Part Two of the Ferguson Chronicles is at:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61495


 

Before we start I might recommend that you take a look at my "Let's Talk About Race: What are the Facts." on this site at:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61331&authorid=121255

It takes a look at race and discrimination in an historical context and goes into these issues across thousands of years.

But now in this article to become a book I take the Ferguson situation as a current example.

First let’s have look at examples of the press coverage.

Racism As A Tax and Profit Center and Feeding Off The Poor.

The Ferguson city budget: Note the increase in traffic fines revenue: up 23% over three years, more than any other item in the budget except capital. Why?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/22/ferguson-s-shameful-legal-shakedown-three-warrants-a-year-per-household.html

http://www.fergusoncity.com/DocumentCenter/View/1609

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/19/us-usa-missouri-shooting-tickets-insight-idUSKBN0GJ2CB20140819

Profiting from crime

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/chaunceydevega/profits-racism-coward-darren-wilson-who-killed-michael-brown-has-now-raised?paging=off&current_page=1

Imagine Life As A Poor Person: White or Black

You get up in the morning and you have no job, can't get one because you had a traffic warrant, were stopped and frisked, it went to warrant, you could not pay the fine, and went to jail: spent time, got out and now can't vote, and can't get a job.

You have to shop in stores (if you can find one close to you) that overcharges you for inferior goods at prices above what whites nearby pay for the same goods. That hurts your, slim or non-existent, budget.

You pay higher rent on your apartment which is not maintained by the local slumlord because he/she can get away with it. You got rats, black mold, peeling wall paper, bad toilets and nobody does anything; and you are told "you people live like animals."

Your kids go to schools which are sub-standard and under-funded by even with the property taxes you pay, much of that goes to white schools and do not return to your district to benefit your schools. This means no computers, substitute teachers, low reading, math and SAT scores and unsuccessful college applications.

So What Is Your Day Like?

You send your kids off to school in the morning where drug dealers await them on the corners and you wonder where are they getting the money to buy the drugs to sell to your kids. People in the ghetto don't have the money to finance huge drugs deals and get to get the drugs to the ghetto. You wonder why the police don't stop your community from being flooded by these cheap drugs, wonder why they don't stop looters but can stop peaceful protesters, can't stop the local city council from zoning in and making possible a liquor store on every corner in your neighbor, but this doesn't happen in white neighborhoods, wonder and marvel that in these stop and frisk situations the police take your bag of grass and use it to plant on the next stop and frisk person, or sell it to make money for themselves, and above all, you realize the cops want to see high crime rates high and looting for television because it means more overtime for themselves and bigger police budgets and medals for stopping "crime."
You kid goes out the door to a sub-standard school where there are state mandated vaccinations and you are aware blacks have been used as guinea pigs over the years and you know birth defects in your community are higher than other communities. And, you have to let your children eat the "free" lunches because you can't afford to feed them sometimes and you wonder what is in the food and you know that school lunch and food stamp programs are profit centers administered by Chase Bank.

http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/65411347291/corporate-welfare-jp-morgan-chase-has-made

High confidence there.

You see your kids exposed to untreated mental health cases because the state facilities have all been closed. Your elderly can't go to nursing homes because the price is too high: you see doctors give up on your grandmother and she dies where she should have lived, perhaps, because black life is not valued.
You can't get a car loan at a reasonable interest rate because of warrants and redlining; ditto on credit cards, and if you or someone you love dies, you can't even afford the funeral and often can't even get the body, because doctors and the police don't want autopsies done because they could be sued over what they have done or not done.

Have I mentioned the polluted environment and neighborhoods, you have to live in, next to refineries, dumps, toxic and city?

Unmarried you pay higher state and local taxes than married whites do.

You pay a higher proportion of your income in a retrograde sales tax structure and property taxes where your home equity is degraded because of many of these factors where your neighborhood has been redlined scaring whites into flight--a fact that only benefits real estate agents and the banks- who make a killing on this turnover-at your expense.


You pay more for car insurance, if you can get it, based on your zip code, traffic fines and warrants, so even driving to a job interview can be risky and expensive, especially since the cops have booked you and are now on the look-out for you. Spotting you they can make up any excuse for stopping you, they frisk, search etc. and the merry go around begins again.

Now the justice system and the cops run on this revenue, not to mention the attorneys, yours or the court-appointed one, blood with-drawers, etc. all of this is fed on the backs of the poor; people's jobs depend upon a steady stream of this revenue, and the cops know it. They have quotas on stops. Yes they do.

