Welcome to the latest edition of The Week that Was, my rundown of what happened last week, curated, in the loosest sense of the word, for your reading pleasure, or displeasure.
Due to time constraints, and the fact that there is another substack, Interruptrr, which has the resources to cover A LOT more than I do, and does a great job of it, I’m going to limit myself to just one or two really outrageous stories. This week there are two.
James Carville turns from raging Cajun to inane Cajun; and
·The D.E.A. accidentally admits what it is really about.
1. James Carville Turns from Being Raging Cajun to Inane Cajun
James Carville isn’t the only one getting high off his supply.
At the beginning of the week James Carville wrote an Op-ed for The New York Times advocating that the Democratic Party do nothing about Trump, since Trump is bound to fail. I’m reminded of Charles I’s refusal to recognize the court that put him on trial. The court went on to convict him, and the English monarch was executed in 1649.
James Carville: It’s Time for a Daring Political Maneuver, Democrats
By the end of the week, Carville was speculating that Trump was suffering from tertiary syphilis.
Inanity, know thyself.
Carville Speculates Trump Has Syphilis After ‘Mad’ Zelensky Meeting
2. D.E.A.’s Man in Mexico City, Todd Zimmerman, Inadvertently Discloses What the D.E.A Is Really About
Buried in an article in the Los Angeles Times about possible drone strikes on Mexico was the admission that the D.E.A. is really advocates that drug users switch from fentanyl to other drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and maybe a bit of heroin..
The piece started out with a recap of Trumpian nonsense:
“Mexico is ‘essentially run by the cartels,’ President Trump has said, insisting that the United States should ‘wage war’ against them.
The article then went on to state what we all have known for a long long time:
“No administration in modern times has taken such a militaristic approach to Mexico, a U.S. ally that Trump blames for producing the fentanyl that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. His stance upends recent U.S. policy, which emphasized beefing up the rule of law in Mexico, and stands at odds with Mexico’s security strategy, which has veered away from the sort of fierce cartel confrontations that drove record levels of bloodshed.”
Needless to say, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is not having it.
“’The Mexican people under no circumstances will accept interventions, meddling or whatever other act from abroad that would be harmful to the integrity, independence and sovereignty of the nation,’ she said, adding that that included ‘violations by land, sea, or air.’”
Then the article segued into more repetition of misconceptions that everybody already knows about:
“Todd Zimmerman, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s special agent in Mexico City, said in an interview that the administration’s decision this week to label drug cartels as terrorist organizations was a pointed message to their leadership that U.S. military action is on the table.
“’They’re worried because they know the might and the strength of the U.S. military,’; he said. “They know that at any time, they could be anywhere — if it comes to that, if it comes to that — they could be in a car, they could be in a house, and they could be vaporized. They’ve seen it in the Afghan and Iraq wars. So they know the potential that’s out there.”
Note the way that Zimmerman completely ignored the complete failure of U.S. interventions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Zimmerman essentially summed up the D.E.A.’s mission:
“The hope, he said, is that the cartels will ‘step back away from fentanyl, and they’ll just go back to what they’ve always done, which is cocaine and methamphetamines and a little bit of heroin.’”
Talk about a man who is in touch with his institution’s needs and wants: To keep getting funding, to keep on doing the occasional bust, and to always have an insoluble problem to be working on.
U.S. official says drone flights over Mexico may signal future strikes
Buried in the article is a link to another article, which lays out fundamentally what is really happening.
“What is the narco-narrative?”
“It argues that drug organizations have become very sophisticated and very empowered and have endless resources, and that they can challenge not only authorities in countries such as Colombia or Mexico, for example, but also U.S. intelligence institutions such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI.”
“It’s the public justification of a militarized policy that has been pushed into Latin America from the Global North, and it has resulted in bloodshed affecting the most impoverished and disenfranchised and vulnerable sectors.”
Then we come to the crux of the matter:
“Your book is titled “The Cartels Don’t Exist.” Do you really mean that?”
“What I argue with with this title, first and foremost, is that the concept of the cartel is in itself a fiction. This is not to say that traffickers or their organizations are not real. What I challenge is the language that we use to describe them, which I believe is key to understanding the way consensus is built to legitimize the violent, militaristic policies that are pushed in societies such as Mexico. It’s language that legitimizes state violence, abuse, crimes against humanity — all kinds of horrors that a militarized country has to endure.
“The concept of the cartel was pushed by the DEA in the late 1970s to show the U.S. public that these organizations had evolved in power and reach, and they had become very dangerous to national security. The word itself was seldom used by traffickers. In fact traffickers were the last ones to realize that they were a part of this so-called cartel.