Terrorists and other criminals are laundering $43 billion a year in the Tri-Border Area.
An Iranian-backed terrorist group is laundering money in the Tri-Border Area of Latin America, according to a report published Tuesday. Such illicit activities in the region straddling the intersection of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have long been a source of concern for United States security officials. Continue reading
While Venezuela is drifting towards mass starvation, government collapse and civil war Colombia has managed to avoid all that and then some. What Colombia did was not easy. It required nearly two decades of effort to reach the point where a peace deal was agreed to and succeeded in disbanding the major leftist rebel group FARC. With that accomplished (as of the end of June) the second largest leftist rebel group (ELN, a third the size of FARC) now wants to talk peace as well. All these leftist rebels got going in the 1960s but by the 1990s were rapidly losing popular support. It got worse after 2000 because by then the drug gangs and leftist rebels had merged in many parts of the country, and the war was increasingly about money, not ideology. A new reform government took advantage of this and organized an offensive that sharply reduced crime and gave the economy a chance to become the most successful in South America. Continue reading
The Navy SEALs, one of the U.S. military’s most elite forces, is dealing with a “staggering” drug problem that resulted in a safety stand-down and a stern warning from a commander late last year, CBS Evening News reported Tuesday
Three whistle-blowing SEALs, whose faces were blacked out and voices altered by the broadcaster because of fears of retribution from within the ranks, said members of the Navy’s cream-of-the-crop special-operations team around the world had tested positive for marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and methamphetamine. Continue reading
First it was Italy which, as we reported last week, had decided to “boost” its GDP by adding the estimated impact of cocaine and hookers. And now, riding on the coattails of this economics gimmick designed solely to make the economy appear more solvent, it is Britain’s turn, whose Office for National Statistics will also add add up the “contribution” made by prostitutes and drug dealers.
According to the Guardian “for the first time official statisticians are measuring the value to the UK economy of sex work and drug dealing – and they have discovered these unsavoury hidden-economy trades make roughly the same contribution as farming – and only slightly less than book and newspaper publishers added together.” Continue reading
Today one of the top economists in the world told King World News that despite bounces, stocks will continue to crater and he has positioned his clients short for a collapse in global markets. Michael Pento, founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies, also warned that central planners now have the world headed into a depression.
“You’ve seen the releases from China, and now the Fed is feigning an interest in letting markets work. I believe it’s because they have duped themselves into believing that all of the cocaine they have put the economy on, in order to put a floor under real estate and give a boost to equity markets, isn’t the reason why we have some semblance of growth in global GDP. Continue reading
Global Geopolitics 