Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
“Raise your hand if you like weed,” the gang leader asked the raver crowd. But nobody raised a hand or so much as moved. They were too scared. So he repeated his question, this time while firing a quick burst from his R-15 into the air. ”I said who likes fucking weed?!!” Naturally, a lot of hands went up.
MONTERREY, MEXICO— La Letra (what we call the Zetas these days because we’re too terrified to call them by name) is at it again. It’s getting worse than ever, thanks the lower ranks of the cartel business–made up of young, impressionable school dropouts and assorted jobless little motherfuckers. Now, these scumbags are letting their presence be known like never before. In Monterrey, the Zetas have started using them to police the drug use of the general population to make sure that people are consuming the right drugs and buying them from the “right sources.” As in: them.
These junior squads have started doing rounds at parties like some sort of narco-security. If they see someone smoking weed, they approach and inquire about the source of the weed, breaking off a little from the joint and inspecting the mary jane (they know exactly what their product looks like and can recognize their product from the others). If it’s not from one of their tienditas (remember those neighborhood drug stores I wrote about about a year back?), they just take him backstage to introduce the kid’s naked ass to their little friend “la tabla,” which’ll leave them with welts for the next few weeks and mental scars for the rest of their lives.
The Zetas kicked off this trend when they started recruiting among young pandilleros (aka gang-bangers) from poor neighborhoods at the start of the Cartel War, somewhere from 2005 to 2006. Now the fashion has been catching on with other cartels, too. That’s the way it is these days. Nobody likes competition from independent operators anymore, not even the drug cartels. The anti-capitalist bastards!
This has been screwing everything up, and I don’t mean just for local businesses or for the freelance dealers who have been left without income or heads. It’s been just as bad for the little people, especially kids. You can’t even smoke a joint at a rave without being bothered anymore. To get hassled like that when you’re all soft, tripping on acid or ecstasy or mescaline—it’s just brutal.
Around 4AM, when the main DJ was starting to play, his crappy psycho music was suddenly interrupted by machine gun rapid-fire– and it all screeched to a halt like air blowing out of a balloon.
The ravers found themselves surrounded by about 50 thuggish kids armed with machine guns, sent courtesy of the Zetas. They were 19 to 25 years old at most, and acted all tough strutting around with their R-15s, rounding up the crowd like sheep dogs, sporadically firing bursts into the air from their black rifles just to keep people on their toes.
When the thugs had all the ravers assembled into a flock, the little bastards proceeded to rob everyone. Going person to person, they took cell phones, cameras, jewelry, cash, and anything else shiny that got their attention. They were like little ravens with automatic weapons. They even stole the DJ’s passport and credit cards. Fuck, they even took his headphones.
But that was all just collateral. The main purpose of their visit were the drugs. With flashlights in hand, they scouted the floor for baggies of weed, pills, LSD, coke, anything… They must have felt like they were on an easter egg hunt.
The leader then addressed the people: “Raise your hand if you like weed,” he asked the crowd. But nobody raised a hand or so much as moved. They were too scared. So he repeated his question, this time while firing a quick burst from his R-15 into the air. ”I said who likes fucking weed?!!” Naturally, a lot of hands went up.
“Good, now, who likes pills [ecstasy]?” he continued. A few hands went up. “Great, great,” he said, satisfied. ”But if you like them so much why aren’t you buying them at the right place?” he asked the crowd, like some kind of TV salesman.
The meaning was clear to all involved: you better buy your drugs from the Zetas’ tienditas.
He finished with a brief, somber, almost grandfatherly speech: “We apologize to everyone. We know this is a party but we are only doing our jobs, so that you won’t buy your loquera [drugs] from other sources. The plaza belongs to the compañia and we are going to come to these parties every time that we want to. We are taking your cellphones and cameras to erase any evidence.”
Before taking off, the thugs started calling out cars like they were valets. Like this:
“Who owns the blue Mazda truck?” a Zeta kid who looked like he was sponsored by Ed Hardy would shout. After some frightened girl somewhere in the back would raise her trembling hand, he’d yell: “Give me your keys.”
Nobody gave me an exact number of just how many cars Zetas took that night from the rave, but it was somewhere between 10 and 20 cars. They weren’t doing it just to be dicks. No, the stolen cars had a very specific purpose. They’d be used in levantones (kidnappings), executions, moving drugs and/or insurance company fraud.
After that, the comandante said his goodbyes to his captives and warned: “Now putos, everyone is gonna get on the floor face down for 20 to 30 minutes. And if anyone stands up or walks outside the big tent area, I got men outside who will kill you just like that. So it’s up to you.” He added that they shouldn’t even think about going to the police because the cops worked for them.
I’m still a little shocked by this story because nothing like it had ever happened before.
