U.S. Guns for Mexican Cartels U.S. Customs and Border Protection caught 1,171 guns being illegally smuggled into Mexico in 2023—but that’s only a small fraction of the number of U.S. guns arming Mexican drug cartels. Mexican officials seize thousands of guns inside the country at crime scenes every year. The vast majority of those guns come from the United States.
“Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives indicates that between 2017 and 2022, nearly 124,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and subsequently traced. Sixty-eight percent of those guns — more than 83,000 — came from the United States.”
The cartels get guns from the United States and then send fentanyl into the United States. Commercial traffic and returning U.S. citizens are by far the largest sources of smuggled fentanyl. Republican refusal to approve increased funding for Customs and Border Protection helps. NBC reports:
“Customs and Border Protection has spent millions on the most up-to-date high-tech scanners to spot fentanylcrossing the southern U.S. border, but many scanners are sitting in warehouses unused because Congress hasn’t appropriated funds to install them, acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller told NBC News. …
“Officers in Nogales have found fentanyl hidden inside crates of Coca-Cola, where bottles are painted black to look like liquid, sawed in half and filled with fentanyl pills; they’ve confiscated millions in fentanyl pills stuffed inside the water barrel of a commercial bus bathroom; they’ve even found fentanyl in cars carrying young children in the back in car seats. More than 95% of fentanyl seized at the border, Miller said, is actually brought into the U.S. in personal vehicles. …
“The money to install the screeners was in the supplemental funding request Republicans blocked.”
Republican Hate Candidate in North Carolina The Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina is Mark Robinson, who is arguably even more unhinged than Donald Trump. Robinson is a Holocaust denier, who has also called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a communist, called LGBTQ+ people “filth”, and said the country would be better if women had never been allowed to vote.
He’s running against Democrat Josh Stein, currently the state attorney general. The election is predicted to be close. Over at Public Media, Josh Legum details Robinson’s background and the way that corporations are funding his campaign by contributing to the Republican Governors Association:
“Tuesday night, shortly after Robinson was declared the winner of the Republican gubernatorial primary, the Republican Governors Association posted their congratulations and said, ‘[W]e look forward to supporting him in the general election.’
“The RGA has plenty of resources because, unlike many political entities, it can accept unlimited amounts of money from corporations. This is not money that comes from corporate PACs, but funds that are transferred directly from corporate treasuries.
“Many of the nation’s most prominent corporations have donated 6-figure sums to the RGA — money that can and will be used to help Robinson’s win. Major corporate donors to the RGA in 2023 included Microsoft ($400,000), Alphabet (Google’s parent company) ($378,000), CVS ($300,000), Pfizer ($300,000), Amazon ($275,000), Coca-Cola ($259,287), Deloitte ($151,000), and DoorDash ($125,000).”
Long story made short: ANY contribution to the national Republican party will support hate-mongers and fascists. There’s no way to avoid it, because haters have taken over the entire party apparatus.
The Russians Are Coming: TechCrunch reports an ongoing attack on Microsoft by Russian hacker Midnight Blizzard, which “is believed to be a hacking group working for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, known by its Russian initials, SVR.”
Microsoft’s corporate blog acknowledges:
“As we shared, on January 19, the security team detected this attack on our corporate email systems and immediately activated our response process. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence investigation identified the threat actor as Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state-sponsored actor also known as NOBELIUM. …
“In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access.”
And More Cyber Attacks: Meanwhile, the two-week-old cyberattack on UnitedHealth and its subsidiary ChangeHealthcare that disrupted U.S. pharmacies has expanded to target all of health care. From the New York Times:
“The hacking shut down the nation’s biggest health care payment system, causing financial chaos that affected a broad spectrum ranging from large hospitals to single-doctor practices. …
“An urgent care chain in Ohio may be forced to stop paying rent and other bills to cover salaries. In Florida, a cancer center is racing to find money for chemotherapy drugs to avoid delaying critical treatments for its patients. And in Pennsylvania, a primary care doctor is slashing expenses and pooling all of her cash — including her personal bank stash — in the hopes of staying afloat for the next two months. …
“But on March 1, a bitcoin address connected to the alleged hackers, a group known as AlphV or BlackCat, received a $22 million transaction that some security firms say was probably a ransom payment made by United to the group, according to a news article in Wired. …
“The same entity that was said to be responsible for the cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline, a pipeline from Texas to New York that carried 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel supplies, in 2021 is thought to be behind the Change assault.”
Not sure when health care payments and systems will be functioning normally again, but this hack clearly highlights the danger of corporate health care consolidation into only a few major players.
Mary Turck