, after four years of the Biden Crime Family and all his progressive cronies laying waste to a functioning society, the American people had hit their limit; in November, a majority of the nation showed up to re-elect Trump, delivering a soaring electoral victory and the popular vote. While I wish it were a referendum on abortion, or federal usurpations, people obviously showed up for two reasons: the economy and the crime rate, both of which were negatively (and seriously) impacted by a massive influx of third world foreigners who have no right to be here.

Now, any leftist movement throughout history bears a shared characteristic, and that is that it uplifts evil, and trods on good; villain becomes victim, and the innocent become the enemy. So naturally, it’s only consistent that the leftist, pro-crime media follows suit—the criminal illegal alien, violating American law and sovereignty, is now a victim of “right-wing” xenophobia and hate—and Eugene Robinson’s new piece at The Washington Post displays the fallacious appeal to emotion in an effort to subvert the will of the people that we can expect in the coming months:

Donald Trump has promised the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, and now we know how that will look: ugly, wrenching, heartbreaking and cruel.

[snip]

Migrants without papers who have built new lives in this country will be apprehended in their homes and at their workplaces. National Guard troops likely will not be used to conduct these raids but instead transport detainees to the centers where they will be held.

You know what’s “ugly” and “cruel”? Abortion, and all that goes along with it… a retiree on social security only receiving a 2.5% increase because a federal government artificially deflated the inflation numbers… stealing the work and wealth of one person and giving it to another by the barrel of a gun (taxation)... mutilating the bodies and  healthy sexual organs of children to “trans” them… providing support to terrorist groups for politically expedient purposes….

(Clearly, I cannot begin to do this list any justice.)

Per Robinson, “family separation” is ugly and cruel… but so is deporting them together—ipso facto, Robinson wants mass amnesty. (This is also assuming that these “family units” are in fact related and these children aren’t being trafficked by strangers and bound for sale at a brothel which is, quite a presumption. Don’t forget, there are still hundreds of thousands of migrant children unaccounted for due to the chaos and incompetency of the last four years.) 

You can’t win with these people, so if, but hopefully when the time comes, I urge you to stand your ground, don’t give in to emotional arguments, and see to it that we get our nation back.