Did I mention driving schools, the DMV itself feeds on you as well?

Here is an example from Missouri webpage.

http://www.dmv.org/mo-missouri/traffic-tickets.php#Insurance-Rate-Increases

Most likely you end up homeless, living at mom's house, or five to an apartment. You see your sister, aunt or even your own mother prostitute to help pay the bills. It is organized, enforced degradation; a race tax.

Media Pile-On
On TV you see yourself 99% of the time portrayed as a drug dealer, dangerous, and preying upon whites, poor, jobless, where why that should be so is never discussed or elucidated.

More importantly, how all this is enforced daily is never discussed or illuminated, until at some point you start to believe this media propaganda yourself. And when your kid asks you "why do they hate us so?" you don't have an answer.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2722613/African-Americans-Twitter-protest-media-s-portrayal-black-people-wake-police-killing-teenager-Michael-Brown-iftheygunnedmedown-hashtag.html

Meantime, White Life is all valley girls, prom dresses, "orange is the new black" and vacations in Greece.

You try for medical care but that is difficult so you end up with unattended to health problems, see friends and relatives dying young, from police bullets or those very same health problems, and you get bitter.

If you or your son or daughter does find a job it is a McDonald's job and pays very little.

There are no unions to help you get ahead in life.

The national government does little to help and even when federal funds come in they go the police department in tanks and guns, and even funds earmarked for the poor are skimmed by the city and state and the money is largely used to get themselves re-elected and to provide jobs for their relatives and friends. Highway funds and jobs only go to whites, ditto for school fundings, you name it.

Try to vote them out and you face voter suppression schemes which are increasingly endorsed by the Supreme Court of the United States. Now even local elections have huge amounts of outside money coming in especially for candidates running for local justice and judicial posts.

The police, the police, are there every day, like an occupying army. Standing outside your own house you are told to move on, or get down on the sidewalk, and if you dare question the officer you are charged with resisting arrest, and now another series of warrants and perhaps back to jail, because you can't pay the heavy fines. You don't have the money for a lawyer to help and court appointed attorneys work for the prosecutor.

Then you find out the city has spent thousands on surveillance equipment, a lot of it in your neighborhood to "fight crime" but is really part of a traffic "spy for cash" program where a city like Ferguson makes 2.6 million dollars a year doing this, the second largest source of income increase in their budget, all this is paying for white cops and "civil servants" that don't live in your neighborhood and are, for you an occupying army, if you protest, they dominate the so-called justice system where a cop is seldom indicted, or charged for murdering black men, children and women.

These stop and frisk programs have proven to be ineffective in reducing crime and mostly benefit the police in terms of scaring citizens in increasing their budgets and their armor and guns, not to mention overtime. Yes, over time is where many police department folks make their money. This is a perverse incentive.

Stop and Frisk Not effective in NY city:

http://rt.com/usa/181976-stop-frisk-ineffective-guns/

On top of it all these cops are paid for by your taxes because the majority of property taxes in Ferguson are paid for by its black residents.

Then, if you protest, you are called "an animal" and besieged by tanks, tear gas and the national guard, (which you also pay for with your taxes.)

If, by some miracle, you overcome all these obstacles, and you graduate from high school, you find that college is not affordable, even if you could find one that would take you, you have to take on thousands of dollars in debt because your mom and dad took on sub-prime debt to get you to that point and Wall Street took the house they had paid for years, back. Gone. Scammed; often forced into bankruptucy.

The City you live in has also been scammed by Wall Street and mom or dads, pensions will not be paid out as planned; that even their savings over the last ten years has earned only 1% percent interest, wall street, literally stole the money.

Even if you get through college and by some miracle you graduate you can't get a job when you get out, except maybe at McDonald's which is threatening to put in robot cooks if you try to unionize.

You and your family, if you have one, has to live on 75$ a week.

"Don't mess with me now because I am close to the edge" to paraphrase the song.

Meantime, white racists cruise the streets carrying arms, threatening, seeming crazy for a racist war to pump bullets into you and yours, and you complain to your local officials and they do nothing.

Ferguson cop speaks out "rabid dog" comment

http://rt.com/usa/182284-police-ferguson-insult-protesters/

http://rt.com/usa/181924-ferguson-officer-kill-protesters/

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26063-time-to-get-rid-of-racist-policing-in-the-united-states

New video of killing a second black man

http://rt.com/usa/181772-deadly-st-louis-shooting-video/

Under the stress you feel bad about not being able to support your family, even date a girl, because you don't have the money, a car, or a job, you decide to sell some pot just to feed the family, help with stress, and they stop and frisk you and give you 15 years.