Why are they doing this? Well, I figure it has to do with Mexico’s war on drugs. The government has been pushing the narcos so hard that now we are entering uncharted territory.
Yoga and Capitalism: An Uneasy Partnership
Last week’s corporate-sponsored Yoga at the Great Lawn event in NYC has been attracting quite a bit of press. Yesterday’s NYT blog article took a look at the corporate angle of the event. “This would have never happened without corporate support,” said Sascha Lewis, a co-founder of FlavorPill, the NYC cultural guide which organized the event.
It was advertised as a free class, and as such needed corporate sponsorship. The distributed mats (which every registered person was supposed to receive) were branded with the JetBlue logo, a small gesture which in fact positions yoga mats as desirable retail space. adidas, which didn’t appear on the official literature but had a presence, since the event’s primary teacher, Elena Brower, is an adidas yoga ambassador (and is apparently making efforts to help adidas deliver their sustainability yoga wear line ~ I thought their previous ambassador accomplished that task…)
On the one hand, it’s great that this event happened and so many people, especially first-timers, were able to experience yoga in a grand setting. However, given the scope and ambition of the event, I have to question the intention behind these corporate interests in yoga. They claim they want to bring yoga to as many people as possible, but I’m not entirely convinced that’s their main interest.
The event accomplished the feat of being the largest yoga class ever recorded, even though there wasn’t much of a class. The practice was cancelled shortly after it started, due to the rain, and the disappointed practitioners lugged “their soggy JetBlue yoga mats and their SmartWater bottles and their ChicoBags filled with a few goodies” (according to the NYT blog post) out of the park.
“The yoga community is now merrily two-stepping the American way, with corporate logos,” observed the NYT blog. It then went on to ask if this was even a bad thing. Given the culture that yoga has landed in, it certainly seems inevitable. But there are ways to cross the line. At the Yoga at the Great Lawn event, Well+GoodNYC noted, “A single row of Who’s Who yoga teachers like Sadie Nardini, Sarita Lou, and Duncan Wong sat like Adidas-branded Buddhas, all in matching white tanks.” The shiny yoga elite, dressed alike in their branded uniforms… it’s kind of a creepy picture.
I wonder, do we have to do this dance? We all know it’s a dance. You really can’t convince me that, other then sponsoring an event with a guaranteed captive audience of 10,000, do these companies embody yogic values? JetBlue would like to co-opt the openness and transparency associated with yoga by guaranteeing “no blackout dates, no seat restrictions” on its frequent-flier program. It’s nice of adidas to sponsor a high-profile yoga teacher, offer free yoga classes around the world and develop a line of sustainable yoga wear ~ but its other business practices include endorsing the slaughter of kangaroos (an endangered species) in Australia and sweatshops in Asia. Can we separate these actions from its endorsement of yoga?
Elena Brower indicates that “the notion that capitalism and yoga are in conflict is old-think. ‘The companies are making it possible for all these thousands of people to have this experience. This is what we need,’” she said. I’m going to step forward and say that I’m pretty old-school in being skeptical of corporate motivations for sponsoring large scale yoga events, and I’d prefer to create community from a grassroots level, and introduce people to yoga without having to woo them with free branded mats and bottled water.
Marlboro man takes sacred plant
by Tamara Herman
Indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon have refused to repeal a policy resolution issued in 1996 declaring US citizen Loren Miller an enemy whose "entrance in any indigenous territory should be prohibited."
Miller, director of the American-based International Plant Medicine Corporation, exchanged two packs of Marlboro cigarettes for a sample of a sacred Amazonian plant from a tribal chief 12 years ago and proceeded to patent it without seeking permission from local indigenous groups.
The plant, Ayahuasca, is a sacred hallucinogen that Amazonian people have been cultivating for thousands of years.
Miller maintains that he is acting in accordance with US and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) patent laws, which allow him to sell and breed Ayahuasca. However, the Co-ordinating Body for Indigenous Organizations in the Amazon Region (COICA), which represents 400 Amazonian indigenous groups in nine South American countries, rejects Miller's commercial claim to Ayahuasca.
COICA argues that intellectual property rights regimes should allow indigenous people to control and benefit from the commercial use of their knowledge and biological resources. They note that the Convention on Biological Diversity, negotiated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil and ratified by over 170 countries, promotes "the equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations, and practices."
"Bioprospector" companies, such as Miller's International Plant Medicine Corporation, often screen plants used by indigenous people for genetic components that may be useful in agricultural, pharmaceutical and other commercial products. Indigenous people's biological resources contribute an estimated $30US billion a year to the pharmaceutical industry.
