First, Tuesday’s Washington Post story on Al-Qaeda’s desire to use WMDs against America:

“…a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.

The report, by a former senior CIA official who led the agency’s hunt for weapons of mass destruction, portrays al-Qaeda’s leaders as determined and patient, willing to wait for years to acquire the kind of weapons that could inflict widespread casualties.”

So a retired intelligence official is alleging that a WMD attack from al-Qaeda is a genuine threat, based purely on the strength of his musing.  The report cites absolutely no evidence at all, and has no empirical support.  It’s simply speculation.

Let’s take a moment to consider its assertion though, in light of what we’ve learned from al-Qaeda’s most recent round of recruits.

Successfully deploying nuclear, chemical, or biologically weaponry is insanely delicate and difficult, military units trained to use or defuse that kind of weaponry are some of the most intelligent and well-trained.  WMDs are incredibly fragile, requiring careful handling and precise calibration to be deployed effectively.  Only the most intelligent enlistees are chosen for WMD training, a task that takes several months to complete.  Conversely, everyone in the military learns how to shoot a gun within the first few weeks.

So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that, in the past decade, more Americans have died by pulling a vending machine onto themselves than through a terrorist WMD attack. Probably about twice as many.

Meanwhile, men allied with al-Qaeda (which, it’s important to remember, is much more an Ism than a discrete club) have often shown themselves incapable of so much as properly lighting a fuse.  There’s Richard Reid the infamous shoebomber, and the more recent underwear bomber, Umar Mutallab.  Plus the bomb outside a UK nightclub in 2007 which fizzled, and the bomb the same cell put into their jeep and drove into the awning of the Glasgow Airport, which also fizzled.  And whose driver was thwarted by a local cabbie, who famously kicked the fleeing terrorist in the nuts so hard that the cabbie nearly broke his own foot.

Creating simple homemade explosives is clearly the absolute upperlimit of men who choose to become terrorists, something they often as not manage to flub.  Deploying WMDs are an entire order of magnitude more difficult than that, which is why outside of military action they’ve almost never been used.   Is their use feasible?  Yes.  Is it damn well bloody likely that men who can’t even properly manage the simplest of homemade explosives are ever going to successfully use them?  Not so much.

However the Washington Post still decided that pure unadulterated fear-mongering speculation was worth putting in its front section:

“He cites patterns in al-Qaeda’s 15-year pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that reflect a deliberateness and sophistication in assembling the needed expertise and equipment.”

The only clear pattern in al-Qaeda’s past fifteen years is one of sophomoric amateurism.  Men who’ve chosen to associate with al-Qaeda have shown time and time again that just assembling conventional homemade explosives is an iffy proposition.  Even the 9/11 attacks relied on an incredible amount of luck, one group of hijackers that morning were so late getting started that they only made their gate with six-minutes to spare.

Terrorist attacks have not been getting more hierarchical-dependent and sophisticated, they’re becoming self-assembling and simple.  Last June a radicalized American citizen killed an Army recruiter and wounded another by simply shooting them, and last November a radicalized American citizen 13 and wounded 43 more also by simply shooting them.  And the DC Sniper, who brought the blue Chevy Caprice used in all the attacks on 9/11 as homage to bin Ladin, also just shot all of his victims – in the process creating the single most efficient terrorist campaign in America to date, drawing in law enforcement from across the eastern seaboard and nearly disrupting an election.

Which brings us to the story you probably missed, about the attack that didn’t happen.

At 4am on the same Tuesday morning as the Washington Post carried that story, New Jersey police arrested Lloyd Woodson after the clerk in a local Quick Chek store called 911 when Woodson entered his store and began behaving suspiciously.  Police arrived, Woodson fled.

He was subdued with pepper spray a few minutes later in a trailer park behind the store, and was found in military fatigues with a bullet proof vest beneath, and toting a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that’d been altered so it could shoot .50 caliber rounds.  He had four additional magazines of ammo on him, but that wasn’t the half of it.

Back in his room at the Red Mill Inn, police found a Cobray rocket-propelled grenade launcher, two rifles (one with a nightvision scope), hundreds of rounds of .38 and .50 ammo (some of them armor-penetrating), a police scanner, a map of Fort Drum, a map of a community subdivision, and a keffiyeh.  Also among his personal effects according to New Jersey law enforcement, were other unnamed items which tied him to radical Islam in general and to a specific Islamic militant group.

And unlike your average weapon of mass destruction, his arsenal wasn’t exactly difficult to acquire.  He’d simply purchased them on the streets of New York City, and defaced their serial numbers so they’d be difficult to later track.

It’s quite possibly he might ultimately have wussed out at the last moment, although it’s obvious he’d devoted an awful lot of time and preparation to at least plotting an attack on a military facility.   And having spent time in the Navy, it’s likely he had the basic training necessarily to operate the rather impressive firepower he’d brought along.

We’re still waiting to learn more about Woodson’s background, and the FBI has stated that he wasn’t part of any larger terrorist plot – even though items were found that linked him to an established Islamic militant group.   However it’s extremely unlikely his ideas came to him in a vacuum, and although he may never have made face-to-face contact with any proven terrorists, when the investigation is finished you’d be betting good money if you wagered that he made contact with extremists online at one point or another.

And although we’ve yet to learn whether Woodson spent any time in prison or if he began his association with Islam there, we do know he was previously convicted of a felony gun possession charge… so don’t be surprised if it turns out that like so many others, he was initially exposed to radical Islam while in prison.

The Arkansas shooter, Abdulhakim Muhammad, made his initial extremist contacts online before ultimately converting to radical Islam while in prison, and recently changed his plea:

“My lawyer has no defense,” Muhammad wrote in the two-page letter, dated Jan. 12. “I wasn’t insane or post-traumatic nor was I forced to do this act.”

In letter, Muhammad described himself as a soldier in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and called the shooting “a Jihadi Attack.”

“This was a jihad: attack on infidel forces. That didn’t go as plan. Flat out truth,” Muhammad wrote in the letter.

The men who ascribe to Radical Islam do not see themselves as terrorists, they see themselves as soldiers.   And their training and conversation no longer happens in terrorist camps or in personal exchanges – as was the case with the 3/11 Madrid bombings, conversion and radicalization often occurs in the amorphous world of online media interactions.

This is not some ersatz training method, the same social forces that powered Twitter and Facebook’s ascension are now being used by terrorists to find recruits in society’s margins. Which do you really think is more of a threat: a terrorist with access to WMDs who’s actually savvy enough to use them when his average companion can’t even set off a simple bomb, or a pissed-off ex-con with access to firearms and a grudge against the government?

Our gravest threat doesn’t come from a sophisticated Bruckheimer-esque WMD attack, it comes from the margins of our society.  Men who feel alone and isolated.  There’s no better place to find and radicalize such men than in prison – where an overwhelming majority of America’s recent terrorists got their start.

And because of our drugs laws, an incredibly disproportionate number of those men are black.  Yet the Washington Post feels it’s more productive to report sensationalist baseless speculation, than the fact that the African-American unemployment rate is double or triple the national average depending on where you are, that African-Americans are three-times as likely to have their homes foreclosed on than whites, that African-American families currently have just eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and that an African-American child is nine-times as likely as a white child to have a parent in prison.

That’s where terrorism comes from.

Not from some unspeakable evil cabal, but from the lives and families we’ve spent the past forty years gutting with one hand, and awkwardly trying to high-five with the other.

- learn more about Tremble the Devil -

The Chinese have a powerful sense of their identity and worth. They have never behaved toward the West in a supplicant manner, for reasons Westerners persistently fail to understand or grasp.

China is simply not like the West and never will be. There has been an underlying assumption that the process of modernization would inevitably lead to Westernization; yet modernization is not just shaped by markets, competition and technology but by history and culture. And Chinese history and culture are very different from that of any Western nation-state.

