Showing posts with label the Solari index. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Solari index. Show all posts

Friday, May 8, 2009

Breaking Neighborhoods For Fun And Profit

(Warning: this post is long.) The masters of the official economy are threatened by self-sufficient, resilient neighborhoods and communities, as these communities don't make a good “growth market” for the products produced by the official economy. People who own their own land and homes outright, who don't have to pay a mortgage, who grow their own food, who provide for their own needs, who live frugally – such people threaten the profit motive of the big growth capitalists. These growth capitalists cannot easily take advantage of people as long as people are self-reliant.

In order therefore to insure “growth,” corporatists must break self-sufficient, resilient neighborhoods and communities. It is only when such social units are broken and the means of self-reliance are taken away that corporatists can make a prey out of the people who comprise such neighborhoods and communities. It is only when fully-paid houses and profitable locally-owned business are wiped out that large developers and big-box stores can continue their expansion. By breaking perfectly good things these corporatists can sell more newly-manufactured things to replace the things that were broken, and they sell the new things at greatly inflated prices.

One of the tools of this breakage is the abuse of eminent domain. “Eminent domain” is defined in Wikipedia as “...the inherent power of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent.” This power has always existed in the United States, being part of the common law inherited from England. However, the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment restricts the Federal government's taking of land to that which is taken for expressly public use.

While the Federal government has always been limited in the purposes for which it could seize or restrict land use, the states were under no such limitation until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1896, the Supreme Court held that the eminent domain provisions of the Fifth Amendment were incorporated into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and were now binding on the states. That meant that the states were prohibited from seizing anyone's property unless that seizure was for a clearly public use, such as a public road or dock or harbor.

That is the concept of eminent domain that most Americans have in their minds today, and it was taught to us from grade-school civics classes and onward. Yet most Americans don't know that this definition is seriously out of date, and has been since before many of us were born. As early as 1954, as cities across the nation struggled to “reduce blight” within their environs, the Supreme Court ruled that the District of Columbia could seize “blighted” properties within designated “slum” areas and transfer these properties to private developers for the purpose of “urban renewal.” This set a precedent for other cities, which engaged in wholesale condemnation and seizure of properties within areas of designated urban blight. These areas were inhabited disproportionately by poor and minority residents, who were displaced and severely disrupted by the seizure of their homes, and who were unable to afford the new dwellings and amenities constructed in these zones as part of “urban renewal.”

This Supreme Court decision allowed cities to redefine taking private property for public use as “taking private property for the public good.” This became the justification for cities seizing homes and other real estate and transferring these properties to other private parties because of some perceived “public benefit” arising from the transfer. This decision kicked off a wave of such seizures, most of which occurred in poor, minority communities targeted for “gentrification” and “urban renewal” by city planners. Homes were seized and razed to make way for expensive condos and upscale shops, among other things. In the state of Kansas, 150 homes were condemned to make way for a racetrack. In Michigan in 1981, the state Supreme Court allowed the demolition of over 1000 homes and 600 businesses in the city of Poletown to make room for a new General Motors plant, in order to serve the “public purpose” of providing jobs and economic growth. The property rights group Institute for Justice found 10,000 cases from 1998 to 2002 of local governments in 41 states using or threatening to use eminent domain to transfer homes and properties from one private owner to another.

One key thing that happened from 1954 onward was that as poor and minority neighborhoods were broken up and redeveloped, cities and powerful business franchises began to seize ever more mainstream houses and neighborhoods – including homes that were increasingly owned by non-minority, educated middle class residents. Many of these people had the financial means to fight the seizure of their property or the declaration of their property or neighborhoods as “blighted.” And fight they did. One notable fight (which unfortunately was lost) was Kelo versus City Of New London, a case between a group of neighborhood residents (including resident Suzanne Kelo, after whom the case was named) and the City of New London, Connecticut, which used eminent domain to seize the homes of these residents in order to transfer the underlying land to a developer for a dollar a year. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that if an economic project creates new jobs, increases tax and other city revenues, and revitalizes a “depressed” (even if not blighted) urban area, then it qualifies as a public use. When the Kelo neighborhood residents appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it ruled 5-4 against them. (Interestingly, this decision was supported by all four of the justices appointed by President Clinton, who supposedly “felt our pain” and was supposed to be for the little guy.)