US officials say Miller's actions are legal under the 1995 GATT Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP) Agreement, which allows corporations to patent their knowledge-based innovations in all GATT member nations, thereby profiting from the research and development undertaken.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_h ... n28752586/
The CIW's Anti-Slavery Campaign is a worker-based approach to eliminating modern-day slavery in the agricultural industry. The CIW helps fight this crime by uncovering, investigating, and assisting in the federal prosecution of slavery rings preying on hundreds of farmworkers. In such situations, captive workers are held against their will by their employers through threats and, all too often, the actual use of violence -- including beatings, shootings, and pistol-whippings.
In one of the most recent case to be brought to court, a federal grand jury indicted six people in Immokalee on January 17th, 2008, for their part in what U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy called "slavery, plain and simple" (Ft. Myers News-Press, “Group accused of keeping, beating, stealing from Immokalee laborers,” 1/18/08). The employers were charged with beating workers who were unwilling to work or who attempted to leave their employ picking tomatoes, holding their workers in debt, and chaining and locking workers inside u-haul trucks as punishment ("How about a side order of human rights," Miami Herald, 12/16/07).
This case became the seventh such farm labor operation to be prosecuted for servitude in Florida -- involving well over 1,000 workers and more than a dozen employers -- in the past decade. Since 2008, the federal government has initiated two more prosecutions, bringing the total to nine as of 2010. Here below is a list of the nine cases, in chronological order:
U.S. vs. Flores -- In 1997, Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez were sentenced to 15 years each in federal prison on slavery, extortion, and firearms charges, amongst others. Flores and Gomez had a workforce of over 400 men and women in Florida and South Carolina, harvesting vegetables and citrus. The workers, mostly indigenous Mexicans and Guatemalans, were forced to work 10-12 hour days, 6 days per week, for as little as $20 per week, under the watch of armed guards. Those who attempted escape were assaulted, pistol-whipped, and even shot. The case was brought to federal authorities after five years of investigation by escaped workers and CIW members.
U.S. vs. Cuello -- In 1999, Abel Cuello was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison on slavery charges. He had held more than 30 tomato pickers in two trailers in the isolated swampland west of Immokalee, keeping them under constant watch. Three workers escaped the camp, only to have their boss track them down a few weeks later. The employer ran one of them down with his car, stating that he owned them. The workers sought help from the CIW and the police, and the CIW worked with the DOJ on the ensuing investigation. Cuello worked for Manley Farms North Inc., a major Bonita Springs tomato supplier. Once out of prison, Cuello supplied labor to Ag-Mart Farms, a tomato company operating in Florida and North Carolina.
U.S. vs. Tecum -- In 2001, Jose Tecum was sentenced to 9 years in federal prison on slavery and kidnapping charges. He forced a young woman to work against her will both in the tomato fields around Immokalee, and in his home. The CIW assisted the DOJ with the prosecution, including victim and witness assistance.
U.S. vs. Lee -- In 2001, Michael Lee was sentenced to 4 years in federal prison and 3 years supervised release on a slavery conspiracy charge. He pled guilty to using crack cocaine, threats, and violence to enslave his workers. Lee held his workers in forced labor, recruiting homeless U.S. citizens for his operation, creating a "company store" debt through loans for rent, food, cigarettes, and cocaine. He abducted and beat one of his workers to prevent him from leaving his employ. Lee harvested for orange growers in the Fort Pierce, FL area.
U.S. vs. Ramos -- In 2004, Ramiro and Juan Ramos were sentenced to 15 years each in federal prison on slavery and firearms charges, and the forfeiture of over $3 million in assets. The men, who had a workforce of over 700 farmworkers in the citrus groves of Florida, as well as the fields of North Carolina, threatened workers with death if they were to try to leave, and pistol-whipped and assaulted -- at gunpoint -- passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. The case was brought to trial by the DOJ after two years of investigation by the CIW. The Ramoses harvested for Consolidated Citrus and Lykes Brothers, among others.
U.S. vs. Ronald Evans -- In 2007, Florida employer Ron Evans was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on drug conspiracy, financial re-structuring, and witness tampering charges, among others. Jequita Evans was also sentenced to 20 years, and Ron Evans Jr. to 10 years. Operating in Florida and North Carolina, Ron Evans recruited homeless U.S. citizens from shelters across the Southeast, including New Orleans, Tampa, and Miami, with promises of good jobs and housing. At Palatka, FL and Newton Grove, NC area labor camps, the Evans' deducted rent, food, crack cocaine and alcohol from workers' pay, holding them "perpetually indebted" in what the DOJ called "a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible." The Palatka labor camp was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, with a No Trespassing sign. The CIW and a Miami-based homeless outreach organization (Touching Miami with Love) began the investigation and reported the case to federal authorities in 2003. In Florida, Ron Evans worked for grower Frank Johns. Johns was 2004 Chairman of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, the powerful lobbying arm of the Florida agricultural industry. As of 2007, he remained the Chairman of the FFVA's Budget and Finance Committee.
