Mexican Businesses ran full page newspaper ads pleading with Mexico President Felipe Calderón to stop the drug violence that has now hit their business capital, Monterrey. That's desperate.

A surge of drug violence in Mexico's business capital and richest city has prompted an outcry from business leaders who on Wednesday took out full-page ads asking President Felipe Calderón to send in more soldiers to stem the violence.

The growing violence in Monterrey, long one of Mexico's most modern and safe cities, is a sign that the country's war against drug gangs is spreading ever further from poorer battlegrounds along the border and into the country's wealthiest enclaves.

Residents opened their newspapers Wednesday morning to find the ads taken out by Mexican business leaders, begging the government to send more military into the city. "Enough already," said the notice that ran in national and local papers, criticizing what it said was a slow response of police against "criminal bands that in every act look to establish a new boundary of terror."

Nearly 23,000 people have died in Mexico as a result of drug violence since 2006. Mexico is as dangerous as Iraq or Afghanistan.

This story caught my eye. The New York Times outlines how each blood donation, paid out at $30 a pop, generates $300 in pharmaceutical products.

Blood donation centers concentrate in extremely poor areas, with high health issues including drug addiction.

So, get this, Mexicans are crossing the border twice a week to donate blood, to earn $60 a week. It's more money than what they can make on wages in Mexico!

Twice a week, Ms. Delgado, the mother of three young girls, walks across the bridge from Piedras Negras, Mexico, where she lives, to Eagle Pass and enters a building just two blocks from the border.

Inside, for about an hour, Ms. Delgado lies hooked to a machine that extracts plasma, the liquid part of the blood, from a vein in her arm. The $60 a week she is paid almost equals her husband’s earnings.

“This is like another income,” she says.

When is the United States going to make it clear, once and for all, U.S. jobs and workers are not for trade?

Because Congress finally stopped Mexican trucks from entering the United States, which obviously would labor arbitrage U.S. truckers in addition to security and safety issues, Mexico is retailiating by tariffs.

Mexico slapped tariffs on 90 American agricultural and manufactured exports on Monday in retaliation for Washington's move to block Mexican trucks from using U.S. highways.

Mexican Economy Minister Gerardo Ruiz said about $2.4 billion worth of exports from 40 U.S. states would be affected and that his government would soon publish a list of them.