The Kelo ruling caused quite a backlash and outcry in the U.S., and several states passed laws or ratified changes in their constitution to forbid the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private party to another. However, eminent domain abuse is still alive and is doing quite well even today. A particular case that comes to mind is the City of Fullerton, California.

In the early part of this decade, the neighborhoods near the Fullerton train station were mainly comprised of small older homes typically inhabited by renters. Most of the residents were Hispanic and working-class. But around 2003, that area was targeted for redevelopment as part of the City Council's plan to turn the downtown area into an entertainment/upscale living magnet. Most of the old homes were torn down and replaced by very expensive “townhomes” and loft condo's. Many of the older downtown antique and specialty businesses were replaced by bars and nightclubs. (In fact, I believe the City managed to cram over 40 bars into the space of a few city blocks! Talk about taking a hit to the Solari index!)

I saw the transition as it took place, because there was a time when I had to catch the Metrolink train in Fullerton to get to work. I read of the toll the transition was taking on the non-alcohol-serving downtown businesses and nearby neighborhoods who had to endure the antics of drunken visitors on weekends. I saw increasing numbers of homeless people “from every kindred, tongue and tribe” hanging out at the Starbucks on Harbor Boulevard in hopes of receiving some help from charitable passers-by. I must admit with shame that at the time, I never connected the dots between Fullerton's “redevelopment” and some of the things I was seeing, nor did I question how the City had managed to get hold of the redeveloped land.

Now it seems that this bit of redevelopment was not enough for the City. According to the Fullerton Observer, the City Council was scheduled to vote on the 5th of May on whether to expand the City's redevelopment area by 1,165 acres, thus placing nearly 25 percent of the entire city under its redevelopment agency and its expanded powers to use eminent domain, divert property taxes and subsidize development. (I wonder how the vote went.) Included in this area are properties which do not meet strict definitions of “blight,” as well as several well-known and highly successful niche small businesses like Bob Marriott's Fly Fishing Store. (I almost stopped in there several times when I was living in So. Cal.) By the way, it seems that the City's redevelopment agency is now coming up with some creative definitions of “blight.”

Eminent domain and the threat of redevelopment are used to displace people whose homes are paid for, whose homes are older and thus not subject to high property taxes, and who are in some cases accused of “overcrowding,” as stated by Fullerton Mayor Don Bankhead. Eminent domain and the threat of redevelopment are some of the methods of choice for cities which seek to grow their tax revenues. It is not surprising that the incidence of eminent domain abuse rose with the recent real estate and construction bubbles in the American economy.

But the abuse of eminent domain is a direct threat to the building of households, neighborhoods and communities that are resilient in the face of the social shocks now arising from Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse. For the building of such resilience and of alternative safety nets depends on having a stable and guaranteed place to live. The threat of foreclosure and the worry of indebtedness are already enough of a destabilizing force without the threat of some municipality taking property from its citizens in order to increase its tax revenues or satisfy some big business. The problem of eminent domain abuse must therefore be forcefully addressed by residents of neighborhoods and communities that seek to become resilient. Otherwise, why create a permaculture garden in your backyard or form a neighborhood barter network if you and your neighbors are at constant risk of being thrown out of your homes? Why take in displaced relatives if doing so will expose your home to seizure on account of “overcrowding”?

