By Alan Bean

A Mexican newspaper has published a thoroughly documented expose that makes a stunning case.  Beginning in the 1990s, the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made a deal with one of Mexico’s deadliest drug cartels.  If the Cartel gave the DEA accurate information on rival cartels, the DEA would allow the Sinaloa Cartel to import narcotics into Chicago.

I know this sounds crazy.  If the goal was to staunch the import of illegal drugs into the United States, what difference did it make which cartel was bringing in the drugs?

But, as anyone associated with the Drug War realizes, the goal has never been to stop, or even slow the importation of illegal narcotics into the United States; the goal has been to make a series of highly publicized drug busts in order to justify the continual flow of federal funds to the DEA.

That was the the game in its entirety.

When I published “The Law Falls Silent” in May of 2012, many found it difficult to believe that the American government would allow a Mexican drug kingpin to leave the United States in exchange for setting up an innocent man, Ramsey Muñiz .  In that case, neither the US Attorney who prosecuted the case, nor any one who testified at the 1994 trial, understood the first thing about the relationship between Donacio Medina (a Mexican drug dealer) and Ramsey  Muñiz, a para legal based in Corpus Christi.  No one questions that Muñiz drove Medina’s vehicle from one motel to another.  But did  Muñiz know the car, which he claimed to be moving as a favor to Medina, contained $800,000 worth of powdered cocaine?

Muñiz says Medina approached him because the Mexican national was looking for an attorney to assist two family members who were incarcerated in federal prisons.  Although no one involved with the trial knew it at the time, the feds arrested Medina in Houston and told him he was going to prison unless he could give them something or somebody of value.  Medina set up the scenario in Dallas that brought Muñiz down and told his DEA handlers to arrest the guy driving the Camry.  As soon as the trunk was opened, Medina was allowed to leave the country a free man.

The story Ramsey Muñiz told at trial sounded incredible to the jury.  Why would the federal government put a man in prison for the rest of his life unless they knew for certain he was a dangerous drug dealer?  More to the point, why would the feds release a man they knew was importing millions of dollars of cocaine into the United States knowing full well that he would continue his illegal activities?  It made no sense.

Read the story below and you will know why neither the DEA nor the DOJ cared who put the drugs in the car or whether Ramsey Muñiz knew he was driving a hot car.  It didn’t matter.  Medina gave them a high-profile narcotics case on a silver platter. The fact that Muñiz, two decades earlier, their suspect had run for Governor of Texas only sweetened the story.

Once again, the legitimization of the drug war, and the vast sums of money that came with it, were all that mattered.  If you doubt that, read on.

CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel

By MICHAEL KELLEY

Business Insider

January 13, 2014

An investigation by El Universal has found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs in exchange for information on rival cartels.

Sinaloa, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.

There have long been allegations that Guzman, considered to be “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” coordinates with American authorities. (more…)

By Alan Bean

Last year, Dallas-based real estate developer, Ari Nessell, gave away $1,000 a day to small non-profit organizations across the nation.  Friends of Justice is the proud recipient of one of these Pollination Project grants and are using it to kick-start our Common Peace Community program.  Last week, the Dallas CBS radio affiliate ran a story that featured our work.  You can find the audio here.

Should philanthropists make lots of small grants or a handful of large grants?  I suppose that is up to the philanthropists–they don’t ask us.

A Thousand Dollars A Day

DALLAS (KRLD) – How much of a difference can $1,000 make? For almost 400 organizations around the world, a thousand dollars has been the start of something big.

Dallas-based developer and philanthropist Ari Nessel gave away $365,000 in 2013, a thousand dollars at a time as part of the Pollination Project. The grants were given to start-up non-profit organizations and individuals who are bringing new ideas to the challenges of environmental sustainability, social justice, and community health and wellness.

KRLD’s Emily Trube spoke with Nessel and some of the people in North Texas who were recipients of the Pollination Project grants.

By Alan Bean

A quick glance at this graph and you would think you were looking at a comparison of murder rates, incarceration rates, or the use of the death penalty.  America, in so many instances, is an outlier; we have our own unique ways of doing things.  We lock up far, far more of our citizens than other nations.

Although our crime rates generally aren’t that high, we kill each other at an astonishing rate.

Then we execute many of our murderers (especially in Texas and the South) while most other western democracies do not.

Unlike other nations of similar affluence, we make it progressively easier to buy a gun and progressively more difficult to vote.

And then there’s healthcare.

Americans believe that a comparatively privatized health care system offers more effective, efficient and inexpensive medical services.   It only seems natural.  After all, we know that government services are always less efficient and cost-effective than services produced by the private sector.  Right?

In some cases, this is likely true.  Competition can produce low cost, high quality goods and services.  Governments, for instance, don’t make good cars.

But when it comes to healthcare, American insistence on privatizing services whenever possible comes with an extremely high price tag.  The following charts (you can find plenty more at the CSM site) demonstrate just how different the US system is, and how much we are paying for that difference.

Although premiums under the Affordable Care Act are reasonable by American standards, we are still paying far more for medical insurance than nations with single-payer systems.  The phrase “socialized medicine” is misleading.  Parts of the medical system in Canada, for instance, involve the private sector and America covers millions with Medicare, Medicaid and the military medical system.  Still, it appears that involving the government more, in this one instance at least, does wonders for the bottom line.