U.S. vs. Navarrete -- In December 2008, employers Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete were sentenced to 12 years each in federal prison on charges of conspiracy, holding workers in involuntary servitude, and peonage. They had employed dozens of tomato pickers in Florida and South Carolina. As stated in the DOJ press release on their sentencing, "[the employers] pleaed guilty to beating, threatening, restraining, and locking workers in trucks to force them to work as agricultural laborers... [They] were accused of paying the workers minimal wages and driving the workers into debt, while simultaneously threatening physical harm if the workers left their employment before their debts had been repaid to the Navarrete family." Workers first reported the abuse to Collier County police, and additional workers sought help from the CIW. The CIW collaborated with the DOJ and the police on the year-long investigation and prosecution.
U.S. vs. Bontemps -- In July 2010, Cabioch Bontemps, Carline Ceneus, and Willy Edouard were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to commit forced labor. DOJ officials accuse the three of holding over 50 guestworkers from Haiti against their will in the beanfields of Alachua County, Florida. The indictment states that Bontemps raped one of the workers in his employ and threatened her if she were to report it. The employers held the workers' passports and visas, and forced them to work in fields recently sprayed with harsh pesticides, causing permanent scarring. The grower, Steven Davis, asked the judge during the court hearing to release Bontemps since he was key to the harvesting operation. "All these people [the workers] look up to him," Davis said. "All these people respect him. All these people worship him." As of September 2010, the prosecution is ongoing. The CIW trained local law enforcement and church groups shortly before the workers were rescued, and assisted in referring the case to the DOJ.
U.S. vs. Global Horizons -- In September 2010, staff of guestworker recruiting giant Global Horizons were charged with operating a forced labor ring active in 13 states, including Florida. Global Horizons President Mordechai Orian and six others are accused of holding hundreds of guestworkers from Thailand against their will, in what prosecutors call “the largest human trafficking case in U.S. history.” FBI Special Agent Tom Simon described the latest case as "a classic bait-and-switch what they were doing. They were telling the Thai workers one thing to lure them here. Then when they got here, their passports were taken away and they were held in forced servitude working in these farms." The prosecution is ongoing, with more details to emerge about the various states workers lived in and what crops they picked.
The Anti-Slavery Campaign has resulted in freedom for more than a thousand tomato and orange pickers held in debt bondage, historic sentences for various agricultural employers, the development of a successful model of community-government cooperation, and the growth of an expanding base of aware and committed worker activists. The CIW employs a unique combination of outreach, investigation, and worker-to-worker counseling in order to combat already-existing slavery operations case-by-case.
Neoliberalism's Newest Product: The Modern Slave Trade
By Ignacio Ramonet
IPS, August 3, 2011
PARIS, Jul (IPS) Two centuries after the abolition of slavery we are seeing the reintroduction of an abominable practice: human trafficking. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 12.3 million people each year are taken captive by networks tied to international crime and used as forced labour in inhuman conditions.
In the case of women, the victims are subjected mostly to sexual exploitation while others are exploited as domestic servants. There is also the case of youths who are taken captive through various scams so their body parts can be sold in the international human organ trade.
These practices are expanding more and more to satisfy the demand for cheap labour in sectors like the hotel and restaurant industries, agriculture, and construction.
The OSCE dedicated two days of its last international conference in Vienna in late June to this subject[i ]. Though the phenomenon is international, various specialists asserted that the plague of slave labour is growing rapidly in the EU. Unions and labour groups estimate that in Europe there are hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to the blight of slavery [ii].
In Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and other countries of the EU, foreign migrant workers attracted by the mirage of Europe find themselves trapped in the networks of various mafias and working in conditions like slaves of past ages. An ILO report reveals that south of Naples, for example, 1200 homeless farm labourers work twelve hours per day in greenhouses without contracts and for miserable pay, guarded by private militias and living in what resemble concentration camps.
This "work camp" is not the only one in Europe; thousands and thousands of undocumented immigrants have met similar fates, victims of a modern slave trade flourishing in any number of European countries. According to various unions, this form of forced labour accounts for almost 20 percent of agricultural production [iii].
Responsibility for this expansion of human trafficking lies largely with the current dominant economic model. In effect, the form of neoliberal globalisation than has been imposed over the last three decades through economic shock therapy has devastated the most fragile levels of society and imposed extremely high social costs. It has created a fierce competition between labour and capital. In the name of free trade, the major multinationals manufacture and sell their goods around the world, producing where labour is cheapest and selling where the cost of living is highest. The new capitalism has made competitiveness its primary engine and brought about a commodification of labour and labourers.