You sit in stir and think about the fact that whites don't even know about all this, yet benefit from this system, and don't want to know about it and if you complain in prison, it is 10 years of solitary confinement.

All through this you are told to pray, don't go to violence, be patient and call your congressman.

This new Jim Crow in America, this is slow genocide, and Americakkk.

This is how you feel.

Angry? Yeah. Angry.

12 Things White People And Others Can Do About Ferguson

Few in the white tribe will speak out fearing retribution from other members of the white tribe family or friends. If you don't think so check out face book entries on this topic.

Here one that did speak out.

http://www.nationofchange.org/justice-ginsburg-america-has-real-racial-problem-1408803839

Months later what happens to the cop who did the shooting?

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/heres-what-happens-police-officers-who-shoot-unarmed-black-men

Then if you starting reading you find out that it is indeed not just a one city problem but a country-wide pattern and fits into a global pattern. You start to realize that it is a global system that is being built and is a coordinated one.

Red Light Camera World Wide- Making cameras and the law pay. Increasing taxes and revenue the traffic way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera

Who is running this locally and worldwide?

See:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=59847&authorid=121255

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-ultra-rich-01-have-sucked-even-more-americas-wealth-you-think?akid=12158.260128.WpCMfI&rd=1&src=newsletter1016531&t=4

Allan Watt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GArlDpwvFhc


Mega-Bucks Traffic Fines and Revenue For Cities

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/08/18/ferguson_police_department_the_economic_incentives_that_make_cops_harass.html

http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/are-cities-agressively-looking--at-traffic-fines-for-revenue

http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2011/10/19/town-that-lived-off-speeding-tickets/

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/02/10/speeding-parking-tickets-on-rise-as-government-revenue-source/

The Fort Worth Example:

"In the Fort Worth area alone, roughly 400,000 of tickets are issued for Class C misdemeanors, traffic violations and parking citations annually. Recent data shows that nearly 850,000 tickets were handed out since January of 2008, and 125,000 of them resulted in the issuance of bench warrants. Considering the amount of uncollected fees, fines and court costs associated with those unpaid tickets and the warrants themselves, the city is waiting on nearly $80 million of payments. The situation is almost as dire in nearby Arlington; that city has over 100,000 active warrants stemming from unpaid citations. The economic impact of non-payment of these bills extends beyond the city governments themselves; the state of Texas receives a portion of all recovered fees, so they are adding fuel to the fire, pressing cities to make more aggressive collection efforts."

From:

http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/are-cities-agressively-looking--at-traffic-fines-for-revenue

http://www.diversityinc.com/news/history-racially-charged-violence/

8/23/14

6.2 billion in speeding ticket  as of 7/14? Is this a racket? This does not even count warrants, fines and the rest. Feed off the poor and now the middle class and the  out-of-town driver.

The System Is Predatory And Parasitic Against The Poor, And Makes Money Off Their Poverty.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/driving-citation-statistics/

"Many of the protesters described their frustrations with a system that locks people up for unpaid parking tickets. Despite having just over 21,000 residents, Ferguson issued over 32,000 arrest warrants for non-violent offenses — most of them driving violations — in 2013."

From:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/28/in-ferguson-a-sense-of-no_n_5732502.html

8/26/14

More on the Probation Spiral And Civil Forfeiture

After the warrants comes the probation spiral. Once in the system the justice system wants to keep you there.

The rules are:

1. One mistake and more fines. Five minutes late and they lock the court room doors and you can't get in and get "a failure to appear" and another warrant and more fines. You have trouble getting there, it is often at a place you don't know, their paper work requires faxing, a computer, a home printer, Wi-Fi and you don't have ready access to these; all this designed to trip you up.
 

There is endless paperwork because so many agencies want to get their share of the loot; from judges, police, probation, social work, prison, DMV, attorneys, prosecutors, court-appointed attorneys, lots and lots of people live off those fines.

2. Break any of the myriad rules and the same: more fines; probation officer etc. all designed to keep you in the system because the ultimate goal is jail. destruction of the individual, of family and jobs for the justice system people. This happens all over America and in most the West as well.

3. On probation, if you get stopped, the cops have the right to confiscate, repeat confiscate your car, your goods, anything they can get their hands on. Repeat: anything, which they sell to get money for their own salaries.
 
