What should be talked about at the North American Leaders' Summit
The bilateral relationship between the governments of the United States of America and Mexico is long, complicated and infinitely complex.
The human ties between Mexicans and Americans is familial, inexorable and deep. Our histories are deeply linked politically, culturally and economically. The contributions of Mexican immigrants to the security, prosperity and enduring liberty of the United States cannot be overstated. The beauty of Mexican culture, food, music and life is celebrated in America everyday.
The United States does not have clean hands in its historic relationship with Mexico. Ulysses Grant served in the Mexican War, and said this about it: “I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Donald Trump, who began his quest for the US presidency by slandering the Mexican people as “rapists and murderers” is admired by current Mexican President Lopez Obrador. Like many of his predecessors, Obrador feels kinship with tinhorn dictators from a wannabe-like Trump, to his fellow leftist travellers like Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
President Obrador revealed his fatuousness with his gamesmanship over boycotting the Los Angeles Summit of the Americas last year because the Western hemisphere’s dictators were excluded from stepping foot on US soil.
Obrador is an unreliable partner with a troubling record of tolerance for human rights abuses, which include connections to the murder of Mexican journalists.
There is a simple truth about Mexico. It is one of the most beautiful nations in the world with one of Earth’s richest cultures. It is the home of Teotihuacan, one of the wellsprings of human civilization. It is also one of the most violent and corrupt nations on Earth. The Mexican government does not control vast swaths of its territory. The cartels operate with impunity, and are killing Americans with a poison in a type of chemical attack that must be dealt with by action and deed, not delusion and appeasement.
President Biden will be the first American president to step foot on Mexican soil since 2014. That is an astonishing fact, considering Mexico is the chief source of the fentanyl that killed more than 71,000 Americans in 2021.
Enrique Perret is the managing director of the US-Mexico Foundation, which does important work fostering cooperation between the two countries. In an interview with Associated Press, when discussing the North American Leaders’ Summit, he said, “Every country is arriving with different priorities, but there is common ground. It’s competitiveness, it’s economy, it’s education, it’s labor mobility.”
Yes, but, there is something important which seems glaringly absent from Mr. Perret’s optimistic assessment. That is, of course, all of the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans that pile higher daily on a hideous butcher’s bill of senseless grief and tragedy. That number will ultimately be counted in the millions at the present trajectory.
The deadliest and most degenerate family in American history is the mass murdering Sackler family, who instigated the American opioid holocaust with their greed, arrogance and immorality. The Sackler opiod crisis has become the Mexican cartel fentanyl crisis. The Sacklers and the cartel leaders are in the same deadly billion dollar business. It is fueled by the souls and dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. They are all terrorists, and their poisons are “weapons of mass destruction.”
The American people are abused on a daily basis by an American media that works in corrupt partnership with the politicians they are supposed to be holding accountable. The result is a toxic deluge of division, disinformation and stupidity that spews like Mt. Etna burying our American Pompeii under a mountain of molten bullshit. The result is idiocy like this:
Journalism is elemental towards the functioning of a free society. The finest news organization in the United States of America is the peerless Washington Post.
The Washington Post published an investigative report about the fentanyl crisis. Every American should read it. The journalists who wrote it deserve the gratitude and thanks of the American people. The story speaks for the hundreds of thousands of American dead. It documents the facts and truth around one of the gravest threats to the peace and prosperity of the American people in our history. It demonstrates the failures of the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations to contain a catastrophe that is unequal to any other. It indicts the Congress of the United States for its choice of demagoguery over solutions and action.
The epic work of investigative journalism demonstrates the shattering cost of this frivolous era in which tiny men like Kevin McCarthy and a legion of demagogues have architected mass death to score political points. Campaign ads are the poisoned arrows that make American public discourse septic with :30 second increments of banality, crudity and deception that make difficult problems intractable vendettas.
Here is the result, according to the Washington Post:
The American fentanyl crisis deepened during the coronavirus pandemic. From 2019 to 2021, fatal overdoses surged 94 percent, and an estimated 196 Americans are now dying each day from the drug — the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 757-200 crashing and killing everyone on board.
The roots of the epidemic reach back to the Bush administration, which did little as countless Americans became addicted to oxycodone and other prescription opioids while U.S. drug manufacturers, distributors and chain pharmacies made billions in profits.
During the Obama administration, amid a wider questioning of the U.S. criminal justice system, the government defunded and dismantled key drug-monitoring programs in the years before fentanyl hit. President Barack Obama demoted the White House drug czar position, removing the role from the Cabinet. And when heroin use rose after the government crackdown on prescription opioids, authorities treated fentanyl as an additive, rather than a distinct threat requiring its own specific strategy.