Globalisation, which offers remarkable opportunities to a lucky few, imposes on the rest, in Europe, a ruthless and unmediated competition between EU salary workers, small businesses, and small farmers and their badly-paid, exploited counterparts on the other side of the world. The result we now see clearly before us: social dumping on a planetary scale.
"I WAS A SEX SLAVE FOR THE CIA!!!"
Trance Formation of America
Book Review
by
Jaye C. Beldo (Netnous@aol.com)
If you are bored out of your mind with the usual Pamela Anderson Lee 'power fuck' porn, I suggest grabbing a copy of Trance Formation of America and heading to the nearest bathroom with a jar of Vaseline. Why not infuse new life into your worn out sexual fantasies by envisioning some of the scenes spelled out in Cathy O'Brien's supposed exposé of the pedophile shenanigans of our Government officials? I mean, how could you not get excited over picturing Hillary Clinton going down on the author's deformed vagina like a starved wolf while Bill walks in on them and casually ignores them? How can you not get excited about Box Car Willie's penchant for fondling preteens after his cornball shows at the Grand Ol' Opry? Or Dick Cheney using an OZ hour glass as if it were a vibrator on the author, while dry running the next meeting with Prince Bandar bin Sultan through his mind?
Excuse my overt facetiousness, but this is one hard book to swallow, pardon the pun. I cannot help but get the impression that Cathy is, at times, really no different from some of the questionable UFO abductees making extravagant claims of being transported to other solar systems and back again. Obviously something happened to her of a traumatic nature (her wary demeanor and tremulous voice reminds me very much of Bill Cooper when he talks about the Kennedy assassination). You can hear the trauma in her voice. How she has chosen, whether unconsciously or not, to manifest the effects of the trauma deserves some responsible scrutiny from the reader.
I have trouble fully believing her harrowing story for a number of reasons. Firstly she starts out her book with the following sentence:
"Mind Control is absolute." I can hear Robert Anton Wilson rolling over in his non-local indeterminate grave, shuddering, in subatomic fashion, upon hearing the word is as well as absolute! With statements like these, obviously there are no chinks in O'Brien's armor. Her version of the Great Wall of China is firmly in place and there are no peep holes, no opportunities for us to make our own conclusions. (Please see my review of David Icke's book, The Biggest Secret posted on The Konformist web site for further elaboration on this phenomena of how paranoia compels authors to fill all available space with wall to wall facts.)
However, considering the sordid reputation our government officials have, as spelled out in many other conspiracy books, I truly want to believe at least some of O'Brien's stories. I want to believe that Sparky Anderson, the manager of the Detroit Tigers is/was a pedophile. I want to believe, more than anything, that Gerald Ford made Cathy give him head in the most savage of fashions.
The details Cathy gives are convincing and deeply disturbing if not because they actually happened then because they are the overt manifestation of some other painful experiences she suffered through in her past. I wonder how could she invent all of the relentless scenarios of sexual abuse chronicled in Trance Formation. If she did, I at least hand it to her for having a more than vivid imagination. She seems to have an imagination that may possibly help her cope with the pains of sexual abuse, whether it be from family members or politicians. The details are as convincing as those found in a well written Cloak and Dagger novel. (I'm not suggesting False Memory Syndrome but rather that she may be accessing, via her imagination, the lower astral plane which is rife with ethereal perversions, the very plane that attempts to control us through low vibrational thoughts).
Truth Seekers Books (http://truth-seeker.com) who have been kind enough to send me most of their excellent conspiracy related titles also sent me a video of Cathy and her intelligence insider 'rescuer' Mark Phillips giving a talk on the subject. I attempted to willingly 'suspend my disbelief' to allow the subjective reality of Cathy and Mark into my inscape but something just did not intuitively click or ring true with their story. Strangely, as Mark preambled on for Cathy, he did not go into any extensive details of how he rescued her from the CIA's MK-Ultra lair. I really wanted to know more about it so I could be more thoroughly convinced by her story.
I tried to avoid psychoanalyzing Cathy while watching the video. However, I did notice that she used some NLP techniques to enhance her persuasive potential, such as the voice roll, nodding the head to emphasize certain words, widening the eyes at key moments and other tricks that most politicians and T.V. Evangelists use to put their audience members in a suggestive state. I wonder where she learned these techniques from. Did she learn them from her supposed tormentors at the CIA? If so she needs to hone the skills a bit more to make them less obvious.
I suggest that the reader of Trance Formation regard the work as an elaborate albeit disturbing metaphor of the effects of sexual abuse on young children and how it manifests later on in their lives. Cathy's work may very well provide us with a useful perspective on how trauma can embody itself, how it can be projected upon political figures (and also how political figures can project their perverted sexuality upon us which then manifests in our imaginations. I highly recommend reading Ioan Couliano's work, Eros and Magic in the Italian Renaissance. He describes how those holding power manipulated the masses via images of a sexual nature. Same old, same old. He was later assassinated in a bathroom on the campus of the University of Chicago.)
