There have been gunfights outside American schools and a big private university. The mayors of two suburbs have been murdered. And a grenade has been thrown at Saturday evening strollers in a square, injuring 12. All this has happened since August not in Kabul or Baghdad but in Monterrey in northern Mexico. The latest battleground in a multilateral war between drug-trafficking gangs and the authorities, Monterrey is not a dusty outpost. It is one of the biggest industrial cities of North America, a couple of hours’ drive from Texas and home to some of Mexico’s leading companies.

The maelstrom of drug-related violence that is engulfing Mexico has produced exaggerated, sometimes xenophobic, alarm in parts of the United States. The response in Mexico City has, until recently, been defensive denial.

Both reactions are wrong. The violence, in which at least 28,000 people have been killed since 2006, reflects a double failure of public policy: decades of neglect of the basic institutions of the rule of law in Mexico, and a failed approach to drug consumption (plus lax gun laws) in the United States. These mistakes have helped to create the world’s most powerful organised-crime syndicates. Reforms in both countries could help tame them.

Take […]

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MESQUITE, Nev. - Candidates and outside interest groups are expected to spend at least $50 million in Nevada’s 2010 federal election campaigns, mostly on advertising, but it’s unclear how much that will influence the state’s voters - if at all.

The targets of this spending spree, like those in other close races around the country, are the people who play golf at the Falcon Ridge Golf Club in this town of 25,000 northeast of Las Vegas. Or the folks who shop at the nearby Wal-Mart or hang out at the Stateline Casino, where many of the regulars are unemployed or retirees living on fixed incomes.

These Nevada voters will have a big say in the outcome of two of the nation’s most closely watched races: The U.S. Senate contest between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Sharron Angle - polls show a dead heat - and the U.S. House of Representatives race for Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District between Democratic incumbent Dina Titus and Republican Joe Heck.

Campaign ads help candidates influence voters, just as any advertising affects a consumer’s view of a product, whether it’s soap or cereal. Ads can boost a little-known product’s visibility, and cement a product image in the […]

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Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed new rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has helped wage a national campaign to limit the ability of trial lawyers to sue businesses.

These large donations – none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group which keeps its donors secret – offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

They suggest that the recent allegations from President Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding American companies eager to […]

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Reports that two Supreme Court Justices have attended seminars sponsored by the energy giant and conservative bankroller Koch Industries has sparked a mild debate over judicial ethics.

On Tuesday evening, the New York Times reported that an upcoming meeting in Palm Springs of ‘a secretive network of Republican donors’ that was being organized by Koch Industries, ‘the longtime underwriter of libertarian causes.’ Buried in the third to last graph was a note that previous guests at such meetings included Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two of the more conservative members of the bench.

It’s not rare for a Justice to attend a seminar sponsored by a group with judicial or political interests. Members of the court, for instances, often speak at academic institutions or think tanks. Virtually all companies, meanwhile, are affected by the judicial branch. So long as Scalia and Thomas did not participate in overt partisan activities, there would be no apparent conflict of interest.

‘There is nothing to prevent Supreme Court justices from hanging out with people who have political philosophies,’ said Steven Lubet, a professor of law at Northwestern University who teaches courses on Legal Ethics.

But the Koch event appears more political than, say, the Aspen […]

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