4. If you can't pay you go to jail. This is, in effect, the re-creation of debtor prisons. The poor today, the middle class tomorrow.

Not in America you say?

Take a look:
Debtor Imprisonment in the United States

https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/debtors-prisons

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/28/local-courts-reviving-debtors-prison-for-overdue-fines-fees/
 

"Advocates are trying to convince courts that aside from the legal questions surrounding the practice, it is disproportionately jailing poor people and doesn't even boost government revenues -- in fact, governments lose money in the process. 

"It's a waste of taxpayer resources, and it undermines the integrity of the justice system," Carl Takei, staff attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project, told FoxNews.com. 

"The problem is it's not actually much of a money-making proposition ... to throw people in jail for fines and fees when they can't afford it. If counties weren't spending the money jailing people for not paying debts, they could be spending the money in other ways." 

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law released a”

Tool Kit for Action

“in 2012 that broke down the cost to municipalities to jail debtors in comparison with the amount of old debt it was collecting. It doesn't look like a bargain. For example, according to the report, Mecklenburg County, N.C., collected $33,476 in debts in 2009, but spent $40,000 jailing 246 debtors -- a loss of $6,524"

 What the writer doesn't understand is that the payoff in Ohio at least goes under the table to judges, in the famous "cash for kids" scandals in that state. Who was paying off the judges, the private prison system because they make money by filling those jail beds?

Probation Profiling

http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/profiling-for-dui-offenders/vCpyNH/

See: The Scandal of Civil Forfeiture

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=59408&authorid=121255

The Impounding Scam

http://ay.gy/rVEIo

"When events like the Michael Brown shooting occur that inflame people and motivate them to take to the streets to protest, we are reminded that there is not justice for all in America. We must also acknowledge and condemn the daily injustices born of a system that slowly grinds down the people who can least afford it, and, in too many cases to count, leads to their early death. In the line at the San Francisco impound lot; I overheard the crying woman ahead of me telling the clerk, “I need my car to get home to my children.” The clerk responded, “I wish I could
help you, ma’am, but if you don’t have the money, there’s nothing I can do.”

Impounding: A Nation-Wide Money-Maker for Cities?

http://www.wave3.com/story/12773921/city-revenue-from-towing-cars-skyrockets


http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Car-Impounds-to-Be-Debated-140715003.html

http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/profiling-for-dui-offenders/vCpyNH/

If a white person tries to help you, and is riding in the same car, it is a guarantee you will be pulled over. Discipline of whites social and legal is common, a warning to them not to help you or be seen with you.  

If you drive in a white neighborhood you are a target; period. On the freeways passing white areas, at night, cops shine lights into the cars to spot black drivers, to intimidate them into never coming back that way again. To be seen in a white neighborhood is to be stopped and intimidated or worse.

The sad fact is that most blacks never leave their neighborhoods and seldom travel more than 25 miles from their home. There is a reason for that. So they are trapped in their neighborhoods, no car, and grocery owners know this and charge them more. That is why there is so much animosity against immigrant store owners because their prices are higher and this is not just because they are small (see dollar stores) it is because you sooner or later sense the exploitation immobility allows.

If you get a car, a nice car, you immediately become a target, suspected of having stolen it. The truth is that country- wide 95% of all these stops produce no evidence of crime, that is if the local police force keeps statistics and if they do, those statistics cannot be trusted.

Whites are constantly in the press, being propagandized so they fall silent at injustices, thinking, "it is probably true and/or simply afraid to speak out, because of hatred coming their way from their own white tribe. But many depend upon that the income from all of this and don't want to speak out against their own interests.

What a country.

Trying escape all this by joining the military is not a solution. You get put in harm’s way as matter of course, and are asked to go off overseas and kill Asians, Iraqis, or whomever, to bring to them the benefits of Democracy.