What I mean is that the very people she chronicles as having abused her could represent/embody, in a way recognizable to her and us, the very deep, ultimately core pathology in the heart of the American psyche. I have little doubt that some of the horrific things she mentions actually happen on a day to day basis. Completely denying them would be folly. However the web Cathy weaves must be skirted with much caution. The gravity of her argument could very well suck us into territory hard to escape if we don't take the necessary precautions.
Jaye C. Beldo is a writer, intuitive counselor, and spiritual anarchist. He has been published in FATE, Green Egg, Magical Blend, Mythos Journal, Electric Dreams, etc.
Street Crime
The right never tires of exonerating society and blaming crime on the criminals. This is, of course, nonsense. To understand the important role that basic social and economic problems play in the creation of street crime, simply take a map of a major American city and put a small red dot wherever a homicide occurred. Soon small red lakes start forming in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. For example, in 1993, the New York City Police Department reported that twelve of the city’s seventy-four precincts—all twelve located in impoverished areas of Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—reported a total of 854 homicides (43.6 percent of the city’s 1,960 murders) while twelve other precincts—all located in more affluent terrain—reported only thirty-seven homicides (less than 2 percent of the total). In general, wherever neighborhoods are plagued by extreme poverty and unemployment, extraordinarily high levels of violent crime exist.
Not surprisingly, U.S. prisons are also filled with convicts who have little formal education, lousy job prospects, and dismal incomes. One government survey of prisoners who entered state prisons in 1991 found that 64 percent had not graduated from high school, compared to 19.8 percent in the general population. About 45 percent did not have a fulltime job when they were arrested, 33 percent were unemployed, about 70 percent earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year (compared to 23.5 percent of all U.S. households), and only 15 percent earned more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year (compared to 59.2 percent of all American households).
Likewise, inmate populations are mostly people of color that have faced severe socioeconomic problems. Blacks, with unemployment rates twice as high as whites and poverty rates more than three times higher, comprise 30 percent of federal and 46 percent of state inmates, even though they make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population. Latinos, suffering unemployment rates nearly twice as high as whites and poverty rates nearly three times higher, make up 28 percent of federal and 17 percent of state inmates, but just 10.2 percent of the population. In short, the higher incarceration rates of blacks and Latinos are very strongly correlated with their higher unemployment and poverty rates.
The link between poverty and crime, however, needs to be handled with care. There is, for example, no evidence to support the view that young males of color and immigrants are “more criminal” than other members of the population. Most impoverished young men manage to get through life without committing serious violent crimes, and those who do enter a life of crime commit few of the worst crimes. Most corporate crimes are committed by wealthy, middle-aged white men, and young people of color have virtually no control over the global drug trade or money-laundering. The popularity of derogatory stereotypes also obscures the terrible impact that street crime has on less-affluent neighborhoods. We tend to forget that working and less affluent Americans are disproportionally victimized by crime. This is particularly true of corporate crime—poorer neighborhoods generally have the worst environmental problems, and working Americans are far more likely to die at work than more affluent white-collar workers. In addition, about half of all U.S. homicide victims are black. People who live in households that have less that fifteen thousand dollars in annual income are three times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted, two times more likely to be robbed, and one and a half times more likely to be a victim of an aggravated assault than those who live in wealthy households.
All of this goes to show that the salient difference between high-crime and low-crime neighborhoods in urban centers is economics, not morality. Communities that offer their residents economic and social opportunities have low rates of street crime. And it also tells us why hiring more police, building more prisons, and imposing tougher sentences has not worked. Spending on law enforcement has increased astronomically and the number of people behind bars now approaches two million, but there is little evidence that punishment has had much of an impact on crime rates. Crime rates rose in the 1960s, when the number of people behind bars fell, but those numbers rose in the 1970s as the prison population skyrocketed. Street crime rates then fell in the early 1980s, as the prison population soared. But, crime rates escalated dramatically between 1984 and 1992, when the prison population increased even faster and even more draconian laws were passed. Crime rates dropped in the mid-1990s, as still more people were put behind bars. While law-and-order fanatics have taken credit for this decrease, any honest observer can see there is no connection between stiffer punishment and lower crime rates.
Prisons have been ineffective because punishment doesn’t address what might be crudely called the supply of criminals. Government officials can double or triple the number of people behind bars and keep them there for longer periods of time, as they have in recent years. But crime will not decrease as long as social and economic problems create millions of new street criminals to take their place.