And so far as I can tell, no one protested this observation as racist or even remotely controversial.  It’s simply a cultural observation.

Chinese culture is not Western culture.  It is, as they say, what it is.

Cultures instill different values, they have different norms, they lead to markedly different behaviors.  As the article so aptly put it, our “failure to understand the Chinese has repeatedly undermined its ability to anticipate their behavior.”  Western culture, it’s often said, is rooted in “Judeo-Christian” values.  These values have become imbued in our legal systems and constitutional rights, over thousands of years religion has seeped into our sense of justice, of right and wrong.

This exact same argument of culture dissonance can be made when it comes to religion, between Christianity and Islam, although just about everyone seems terrified to bring up the obvious.

And yet almost ironically, the single biggest difference between Christianity and Islam is a simple temporal one.  The paths these two great Western religions took barely even meander from the same path, one of the two just moved much more slowly.  This temporal dissonance, the fact that Christianity took hundreds of years to get to the same point that Islam reached in just a few generations, is central to understanding the differences in how the two great world religions are applied in a modern everyday context.

As much as most Christians would like to believe that their religion’s story ends with the Bible, it doesn’t.  Christianity was just one of scores and scores of mystery cults in the ancient world until Constantine co-opted it and made it the official state religion in 312AD, up until that point Christians had been persecuted along with others who were viewed as occultists. Countless elements of Christian ritual are shamelessly borrowed from existing mystery cults: drinking communal blood and the Cult of Mithras, rebirth and Osiris, and the unavoidable Zorastrian influence we’ve since collectively decided to forget.

Now that Christianity was the official religion of the most powerful empire in the West… lots and lots of non-Christians were summarily put to the sword.

At this point Christianity had a pretty firm foothold on the world stage.  It’s worth taking a moment to notice that no specific element of biblical doctrine was used when Constantine decided it would be okay to kill anyone who wasn’t a Christian.  And yet this was ultimately what spread the faith across the Western world.  Peter didn’t singlehandedly spread Christianity as the end of the New Testament would have us believe.  Christianity seeped across the world benignly at first, but it only gained prominence at the tip of a sword.

But since Christianity’s official doctrine doesn’t talk about killing people who don’t convert, you feel pretty safe saying “killing people who won’t convert is un-Christian.”  Look at the history though, and you find that killing people who refuse to convert spread Christianity much more broadly and deeply than any peaceful means.

Even after Constantine, Christianity wasn’t firmly entwined with Western culture until Charlemagne came along and continued with the “convert or die” approach.  Following his birth in 742AD, he wiped our the remaining pagan and animist religions in Europe by killing untold thousands who refused Christ’s salvation.  In the process he set the groundwork for the French and German empires, and arguably the entirety of Western civilization itself.

It’s kinda funny neither him nor Constantine are really considered prominent Christian figures, even though without them there’s no reason to think Christianity ever would have made it past the status of mystery religion without them.

Islam is roundly denounced because it was spread via military conquest, which leads to the argument that Islam condones violence.  Muhammad was a military leader, he and his immediate successors killed lots and lots of people as they spread Islam across the globe.  Whereas Jesus wasn’t a military leader, and none of his strictly relgious successors ever killed a soul as far as we can tell.

But since Christianity’s later spread by emperors is divorcable from it’s early origins, people feel like Christianity and Islam are utterly different.

They share the exact same story.

They both preach ideals of empathy, compassion, grace, and forgiveness, and yet neither were spread by kindly peaceful conversion but instead by violent domination and conquest. Christianity just took several hundred years longer than Islam to do it, so that part of its story is often ignored.

For the modern Muslim and the modern Christian though, there are immediate repercussions.

Even though, from a distance, it’s obvious that Christianity and Islam followed nearly the exact same path, the fact that Islam took a single generation to follow the path it took Christianity several hundred years to blaze does result in some behavioral differences.  Because Islam’s birth and its conquest of the world occurred so close together, it’s much easier to excuse and condone violence using its traditions and texts.

The Crusades occurred when the West was struggling and Islam was thriving, now that the opposite is true it only makes sense that Muslims are looking to violence to protect their coreligionists and ensure their survival.

]]> http://www.tremblethedevil.com/2009/12/434.html/feed 1 http://www.tremblethedevil.com/2009/12/accidental-guerrillas-in-our-midst-2.html http://www.tremblethedevil.com/2009/12/accidental-guerrillas-in-our-midst-2.html#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 03:50:07 +0000 Anonymous http://subtledig.com/tremble/?p=363 It took two days, but Maurice Clemmons has finally been caught and his accomplices rounded up.

After opening fire on a table full of policemen sitting drinking their coffee in Parkland, an unassuming suburb about 35 miles south of Seattle, Clemmons fled the scene after taking a bullet to the stomach.  Through his network of family and friends he managed to avoid the massive dragnet that billowed out around Seattle.

As the SWAT teams fanned out, knocking on doors, questioning persons of interest, and staking out houses that ultimately turn up empty – Clemmons’ final capture may turn out to be more of a beginning than an ending.   We now know Clemmons wasn’t acting on his own, and he’s certainly not the only black man in America with a grudge against his local city cops.

Whether or not Clemmons sparks any immediate copycats, any outside element seeking to sow the seeds of dissension and unrest in America doesn’t have to squint too hard to see that there are potentially hundreds of thousands of other men with similar backgrounds, who have also spent time in prison, have no love for the police, and who might jump at the idea of killing a few of them.  And the regime most attuned to that possibility is easily Iran’s, which was best illustrated by what they did at the very start of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.   Right after they released all the women and children, they released one other subset of the hostages.

They released all of the African-Americans, making a direct appeal to their status as fellow victims of American oppression.

And yet most Americans had almost no idea that the ‘79 Revolution, which put the current theocratic totalitarian regime into power, was going on at all.  Other than maybe Kermit Roosevelt, pretty much no one in America had the slightest clue that anything of any importance was going on in Iran until the hostage crisis began at the tail end of the Revolution, on November 4^th, 1979.The hostage crisis was the culmination of the Revolution, it had begun nearly two years earlier in early 1978, when the first street rallies and demonstrations coalesced on Qom’s dusty streets.

It was the Iranian hostage crisis that held the world’s attention rapt for 444 days, and which suddenly made events that before seemed utterly immaterial to the average American a staple of their nightly news.

And, fittingly, it was the hostage crisis which gave birth to the formalized hierarchy of American Special Operations, the United States Special Operations Command, which still exists  largely unchanged today.  The botched rescue effort, thwarted by insufficient planning and operational naivete, served as a telling foil for the aptitude and guile the Iranian regime went on to demonstrate in countless acts of state sponsored terrorism in the years that followed.

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President Carter’s botched rescue effort, Operation Eagle Claw, was a clusterfuck in every sense of the word.  Not only did eight American servicemen lose their lives as a desert sandstorm whipped up and made helicopter flight all but impossible, but Iran gained control of six state-of-the-art American helicopters.  It’s hard to imagine a mission going worse.

Iran, on the other hand, soon proved itself a master of irregular warfare.  The furnace of the Revolution burnt away any element of Iranian society which might have weakened the new regime, and allowed it to sharpen Iran’s military into a formidable and deft weapon.

In 1983 the Iranian military masterminded the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, one of the most devastating surprise attacks in American military history.  And then throughout the 1980’s Iranian sponsored terror took lives in Jerusalem, Rome, and countless other Western cities – soon becoming classified by the United States as the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist attacks.

But what is state-sponsored terrorism really?

On a purely analytical level, it’s simply another term for irregular warfare.  Whether or not an act of violence breaks the Geneva Conventions shouldn’t be the judge of whether or not it’s considered “terrorism.”  Certainly not whether it’s considered an act of Political Terrorism, a phenomenon that has clearly defined boundaries.