One last note: Some members of the “libertarian” camp have jumped on the “Down With Eminent Domain!” bandwagon. But they have a devious agenda: they seek to define “eminent domain abuse” as the placing of any restriction on land use by any government agency. According to this definition, restrictions on land use arising from environmental protection concerns would be classed as “eminent domain abuse.” I thoroughly disagree with such a definition. In my opinion, it is bogus and childish. I firmly believe that to the extent that people legitimately own property at all, they must realize that they “own” it only as a trust and stewardship, and that their use of their land affects others even when those others don't live on the same land. Therefore I thought Oregon's Measure 37 was a huge mistake, as it allowed a bunch of greedy landowners and developers an opportunity to try to turn Oregon into another Southern California – strip malls, freeways and housing tracts from one end to the other. I was glad when Measure 49 passed. (In fact, I voted for it.) I also support environmentally responsible restrictions on land use.

Sources:

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Saturday, April 11, 2009

Homeboy Culture And The Solari Index

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2007, I immediately noticed one difference between Portland and Southern California from whence I had come: the almost complete absence of “gangsta” graffiti. The rare graffiti I did see was almost entirely political – much of it quirky and quaintly humorous.

Over the last year and a half, that has changed. There has been an explosion of graffiti in our city during that time, and most of the new stuff is not political. Instead, it's a tired repeat of the same things I saw in So. Cal. – homeboys and “wanna-be” homeboys marking out their turf in destructive ways, much like cats marking their territory with their own urine. The City of Portland has a webpage with a link to a document titled, “How to Read Graffiti And What To Do,” describing the various types of graffiti now showing up everywhere in the city (http://www.portlandonline.com/index.cfm?mode=search&search_action=SearchResults). According to that document, gang-related graffiti now accounts for 15 percent of all graffiti in Portland, although that percentage is growing. (“Tagger” graffiti comprises almost all of the rest.) The document also states that most of this gang graffiti is now done by Hispanic/Latino/Latina gangs and gang “wanna-be's.” Curiously, the document does not mention the obvious link between gang graffiti and tagger graffiti.

This graffiti can be found on the usual public structures such as signs and freeway barriers, but it is also being applied to private buildings such as company offices and storefronts. Here's the kicker: some taggers are now putting their mark on private residential property, such as front yard fences, houses and vehicles. I'm sure these taggers are not asking the permission of the owners of said property beforehand.

This says something about the mindset and culture of these people, namely, that they can't feel comfortable living in a place unless they have had a chance to make it ugly and dangerous. Graffiti is the first step toward turning a place into a ground of armed battle – battle over things that are really stupid and insignificant, desperate attempts by gangbangers to provide themselves with an identity. That identity is not built around a worthwhile personhood devoted to making one's place a better place or becoming a productive member of one's society, but rather toward doing one's best to tear things apart – toward becoming known as the biggest, baddest nihilist (though most gangbanger wanna-be's can't even spell “nihilist,” let alone tell what it means). Gangstas and wanna-be's don't care if the things they deface are not their own things – in fact, it's more fun to destroy someone else's things, whether those things are publicly (i.e., taxpayer) owned infrastructure or privately owned buildings, houses and neighborhoods, or human lives.

Who is responsible for creating this culture? There are two answers to that question, I suppose. On the one hand, one can say that gangbangers are fully responsible for their actions, having knowingly chosen things that are wrong and evil, and that one day they will have to answer fully for their actions. There is a level on which that is certainly true. This should be a cause of great fear for gang members, if they are thinking with clear heads – namely, that one day, they will stand in ultimate judgment for every piece of defaced property; every stupid, senseless fight; every neighborhood ruined by senseless violence; everyone killed over gang signs, gang colors, ethnicity or other stupid reasons; every wounded or killed innocent bystander; every attacked outsider; everyone who was ever pressured by a gang peer group to do something criminal.