The effects of economic changes on crime can be seen in the recent history of poor white immigrants in major cities like New York. In the 1910s and 1920s, for example, Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods had extremely high rates of street crime. At the time, conservative commentators blamed the problem on genetics. Yet, a mere two generations later, the grandchildren of these supposedly degenerate races are generally affluent and well-educated, with low unemployment rates. Not surprisingly, their involvement in street crime has also plunged.
The success of these groups and the failure of others can be traced to the economic changes made during the New Deal in the 1930s and the early postwar period in the 1940s, which expanded the consumer economy, boosted wages, and improved educational opportunities. But these benefits were not spread equally throughout the economy.
For starters, U.S. farm policies, which encouraged the development of a capital-intensive agribusiness, pushed millions of small farmers and farm laborers out of the U.S. South, Appalachia, and Puerto Rico into Northern cities between 1940 and 1970. These new immigrants arrived at a time when government policies and corporate investment strategies were encouraging the flow of capital out of the older industrial cities and into the lower wage, nonunion urban centers and suburbs of the South and West. Massive U.S. military spending encouraged an enormous government-sponsored shift of capital from urban centers to either the suburbs or low- wage centers abroad. Domestic military spending during the Second World War was disproportionately made in suburban or Sunbelt areas, and the vast majority of postwar military spending occurred outside of urban centers.
Meanwhile, tax policies such as the interest deduction for mortgages favored suburban homeowners over urban renters and reduced investment in decaying urban housing stocks, while other aspects of the corporate tax code encouraged corporations to build new factories overseas or in the suburbs rather than remodel and upgrade urban facilities.
Over time, these capital movements destroyed the economic basis of many American cities and pushed up crime rates, despite the country’s overall prosperity. In one study, Don Wallace and Drew Humphries investigated crime rates in twenty-three cities between 1950 and 1971. They looked at the connection between different types of crime and larger economic changes, such as a region’s economic prospects, labor-force changes, levels of poverty, and unemployment and analyzed how this affected different types of crime. Overall, they found that older, industrial cities had lost jobs, suffered high unemployment, faced large numbers of new migrants, and had much higher levels of murder, robbery, auto theft, and burglary. They concluded: “This result supports our hypothesis as well as earlier studies linking industrial employment, community stability and low crime rates.”
Such problems were further exacerbated in the late 1960s and 1970s. Faced with growing international competition, higher oil prices, and worldwide economic stagnation, corporate America underwent a painful restructuring. Layoffs, attacks on organized labor, the movement of factories overseas to low-wage zones, reduced government regulation, probusiness tax policies, and a wave of mergers cut overhead, boosted profits, and created more globally competitive corporate behemoths. This increased the prosperity of the richest Americans, but it also caused family incomes to stagnate, poverty rates to remain high, and wages for low-skilled workers to drop.
The economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s had an enormous impact on street crime, and not just in the cities. In the 1980s, crime became an increasingly worrisome problem in both rural and suburban areas as millions of workers lost their jobs, the manufacturing sector was devastated, and real wages fell dramatically. Still, America’s cities and their low-wage and often minority workers suffered the most. Overall, almost three million manufacturing jobs were lost nationwide in U.S. cities between 1979 and 1990. Moreover, pay for many low-skilled jobs in the United States fell dramatically—a particularly important development because men with few skills and little formal education are much more likely to commit street crimes than other demographic groups. Wages for low-skilled white men in their twenties fell by 14 percent between 1973 and 1989, while wages for white high-school dropouts fell by 33 percent. Similarly, wages for black high-school dropouts fell by 50 percent and those for black men in their twenties fell by 24 percent during this period.
These problems were compounded by the right’s successful attacks on social programs designed to eradicate the causes of crime. Between 1981 and 1992, federal spending for subsidized housing fell by 82 percent; job training and employment programs were cut by 63 percent; and the budget for community development and social service block grants was trimmed by 40 percent. Between 1972 and 1992, welfare and food-stamp benefits for single mothers declined by an average of 27 percent nationwide. Although welfare benefits once provided enough money for a family of four to live at the poverty level, no state in the early 1990s (when crime rates hit record highs) provided grants and subsidies equal to 100 percent of the poverty level.
Reduced wages, higher unemployment rates, and lower government benefits played a crucial role in the rise of street crime and the growth of street drug markets. Likewise, improved economic conditions in many cities after 1993 begin to explain the recent reductions in street crime. It is no coincidence that street crime rates have fallen to their lowest levels in thirty-five years in a period when unemployment and poverty rates have also dropped back to the levels last seen in the more prosperous 1960s.