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Because terrorism, as a means, has such a broad nature you have to categorize terrorist violence within a framework before you make any sort of analysis if it’s going to mean anything at all.

The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes.  It’s the outcome of violence used with precise timing and targeting in the right set of social circumstances. Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media’s attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step’s retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism.  Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist’s real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can’t goad the established authority into striking back.

It is this retribution that validates his ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

And in just the last year, a new term has been coined to describe what happens when the cycle of Political Terrorism is triggered within an international context of warfare that allows travel between nations and cultures, and the instantaneous transmission of events from anywhere in the world to everywhere in the world.

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Before coining the term “accidental guerrilla,” David Killcullen fought as a member of the Australian military in theatres of war on multiple continents, and served as a counterterrorism adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General David Petraeus, as well as serving as the chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department.  The term accidental guerrilla has its origins in the native resistance to the War on Terror that began after 9/11.

As Killcullen traveled to areas where there was ongoing military action against declared “terrorists,” he noticed an odd phenomenon.

Many, in fact most, of the men fighting against American forces didn’t actually ascribe to the violent jihadi ideology that led al-Qaida to perpetrate 9/11.  They were just average locals who found outsiders engaged in a shooting war on their turf, and felt compelled to join in.  In the words of one Afghani villager who spontaneously joined in with the Taliban in an ambush against American troops, “when the battle was right there in front of them, how could they not join in? …This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley in years.  It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out.”¹

As outlined in his ground-breaking book The Accidental Guerrilla, the phenomena follows a four step cycle that’s nearly identical to Political Terrorism, and that can be simply understood as Political Terrorism within a specific framework.  Kilcullen describes accidental guerrillas as the result of a syndrome, and illustrates it using biological analogies and four stages:

1. infecting an area where the State has a waning influence
2. reaching a virulent potential for widespread media dissemination by carrying  out acts of captivating violence
3. drawing in outside intervention to deal with this new virulent threat
4. a rejection of the heavyhanded outside intervention by the local population, which wins the infectious agents sympathizers and followers

And so accidental guerrillas are born when they become infected by the virulent influence of al-Qaida or any other radical ideology, and fight back against any outside intervention that follows. Not necessarily because they agree with the radicals, but because they feel compelled to reject what they’ve come to see as an unjust and illegitimate outside power.

The rest of the book goes on to illustrate how the accidental guerrilla syndrome rallied locals to  the side of international jihadis everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan to East Timor, and argues that the syndrome was responsible for mobilizing most of the violence against an outside American military presence.  Locals who either want in on the action, or are afraid “the Crazies will kill them,”² reportedly make up nearly 90% of those fighting back against what’s been sold to them as a military operation undertaken by outsiders.

In the last few chapters of the book, Kilcullen addresses the potential for Europe to act as a stating area for terrorism and future accidental guerrillas, as well  as the role there of micro-havens, “urban undergrounds, alienated ethnic groups, and slums where the writ of government does not always run and where police and security services’ situational awareness is low.”³

But oddly enough, the potential for accidental guerrillas to emerge in America is never explored.

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Another nearly identical term for “microhavens” is State Shells.  At the broadest level, State Shells are semi-autonomous polities hosted within a nation that are able to impose their own will and organizational structure on some segment of society beyond the reach of local government regulation.

Strictly speaking, State Shells are cohesive organizations which have “a monopoly on the means of violence; territoriality; taxation; and public bureaucracy”⁴ within their stomping-grounds. The depth and breadth of the will they are able to impose varies greatly from situation to situation, but generally State Shells establish a following in a society by filling gaps left open by the government.

The less able a government is to provide public works and order, from hospitals to schools to support for the needy, the bigger the opportunity a State Shell has to gain credibility and then power within a pocket of that state. Hezbollah, the PLO, the IRA, ETA, and the Shining Path, are a few of the more notorious State Shells.

A crucial common-denominator among all State Shells is economic independence from the host government – State Shells must be able to raise their own funds, either through their own taxes, outside support, or often via the illicit trade and smuggling of drugs and guns. Within America the drug trade forms a particular poignant example of this, as the hierarchy of gang commerce has come to mimic the corporate pyramid of power – with lots of low-level workers propping up a few kingpins.

Many of the world’s most recognizable terrorist groups are prime examples of State Shells filling the gaps created when a government – beset by political violence, incompetence, or upheaval – is unable to fully govern.

Or, in the modern American case a government may lose its grip on governance because of economic catastrophe, as California is one of the first but not the last state to openly discuss ending many forms of public welfare and support for the needy, and is already laying off cops and other public officials. This creates even wider gaps for gangs to fill, as in many urban black communities gangs already provide jobs in the form of drug dealing, and act as the de facto security force and arbiters of justice.

Within a State Shell there is no such thing as the rule of law, and the exercise of Godfather-esque impersonal power that is based not on a code of justice but individual
whim is paramount over political representation or citizenship. Although they do provide public works, a State Shell’s overall effect is not a positive one on the society that hosts it, as they are by nature exploitative and predatory.⁶

Examples of this behavior span numerous continents and countless generations. But nowhere and never has it been so apt than among the minority populations of America’s innercities.  Gangs serve as imperfect examples of State Shells, but examples all the same.  If there’s anywhere a State Shell might find traction in America, it’s among our urban minority innercities. For generations our urban innercities have been haunted by gang life and the drug trade.

Neither gang life nor the drug trade manifested spontaneously out of the black community.  They only emerged after racially biased drug laws caused blacks, who make up 14% of our drug-users but over half of those imprisoned for drug-use, to find their lives dictated by a life behind walls we all built but refuse to see.

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Nearly any way you look at it, our current economic crisis is impacting our poor black communities much more acutely than our poor white ones.  The most obvious indicator is the still skyrocketing unemployment rate, which for young black males is now twice as high as their young white counterparts.  But simple unemployment doesn’t capture the full scope of economic distress.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity.   The American Revolution, the French Revolution,  China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ‘79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent.

It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

And for going on two generations now, America’s level of economic disparity has been steadily rising.  This ongoing financial crisis may be what finally causes it to crest over.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open.  Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”²⁵

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.”²⁶

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure.  In the early 1970’s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

One way to capture it is by examining what portion of America’s total income the top 1% of earners receive.  The share of that top 1% has nearly doubled since 1970, and
it’s now the same size as the income earned by everyone in the bottom 40% of earners combined.²⁷

So the very few families who make up the top 1% of all earners have a combined income that matches the incomes of all the families in the bottom 40% of earners.

Looking at economic well-being another way, in terms of  financial wealth or “stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses, and other financial instruments,” as of 1998 the top 1% of families controlled nearly half of that pie, with the top 20% controlling fully 93% of it.  Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of families actually have negative financial wealth – their debts actually surpass their assets.²⁸

And this cavernous gap has only been widening, between 1998 and 2001 the net worth of families in the top 10% of America jumped 69%, significantly more than any other group.²⁹ In the years leading up to that point, between 1988 and 1999, the difference in net worth between black families and white families grew by $16,000 and the gap in net financial assets grew by $20,000.  By 2004 white families had an average net worth of $81,000, and black families an average net worth of just $8,000 – roughly a tenth the average white family’s.³⁰

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and  fully 60% among our middle class,³¹ the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth.  Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay  what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods³² – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.³³

And as the real estate market has crashed blacks have suffered much more severely than whites. As it was stated earlier, even when income and credit are controlled for black families now have their homes foreclosed on and are thrown out into the street three-times as often as white families.