Yet gang members are not thinking with clear heads; if they were, they wouldn't be gang members. Gangs are dysfunctional groups that attract dysfunctional people. They are symptoms of a larger dysfunctional society. In my post, “Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods,” I described the “Solari Index” as a measure of how safe and healthy a neighborhood is for its residents, and I described how certain wealthy interests outside the American minority community were doing things that lowered the Solari index of minority neighborhoods in order to make money. The problems caused by this, and the culture that results, have become the emblems of minority culture in America. But a further problem is now becoming apparent – that the dysfunctional culture of the American 'hood has now burst out of the 'hood to infect the rest of America and the world.

It can be seen in places as far-flung as Sudan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6915187.stm), and Britain, for instance, where over the last few years there have been incidents of gang-related gun violence and where in 2004, a well-known black personality on British TV criticized gangsta street culture as a “deadly virus” destroying a generation of African-Caribbean boys. According to a Guardian news article, the TV sportscaster, Garth Crooks, said “...there was a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black boys away from education and into crime and violence.” (Source: “Gangsta Culture A Deadly Virus, Says Top TV Presenter,” UK Guardian, 12 September 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/sep/12/schools.society)

As drug use in American minority communities was partly boosted by CIA and Federal involvement during the 1980's and 1990's, I'd like to suggest that gang culture in America is being driven by forces outside that culture, in order to enrich certain powerful growth capitalists. The drivers of that culture include all the usual suspects, namely poverty, exploitation and gross material inequality. But I want to focus on two huge drivers of that culture: the prison-industrial complex and the entertainment (or “content”) industry.

It's fairly easy to trace the role of the prison-industrial complex in the growth of American gangsta culture. As the prison “industry” has lobbied for ever-tougher laws and punishments for ever more trivial offenses, the result has been an explosion of the American prison population. This has meant more jobs for prison administrators, staff, guards, and so forth, as well as more contracts for architectural and engineering firms who design these prisons. But it also means that one out of every 31 Americans is now in jail. One out of every 31 Americans is now being exposed to and shaped by a corrosive institutional culture in which gangs are prominent. One out of every 31 Americans will one day come home to a family that has been disrupted by that one individual's incarceration. Many of those families will have kids on whom the culture of the lockup will rub off.

The corrections “industry” has influenced the American judicial system to prey on minority communities first of all. But the corrections “industry” is a growth industry, like all industries in our global economy. Its success is measured in capturing market share and growing the bottom line as measured each quarter. Therefore, it can't remain static. It grows exponentially, as expressed thus:

Corrections Industry Growth = Aex

Those who want to grow it want really high growth rates, rates that are usually higher than the rate of population growth, so that they can get rich really quick. This can be expressed thus:

Corrections Industry Growth Aex > General Population Growth Bey

This means that this industry is branching out beyond the minority community in its search for people to throw in prison. They're probably already looking for poor non-minority candidates for lock-up. Who knows? Maybe soon they'll be looking for formerly well-off people who can't pay their bills. They'll encounter ever more surprised fish as they move up the food chain. We may get to see what sort of culture emerges when a large percentage of America is thrown in the slammer.

Then there's the entertainment industry. I don't have nearly the time to trace all of the “urban-themed” entertainment now being marketed to impressionable American youth, but I suspect that it's quite a lot – from the rap, gangsta, hip-hop and other “urban” music, radio and music videos to the gang-themed movies. As I write this, Slumdog Millionaire comes to mind – not only because it shows how pervasively American hood culture has infected the rest of the world, but because the producer, Celador (now wholly owned by Sony Pictures) couldn't even make a movie about a non-Anglo country and culture without injecting American trash culture into it. Now Summit Entertainment is releasing yet another “urban” film, Next Day Air, with black people in all the settings customary to such a film – raunchy comedy, drugs, guns, and sex. There are even gang-themed video games for Microsoft's Xbox and Sony Playstation!

The trouble with all of this is that it's being marketed to an ever-younger audience. The self-imposed industry rating systems are a joke, as they are meant much more to protect the movie industry from strong regulation than to actually protect young kids from trash. The content industry says that consumers of its content are assumed to be responsible consumers who can properly process the unwholesome parts of the content they consume. But this is not the case with young kids whose powers of discernment are not only not yet developed, but are actively being short-circuited by ads for harmful movies and other content. The content industry says that its movies, TV and other offerings are not contributing to a general breakdown of society. But anyone who watches young kids acting out the “entertainment” they now see and hear knows that this is a lie.

