I applaud Mexican President Felipe Calderón for his honesty and courage in calling for a debate on drug legalization to help reduce the bloody war in Mexico (“Thinking the unthinkable”, August 14th). Former President Vicente Fox has since gone further and called for an end to prohibition. Their openness and frankness are in stark contrast to the Obama administration. Barack Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, has repeatedly said not only are he and Mr. Obama opposed to legalization, but that the word is not even in their vocabulary.

America has sent Mexico $1.3 billion in aid to buy guns and tanks. What Mexico really needs doesn’t cost a penny. It needs America to open up a debate about the causes of and solutions to the violence in Mexico. All options need to be considered when coming up with an exit strategy for this un-winnable war.

From USA TODAY / AP:

The unemployment rate rose in August for the first time in four months as weak hiring by private employers wasn’t enough to keep pace with a large increase in the number of people looking for work.

Overall, the economy lost 54,000 jobs as 114,000 temporary Census positions came to an end. State and local governments shed 10,000 positions. The jobless rate rose to 9.6% from 9.5% in July.

More than a half-million Americans resumed their job searches in August, which drove up the jobless rate. When the unemployed stop looking for work, they are no longer counted in the jobless rate…

Click here to read the full article.

From the PATRIOT-NEWS:

1. Mayor Linda Thompson, who has been in office since Jan. 4 and promised to “hit the ground running,” has yet to announce a plan.

2. The mayor and the majority of City Council members are barely on speaking terms. They can’t even agree on the hiring of a financial adviser or on three individuals to serve on the board of the Harrisburg Authority, which oversees the incinerator.

3. The city is in default. It missed another incinerator-related bond payment Sept. 1 and has given notice it will default on more than $3 million of general obligations bonds that are not related to the incinerator on Sept. 15.

4. Dauphin County, which regretfully co-signed as a guarantor on about half of the incinerator, is joining with other creditors to sue the city and force it to pay up…

Click here to read the full article.

FINANCIAL TIMES:  Wheat prices rose further on Friday in the wake of Russia’s decision to extend its grain export ban by 12 months, raising fears about a return to the food shortages and riots of 2007-08.

In Mozambique, where a 30 per cent rise in bread prices triggered riots on Wednesday and Thursday, the government said seven people had been killed and 288 wounded.

Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Thursday extended an export ban first introduced last month until late December 2011, sending wheat and other cereals prices to a near two-year high. It came as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation called an emergency meeting to discuss the wheat shortage…  (more)

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Meanwhile the USA  subsidizes  the conversion of  wheat to gasoline under an Ethanol program of dubious energy saving value.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:  Pennsylvania families were squeezed last year as many residents lost jobs and those working saw their inflation-adjusted buying power eroded by stagnation in income and wages, according to an annual report on the state of the state’s economy.

The Keystone Research Center’s 15th annual check-up on the status of working Pennsylvanians examined the economic challenges residents faced over the past 12 months.

“The central message of our report is we need to be focused on the jobs deficit and the middle class wage deficit, and not the federal deficit,” said Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the non-profit economic research group in Harrisburg…  (more)

From the VICTORIA TIMES COLONIST [Canada]:

Sharing of dirty needles by Victoria’s injection-drug users increased substantially after the city’s only fixed needle exchange closed in 2008, according to a study by the University of Victoria’s Centre for Addictions Research of [British Columbia.]

And rates of needle sharing – a practice that contributes to the spread hepatitis C and HIV – have remained significantly higher in Victoria than Vancouver over the past three years, researchers say…

Researchers say the needle sharing can be explained by the closing in May 2008 of Victoria’s only fixed needle exchange…

The report, called Drug Use Trends in Victoria and Vancouver, recommends reinstating at least one fixed-site needle exchange in Victoria along with mobile exchanges as part of a comprehensive range of services. It also calls for immediate abolishment of the current no-go zone for mobile distribution of needles in downtown Victoria so that they can be distributed where most needed…

BLOOMBERG:  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke  said he regretted not saying in congressional testimony shortly after the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 that the central bank had no authority to save the firm.