Even the very idea of what it means to be poor is color-coded, as while 1 in 3 blacks live in poverty, less than 1 in 10 whites do.   And yet the very definition of poverty itself now varies to the point of absurdity, since “poverty level whites control nearly as many mean net financial assets as the highest-earning blacks, $26,683 to $28,310.  For those surviving at or below the poverty level, this indicates quite clearly that poverty means one thing for whites and another for blacks.”⁷

The impact of these facts have echoed across generations, as nearly three-quarters of all black children grow up in homes with no net financial assets.  That’s nearly double the rate of white kids.  And nine in ten black kids grow up in homes without enough monetary reserves to last more than three months at the poverty line if their income were to drop, roughly four times the white ratio.⁷

Even Eminem seemed to have no sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations.  The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration.  This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”⁸

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.⁹

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation.  The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans.  Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house.  All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.¹⁰

Hotlanta served as a case study for mortgage-based racism, as the Pulitzer-winning series in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution “The Color of Money” so aptly captured.

It showed how blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for.  And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts.  However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites.¹¹

Even well-to-do blacks have been unable to escape from this institutional prejudice.

Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors.  Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.”¹²

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years.  And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” however the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

This racial stratification has created neighborhoods ripe for infection by radical Islamists hoping to begin the accidental guerrilla syndrome.  Black neighborhoods have more crime, more poverty, and less governance than wealthy white ones – the ideal conditions for an outside terrorist infection to set in.  And the process is made even easier when you consider the effect the prison system has on black communities, isolating young men away from their friends and families and everything they’ve ever known for years at a time, the ideal circumstances for softening someone up for radicalization.

Once radicalized, they’re released back to their old neighborhoods to begin spreading the contagion that had been injected into them in prison while they were held prone by hopelessness, isolation, and fear.

i                           i                         i

If the Accidental Guerrilla theory of terrorism is correct, America shouldn’t be worried about the detonation of a nuclear device in one of our ports, about the release of a biological plague, or any outside element directly attacking our country.  The risk of retribution is simply too great, as Tom Clancy so bluntly illustrated in Executive Orders – if any attack can be traced back to your soil, America will not hesitate to blithely erase you from the map.

As the events of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 have made abundantly clear, adherents of radical Islam who seek to attack the West won’t do it through any weapon of mass destruction.  Homemade bombs with cell phone triggers have already proven highly effective, and are easily produced.

And as events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have borne out – the most effective way for radical Islamists to attack a society isn’t by using overpowering technological capabilities or advanced biological weaponry to inflict massive civilian casualties. Instead, it’s by co-opting weak and vulnerable elements of the society who don’t feel like they have protection from a strong central government, and by exploiting pre-existing social tensions and fissures.

To create accidental guerrillas from a desperate and angry minority community that feels abandoned by their neighbors and their nation.

As revolution burns in Iran, what emerges will either be a strong and progressive state intent on embracing choice and human freedom, or a totalitarian theocracy hardened by the violent removal of any element of dissent.  Iran is just warming up, the Islamic Revolution took the better part of two years, this progressive one will at least take several more months.

It might seem like what’s going on over there won’t touch your life here.

But if Iran were to look for a weak point in America’s armor, it would be where accidental guerrillas have emerged in other societies – among our disaffected minority populations, who have been subject to an incredibly disproportionate amount of time in prison, as well as several generations of stifling economic realities.

If African-Americans who have been converted to radical Islam while in prison do successfully pull off an attack that claims innocent lives (as already happened in Arkansas and was attempted in New York), and the police cracks down on their communities in turn – it’s not hard to imagine the urban black communities protesting and rioting against what they’ve in the past seen as an unwarranted and unjust crackdown.

Our urban police forces don’t exactly have a calm or productive relationship with our urban minority communities, accidental guerrillas will be far from endangered if the cycle of Political Terror begins in America.

America isn’t supposed to be about advancing the strongest members of our society while isolating weaker ones, but about providing a fair chance to everyone.   So long as we continue to look the other way, and pretend nothing is wrong as economic and judicial realities tie the hands of so many of our neighbors, we remain exposed to the threat of outside forces inciting accidental guerrillas.

]]> http://www.tremblethedevil.com/2009/12/accidental-guerrillas-in-our-midst-2.html/feed 1 http://www.tremblethedevil.com/2009/11/and-here-we-go.html http://www.tremblethedevil.com/2009/11/and-here-we-go.html#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:38:16 +0000 admin http://subtledig.com/tremble/?p=12 In one of the more pivotal scenes of The Dark Knight, Alfred descends into a strictly ordered halogen-lit Batcave as Bruce Wayne is doggedly patching himself up. After helping his employer with some stitching, Alfred realizes that Master Bruce doesn’t fully comprehend this new halcyon of violence that the Joker is creating in Gotham City:

Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the Joker’s rubric on terrorists.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

Because we lose any chance of gaining useful insight when we label Hasan a terrorist, stuffing him into a box of our choosing. Instead of trying to see the box that he saw himself in, and carefully crafted for himself.

Terrorism isn’t about creating chaos simply for chaos’s sake. Terrorists don’t kill for the pure joy of killing, they aren’t evil embodiments of some dark sinister incomprehensible force. That’s where the Joker fails as a metaphor for terrorism.

The Joker is terrorism only as we see it, he perfectly embodies terrorism only as we perceive it. But that perception is never the entire story. If anything the Joker embodies just how limited society’s take on terrorism so often is, we are unwilling to approach it unless it seems to be disfigured by insanity, the twisted product of a warped and disturbed mind.

But viewing terrorists that way masks who they really are. It hides their true identities, and prevents us from either understanding or preventing their actions.

The men we call terrorists view themselves as fighting the good fight, as dying for for something greater than themselves. Each and every one of them, to a man. They view themselves as serving a cause, as sacrificing their life at the altar of some worthy or noble duty. Judging their moral calculus, pressing our own ideas of when killing is or isn’t justified, onto them does absolutely nothing to help us understand or analyze their actions and their origins. Lives we see as innocent, they see as necessary or unavoidable collateral damage.

Innocence and innocents alike are lost in the stench of terror’s breath.

In times of war, civilians lose their lives. By the thousands, sometimes by the millions. But in the context of war, as a society we’re okay with that. Innocent lives can be sacrificed at the altar of warfare, it’s an unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect that we don’t let ourselves be troubled by. And in the same way, killing civilians doesn’t trouble terrorists either.

Because terrorists see themselves as soldiers. Soldiers fighting a war worth dying in, a war that transcends their lives, and any interpretation of right or wrong and good vs. evil that we – as outsiders – might bring in from the outside.

Terrorism has always been and will always be the little brother of warfare. It’s primary goal is first and foremost to make the targeted society’s members feel like they’re at war. Terrorism is at its awful finest when no one knows if they might die next, when death comes at random to their doorstep, unannounced and shrouded in unpredictability.

That’s the point of the chaos. That’s why they want the world to seem like it’s burning.

And to sow this illusion of warfare, the men we label terrorists must themselves become soldiers. They prepare themselves for going to battle and likely death by saying goodbye, and letting go of their earthly possessions. They see themselves as fighting and dying in a war, often against an outside aggressor whose violence can only be responded to in kind.

The only time terrorism seems complicated or nuanced is when we bring our own moral framework into a situation where it doesn’t apply. The men who see themselves as soldiers, who we could call terrorists, don’t fit into our moral framework. So if you really want to understand terrorism, you have to leave your own moral framework and interpretations behind.

If you can do that, then you’re ready to continue on down the rabbit hole.

And you’re ready to learn about the role Gideon played as the godfather of all terrorists, and about how modern terrorism is simply another step down a path we’ve all been on since the beginning of history.

But so what. It’s not like the War on Drugs, begun almost two generations ago in 1973, has done anything to increase the growing level of economic disparity in America… right?

A lot happened in 1973.

It was a few years after Nixon slammed the gold window shut, the waning hours of a decapitated Civil Rights movement, when the kindling of an energy crisis was beginning to pile up, and the year that marks our disentanglement from Vietnam.