The continued creation and strengthening of gang culture in the U.S. will be an impediment to the efforts of citizens to create local, resilient communities that can weather the effects of economic collapse, resource constraints and climate change. All of these threats will be difficult enough to handle without having to worry about dysfunctional people trying to tear down whatever anyone tries to build up, all for the sake of “keepin' it real.”

For Further Reading

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Saturday, February 28, 2009

Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods

(Warning: This post is long.) Non-minority, middle- to upper-middle class families are the media's frequent focus nowadays when discussing struggling neighborhoods, households and families in the context of our present economic crisis and the challenge posed by Peak Oil. This is seen in recent news articles such as the New York Times piece titled, “You Try To Live on 500K in This Town”; the CNN stories titled, “Bad Economy? Do What You Love,” and “From Beverly Hills To Shoveling Manure On A Farm”; the Colorado Springs Gazette piece titled, “Youth Hockey Surviving Economic Crunch”; and the CBS Evening News story titled, “One Family's Recession – How A Single Family's Life Is Shifting Amid A Slumping Economy.”

These stories and others like them have common elements: namely, how affluent, usually blond, educated suburbanite and high-class urbanite families are coping, financially, psychologically and interpersonally with being forced by present circumstances to give up some of the more optional parts of their lives. Some stories chronicle the mental and emotional processes some of these individuals go through in discovering that things formerly considered to be “necessities” are, in fact, optional. And these stories are all uniformly told in warm, sensitive, empathetic tones by the American mainstream media.

But there is another, less-noticed segment of the American population that is getting absolutely slammed by the present economic collapse. Even before the collapse, their lives were lived precariously exposed above an unforgiving economic landscape lacking any safety net. Many of these people are people of color. Most of them would dearly love to trade their present lives for the supposed struggle of “trying” to live in a place like New York City for “only” $500K a year. The stories of most of these people are not covered by the mainstream media. These are the citizens of our least resilient neighborhoods, who lack the capital needed to recover from even the smallest crisis. I'd like to begin in some small way to tell their story now. My story has paralleled their story at significant times in my life. I will speak from the point of view of the black American community, since I am black, although the processes which have existed for a long time in the black community are now working everywhere.

While Men Slept...

The American civil rights struggle of the 1950's and 1960's was a landmark time that yielded important victories for black people struggling against murderous racism. Those victories included the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation; the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the first appearances of black men and women in intelligent roles in TV and film. Great legislative and judicial strides were made at the Federal level to render both de jure and de facto segregation illegal, and these were followed by affirmative action programs to redress the evils caused by the old segregationist laws and social arrangements.

During the 1970's, however, some voices began to make premature declarations that “We've made great strides! Surely America has risen above its ugly past. The civil rights struggle is over!” And in the 1980's, certain individuals and groups began stating that affirmative action was no longer needed, having accomplished its purpose. Some of these people even initiated lawsuits designed to end affirmative action in higher education and hiring for government jobs. Such declarations of a successful end to the civil rights struggle served to dull the awareness of the nation and to put everyone – black people included – to sleep. But the truth is that affirmative action had not gone nearly far enough in rectifying the inequalities between the American black community and the rest of American society.

The secret dismantling

By 1970, many of the gains made by black America were already beginning to be dismantled. Some elements of that dismantling were deliberate, but others were simply a consequence of the general re-ordering of American society due to changing economic conditions.