What a country,

8/25/14

John Oliver Video on Ferguson

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/18/6030265/john-oliver-ferguson-monologue

Daily Show on Ferguson

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ufqeuz/race-off

]
 Next we do:

Gentrification, Politics and Leadership and the Prison Industrial Complex

 Meantime see:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/get-out-of-jail-inc

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/the-us-incarceration-system-ruins-the-lives-of-the-poor-and-favors-the-wealthy

Celebrities and Ferguson who has spoken out and who took the ice bucket challenged?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/19/middlebrow-ferguson-ice-bucket_n_5692645.html

A Compendium of Coverage

http://ibw21.org/ferguson/

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/105979

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/26/343484238/a-map-to-the-roots-of-fergusons-civic-unrest

 8/26/14

The Attack Upon The Military Poor, the Middle Class and the Poor
 

First let’s look at the Military on Food Stamps

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/25807-about-620000-military-families-rely-on-food-pantries-to-meet-basic-needs

8/27/14

The Larger Meaning of Ferguson--It Is Not Just About Race

Now stepping back and looking all of this it is difficult not to ask the question "is all of this a deliberate, coordinated effort;" is it a perfect confluence of pre-existing racialized attitudes, in the US (now seen to be an example of prevalent racialized societies in most of the West;) allied with financial crunch attitudes where tribes start to look out only for their own when times get rough; where large sums of money are being spent to create and maintain divisions in society along racial, gender, economic and social lines to exploit and intensify hatreds and conflict.

Strife, conflicts and hatreds pay; and they exist because some in society benefit enormously from them, and in existing, others are designated to be crushed losers.  Behind all the angst of these divisions hide the real powers that are pulling the strings, making money and never challenged.


The Banks fed off poverty as well.

http://rt.com/op-edge/182896-mortgage-scams-unpunished-ferguson-angry/

See also my "The History of Human Societies" to see these patterns at work across thousands of years of human history.

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=60893&authorid=121255

And:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61029&authorid=121255

Nothing scares powerful elites, bent on maintaining their power, more than seeing races and social groups begin to unite, rather than fight against each other.

These elites love divisions, deliberately sow discord, and note as well, that many in US society, for example, also depend upon these divisions for their daily livelihood, are emotionally enmeshed in families, groups, races which severely punish those who step outside the prevailing ethos, racial attitudes and the like, pushing the idea that divisions and hatreds are all part of some natural order of things (i.e., the poor will always be poor and with us; i.e., in life there are winners and losers;) all this designed to encourage acquiescence in the status quo.
.
Maintaining and enforcing this "culture of acceptance" of the unacceptable is parroted and reflected in the media, in the family, in subcultures, in the schools, in politics, at work, virtually everywhere. Superiors and inferiors are natural so goes the propaganda. The message is "count yourself lucky that you are not a target like the blacks. Look the other way."

See:
How personal values are superseded by those parroted propaganda messages in the media. A worldwide study.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140224081027.htm

This is how attitudes become inculcated in a society and more or less become part of each of various sub-cultures and is maintained by a combination of social controls across an entire society where punishments and reinforcements are enmeshed in the very fabric of the culture; of people's lives. Done successfully, individuals fail to even question their circumstances or the prevalent order of things altogether.

This is where we are now. Rebellion against the prevailing ethos is stamped out with tanks and guns. This has happened over and over in history and it is happening now in the United States which is by no means the first time it has happened It is part of American History.

Ah, but what to do?  It is hopeless? Why no, of course not. What the human mind and hands have built they can change.

I have a few modest suggestions about how change is possible at:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61366&authorid=121255

8/28/14

The Impact of Racism on Whites

Now we look at the impact of racism on whites noting most whites have no idea of the negative impacts that such institutionalized racism has upon them and theirs.

Most of the white tribe see themselves:

1. As superior to virtually every black they meet (studies show this time and time again) and even ones they never meet. Brain studies show that people and human recognition areas of the brain fail to light up when whites look at photos of blacks. They light up normally when viewing photos of whites. Failure to light up basically means most whites don't see blacks as human beings, therefore lack empathy for them, and basically see them as animals.
For men an additional basic reaction was that of fear and threat.

"Neuroscience has shown that people can identify another person’s apparent race, gender, and age in a matter of milliseconds. In this blink of an eye, a complex network of stereotypes, emotional prejudices, and behavioral impulses activates. These knee-jerk reactions do not require conscious bigotry, though they are worsened by it."

More:

"Within a moment of seeing the photograph of an apparently homeless man, for instance, people’s brains set off a sequence of reactions characteristic of disgust and avoidance. The activated areas included the insula, which is reliably associated with feelings of disgust toward objects such as garbage and human waste. Notably, the homeless people’s photographs failed to stimulate areas of the brain that usually activate whenever people think about other people, or themselves. Toward the homeless (and drug addicts), these areas simply failed to light up, as if people had stumbled on a pile of trash."

From:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/look_twice

Now the depth of this unconscious racism despite what people say has some astounding aspects. Namely:

1. Both blacks and whites are racist to an uncomfortable degree and is in place by age three. Blacks have both varieties: self-racism and racist attitudes toward whites mixed in with other aspects including, feelings of inferiority, fear, anger and resentment and feelings of superiority towards whites as well.