But it also marks the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed. And that same year, something funny happened: the income gap between black and white begins to widen back out, instead of closing – as it had been up until 1973.

Is that just a coincidence, or is there demonstrable cause-and-effect at work? If you know anything about American drug laws, it shouldn’t surprise you that some 90% of those arrested under the Rockefeller drug laws in the first years after its passing were minorities.

Drug laws in America, after all, “have originally been based on racism… all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot.”¹ The popularly cited motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War.

Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there’s no way in hell that was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers’ addiction as opportunistic displacement.

Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed in some states, banning the consumption of alcohol. But not, of course, for everyone.

Whites could drink as much as they pleased – as well as use opiates and cocaine, but if you were a minority in much of antebellum America you were prohibited from imbibing or using any drug at all.

At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn’t control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all “uncivilized races.”

In this case, “uncivilized” was synonymous with “dark.” At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted – while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant.

Throughout the first half of the 20^th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a “cocaine-crazed negro.” Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON’T DIE!, and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn’t large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty.

However blacks weren’t singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone, and then eventually altogether.

Nixon’s public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in the story of American anti-drug laws that has always been rooted in racism.

Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and eventually the entire federal government.

They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, partially because they included a fifteen-year prison term for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year.

These counter-narcotics laws that, both by design and in practice, fueled an explosion in our prison population – a population which started disproportionately black – with 90% of those incarcerated under the Rockefeller laws either Latino or black – and only growing to become more so as the years passed. Between 1979 and 1990 blacks made up a steady percent of our overall population, but between those same years blacks went from making up 39% of our drug-related prison population to 53% of it.²

Today that number’s down to 51.2%. An improvement, but hardly.

Through the 1980s this disparate growth was fueled by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the hundreds of crime bills passed by state and Congressional legislatures in the 1980s and 1990s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed the first of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, here five-years in prison without chance of parole for anyone caught selling a substantial-enough amount of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, or cocaine. This last drug, cocaine, had a unique provision.

You’d receive the same unparolable five-year sentence for selling either 5 grams of crack cocaine as you would selling one-hundred times that much – 500 grams – of powder cocaine. Crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the exact same drug, there’re only two important differences. One is that crack cocaine is smoked while powder cocaine is snorted. The other is a bit more telling. Powder cocaine was mainly consumed by whites, whereas crack cocaine was the form of choice for innercity blacks.

Critics, for good reason, blasted the law as shamelessly racist.³

America introduced a solution to civil disorder and social injustice that wasn’t novel, it’s simply grown to become unmatched in scale. By 2003, the percentage of our population in prison dwarfed England’s level, our international neighbor whose culture and mores are closest to ours.

We have, proportionally, six-times our population locked up behind bars as our tea-sipping crumpet-munching cousins across the pond. For France and Germany, the difference approaches ten-times as many.

Our prison population has increased five-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners.²² And these American prisoners have one common and inescapable denominator that you’ve almost certainly already stereotyped them with – but for good reason. The stereotype of the black male American prisoner is, among other things, an accurate reflection of reality.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And although although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.⁴

This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he’d only face a 4% chance of incarceration – a disparity that’s been steadily increasing since then. In Chicago’s home state there’re 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.⁵

In 2001 a government survey revealed that the per-capita rate of illicit drug use was only point-two of a percent higher for blacks, and yet two-thirds of those imprisoned for drug possession were black, and the rate of black arrests was four-times the white rate. Nearly half of all drug arrests in America are for simple marijuana offenses. These statistical realities should do much more than stagger you.

If you’re black – they terrify you.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ‘79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent. It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

And for going on two generations now, America’s level of economic disparity has been steadily rising. This ongoing financial crisis may be what finally causes it to crest over.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”⁶

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.”⁷

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970’s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

One way to capture it is by examining what portion of America’s total income the top 1% of earners receive. The share of that top 1% has nearly doubled since 1970, and it’s now the same size as the income earned by everyone in the bottom 40% of earners combined.⁸

So the very few families who make up the top 1% of all earners have a combined income that matches the incomes of all the families in the bottom 40% of earners.

Looking at economic well-being another way, in terms of financial wealth or “stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses, and other financial instruments,” as of 1998 the top 1% of families controlled nearly half of that pie, with the top 20% controlling fully 93% of it. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of families actually have negative financial wealth – their debts actually surpass their assets.⁹

And this cavernous gap has only been widening, between 1998 and 2001 the net worth of families in the top 10% of America jumped 69%, significantly more than any other group.¹⁰ In the years leading up to that point, between 1988 and 1999, the difference in net worth between black families and white families grew by $16,000 and the gap in net financial assets grew by $20,000. By 2004 white families had an average net worth of $81,000, and black families an average net worth of just $8,000 – roughly a tenth the average white family’s.¹¹

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and fully 60% among our middle class,¹² the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth. Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods¹³ – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.¹⁴

And as the real estate market has crashed blacks have suffered much more severely than whites. As it was stated earlier, even when income and credit are controlled for black families now have their homes foreclosed on and are thrown out into the street three-times as often as white families.

Exactly what impact modern drugs laws had on this growing level of racial economic disparity is impossible to know, however it seems more than a little suspicious that so many economic factors line up so well with the passage of our modern drug laws and the incredibly disproportionate number of blacks who were thrown into prison. It might not even be possible to put a number on how much damage the drug laws have done to black communities – as the most terrible statistic has nothing to do with money.

A black child in America is nine-times as likely as a white child to have a parent in prison.^14.5

And yet one thing that’s not tough to figure out, is whether being exposed to the American penal system increases or decreases someone’s propensity for violence.

Getting a man to kill someone right in front of them is surprisingly tough to do. The US Army didn’t get the formula right until Vietnam, when it combined the modern psychological principles of classic and operant conditioning, along with heavy doses of desensitization to violence and the appropriate levels of cultural and moral distance.

Our modern prisons, while not using classic or operant conditioning, appear to be reaching the same ends. Not only does increased incarceration raise the rate of violent crimes at the community level,¹⁵ but sticking someone in jail desensitizes them to violence and increases their level of cultural, moral, and social distance from anyone not in their own race.

No where in the modern world is someone more forced to “practice thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment,” a crucial step in becoming prepared to take someone’s life.¹⁶ It is impossible to survive in most prisons without at least loosely aligning yourself with whatever gang your race corresponds to, and steering well clear anything beyond cursory or institutionally-forced interaction with members of another race.

Although America’s five-fold per-capita increase in the incarceration rate hasn’t seemed to have increased the overall level of violent crime, a study released in 2002 revealed that without the advances in medical technology that we’ve made since 1970 the murder rate would be between three and four times higher than it is today.¹⁷

Numbers aside, there’s absolutely no way spending time in prison pacifies someone. And upon their release, prisoners often become ineligible for public housing and are denied welfare. So getting a job and trying to find a legitimate way to support themselves is far from easy for ex-cons, more often then not they feel forced to go back to a life of crime to support themselves and any family they might have.

Unemployment rates as high as fifty-percent are frequently cited by those who have researched and followed the lives of former prisoners. One recent study put the unemployment rate at 60% in the first year after release, and another survey found that two-thirds of the employers surveyed in five large cities would never hire an ex-con.¹⁸ Having to state that you’ve been incarcerated on your job application means that any jobs beyond the most menial and low-paying will likely remain out-of-reach. And in today’s turbulent economic times, when even those with advanced college degrees have trouble finding any kind of paid work, the prospect for an ex-con is even more grim.

Due to the incredibly high concentration of blacks in the American prison population, the hope-numbing impact of being held in prison and then being hard-pressed to find employment afterward enforces “the stigma of race [that] remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation.”¹⁹

Racism is generally understood in America to have fallen to an all-time low. But this is an illusion, created because our prisons and the hundreds of thousands of black men inside of them are built at sites unseen.