To understand the re-ordering, remember that the 1960's were the period of the last great expansion of industrial/manufacturing activity in the United States. This resulted in increased demand for skilled manufacturing employees and an increased number of openings for highly-paid manufacturing jobs. This increase in demand occurred at the same time as the strongest and most visible pushes were being made by those in the civil rights movement for equal access to jobs. Black workers were concentrated most heavily in those cities whose manufacturing base was expanding and where the demand for skilled manufacturing workers was greatest. And skilled, highly-paid manufacturing jobs were a key rung on the ladder of advancing material well-being, since such jobs could be used to pay for things like home ownership and college education.

However, the 1970's saw the reversal of manufacturing in the United States, the outsourcing of manufacturing overseas, and the beginning of the transformation of the American economy into a “service” economy. This coincided with the peak and resulting decline in American oil production and was partly caused by that peak. While this transformation devastated many communities, especially cities that depended on local industry, it was especially hard on the black community, since so many black workers had begun to rely on skilled, highly-paid manufacturing jobs as a means of climbing the ladder of advancement, and now this rung was being taken out from under them.

There was also the dismantling of enforcement of equal opportunity legislation and judicial rulings. The United States Equal Opportunity Employment Commission was created via the 1964 Civil Rights Act championed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and passed by Congress. As originally created, the EEOC was a rather toothless body incapable of any real enforcement. But surprisingly, it was President Nixon who proposed giving the EEOC the power to file discrimination suits against companies on behalf of citizens. This power was granted by Congress in the early 1970's. And President Carter further amplified the power and scope of the EEOC.

But President Reagan sought to dismantle the EEOC, changing it from being an activist champion of equal employment to being merely a rubber-stamp approver of a status quo enacted by the private sector. Reagan packed the EEOC with appointees who believed that government was the problem in modern society and not the solution to problems. He also slashed more than 10 percent from the EEOC budget during his first years. This dismantling of minority protection was continued under President Bush (the Elder) from 1989 to 1992, as noted in a Chicago Sun-Times article from 1992 which documented Senate hearings in which plaintiffs described the poor performance of the EEOC under the chairmanship of Bush appointee Evan Kemp (who was a champion of the disabled, by the way).

Although funding increased modestly under President Clinton, the Clinton-appointed EEOC chair channeled a large proportion of discrimination claims to binding arbitration instead of more aggressive action, and encouraged a large number of plaintiffs to settle with their employers instead of investigating their complaints. And the administration of President Bush (the Younger) resulted in a loss of 20 percent of EEOC staff from 2000 to 2006, constant calls by President Bush to cut the EEOC budget, and a swelling of the EEOC's case backlog to over 40,000 in 2007. In 2008, when Congress approved an appropriations bill that would have increased the EEOC budget by $50 million more than the President's request, Bush threatened to veto it.

This dismantling of protections and the assertion that such protections were not needed also extended to housing, where studies performed in the 1980's showed clearly that housing discrimination still existed. A Washington Post article from 1993 described the “collapse” in HUD enforcement of anti-bias policies at the national and regional levels. This set the stage for the present sub-prime crisis as experienced by the minority community.

Present Threats To The Minority Community

There are three main threats menacing the minority community at present. The first is the economic victimization which exists because of the dismantling of government protections. That victimization is via predatory lending practices leading to foreclosures and loss of home ownership in minority neighborhoods, as well as ongoing job discrimination. In 2005 and 2006, over 50 percent of all loans made to black Americans, and over 40 percent to Latinos were subprime, as opposed to only 19 percent of white borrowers. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan recently stated on National Public Radio that a black American earning more than $100,000 was more likely than a white person who earned less than $35,000 to be put into a high cost, subprime loan.

These loans carried “exploding” adjustable rates and high prepayment penalties which made them impossible to refinance. These loans were also made by brokers who received kickbacks from lenders for selling subprime loans. And they were often made with the expectation that the lender would sooner or later be able to make money through repossession and resale of a borrower's house. In other words, these loans were designed to fail. The most damnable aspect of these loans was that many of these loans were not marketed to people wanting to buy McMansions, but were marketed as a way for first-time borrowers with existing mortgages to save money on monthly payments through refinancing or as a means to finance home improvements.