2. That all this is learned and culturally inculcated by age three in institutions ranging from the media, (see above on media) from schools, from religion, (Jesus was Jewish and most certainly dark-skinned but media have transformed him into a white male) to work where inferior roles are usually assigned to blacks and dark-skinned individuals or other-color skinned people. It is like a color caste system.

3. History, for example, is blurred over and untruths are presented as fact. For example, most Americans don't know that World War II was waged by Hitler to rid the world of Jews and blacks (whom he thought were inferior and though they controlled America inferior as they were America could be easily defeated in war.) It was a war to enthrone the "Aryan Race" for a thousand years. So racism matters and millions of lives were lost and are lost today because such racism persists; ominously more that Hitler himself is that millions of Germans went along with this rant.

It is in all of us and this book will look at not only the details of its existence but also how it is created and maintained each generation. It is not inevitable, it is enforced. We will concentrate on the latter aspect in this book to some extent.

But for now we want to see the huge negative toil racism takes on our white brothers and sisters.

The first is that a racist system produces severe psychological, economic and often fatal results for whites.

Let's see how the psychological aspects work first.

The white psyche is haunted by fear, by visions of violence and threat. Seeing blacks, indeed any "other" as dangerous and a threat is common within the racist-inculcated culture.

Just look at American foreign policy. We have been in in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in South America, all over the world, seeking out 'threats." Terrorists are everywhere and we kill them in villages and hamlets all over the planet and then wonder where terrorists come from, as populations strike back.

And creating more and more terrorists in this fashion is entirely functional for elites using terrorism as an excuse to maintain and extend their own power, profits for their arms dealers, power for the politicians, and jobs for their tribe.

These dynamics make our kids, indeed entire generations, clinical psychopaths, producing generations after generations, entirely void of any empathy for the suffering of others.

We kill in our media, in our video games, love to hunt and kill animals, hunt and kill in our cities, kill and sacrifice in our religion myths, love blood, and our unconscious is plagued by vision of vampires sucking our blood (a true metaphor that) and learn all the cultural skills of not seeing clearly any of this; avoidance of real facts in life are learned early.

In essence, we have a culture which enculturates generation after generation of American kids into how to become little psychopaths and rewards the most successful with leadership and positions of power.

See:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=59847&authorid=121255

Actually, during most of my education exemplars such as generals and great civilizations were ones which subdued neighbors and murdered millions and created a unified state, through plunder and mayhem.

Why should I respect this? Only elites bent on the same and similar goals put this up and exposing me to it will make it seem reasonable and only pursuing 'greatness" dare I say "exceptionalism."  I am being conditioned to accept their goals as I grow up.
 

As one of my white friends said: "Actually I don't think about race and all this stuff at all." I said "Precisely Bill." We laughed.

As our first concrete example let’s see what our media tells us about Unconscious America and what our media obsessions tells us about ourselves.

Our movies, TV, print and digital are preoccupied with murder, mayhem, threat, prejudices, vampires, dystopias, selfies, dismemberments and the like. Our media, in effect, create and nurture a constant sense of threat where the correct response is to slaughter the source of the threat. Let’s have a look at this idea and see if it makes any sense. Then we come back to continue our examination, of other institutions.

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=60169&authorid=121255

8/29/14

We look at the angry white male.

We look at individual statistics, domestic violence, gun mania and sales, drugs. Well the list is a long one indeed. What we want to know is if these items are to be taken as effect, or cause?
 

First let’s look at some initial statistics on the white male in America.

They are incredibly revealing,

Oh. Next time, I have to run out and save the world. Be right back.

Back now.

First: The Angry White Male

"And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids."

"They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world."

Sorry to quote so much but this is a landmark article:

"Many of the younger guys are veterans of the first Gulf War, a war that they came to believe was fought for no moral principles at all, but simply to make America’s oil supply safer and to protect Israel from possible Arab attack. They feel they’ve been used, pawns in a larger political game, serving their country honorably only to be spit out and stepped on when they returned home to slashed veteran benefits, bureaucratic indifference to post-traumatic stress disorder, and general social contempt for having fought in the war in the first place. They believed they were entitled to be hailed as heroes, as had earlier generations of American veterans, not to be scorned as outcasts. Now a guy like Bo Gritz symbolizes “true ” warrior-style masculinity, and reclaiming their manhood is the reward for signing up with the Far Right."