The testimony at the time “has supported this myth that we did have a way of saving Lehman,” Bernanke said today in response to questions during a Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing in Washington. “I regret not being more straightforward there because clearly it has supported the mistaken impression that in fact we could have done something.” ..

 “It was a judgment at that moment, with the system in tremendous stress and with other financial institutions under threat of a run or panic, that making that statement might have even reduced confidence further and led to further pressure,” Bernanke said today…  (more)

EDITOR’S NOTE:   In his memoir “On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System”, then Secretary of the Treasury Henry (Hank) Paulson, Jr. describes how he, Bernanke and others struggled unsuccessfully  to find legal authority to save Lehman Brothers which was not a bank.  Emergency legislation was rushed through which enabled private financial institutions to come under the banking code and thus provided the Federal Reserve Bank and other agencies with the means for assisting them through what otherwise would likely  have been a total financial melt down.  They all were in danger and acknowledged it!   

Paulson’s  book  is reasonably comprehensible to the lay person and well worth reading.

As someone who lived in pre-drug war El Paso between 1958 to 1963, I have great difficulty adjusting to the virtual tsunami of information about drug trafficking, murder, and corruption that has been emanating from Juarez since I began following the drug war in earnest in 1995. Not only have the numbers of alleged drug-related killings increased dramatically, so has the savage and brazen manner in which they are being carried out; to say nothing of the fact that pitched battles between government forces and narcotrafficantes are being fought deep in the interior.

Even given their dramatic progression from levels reported as recently as 1995, there is general agreement that after newly elected President Felipe Calderon dutifully attempted to accommodate a Bush-Cheney call for a crack down on drug smuggling in 2006, things have become even worse: more savagery, more killings, and more disturbing evidence the Mexican government is losing control.

Even against that background, President Calderon is still claiming progress in Mexico’s version of the drug war, based on the most recent arrest of another notorious drug lord. How long can such blindness persist without provoking a catastrophic failure of government South of the Border? More to the point: how might such a failure affect us?

And isn’t this very reminiscent of our “successes” against the cocaine cartels and Pablo Escobar in the Eighties, to say nothing of claims made on behalf of body counts and the “light at the end of the tunnel” in an earlier war?

In a column titled “Ambivalent outcome”, Eugene Robinson opines “…while we were able to leave an Iraq that is held together by duct tape and baling wire, it would take monumental effort o- and a lot of luck – to be able to get Afghanistan to that condition.  Given the country’s extreme backwardness and corruption, it is inevitable that we will leave behind a mess.”

WATCHDOG: In an otherwise learned column, Robinson fails to mention the major cause for the “backwardness and corruption”: The extreme  mountainous terrain dictates local autonomy and makes it impossible for a central authority, even if it had all of the resources of the USA,  to police the country.

The Watchdog recalls his indignity at being assigned by his U. S. History professor the task of memorizing the river systems throughout the USA.  It took years for him to understand that geography is destiny!  Example:  If the Susquehanna River had been navigable, Harrisburg and likely Western Pennsylvania would be part of Maryland.

Iraq is level, enabling relative modest force to police a vast countryside.  In Afghanistan, thousands of troops can barely control a two mile perimeter.  No central power will ever control Afghanistan.  There will always be local control with, at best, a loose central confederation stationed in Kabul.

NEWSMAX:  It wasn’t long ago tea party leaders worried about a GOP takeover. But after Joe Miller’s stunning win over GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, sources now say it’s the Republican establishment that is concerned about a grass-roots movement whose power has expanded so rapidly that it now threatens the party’s political hegemony.

Leading the charge: grass-roots conservatives who rocked the political landscape by propelling a relative unknown, Fairbanks attorney Joe Miller, ahead of an incumbent senator with strong GOP support. Murkowski reportedly outspent Miller 10-to-1, and her family had controlled her U.S. Senate seat for three decades.

“Well, I don’t know if ‘taking over’ [the GOP] is the right word,” Miller said with a chuckle during an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview Wednesday. “I think the message that is being spread of returning the country back to its Constitutional foundations is absolutely something that can put the Republican Party back on track. It is something that, if embraced, could allow the Republican Party to provide the answers to a nation that is in crisis right now…  (more)