The Drug Trade
Changes in the larger capitalist political economy have also played a crucial role in the development of the drug trade. While the right blames much of the drug trade on the permissive cultural values of the 1960s, it is important to remember that U.S. drug users are only one (relatively small) part of a much larger system of distribution, marketing, finance, and production that involves million of impoverished peasants (who grow the drugs), global organized crime groups (who distribute the narcotics and earn most of the profits), hundreds of thousands of poor people who sell the drugs in the United States (one Rand study notes that the average street level dealer makes about ten thousand dollars a year and most of that money goes to support his or her own habit), and large financial institutions (which launder the profits).
It is important to stress that this system came into being long before anyone had ever heard of Timothy Leary, the American psychologist and author who promoted the use of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s. Many aspects of the modern drug trade were created by European imperialism. Between 1797 and 1831, as the British opened new opium-producing regions, Chinese imports of opium skyrocketed from seventy-five tons in 1775, when the British started the Bengal opium monopoly, to 2,555 tons in 1840. Opium became so important that, in 1839 and 1856, Britain went to war against China when the Chinese attempted to end the trade. Thanks to the forced legalization of the drug, about 27 percent of all adult Chinese males smoked opium in 1907, and the country had some 13.5 million addicts consuming thirty-nine thousand tons of opium each year. Meanwhile, the Dutch, French, and Portuguese continued to profit from the trade. They set up state-run opium dens, which encouraged the use of the drug, and they used the profits to help finance their colonial regimes.
The decline of colonialism following the Second World War ended the official state-sponsored drug trade, but the decline of colonialism also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a vicious battle for control of Asia’s rich natural resources. The Cold War created the modern heroin trade, producing a deadly mixture of narcotics, peasant revolts, and political corruption. Opium production expanded exponentially, growing from fifty tons a year in 1948 to well over three thousand tons today. Currently, between 180,000 and 190,000 acres of poppy fields are cultivated in the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, and the enterprise employs well over a million people.
In Latin America, mechanized agribusiness, imported manufacturing goods, and the debt crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s devastated many peasant economies, forcing millions of people to enter the drug trade. In Peru alone, over seventy thousand people moved into the coca-producing regions in the 1980s as the economy shrank by 20 percent, inflation hit 3,399 percent, and real wages dropped by 60 percent. In Colombia, coffee prices fell over 33 percent between 1980 and 1986 as the drug trade boomed and in Bolivia, prices for tin and natural gas plummeted as production of coca leaves skyrocketed. By the mid-1990s, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia were earning billions of dollars from drug exports and about one million people were growing, processing, or smuggling cocaine.
Organized Crime
In the postwar period, the U.S. policy of supporting corrupt anticommunist dictatorships allowed some of the world’s deadliest crime groups to expand into multibillion dollar operations. Just as Al Capone relied on a corrupt Republican party machine to thrive in Chicago during the 1920s, Asian heroin smugglers and drug lords thrived under the protection of U.S.-backed dictators in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Taiwan. As these groups smuggled more heroin into the United States, the number of heroin addicts in America shot up from about thirty thousand in 1945 to about 750,000 in the late 1960s. Similar events occurred throughout Latin America, with similar consequences, and today are taking place in Russia, where criminals now control a quarter of the country’s banks.
U.S. support for corrupt but anticommunist governments in Japan and Europe also aided important crime groups. In Japan, the Yakusa, who helped conservatives crush leftwing labor unrest in the 1950s, established close ties to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which allowed them to operate openly and set up multibillion dollar enterprises. In Italy, an alliance was formed between the Mafia and U.S.-backed Christian Democrats, who were saved from possible defeat by the communists in 1948 by ten million dollars in covert U.S. aid. Eventually, political protection from the Christian Democrats allowed the Mafia to rebuild its power and establish a global organization producing twenty-one billion to twenty-four billion dollars in revenues in 1994.
The most important example of how larger economic changes have benefitted organized crime groups can be found in the area of money laundering. As global trade expanded after the Second World War, major multinational corporations and financial institutions created new and unregulated financial systems to make it easier for them to move goods and services internationally. By the mid-1990s, unregulated offshore banks in Panama, Hong Kong, and the Bahamas managed more than five trillion dollars worth of assets. Today, trillions of dollars worth of currency, stocks, and bonds flow across borders each day, protected by strict secrecy laws, lax government regulations, and virtually nonexistent taxes.
Unfortunately, these same features are attractive to organized crime groups and have allowed them to accumulate almost unimaginable wealth. When Nixon declared his war on the Mafia in 1970, few organized crime leaders were worth more than five or ten million dollars. But, by the mid-1980s, organized crime groups in the United States were bringing in an estimated fifty billion dollars a year and, by the late 1980s, some drug cartel leaders had made it onto Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires. Today, organized crime has so much economic power in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Thailand, Burma, and Russia that it will be extremely difficult to curb its operations in the future.
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