(CNSNews.com)– The U.S. government does not have “effective control” of 1,081 miles of the 1,954-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responsible for securing the border.
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The Border Patrol, a division of CBP, is responsible for securing a total of 8,607 miles of the U.S. border. This includes all 1,954 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, approximately 4,000 miles of the U.S.-Canada border, plus sectors of coastline in the Gulf of Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
As of Sept. 30 (the end of fiscal year 2010), the Border Patrol had established “effective control” over 1,107 miles of the 8,607 miles it is responsible for securing, a CPB spokesperson told CNSNews.com on Monday.
Unflattering photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Sen. Barbara Boxer and California Rep. Maxine Waters play a central role in a new TV commercial created by a Republican front group, telling Latino voters to stay home on Election Day.
The Spanish-language ads, entitled “No Votes” (“Don't Vote”), are sponsored by a Virginia-based group that calls itself “Latinos for Reform.”
Published reports indicate that the ads are the work of Robert Desposada, a Republican political consultant, former Republican National Committee director of Hispanic affairs and pundit on the Spanish language TV network Univision.
Imagine for a moment that the New York State Police are warning American boaters to steer clear of the Canadian side of Lake Ontario because they might fall victim to pirates.
Imagine that violent gangs armed with military weaponry created a no man's land along a portion of the border shared by the United States and Canada that challenged the sovereignty of both nations.
Would this for a moment be tolerable? Would the president of the United States or the leaders of Congress simply treat it as a regrettable yet acceptable border problem? Of course not. Yet residents of South Texas are expected to endure precisely this situation on the U.S.-Mexican border.
I wonder if people who insist upon using the i-word ever think about the impact it has on human lives. “What part of ‘illegal' don't you understand?!” they say. Well, as an undocumented immigrant, I need people to understand the traumatic effect this racist language has on us and our families. Many people who don't experience this reality don't seem to realize the inescapable feelings of inferiority it creates. Or that we can get to a transparent, thorough dialogue on human rights and humane immigration solutions only when we remove the i-word as a central piece of the conversation.
COMMENT by Robert David Steele Vivas as Posted at Huffington Post
I like this, a great deal. Am cross-posting it to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
I strongly agree that allowing corporations to abuse the environment, communities, and their employees with the added protection of “personality” is a travesty, and one that my Virtual Cabinet has already addressed here at Huffington Post.
The URL for the Virtual Cabinet is: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-david-steele
With respect to how the USA has treated immigrants over the centuries, I am now ready to say that this abusive exploitation, of Chinese, of Irish, of others, combined with our genociding of the Native Americans and our enslavement of Black Africans, needs to be defined and treated as “Other Atrocities,” one of the high-level threats to humanity identified by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenge, and Change.
My review of their report is here: http://phibetaiota.net/2008/05/a-more-secure-world-our-shared-responsibility-report-of-the-secretary-generals-high-level-panel-on-threats-challenges-and-change-a-more-secure-world-our-shared-responsibility-report-of-the-s/
However, what really touches me about this note [disclosure: I am a white Hispanic] is the author's clear angst over the racism that he has felt, and his very articulate call for a dialog and understanding. This is where I think we need to go, and I will address this with the Virtual Cabinet in the weeks to come.
Outbreaks of bed bugs, soaring in the most unexpected places — like CNN's headquarters — stoke some of our deepest fears. Virtually eradicated nationwide sixty years ago thanks to superpowered pesticides such as DDT, bedbugs are back — largely because those chemicals are now banned, but also thanks to what experts quoted in news reports call “increased foreign travel.” (Claims a rise in bed bugs of 80% since year 2000). Comment: This article at times rises into exaggeration but is useful overall. In the comments section after the article, solutions to get rid of bedbugs mentioned were Food Grade Diatomaceous Earth and Borax.|
The 15th biennial African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda ended on July 27 with mixed results regarding support for U.S. and Western European plans to escalate foreign military intervention in nearby Somalia.
The 35 heads of state present at the three-day meeting were reported to have authorized the deployment of 2,000 more African troops to back up the beleaguered Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu and to bring the full complement of forces doing so to 8,000, but the new contingent will probably consist solely of troops from Uganda and Burundi, which supply the approximately 6,000 already serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Reports of another 2,000 reinforcements from Djibouti and Guinea are problematic and their deployment remains to be seen, not that pressure will not be exerted on those two nations and others from outside the continent.
AMISOM is the successor to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Peace Support Mission in Somalia (IGASOM) set up in 2005 by the six-member group which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda and which also was to have provided 8,000 troops for deployment to Somalia. The 53 members of the African Union except for Uganda and Burundi have been loath to commit military units to intervene in fighting in Somalia, whether against the Islamic Courts Union five years ago or against al-Shabaab insurgents currently.
In late 2006 U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa to plan the earlier IGASOM operation and in January of 2007 Uganda pledged its first troops which, along with those included in a reported offer by Nigeria, were to total 8,000.
Three and a half years later, there are only 6,000 foreign troops in Somalia (now under AMISOM, the only difference being the acronym now employed) and all of those from Uganda and Burundi, both nations U.S. military clients and surrogates.
The African Union (AU) initially approved AMISOM on January 19, 2007 and granted it a six-month mandate. In July of 2010 the real prime movers behind the mission, the U.S. and its NATO allies in the European Union, are pushing for an escalation of armed intervention in Somalia with more Western-trained Ugandan troops conducting open combat operations: Changing the mandate from, to use the terms employed to mask military aggression, peacekeeping to peace enforcement. Continue reading “US, NATO Allies Prepare New Invasion Of Somalia”
“The 10th annual Trafficking in Persons Report outlines the continuing challenges across the globe, including in the United States. The Report, for the first time, includes a ranking of the United States based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.”
Phi Beta Iota: The Department of State has so much potential, if they could just get a grip on the fact that the only thing standing between them and owning the Open Source Center with the Multinational Decision-Support Centre embedded, is the fact that her gate-keepers are blocking every piece of paper on this 9-11 Commission recommended new agency because CIA “claims” it and no one at State is willing to stand up to them. Human trafficking, like other kinds of smuggling including narcotics and arms and blood diamonds, cannot be addressed in stove-pipes. It can be represented by stove-pipes, but the collection and analysis must be REGIONAL. Neither CIA nor any other part of the US get that yet–the Joint Intelligence Centers at the theaters are travesties, just look at the travesty of USSOUTHCOM pretending to help Haiti. The Nordics and the Netherlands have it right–Multinational, Multifunctional Information-Sharing and Sense-Making Centres is the only way to go–Centres that do both the all-source integrated processing the secret world cannot do, and do not lose sight of the human factor working in 183 languages the US secret world, at least, does not speak.
I was on MSNBC talking about the schism among Democrats regarding Arizona’s new immigration law and the Justice Department’s response. Obama is worried about his plummeting poll numbers among Hispanics (down 12 points this year), while Arizona Congressional Democrats are worried about being voted out of office. But nobody is talking about pot.
Full Story Online
When asked about it by Dylan Ratigan, I said that everyone discussing the “immigration problem” was ignoring the elephant in the middle of the room: marijuana prohibition. It’s channeling millions in drug money into the Mexican cartels, and represents 60% of all cartel profits. That money gets used to finance violence not only at the border but in over 200 cities across the United States where they currently have a presence — up from 100 cities three years earlier.