A “subtler and more covert” racism has been enabled as prison populations artificially bend racially specific underemployment rates as “mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettos that live on beneath official rhetoric.”²⁰

The Civil Rights movement was marked by dozens and dozens of indelible images of racism that were carried in the media each day – black children being marched past an angry white mob into a newly segregated school, police dogs being sicced on peaceful black protesters, burnt-out remains of bombed black churches, one black man behind a pulpit preaching of Christian love and patience and another black man punctuating with his fist the need for angry black action, crowds full of college students both black and white being sprayed at times by firehoses and other times by bullets.

We’ve all seen the living, breathing, killing reality of racism in the 1970s. None of us now are able to see its existence now, because racism no longer lives on the front pages of our newspapers and during our evening news – instead it’s been suffocated inside poured concrete walls which rise and fall in invisible existence, locked safely out of sight.

It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

Even the very idea of what it means to be poor is color-coded, as while 1 in 3 blacks live in poverty, less than 1 in 10 whites do. And yet the very definition of poverty itself now varies to the point of absurdity, since “poverty level whites control nearly as many mean net financial assets as the highest-earning blacks, $26,683 to $28,310. For those surviving at or below the poverty level, this indicates quite clearly that poverty means one thing for whites and another for blacks.”³⁰

The impact of these facts have echoed across generations, as nearly three-quarters of all black children grow up in homes with no net financial assets. That’s nearly double the rate of white kids. And nine in ten black kids grow up in homes without enough monetary reserves to last more than three months at the poverty line if their income were to drop, roughly four times the white ratio.³¹

Even Eminem seemed to have no sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations. The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration. This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”³²

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.³³

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.³⁴

Hotlanta served as a case study for mortgage-based racism, as the Pulitzer-winning series in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution “The Color of Money” so aptly captured.

It showed how blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for. And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts. However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites.³⁵

Even well-to-do blacks have been unable to escape from this institutional prejudice.

Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors. Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.”³⁶

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” however the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

Other statistics drive the point home with increased clarity. By 1995, the wealth-gap between black and white was so wide that blacks owned only 8 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites. Just eight-cents to the dollar. In other terms, as of 1998 the average white household’s net worth was $100,700 higher than the black average. And that wasn’t even the peak of the gap, according the most recent data, from 2007, the gap in household net worth is now $142,600.

Take a moment to consider that gap.

Your average white American family has a $140,000 leg up on the average black American family. And those families don’t live intermingled among the same neighborhoods, the difficulty black families have securing a mortgage loan have created high concentrations of blacks living in certain neighborhoods while whites live mostly in others. By 1993, 86% of whites lived in communities where blacks made up less than 1% of the neighborhood.¹³

This racial stratification has created neighborhoods ripe for infection by radical Islamists hoping to begin the accidental guerrilla syndrome. Black neighborhoods have more crime, more poverty, and less governance than wealthy white ones – the ideal conditions for an outside terrorist infection to set in. And the process is made even easier when you consider the effect the prison system has on black communities, isolating young men away from their friends and families and everything they’ve ever known for years at a time, the ideal circumstances for softening someone up for radicalization.

Once radicalized, they’re released back to their old neighborhoods to begin spreading the contagion that had been injected into them in prison while they were held prone by hopelessness, isolation, and fear.

Perhaps most alarming is that the Department of Justice is manipulating its racial drug-related prison date, in effect lying, to make it seem like our Drug Laws aren’t targeting minorities as acutely as they really are. To try and keep up appearances, a few years ago the DoJ decided to simply remove all of the prisoners who were mixed race black-and-white from their data without reflecting this change on any of their tables or in any of their charts.

The DoJ simply shuffled them out of sight, hoping no one would notice or care about a few thousand lives. And for the most part, no one did.

It’s clear that the DoJ decided to simply remove mixed black-and-white prisoners from the system because a footnote in the DoJ’s statistics opaquely fesses up:

“Data analysis procedures adopted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004 affected the categorization of persons identifying with two or more races… and had the result of a modest reduction in the number of persons identified as non-Hispanic white and black.”

Looking at the DoJ’s chart, what happened to the percentage of black prisoners in 2004 after the prisoners identified as mixed black-and-white were left out of the calculations?

In 2003, all but 1.2% of the prison population is accounted for, a percentage explained by Asians and other smaller ethnicities not being listed on the chart at all. And then suddenly the very next year in 2004, the exact year the DoJ changes the way it counts prisoners who identified themselves as mixed black-and-white, 7.7% of the total population pool is now missing.

2003 total: 64,800 + 133,100 + 50,100 = 248,000 prisoners accounted for
248,000 / 250,900 = 1.2% missing

2004 total: 65,900 + 112,500+ 51,800 = only 230,200 prisoners accounted for
230,200 / 249,400 = 7.7% missing

Between those two years, when it seems like the percentage of blacks plummets by 7.9%, 16,200 prisoners simply disappear. That’s 6.5% of the data left unaccounted for when you factor in the 1.2% of Asians and other ethnicities left off every year of the chart.

Using the same calculation the report uses to draw its conclusion that between 1999 and 2005 the percentage of black prisoners drops by 21.6% (dividing the total number of black prisoners from one year by the number of black prisoners the year before), in a single year the percentage of black prisoners seems to have plummeted by 18.2%. However this is simply because, as the above footnote states, in 2004 the DoJ changed the way it categorizes prisoners identifying themselves as of mixed race, both white-and-black.

Apparently it didn’t just “affect categorization,” in one year the DoJ just removed 6.5% of the data – some 16,200 prisoners – from their calculations entirely.

Maybe through simple bureaucratic incompetence but more likely through a concerted attempt to warp the numbers, people who identified themselves as mixed black-and-white were simply thrown out, and percentages were calculated from an incomplete number that was missing prisoners who identified themselves as mixed.

Because where it really gets damning, is when you put those prisoners back into the system.

For the sake of an argument that will be illustrated shortly, we can assume those thousands belong in the Black column, where they originally were up until 2004. And we’ll assume that unaccounted for ethnicities make up 1.2% of the total, the same percentage there was in 2004 when the DoJ quietly changed things up.

That would change the the total number of incarcerated blacks in 2005 from 113,500 to 126,900 , so instead of 44.8% of the total population they now really make up 50% of it. And that 50% is only down 7.6% from 1999 when they made up 57.6% of the population. Even beyond the way the data was heavily massaged, it’s staggering that according to DoJ numbers only 14% of regular drug users in 2005 were black and yet they consisted of 50% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.

So now using the statistic highlighted by the media, and instead examining the way the black prisoner population changed year to year – instead of an overall decrease in the Black population from 1999 to 2005 of 21.6% as the chart erroneously states, the adjusted decrease is instead 12.3%. That’s nearing half the stated level, a fairly large mistake.

A number that was highlighted as the most important statistic by every major media outlet that covered the report.

So the Department of Justice is lying about the reality of bias in our prison system, drug laws in America have always been rooted in class control, and the precise year that they began is the same year that black familes were put on the road to own eight-cents for every dollar owned by whites… where does all of this take us?

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It’s almost impossible to see what’s going on in Iran and not bring in the grandest human frameworks of Justice, Freedom, Right vs. Wrong, and Good vs. Evil.  The men currently controlling Iran’s theocratic totalitarian government seem as sinister and vile as a Sith Lord or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.  They’re violently repressing a people desperately struggle for the right to choose their own path in life.

To live as they choose, not as they’re forced to on fear of death.

Thing is, the men holding the reigns of coercive power in Iran are just men.  They aren’t supernatural creatures possessing any fictional powers whatsoever.   Shattering that fantasy, dispelling the alchemic grip on power they seem to have, is an essential step in understanding what’s really going on in any situation – especially this one.

