Use Their Money Against Them

Knocking out this nice little assignment I had forgotten about. Alright, so opening up, the Editorial Board of the Austin Statesman Newspaper wrote an interesting editorial about a senators idea on what to do with money confiscated from Mexican drug traffickers. Senator  Ogden wondered if any of the millions of dollars are being put to use as payment for better border control. 

The author of the article then, instead of relaying the actual answer, goes into relaying a response from Steve McCraw (director of the Department of Public Safety) about the annual amount of money trafficked into America. This answer was, "an estimated $28 billion a year in cash proceeds from illegal drug sales crosses the U.S. border into Mexico every year. Two-thirds of that money passes through Texas." The author then goes into another relay of response from Sen. Ogden: "That's the Medicaid budget".

The article started off interesting and I was excited to see what exactly was going to happen(as well as the argument the author was going to make), but instead, the author goes off on a branch about how Al Capone was caught and captured. Criticizing the movie "The Untouchables" and giving the 'praise' to the accountants.

After the seemingly unnecessary and quite random talk about Al Capone and the movie, the author goes back to the topic first made at the beginning. Back to the traffickers, mentioning the wars over smuggle routes, how they are the 'heirs' of Al Capone and then finally gets into his argument.

The author argues in this that an accelerated effort to stop money from getting into the hands of the traffickers in the first place will help Mexico but also help get money into our state coffers. Which I agree with, this statement is a very obvious one.

The author points out that money is being laundered through Texas banks for support and funding of these drug traffickers. Continuing his/her statement, the author notes that previous State Senator Shapleigh pointed out that not enough was being done by government to stop illegal money going through Texas banks.

The problem I had with this article is just that it seemed unorganized, as the final couple of statements (s)he reaches back way to the beginning and argues that Ogden's 'instinct' is a good one. Which I don't really understand. I assume the author is referring to the idea and questioning about what the confiscated money is being used for. The targeted audience the author is trying to reach is also hard to assume. However, my best assumption is: The target audience for this particular argument(which the author ends the editorial with) are people who are interested in this situation, bank owners, and people with power in government.

Poor Teachers :c

An outrageous amount of job cuts(over 1000) are going to be carried out by the end of this month. A news article explains AISD's plans to cut over 500 teachers. The plan apparently takes seniority into effect when making the teacher cuts, poor teachers. I feel bad for all the ambitious, relatively new, teachers in Austins Independent School District. Supposedly, the AISD wants to improve their systems efficiency but maintain the "High Quality Education" they offer. The information source, did not provide how much money will be saved from all of these cuts, but I assume it should be a lot. Seeing as the number of job cuts planned is so high, and so early in the year of 2011.