Sean Kennedy for AEIdeas: As the heroin market has expanded, gangs have fought territory battles over the new customers, resulting in terrible consequences for communities caught in the crossfire.
For St. Louis in particular, officials have directly linked cartel-related turf wars to an increase in the city’s homicide rate, and at a recent Senate hearing, DEA head Chuck Rosenberg called increased drug trafficking a factor in the national rise of violent crime.
However, there is more to this story than meets the eye.
The largest provider of this new heroin is the Sinaloa Cartel. To get an idea of the scope of their operations, in Chicago alone the Sinaloa Cartel is estimated to make $3 billion per year off illegal drugs. A Chicago crime commission even named the cartel’s leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the city’s Public Enemy No. 1.
But something dramatically changed in February 2014 when Mexican authorities arrested El Chapo. His capture presaged a lengthy, ongoing struggle to fill the power vacuum.
Mexico’s descent into chaos exacerbated an already fragmented system of cartel dominance in the United States.
Markets in cybercrime
Doug Irving for the RAND Corporation: RAND researchers call it the hackers’ bazaar: a teeming marketplace where hackers and other cybercriminals meet and deal in clandestine chat rooms or secret forums. They found that its inner workings can be as sophisticated and structured as any commodities trading floor. Some of its online storefronts are as bright and welcoming as Amazon or eBay.
Its underground markets often have their own rules and regulations, their own administrators to keep order, their own brokers, vendors, middlemen and moneychangers. Consumers who know the way in can find anything from hospital records to hackers for hire to devastating exploit kits, botnets and off-the-shelf ransomware programs.
For the right price, they can even buy their way into private computers or public servers through secret pinprick vulnerabilities known as zero-days.
There’s even a kind of brand-name hierarchy, the researchers found. Russian hackers have a reputation for quality. Some Vietnamese groups focus on e-commerce. Chinese hackers are known for targeting intellectual property, and Americans tend to specialize in financial crime.
One expert estimated that the cybercrime market generates billions of dollars, at least. It can be more profitable than the illegal drug trade in some aspects, the researchers concluded — with lower costs to enter and much less risk to participate.
Quitting on nuclear
Published by the Progressive Policy Institute: Nuclear power is by far America’s biggest source of zero-carbon energy, providing 19.5 percent of the nation’s electricity. So why are environmental groups who profess to care about climate change working overtime to get rid of nukes?
The mystery deepens with today’s announcement by Pacific Gas & Electric that it intends to shutter California’s Diablo Canyon facility, the West’s last zero-carbon nuclear plant. The decision reflects a deal PG&E has struck with labor and environmental groups to invest more in energy efficiency, renewables and storage as it phases out Diablo Canyon.
The news comes amid a recent wave of nuclear plant closures in the Midwest, where deregulated markets flush with wind and natural gas simply make the plants uncompetitive. But Diablo’s costs are carried by rates, not competitive markets, so something else was clearly at work. And that something was extreme green politics.
…
Reliability is an issue, but the green extreme’s well-kept dirty secret is that wind and solar have severe environmental downsides. Diablo’s closure will eliminate in 10 years the state’s last steady, reliable and pollution-free electricity source.
Replacing Diablo with solar will require vast tracts of land. Siting those facilities pits NRDC against staunch conservationists dead set against displacing the desert tortoise. And wind kills hundreds of thousands of birds and bats annually. But the environmental downside is that renewables need to team with fossil to keep the lights on.
California has for years been banking on an unholy alliance between renewables and load-following natural gas. Moreover, California has already blown its climate change targets because 100,000 tons of potent climate-changing methane leaked unabated into the atmosphere from the Aliso Canyon natural gas field.
In a world of unreliable renewables, electricity systems require something to keep the lights on. But unlike nuclear, natural gas is a fossil fuel. California’s apparent model — Germany — has watched climate pollution increase there as decommissioning nuclear plants has led Berlin to rely more on carbon-intensive coal to back up wind and solar.
But the green extreme is mute on rising emissions. “It makes your skin tingle,” said Damon Moglen, senior advisor with Friends of the Earth, regarding Diablo’s closure. Probably the highly skilled and decently paid nuclear plant workers at Diablo are feeling that way too.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