"So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America’s small towns who can’t make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them."

From:

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/americas_angriest_white_men_up_close_with_racism_rage_and_southern_supremacy/

http://www.diversityinc.com/ask-the-white-guy/atwg-on-racism-bigotry-white-privilege/

http://www.diversityinc.com/ask-the-white-guy/maintaining-racial-divide-fun-profit/

 

8/30/14

What do we make of the AWM grievances? Some seem patently absurd and I will look those in due turn. But first let’s look at the ones which seem justified.

1 The AWM, his father and his father's father have been exploited, disinherited, and used. The family farm has been taxed such that they were broken up and gradually sold off piece by piece to agribusiness which came in with huge tax breaks, which meant higher taxes for other small land owners. They were zoned out with suburban creep, with federal water practices, with even the EPA and by NAFTA resulting in virtually pennies on the dollar for their crops. Massive debt ensued for these small farmers and their suppliers.
2. Without education, they had to leave their small towns, or starve, couldn't marry, and some went to the Gulf and took a lot of that bitterness with them. Compromised in their base beliefs they bought into the idea of bringing democracy to the hoards. But once there many realized that the war was indeed a sham and came home not to small town parades but some scorn, little money, no medical care, and having to get food from the local food pantry to survive, Children they had never seen, wives divorced them and family life crumbled and they were forced to declare themselves PSDT in order to get disability money; this a major humiliation for these proud young men.

They drift into local bars, do domestic violence, drink, drugs, meth labs, sell grass, a lot of things to make ends meet.

On television they don't see themselves celebrated, rather they are demonized. It is the cops who get a lot of TV air and many, many of them become cops, become cops in Ferguson and in many of the small towns in America where they get the same gear they used in America's wars overseas.

'Now we see some of them on television.

More later.

 9-1-14 Ferguson:

"The St. Louis suburb, where unarmed black teen Michael Brown was shot dead August 9 by white police officer Darren Wilson, has just over 21,000 residents and had more than 40,000 arrest warrants as of June 2013, according to ArchCity Defenders, a local advocacy group."

From:

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/08/25/outstanding-warrants-in-ferguson-outnumber-residents-nearly-2-to/20952288/

 See also:

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fines-and-fees-fuel-anger

 So we see here angry blacks and angry whites confronting each other and either side does not understand how that is happening and who is benefiting from this circumstance.

 9/2/14

Now where do we go to from here? What do we make of the AWM in this looking to the future? The grievances above seem valid although the reaction to these grievances are extreme and often have murderous intent.

The interesting question here is why the legitimate anger has resolved itself upon blacks, Jews and the government in such irrational ways, blind anger; lashing out at minorities, and more feeling themselves to be victims in society.

It is easy to see how the divide and rule tactics of political, economic, media and cultural elites have had these folks focus that anger on the Jews, blacks, the government, Indians, Catholics, by a constant propaganda flow which identifies these groups as "threats." Notice how the appeal, in this frame, is to appeal to views of the world the AWM has been trained to see as "other" almost from birth. It is an easy task to focus it on what he/she has seen on TV for years, in video games, in movies, in print, in family attitudes toward those "others" such as blacks. Most of these guys know few blacks, Indians, or Jews.

Racism we see, therefore, creates psychological distortions among these folks, irrational views, and, ominously, they are armed, angry young men.

These pressures are well illustrated in the following article which contains the cultural myth about blacks and crime and the true facts about white on white crime.

"Yet the disturbing truth, according to the FBI's most recent homicide statistics, is that the United States is in the wake of an epidemic of white-on-white crime. Back in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, a staggering 83 percent of white murder victims was killed by fellow Caucasians."

From:

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053811/white-on-white-murder

More on actual crime rates in the United States:

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2012/04/whiteonwhite_crime_it_goes_against_the_false_media_narrative.html

"The truth? As the largest racial group, whites commit the majority of crimes in America. In particular, whites are responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes. With respect to aggravated assault, whites led blacks 2-1 in arrests; in forcible-rape cases, whites led all racial and ethnic groups by more than 2-1. And in larceny theft, whites led blacks, again, more than 2-1."

Yet, as I keep iterating, whites are propagandized daily in the media to see blacks as a violent threat when clearly this is not the case.

FBI Crime Statistics

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-43

So what are to the solutions to this volatile situation?

