Peter Krupa

Here’s a good reason never to return to the United States with my non-U.S.-citizen wife: secret detention centers. From The Nation:

According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City, “Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous. Their procedures are lax. You’ve got these senior agents who have all the authority in the world because they’re out in the middle of nowhere. You’ve got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked.” Like other attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card, was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield office. “I had to become a little sleuth,” Tarin said, describing the hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads, unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each infraction. “I argued with the guy, ‘This is absurd! Whose policy is this?’” Tarin said the agent’s response was, “That’s just our policy here.”

During the last 50 years, the ratio of the highest-paid employee’s compensation to that of the lowest paid rose from 24:1 to 275:1. From the New York Times Magazine:

Indeed, what has happened with executive compensation … is that a culture of entitlement has apparently become the norm. It’s not a matter of how much anyone in particular makes, and certainly not a question of an innovator like a Steve Jobs hitting the jackpot. The problem is that so many now seem automatically to receive so much (the chief executives in the Fortune 500 averaged $11 million in 2008) despite average or poor performance — or, in the case of the TARP companies, performance that was so colossally bad that it almost brought down the financial system.

I’ve often wondered if that CEO who makes $11 million a year really adds $30,000 per day of value to the company, or if it’s just some kind of office politics jackpot. Leaning towards jackpot.

I had assumed Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo would focus on the clandestine U.S. goons hunting down Pablo Escabar. It did, partly, and of course we all love reading about the extra-legal international escapades of the United States of America. But Bowden dedicated the far greater and more interesting portion of his book to the Colombians.

This part was deeply unsettling. Not the fact of the violence, necessarily, but the image of a society that could not respond to it. Dismantle a lab? He kills five cops. Arrest him? He sets of a car bomb. Indict him? He kills the public prosecutor. Bring him to trial? He kills the judge, the next judge, and the next judge’s family. Then he gets acquitted. This all gave me bad dreams.

In the end, the only way to stop a guy like Pablo was to use his tactics against him – that is, go vigilante, burn his stuff, and kill all his associates, including family members. The irony in the whole thing (irony?) is that Pablo never would have become so powerful if he didn’t have so much money, and the source of that money – extremely lucrative cocaine smuggling – was made possible by U.S. anti-drug policy.

Oh, and cocaine prices haven’t really gone up in 20 years (PDF). Meanwhile, the body count has.