In most parts of Mexico, Presidente Calderon’s two-year crackdown on powerful drug cartels has been a dismal failure. But in the community of Culiacan, on Mexico’s west coast facing Baja, there has been some success. Not all residents are satisfied, however.

Law enforcement’s effective smackdown on traffickers has caused a shrinkage of the drug-connected legal economy. Some Mexicans are unhappy with the resulting narco-recession and miss the good old days of illegal drugs and money. There’s just no pleasing some people!

The hardest-hit enterprises in this recession are the purveyors of the typical narco’s favorite toys and pursuits: Flight schools. Yacht and luxury-car dealerships. Dollar-changers. Love-in-the-afternoon motels. Even the Jesus Malverde temple.

A mustachioed Robin Hood figure in Mexican folklore, Malverde is considered the patron saint of the thousands of people who dedicate themselves to smuggling and merchandising cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.

In boom times, admirers and believers swarm the shrine erected here in Malverde’s honor. They paper the building’s walls with photographs of themselves (sometimes with their guns, multiple cellphones and snakeskin cowboy boots showing) in an effort to seek his blessing. They hang plaques praying the saint will protect them on their “journey” from Culiacan to San Diego or Chicago — their smuggling routes.

The temple was deserted during a recent visit save for Dona Tere, a caretaker, and a couple of forlorn souvenir salesmen who hawk candles, Malverde key chains and painted busts in all sizes of the not quite Vatican-approved saint.
[Culiacan, Mexico, feels the pain of a drug-induced recession, LA Times, Oct 21, 2008]

Oh no! Not Jesus Malverde, the beloved crime icon of drug smugglers — how tragic that his unique powers are no longer valued!

True to Mexico’s fondness for crime, some residents wish law enforcement would scram and let Culiacan return to a narco-boom economy:

“We can’t stand the guachos,” said a fat man with a fatter gold watch, using a slang term for the soldiers. His eyes darted back and forth on Benito Juarez Street in search of a potential customer: a car that might slow, its passengers with dollars to sell. There were none.

“At least the narcos gave us work,” he said.

Nice people, these Mexicans — just the kind of law-respecting immigrants we want in the United States!

USA Today published an article that claims that there is a shortage of math, science and special education teachers. According to USA Today:

A growing number of school districts are hiring teachers from foreign countries to fill shortages in math, science and special education. [Schools in need employ teachers from overseas, By Emily Bazar, October 22, 2008]

Contrast that to this Associated Press story:

More than 400 of the lost jobs are expected to include teachers in the core subject areas of math, science, social studies and English. An additional 500 employees — such as teacher aides, hall monitors and clerks — will also lose their jobs.[150 Dallas school employees lose jobs, October 11, 2008 ]

Hmmmmmmmmmm! So, what is going on here?

Salaries are definitely one reason school districts want to dump their experienced teachers. According to USA Today

Segun Eubanks, director of teacher quality at the National Education Association, the USA’s largest teachers union, says many of those districts have trouble keeping teachers for reasons including low pay, disruptive students, and a lack of books and materials.

“American workers are not willing to do the work for the conditions and pay we offer,” he says. “So we’re recruiting them for the same reasons we recruit farmworkers and day laborers.”

There is another reason for the job losses that is far more insidious — BILINGUALISM!

Texas colleges and universities don’t produce enough bilingual education teachers. So, to close that gap, DISD and many other urban school districts with a lot of Spanish-speaking students recruit teachers from countries such as Mexico. School districts are under pressure to comply with state law that requires bilingual education.[Many fear teachers from abroad will be favored as DISD cuts jobs, By Katherine Leal Unmuth, Dallas Morning News, October 16, 2008 ]

So, what we have here is a bunch of school districts that are replacing their domestic teachers with cheap foreign labor that come to this country with H-1B and TN (Trade NAFTA) visas.

I have a couple of suggestions I would like to give to USA Today to deal their claimed shortages of teachers:

1) The teacher’s union or an unbiased think-tank should do a comprehensive study to find out how many math, science, and special ed teachers are losing their jobs, and that should be compared to the numbers that USA Today and other media ilk claims we need. Press releases and TV coverage should be used to expose liars like USA Today.

2) All districts that are laying off teachers should be required to pay for them to go back college in order to get certificates that enable them to teach in science, math, or any other subject that is declared to have shortages of teachers. Once the teachers get the education or certifications they need the school district will guarantee that any new teachers hired are the retrained ones, and the school district must pay the teachers at their last pay scale. Following that regimen will put an end to the open ended promises made to desperate people that once they get certified to teach math or science it will be easy to find a job, and it will prevent school districts from mislabeling what they are doing as “layoffs” instead of what they really are doing — permanently replacing Americans with cheap foreign labor.

Seriously folks, just how much math does somebody have to learn to teach 5th graders how to do multiplication? Remember the newsletter I did about the scientist who did the research for a Nobel prize, but is now getting $10 an hour driving a van? Surely he could handle teaching biology to high schoolers or arithmetic to 5th graders, couldn’t he?