Blogging is an ephemeral medium: you get a lot of hits (if you’re lucky) the day you write something, but interest immediately wanes.  For the most part, it’s just as well.  Hot, topical stuff always gets the most attention, and every blogger knows that nothing sells like a good scandal or controversy.  That said, if bloggers have something important to say on subjects of timeless importance, the hits will keep piling up over the years.  Most posts, deserve to be immediately forgotten, but some stand up.  This explains why, over the course of a year, some posts that were written prior to 2013 got more attention than more recent contributions.   For this reason, we will just be featuring the stuff our readers liked the most in 2013.  Here’s the list.

1. Don’t blame Al Mohler, it was all God’s idea.  This post hit a nerve with people who studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary before it became an indoctrination academy.  In the picture below, James Petigru Boyce, the school’s founder, is pictured in the Confederate uniform he war on formal occasions during the Civil War.

2. Cliburn gives his regards to Broadway.  Broadway Baptist Church said farewell to its most acclaimed member this year.  I talked about the renowned pianist’s relationship with Broadway Baptist Church, a church committed to great music.

3. Curtis Flowers.  Curtis Flowers lives on death row in the notorious Parchman prison in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.  He has stood trial for murder six times, more than any American defendant in history.  Flowers is innocent, and the appeal of his 2010 conviction demonstrates how he was framed by an incompetent and lazy prosecutor.  Friends of Justice has been working on Mr. Flowers’ behalf since 2007.  Flowers is from Winona, Mississippi, the town where civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten half to death in 1963.

4. Ayn Rand: the mother of American satanism.  The title notwithstanding, this post doesn’t suggest that Ayn Rand was a satanist; but her insistence that her philosophy is the antithesis of Christianity was the inspiration for the pop satanism of Anton LeVey.

5. Stories we believe in: Learning from Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm.  What did Ronald Reagan understand about the power of story that liberals never seem to grasp?

6. Money for nothing: how racial bias destroyed six lives, stymied a black-owned business and outraged a congregation.  This narrative was written at the end of months of careful research.  This case sheds light on the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare website; this is what always happens when a single website tries to bring too many players together.  The men and women at IRP believed they could help a long list of federal law enforcement agencies share data.  For their trouble, they were investigated, raided, and tried for, essentially running a fake business.  After all, the government implied, who ever heard of a black-owned IT company?  This case would have been lost to memory if the six defendants hadn’t belonged to the same Pentecostal congregation in Colorado Springs.  These people don’t quit!

7. Tom Berry: Ten years of waste, immigrant crackdowns, and new drug wars.  If you want to know why America’s immigration policy is so badly broken, this article by Tom Berry is a great starting place.  “Continuing down the same course of border security buildups, drug wars and immigration crackdowns will do nothing to increase security or safety,” Berry says.  “It will only keep border policy on the edge – teetering without direction or strategy.”

8. Songs got us through: Fannie Lou Hamer in Winona, Mississippi. The sadistic brutality Hamer and her friends endured in Winona beggars comprehension unless you understand the times.  In 1963, only 6.4% of Mississippi’s eligible black voters were registered.  In Montgomery County it had been years since the last African-American had voted.  It took men like Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge to maintain this unnatural state of affairs.

9. Of hell and hell fire, it’s not what you think.  We are taught that God is love.  We are taught that God consigns the wicked to hell for eternity.  Surely both can’t be true?

10. Welcome to the Parchman plantation.  This post, written following a failed attempt to visit Curtis Flowers at Parchman prison in 2010, keeps getting a lot of attention.

By Alan Bean

Four short years ago, a slim majority (54%) of Republicans believed in some form of biological evolution; now only 43% hold that opinion.  You rarely see this kind of dramatic opinion swing in such a small time frame, so what’s driving it?

This is an important question because, in the Pew survey I am citing, the alternative to belief in biological evolution is that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”  We can debate the details of evolution–how it happened, whether the hand of God was guiding the process, etc.–but the notion that all living things have existed in their present form since the dawn of time is demonstrably false.  To persist in this opinion is to deny the overwhelming consensus within the scientific community–that is, the folks who know what they are talking about.

On Sunday morning, a member of my Sunday school class expressed his amazement that educated people could assert that the universe simply appears to be ancient because God created a world that looks much older than it really is.  “The man who signed my PhD diploma believes precisely that,” I informed the class. (more…)

Google Tulia, Texas and you will be bombarded with references to the ill-fated drug bust of 1999.  By the time Rick Perry pardoned thirty-five defendants in 2003, Tulia had earned the unofficial title of the most racist town in America.  I have long argued that what happened in Tulia was simply the most obvious example of wrongheaded policies playing out nationwide.  By hiring Jeffrey Yarbrough as the town’s first African American police chief, Tulia shows that it has learned from painful experience.  If anything, Yarbrough is over-qualified for the position and the Panhandle community is fortunate to have a man with his background overseeing its police department.

City of Tulia Hires Jeffrey Yarbrough as Next Chief of Police