President Donald Trump took office just as the fentanyl epidemic was about to explode. He promised to build a wall along the U.S. southern border that he said would stop drugs. But Mexican traffickers were sneaking fentanyl right through the front door, hidden in passenger vehicles and commercial trucks passing through official ports of entry in California and Arizona. Today, the partisan border debate in Washington remains fixated on a physical structure that is virtually useless for stopping the deadliest drug U.S. agents have ever faced.
Since President Biden took office, his administration has amplified a public messaging campaign to warn about fentanyl’s mortal threat — “One Pill Can Kill.” He has stepped up efforts to improve scanning technology at border crossings and repair a broken counternarcotics partnership with Mexico. But with Republicans blaming Biden’s border policies for record numbers of immigration arrests, the president and many of his top officials have said little about the skyrocketing amount of fentanyl entering the country.
The Drug Enforcement Administration said Tuesday it has seized more than 379 million potentially fatal doses of illegal fentanyl this year, as Mexican drug-trafficking organizations continue to flood the United States with the cheap synthetic opioid responsible for record numbers of U.S. overdose deaths.
The agency said it has confiscated more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and 50.6 million illegal fentanyl tablets so far in 2022. That was twice the number of tablets seized in 2021, when more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Two-thirds of those deaths were caused by fentanyl, according to U.S. public health data.
Anne Milgram, the DEA administrator, said the seizures recorded by the agency this year contained enough fentanyl “to kill everyone in the United States,” home to about 330 million residents.
This is a national crisis. Kevin McCarthy’s ambitions are a carnival. There is a difference.
Why isn’t this issue on the front page of every newspaper, magazine and network television broadcast seven days a week?
How can it not be?
Why is this tragedy desecrated without any eruption of outrage over callous politicians using mass death to posture and crow? Why is this American travesty invisible to America’s most powerful people?
What are the precise total minutes spent reporting on the mass death of hundreds of thousands of Americans on the network newscasts over 2022?
How many words have been written about this issue that clarify its complexity and illuminate its difficulties, as opposed to confusing the situation even more?
How many times has a politician inspected a wall for the American media?
The American people deserve a plan. They deserve action.
It is time for the president of the United States of America to act. It is time for President Biden to look cold-eyed and clear-eyed at the Mexican president, and let it be known that the Mexican cartels will not wage chemical warfare against the American people.
These criminal organizations are powerful, wealthy and deeply protected from within Mexico’s spectacularly corrupt politics. They will need to be confronted in a new way. They will need to feel the righteous wrath of American power. They will kill or be killed.
The United States of America was attacked on September 11, 2001. Close to 3,000 people were killed, representing 102 nationalities.
What followed was a war of necessity that ended in unnecessary humiliation, violence and bloodshed after 20 years of epic mismanagement and strategic drift.
The second war was a war of choice that lasted eight years.
The total number of Americans killed in the attacks that begat the wars — and all of the casualties that occurred fighting them — total roughly a month of fentanyl deaths in America. The fentanyl comes from Mexico. It comes from the cartels. The fight for freedom isn’t just contained to Ukraine. The United States must defend itself.
This will be an important meeting for the United States, her people and President Biden. We should all wish him well.
Steve Schmidt: "It is time for the president of the United States of America to act. It is time for President Biden to look cold-eyed and clear-eyed at the Mexican president, and let it be known that the Mexican cartels will not wage chemical warfare against the American people.”
We wish you well, Biden, in addressing this important crisis and in protecting the America people. Thank you Steve for bringing this devastating crisis to the forefront of our attention: “The American people deserve a plan. They deserve action.” Yes, we do! Go Biden!
I have worked as a prosecutor for over 27 years. As you might imagine, my experience confirms that the link between drugs and violent crime is direct and indisputable. There have been waves of different drugs over the years: powder cocaine, then crack cocaine, then Oxy and other opioids, leading to the "renaissance" of heroin as a cheaper alternative.
But nothing compares to fentanyl. It is literally everywhere, in everything. We've had overdose deaths in jail and prison, because fentanyl patches are so easy to smuggle. It's a catastrophe on a scale we've never seen before.
I don't know what the answers are, but I agree that President Biden has to take a strong stand with the current, and unfortunately feckless, Mexican President. I agree that Republicans' obsession with illegal immigration and building a wall is a red herring the size of the whale in Moby Dick. With Republicans now the majority in the House, I feel confident no meaningful legislation will get passed. And thousands more people will die, whether from the drug itself or the violence that surrounds it.
P.S. Steve, I think this may be my favorite line you've written so far: "The result is a toxic deluge of division, disinformation, and stupidity that spews like Mt. Etna burying our American Pompeii under a mountain of molten bullshit." Bravo!!!