Andy Kroll

Drug trafficking Mexican cartels continue to spread like weeds throughout the US, funneling drugs through American cities and pocketing massive profits. In the National Drug Intelligence Center's annual "Threat Assessment" report for 2008, the agency found that Mexican drug traffickers had distribution networks in at least 230 American cities, an expansive operation generating billions of dollars a year.

Today, the NDIC, which is part of the Justice Department, released its 2010 "Drug Threat" report. Again, the NDIC highlighted the rise of Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in the US: "Mexican DTOs are more deeply entrenched in drug trafficking activities in the United States than any other DTOs." What the 2010 report doesn't include, however, is the latest tally of American cities now fostering Mexican drugrunners and dealers. The 2010 report says only that they're "active in more cities throughout the country than any other DTOs."

So why the omission? Is the DOJ reluctant to include the figure because the number is so large, the power of Mexican cartels so far reaching? An official with the National Drug Intelligence Center said the report didn't include a hard figure because the agency was "in the throes of reanalyzing" its data, and wouldn't have a new figure for another month or so. The official did add that the NDIC predicts that 230 figure has increased from 2008. You can read into the DOJ's lack of new data however you'd like, but be prepared for some startling statistics when the department does release its new tally of cities caught in the Mexican cartels' web.

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Black homeowners hit hard by the housing crisis and economic downturn are disproportionately shut out of the Obama administration's multibillion-dollar homeowner rescue effort, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). This startling new finding appears in a first-of-its-kind poll conducted by a leading housing advocacy group, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, in conjunction with a hearing by the House oversight committee today investigating why HAMP has failed beleaguered homeowners and hardly slowed the rising tide of foreclosures. A copy of the report laying out NCRC's findings was first obtained by Mother Jones before its public release.

According to NCRC's findings, white homeowners eligible for the HAMP program are 50 percent more likely than blacks to receive a loan modification, which can lower monthly mortgage payments and help homeowners keep their homes. Loan servicers, the poll finds, foreclosed on black homeowners who were late on their mortgage payments noticeably faster than white or Hispanic borrowers. The poll's finding here "suggests that lenders and servicers push delinquent Black or African-American borrowers into the foreclosure process much sooner than borrowers from other racial and ethnic groups." Black homeowners who did receive modifications also saw smaller reductions in their loan's interest rate—an average drop of 2.84 percentage points—than did whites and Hispanics—3.32 and 3.35, respectively. So telling is NCRC's finding relating to racial differences that the group calls for "fair lending investigations of [the] HAMP program and participating servicers."

NCRC's poll is the first to investigate whether servicers and lenders treat people differently during the modification process due to race.

The poll is equally damning in its broader examination of HAMP, the Treasury Department's flagship homeowner initiative. As others have pointed out, HAMP's results have been dismal at best: Despite originally claiming that HAMP would help 3 to 4 million people—around 270,000 every three months—the program has only resulted in 170,000 permanent mortgage modifications in a year's time. In NCRC's poll, they found homeowners surveyed were more likely to get lasting help if they weren't eligible for HAMP than if they were.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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