The following passages were sent to me in an email from an Iranian-American whose family has extremely close and very old ties to Iran’s clerical regime.  The same regime that’s currently in power, the one the people are currently revolting against.  He has immediate family members there now so for obvious reasons he doesn’t want to be named, but his words tell the story behind the evening news.

It shows the men in power not as super-villains, but simply as the petty, insecure thieves that they are.  It lifts the veil that masks their true nature, and shows them for who they were before they got the firm grip on power they have now.

And besides that, it’s pretty damn entertaining.

A quick note that’ll help you follow everything: remember that Khomeini is the cleric who lead the ’79 Revolution and who’s since died, while Khamenei is the Supreme Leader now who you see on TV all the time.

“Ruholah Khomeini was born in the rural, desert town of Khomen in 1902.  His last name just means “from the city of Khomen.” Lived there until he was old enough to go to cleric school at which point he moved to Qom to start his schooling. The main place where you can become a certified cleric in Iran is in the city of Qom. All boys who want to become one when they grow up have to leave their family wherever they are living and move there to do their schooling (it’s like the Harvard of Shi’ite Islam).

After several years of learning and being under the advisement of a fully certified cleric, with his approval you become a certified cleric. This is the equivalent to becoming a priest in Catholicism. Although clerics can marry there’s still a catch.

There are harsher punishments if a cleric breaks a code of Islam, just being around a woman without the veil for a cleric warrants the death penalty. In addition to this clerics also must give up all material desires, kind of like Buddhist monks. They aren’t allowed to have material possessions. Furniture is considered a luxury so that’s not allowed either. Most of them live in very small houses with just a kitchen and a place to sleep. They wear a ceremonial robe and these Arab-style slippers.

Now here’s something that you always see but probably miss. Their head-garment. The color of their head-garment means a lot.  It signifies their bloodline. Clerics with a distinct bloodline known as the Saayad bloodline wear black head garments. Anyone not from the bloodline wears white. I call them head-garments instead of turbans because I’m not a racist fuck, and because they aren’t required to cover the whole head, some just put it around like a donut, it really comes down how the cleric wears it. But anyway, the Saayad bloodline requires some explanation of its own before I go on.

Since the creation of their sect, the Shi’ites kept tabs on anyone who had blood relation to the 12 saints of Shi’ite Islam. These records have been passed down for over a thousand years. If you are among the people who are from the bloodline you are considered a Saayad. This only applies to males though. Women have another name for it which I forget right now but I’ll let you know when I remember. The bloodline can only be passed to the next generation through a male as well. It’s designated by giving the person the title of Saayad on their birth certificate although no one uses the title on a daily bases, it’s mostly just for documents and such. If the bloodline reaches a woman and there are no men to carry it on, the title ends there for that family. This is why it is kind of rare to find Saayads these days.

A lot of Saayads, however, are born into religious families since because of their title they have a moral obligation to follow Islam by the book. Because of this, a majority of the clerics are Saayads. It only makes sense that people with a religious title would be born into a religious family and would want to further pursue a career in their religion. During the era of the Shah this stuff didn’t mean crap. It was a title of respect, and nothing more.

However, since the ’79 Revolution, this title could make a huge difference and practically makes you nobility. People with the title gain a lot more respect under a religious government than they did under the Shah. How much this could help someone in their life, lets just say if you want to make friends with people in the government or gain someone’s respect it gives you some leverage. Some people you  know of who are Saayads are: Khamenei, Khomeini, Khatami, and Mousavi.

Back to the clerics. Basically before the ‘79 Revolution the clerics weren’t worth two shits. They just proceeded over weddings and funerals and gave weekly sermons if they had their own mosque. There was really no money in it and because of this most of them were beggars. Khomeini was all about changing all of that.

He believed that religion is above all and that the power should be given to the clerics since they know what’s best for the people. Furthermore, he thought the clerics were under appreciated and that the poor were misrepresented. (He didn’t grow up with the best childhood living in a rural farm and all.) So that was basically his whole campaign for a revolution.

Because of this the government ended up kicking him out and letting him back in multiple times. When they got rid of him he would make secret audiotapes that were sent to the people in Iran spewing his propaganda at them and convincing them that change was needed. It seemed like something that would never happen until the Shah made a stupid mistake…

President Carter made a statement in the media one day about how certain countries need to be more open or they might find themselves undergoing a revolt or big change if they don’t meet the needs of their people (some shit like that, this one little part I got from an Iranian sociology professor rather than my family so I’m a little fuzzy on it, you might already know it better). The Shah became afraid from hearing this and decided to let Khomeini come back and gave people the freedom of speech. Before that if anyone talked badly if the Iranian government they were considered a national threat and were dealt with by the Sovok.

The Sovok was the Iranian equivalent of the KGB in that they had their hand in a little bit of everything, but they were secret at the same time. They were very powerful people, your stereotypical guy in black suit and sunglasses that comes and takes your neighbor away to secretly interrogate him. So after the Sovok wasn’t a threat anymore all the parties that wanted to cause a revolution started going to work, with Khomeini being the strongest voice. People began rioting, just as they did now, and the Shah was a pussy so he gave up and gave him Iran.

Now this is where Khamenei comes in. Khamenei was a worthless beggar before the revolution. He was born and raised in the holy town of Mashad and became a cleric in Mashad.  It’s possible to become a cleric elsewhere, but Qom is where it’s at.  The he decided to go for further learning in Qom.

Oddly, people from the town are famous for being very stubborn and ironically perverted. This can be noticed in the sermons of the clerics from Qom who devote almost all their sermons toward something regarding sex. Don’t believe me? Read Khomeini’s manifesto on the illegality of fucking chickens and what the conditions are for eating a chicken that’s already been fucked. (I’m not joking, it really exists, you can’t make this shit up.)

While there he followed the advisement of Khomeini and at that point became involved in politics. From then on he followed Khomeini and his ideals. However when Khomeini was outcast from Iran, Khamenei was arrested and afterward agreed to stop conspiring against the government and went back to teaching. This wasn’t enough to make ends meet though – you won’t ever read this shit in wikipedia or any textbooks – and when he moved to Iran he had to beg for money, often playing the bongos in return for change to get by.

Seriously, he hung out on street corners playing the fucking bongos.

People say he had a scooter he always rode around and would ride around in traffic, asking people for change at stop lights and such too. Well after the revolution happened, Khamenei’s devotion to Khomeini paid off and he became a key figure in the government of Iran since then. He became the first cleric to serve as the president of Iran in 1981. I’ll spare you the rest of this stuff since you can find a lot of it on wikipedia.

Now going onto the government and why the people are sick and tired of it. Basically, the government hasn’t stayed true to its promise, and the poor are still poor and the rich were driven out of Iran pretty much. The clerics have all the money. The average salary of an Iranian is equal to about $300 a month, which is pretty good with their cost of living…. the average cleric makes $50,000 a month just for being a cleric, and $500,000 a month if they actually preach at a mosque. Compare that to the cost of living here, and their salary would well over $1,000,000 a month just for sitting on your ass and wearing a fancy robe.

Also, many of the clerics have gone against their teachings, you can see a lot of them wearing fancy Italian shoes and expensive slacks. This goes against the teachings of anti-materialism that they learned. Also Khamenei, the poster boy for clerics, moved into a mansion about 20 years ago with the excuse that he needed it for extra protection.  (No one knows the location of his house as it’s kept secret for his protection.)

The reason the people are so pissed off now isn’t just because the elections were supposedly rigged. It’s also because the government spends too much money serving the clerics (majority of taxes go toward “religious funds” which translates to the clerics’ salaries). Also the government has ownership over 100% of business and all institutions. Even private businesses are technically owned and monitored by the government. These were all things that Mousavi promised to stop, he also promised to get rid of Iran’s bad image of Anti-America and Anti-Israel

In reality most Iranians don’t give two shits about the affairs of a bunch of Palestinians that throw rocks over a country the size of Delaware.”