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the weird things about the mortgage meltdown compared to other financial bubbles was how concentrated it was among the non-affluent. Usually, bubbles put a lot of money in the hands of well-to-do people who end up blowing it. The collapse of the oil bubble in 1982, for instance, wiped out a lot of J.R. Ewing-types in ostrich-skin cowboy boots who had gotten rich in the 1970s.

But the more you look at finer-grained data, the more you see that this was all about money going to the, roughly, the second quartile of society: exactly who had to get the mortgages to raise homeownership rate from its traditional 64% to 69%, just as the Clinton and Bush Administrations hoped.

Browsing through 27 screens of Los Angeles County foreclosure data by zip code, I could better grasp why money managers in New York and London and Shanghai gave out so many stupid loans for homes in crummy neighborhoods. How can any outsider remember the difference between Huntington Beach and Huntington Park, Lynwood and Lawnwood? Aren’t they all in LA? Sunshine! Swimming pools! Movie stars!

But, by accident, one of screens compared three zip codes from two places everybody should have heard of:

So, there were 7 foreclosures in Beverly Hills and 252 in Compton in Q3-2008. Now, those places aren’t anymore exactly like you probably think: Compton has been majority Hispanic since the 2000 Census and Beverly Hills is guesstimated to be 30% Iranians.

Beverly Hills has a large number of hustlers trying to put one over on the world (compared to, say, sedate San Marino near Pasadena, with just one foreclosure). But, still, a lot more money has been lost, so far, in Compton.

(Don’t assume prices have dropped more in Beverly Hills — homes sell there so seldom that price change numbers like the -61% in the famous 90210 zip code probably have more to do with a $20 million estate selling in 2007 but not in 2008 rather than a major decline. Prices at the very top of the market had been firm up until the stock crash of the last month.)

In LA County, though, the real wipeout has come in the farthest exurbs, the high desert Antelope Valley, Lancaster and Palmdale, about 65 miles north of downtown LA by highway.

93535 is Lake Los Angeles, west of Palmdale, which ain’t got no lake, ain’t got no Los Angeles, and sure as hell ain’t got no  Lake Los Angeles, to paraphrase Wesley Snipes’ wife’s opinion of the Vista View Apartments in which she lived in “White Men Can’t Jump.”

There were 621 foreclosures out of about 14,000 owner-occupied homes in just three months there. Ouch. It’s half white, 30% Latino, maybe 15% black. Very working class. Back in 1999, the poverty rate was 18% compared to 14% statewide, so it, at least then, wasn’t extremely poor, it was just a lot of working class families trying to get by, trying to keep their kids out of the underclass. (Or get rich quick off flipping homes, if somebody would lend them $300,000 with no money down.)

What was everybody thinking? What possible reason was there for thinking that the American working class was suddenly developing the earning power to pay off these giant mortgages?

My general opinion of Colin Powell is that he is a sensible man. Moreover, I believe that the employment of sensible men in affairs of state should be encouraged.

Powell tried to slow the rush to war in 2002. In the final analysis, he lacked the moral fiber to take the last steps available to him: resign and speak out against the war.

On the other hand, his situation was directly analogous to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s in 1915. Fearing that President Wilson was propelling America into the Great War, Bryan resigned.

That’s why Bryan’s name is treated with such reverence in the media today.

Oh, sorry, wrong universe … Nobody remembers Bryan’s sacrifice of the highest position he ever attained. They just snicker at him for the Monkey Trial. And we ended up in the war anyway…

Mr. and Mrs. Ayers have a new book listed on Amazon.com.

Product Description

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors’ own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

About the Author

William C. Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He is the author of To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and Fugitive Days, a memoir about his life with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dohrn is the director of the Children and Family Law Justice Center and a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University. She is the coauthor of A Century of Juvenile Justice and Justice in the Making. They live in Chicago.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Third World Press (June 1, 2009)

Where’s Rev. Wright’s book?

Rasmussen Reports says that 26% of people are angry about immigration–but they don’t have anyone to vote for, because of “bipartisanship.”

26% Angry About Immigration, The Issue Candidates Ignore
Rasmussen Reports

Thursday, October 23, 2008
It’s the issue both presidential candidates have largely ignored as they court the nation’s growing Hispanic population, but one-out-of-four U.S. voters (26%) is still angry about the current immigration situation.

Twenty-eight percent (28%) express frustration about immigration, but for 43% it’s just one of many issues, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

With increased enforcement of the borders and America’s struggling economy serving as less of a magnet for illegal immigrants seeking better-paying jobs, it is perhaps not surprising that the number who are angry is down from 34% in August.

But as in August, 74% continue to believe the government is not doing enough to secure the nation’s borders. Just 12% think enough is being done.

Only 35% say it is possible to end illegal immigration, compared to 52% who say it is not possible. [More]

Republicans look like losing this election not only in the White House, but in the Senate and the House of Representatives, too. And it’s partly because they’re failing to pick up a lot of those angry voters.