Now these loans have begun to bear their poisonous fruit, people are being thrown out of their homes, and these homes sit vacant or are vandalized, or are targeted for demolition to make way for “redevelopment” and “gentrification” to provide new opportunities for builders, lenders and realtors to make money.

The second threat to the minority community comes from the war on drugs and the disproportionate incarceration that has resulted from it. The war on drugs as originally conceived by President Nixon was a genuine attempt to halt the spread of drug use in the United States, and it relied on treatment as its first weapon. But that war took on a different character under President Reagan, who made mandatory sentencing one of his weapons of choice, and who signed a drug enforcement bill with provisions deliberately written to favor harsher sentencing of minorities. This was done deviously, by such things as imposing more lenient sentencing guidelines for the use of powdered cocaine (preferred by white users) versus crack cocaine (preferred by black users). As a result of this bias (perpetuated through the Clinton and Bush presidencies), in 2006 black Americans made up an estimated 15 percent of drug users, but accounted for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Even now in places like Portland, Oregon, black men are more likely than white or Hispanic men to be stopped, arrested, jailed and sentenced to prison for the same offense.

But there is also evidence that the Federal government took an active role in promoting drug use in the black community, in part to fund covert operations to overthrow governments hostile to American business interests. This evidence was first presented by journalists on behalf of the Christic Institute in 1986, and was corroborated in an investigation by Senator John Kerry in 1988, as well as by journalist Gary Webb in 1996 reports in the San Jose Mercury News. Further corroboration comes from a 1998 report published by CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz, as well as the writings of Catherine Austin-Fitts, who also wrote of the efforts of the Clinton Administration to suppress this evidence.

The third threat to minority communities comes from gangs and gang culture. Undoubtedly there is a home-grown element to this culture, as evidenced in the “Soul Patrol” I encountered in my younger days. This “Soul Patrol” consists of belligerent young black men who attack any black person whom they consider to be acting too “white”. “Acting white” is defined as speaking intelligently, working hard, trying to educate oneself, or showing an interest in anything other than hanging out, chasing women, or “getting over” on the system. Later I discovered that other ethnic groups have their own version of the “Soul Patrol.” This “Soul Patrol” mentality directly reinforces the present gang culture. But the times now facing us will demand that all of us function as productive and useful members of society, regardless of ethnic background. Those who refuse, who choose instead to be homeboys keepin' it real, may find themselves facing a backlash from the productive citizens of our society.

Yet I have to wonder sometimes if the present reinforcement of gang culture is coming entirely from within the minority community. Just as the drug problem in the minority community is being sustained by forces outside that community, I suspect that the same thing may be true of gang culture. I think especially of the popularization and promotion of gangsta, hip-hop and other “urban” culture in the mainstream media, which continues to reinforce a dysfunctional stereotype of “cool” blackness that sells, yet has nothing to do with reality. But researching and developing that hypothesis is a subject for another day.

Fostering Resilience

One measure of neighborhood resilience is “the Solari Index,” a simple metric devised by Catherine Austin-Fitts to describe how safe, healthy and liveable a neighborhood is. Ms. Fitts also points out in her writings that extremely powerful and rich interests have made a great deal of money from the business of breaking neighborhoods. Minority neighborhods have been the historical targets of choice for breakage, though the appetite of the rich and powerful has expanded to the point where they are breaking any neighborhood whose breakage might yield a profit.

Building resilient neighborhoods therefore consists of devising effective defenses against breakage, repairing the culture of the neighborhoods and fostering neighborhood self-sufficiency. I will explore these elements in further posts, God willing.

Links To Sources:

Concerning How The Affluent Are “Coping” with Recession

Concerning Black Economic Progress, Home Ownership, Predatory Lending and “Steering”

Concerning U.S. Federal Government Civil Rights Protection

Concerning Drugs, Gangs and the Solari Index

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