- learn more about Tremble the Devil -

       
        Twitter seems to have found a calling that no one saw coming – it's helping loosen the grip a totalitarian regime has on tens of millions of lives.

What's going on in Iran right now is unprecedented on multiple levels, but the most surprising is the role Twitter is playing in allowing any flow of information at all out of Iranian cities. It's still fucking Twitter so there's tons of mis- and disinformation to sort through, but somewhere within all the noise is the reality of what's going on. And Twitter certainly realizes this, they rescheduled a crucial network upgrade to prevent a tweet blackout which would've effectively cut Iranians off from the world.

In the same way that during Katrina messageboards and other online forums filled in the gigantic gaps left by the mainstream media, Twitter's #iranelection feed has become almost the only source of information as foreign press broadcasts are being shut down and censorship closes its grip on the throat of the media. And the collective wisdom seems to be effectively singling out who the reputable tweeters really are.   Twitter has officially proved it's potential to change the way everyone approaches the world.

Facebook is easy to block, email addresses have very limited distribution and can easily be choked off, but with Twitter one person can instantly reach millions and millions of potential viewers through a computer, phone, or anything else with a keyboard.

Most of the incredible pictures from inside the protests originally found their way out of Iran via Twitter. (That first picture is of a protester, in the green t-shirt, helping an injured member of the riot police, in ghetto Robocop.)

The online hacking community is rallying against the Iranian regime, there's a good beginner's guide from boingboing, and also some cyberwar guidelines from another site. Even something as small as changing your Twitter location and timezone to Iran can help.

And, par for the course given how financial news is reported, the best source for a summary of what's going on isn't anything from the mainstream media, but from the website of some Fark user.

Without the printing press there probably never would've been a Protestant Reformation, and it's looking like that without Twitter the fate of Iran's people may have been very different.   There's even speculative evidence that the birth of the alphabet itself was linked to the Jewish rebellion that led to the Biblical Exodus.  Yeah, that Exodus – archelogicial evidence shows the alphabet traveling along the same path the Hebrews took out of Egypt, and so one theory is that the alphabet itself may have begun as a way to encode messages.

The internet's changed a lot of things, the way we keep in touch with old classmates, the way we kill time, the way books find their way into the world – and now it's playing a role in the way a  nattion struggles for its fate.

If nothing else, the ongoing struggle in Iran should highlight the fact that Fareed Zakaria doesn't have any idea what in the fuck he's talking about. 

        Within the intelligence community there's a phrase that's used whenever a report that's still being written is made obsolete by new occurrences.   Whether you're writing analysis about political tension, economic upheaval, or the location of a high-value target, oftentimes something will happen to make your report moot.

Say you're writing a lengthy in-depth report about a high-value target, and the suddenly he gets whacked by a rival.  Well fuck, that might be two weeks of work out the window.  And on top of your report you'd probably write "OBE" – or "overtaken by events."

Economic analysts, like all analysts, tend to get an odd sort of tunnel vision.  There are dozens and dozens of websites run by incredibly talented and deeply insightful individuals dedicated to predicting what's going to happen three, six, even two-dozen months down the road.  When a recovery is going to happen, how close we are to a housing bottom, whether or not the value or precious metals will spike, convincing arguments about either inflation or deflation occurring. 

Some of them bring in wry humor and mind-bending technical jargon, others offer unique and informed analysis but skew it with bombast. 

        It is impossible to draw a direct causal line between recent outbreak of terrorist violence and the deteriorating economic conditions.  Everything that's happened could be brushed off as coincidence, because there's simply no way to reliably measure exactly how much economic distress it takes to set any one individual off.  Inarguably though, individuals are being set off by the tanking economy.

It started a few months ago, with a rash of horrifying murder-suicides in quiet suburban American communities.  Men killing off their families and then taking their own lives, all of them apparently driven to and then past the brink by economic distress. 

In your gut, you probably feel like something isn't right.  Unless you happen to be loaded and are only friends with other rich people, odds are you know at least one person who seems more desperate than you ever remember them. 

And desperate individuals, those who feel like they have nothing to lose and nothing left to live for and no way out, often take drastic action.   Economics aren't the only factor, but rich succesful people tend not to go on shooting rampages.  Mix enough desperate individuals into any society, and a few of them will inevitably go off.

This has been happening again and again at an alarming rate,  from multiple debt-driven murder suicides in California, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, and other states to simple suicides in many others.

This afternoon, there was a shooting at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist, who much like the Unabomber was trying to promote his ideology through violent action.  Then a few weeks ago there was the murder of George Tiller, whose shooter didn't really become a terrorist until he threatened that more was to come, that he was just the beginning. 

        The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes.

Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media's attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step's retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism.  Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist's real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can't goad the established authority into striking back. 

It is this retribution that validates the terrorist's ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

Looking at American history, it's tough to argue that white supremacists are going to incite a widespread crackdown by the authorities.  Waco is sometimes pointed to, but that was more of a cult than a white supremacy group.   Arguing that radicalized black Muslims are going to be able to incite a crackdown, now that's a whole lot easier. 

Because take your pick.

Authorities in America have shown a propensity for bringing too heavy a hand against both Muslims and blacks, so it's not much of a stretch to imagine that black Muslims will have a hard time inciting the authorities to bring violence against them. 

Plus there's the fact that neither George Tiller's killer nor today's Holocaust shooter was trying to escape.  They knew full well going into their attacks that they were going to be caught, and were content going down shooting.  Not the case with either instance of violence by fundamentalist black Muslims.  In the purest sense, George Tiller's murderer didn't really become a terrorist until  a few days after the attack when he threatened that more violence against other abortion doctors was coming, and the Holocaust shooter didn't become one until hate messages and an anti-minority rant were found in his car.

The NYC cell had no intention of getting caught as they no idea their apparent terrorist liaison was really an FBI informant, and Abdulhakim Muhammad was only stopped after he was pulled over by the police, with all evidence pointing to the fact he was bent on continuing his spree.  And the NYC cell wasn't stopped because the FBI took action, they only closed out their sting after the four terrorists finally decided it was time to get their hands on some C-4 and plant it at a local synagogues. 

After over a year of interaction with the FBI informant, why did they choose the moment they did to finally act?  Was it random?  Or did it have something to do with deepening economic crisis, and the fact that the unemployment rate for African-American males is now almost twice the national average? 

Even before the current crisis, in 1995 the wealth-gap between black and white was so wide that blacks owned only 8 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites.  Just eight-cents to the dollar.

In other terms,  as of 1998 the average white household's net worth was $100,700 higher than the black average.  And that wasn't even the peak of the gap, according the most recent data, from 2007, the gap in household net worth is now $142,600.

Take a moment to consider that gap.  Your average white American family
has a $140,000 leg up on the average black American family.

These are only the most obvious statistics – like every economic downturn, this one is hitting the poorest of us the hardest.  The sub-prime meltdown has hit the poor, and disproportionately the black poor, much harder than any other segment of our population. The poor have little to no savings, their everyday existence is a tenuous balance between hope and necessity.  And in America, especially within our cities, being black has an extremely high correlation with being poor.

"The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives."

v                                    v                                    v

        California is going to explode.  No state holds all of the necessary ingredients at the same high concentration as California. 

First off, its economy is notoriously hosed, to the point that Arnold is threatening to eliminate welfare, cut pensions, and even close state parks.  There might be other states whose economy is worse off in real terms, but it's hard to actually name one.  Once heralded as a state that in terms of GDP was one of the world's top ten largest economies, California is swiftly closing in on bankruptcy and insolvency.  Tax revenue is now down nearly 20% from last year, leading their Controller to state that California is just 50 days from a complete fiscal meltdown.