9/2/14

For those who want to jump ahead to possible larger political and social issues and solutions take a look at these videos which show not only how change occurs but also how counter-changes occur.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=puusxNAkoe4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jWaR5JRG0lo

How do all these ideas hang together and what is my point? We are back tomorrow to put them all together.

9/3/14

Now, you ask, how do these ideas thus far cohere? Ferguson, political history, conservatism, liberalism etc. Well, they do, and we take a look.

I assume that you dear reader have read the following already-blogs which deal with race, discrimination, the history of human societies and specific tactics elites have used historically, to control the populations under their control.

(Note control strategies used by elites against their populations are identical to those recommended in the book "The Art of War:" this is the bible of big business. See the”The Art of War" by Sun Tzu at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War
 

The previous blogs are listed below.

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61331&authorid=121255

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=60893&authorid=121255

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61029&authorid=121255

What we propose now is to examine what goes for right, left, center and far right in politics today and we come to the conclusion that there is mass confusion in the political realm in the West.

Here are a few points which are seldom discussed in today's political discourse.

1. The Founding Generation of the United States was part of the enlightenment and was clearly anti-government having experienced centuries of kingly, religious, slavery and military domination. They rose against over-weaning powerful government championing reason, individual rights and limited and small government. They created and were the authors of liberalism.

Today these ideas are championed by what is regarded as the far-right wing in politics, adding into the mix portions of racisms, states, extreme nationalism along the way and a mania for guns to resist authority.

Now we want to ponder the question of how did this political reversal  and confusion occur because we see former liberals now championing big government, collective rights, community rule and structure, socialism and various stripes of Marxism, decentralization, worker rights and an incrementalism which argues for inclusion in the current political structure not its total destruction, an anti-nationalism, and a modification ethic; to be contrasted with the far-right vision of secession, ala the South in the pre-civil war era.

How did this flip flop occur? We will take a look.

The connection is that Ferguson can be seen to exemplify blacks wanting big government, active government to intervene and help protect their civil and other rights, while many in the police, are operating from a military tradition operating from an ethos of serving the state in protecting the state and society from would be rebels and revolutionaries and enemies of the state.
Now you can see the confusion and contradictions here.

How to sort all this out, but more importantly what is to be the way and means toward clarity not only in terms of ideas and but down on the ground as well.

Our goal is no mere academic one because once these dynamics are understood and sorted out; we can identify solution sets that do not pit society and social groups against one another, but solutions that work for all. I know, ambitious. But the goal is not to construct utopia, but to avoid dystopia.

Hint: a key driver will be the altered and changed roles of those who control what used to be called the political economy. No, hang on there, it will not be boring. I promise.


9/4/14

The success of the liberal movement in the 18th and 19th centuries was based on several approaches and factors which enabled the liberal movement to effect broad changes in societies across Europe. Monarchy after monarchy fell, peasants, and serfs freed, revolutions occurred...

1. They attacked the monarchies and aristocrats from several vantage points, economic, social, cultural and political, simultaneously.

    a. They organized the burgeoning middle and lower classes holding house hold meetings, took advantage of mass printing for the first time, attacking specific problems, like slavery, working conditions, hierarchy and offering specific solutions, rather than putting out mass utopia solutions as goals. They sought critical solutions which taken together transformed the whole of society in a period of just twenty to thirty years in some cases.
    b. They advanced moral rather that political, or economic arguments, understanding that arguments based upon reason in fact have to be presented with an undertone of emotional outrage using the fulcrum ideas of fairness, equality and justice, and above all the idea of freedom from state power. Dr; Martin Luther King, Gandhi effected change in exactly this way.

    c. They understood that a plurality of strong institutions in society, from the family, to small business, small farmers, communication conduits, a readiness to act were the main ways in which to undermine state power. The would be dictatorial state seek to have nothing between itself and the individual-rending the individual powerless against its massive state institutions.

Social, economic, cultural institutions were created and became the main bulwarks against state power. Even militia power was to be counter-balanced against state means of violence, such that they were effective deterrents against the state actually using its military might, if only because there were many, many citizens scattered across the country.

They understood that weak social, political and economic institutions is the goal of over-weaning power, thus they supported all these institutions as inoculations against state power. They won most of their goals and gave us modern societies.

But it was not to last.

Next we want to look at why they failed to stand up to counter-change forces which sought to re-assert state power.

Now even in the liberal victory against the monarchies, there were several weaknesses which we explore next time, weaknesses which exposed them to a counter-revolution which gives us the current worldwide power configuration in the west.

Summary:

Weak institutions are the goal of would-be power mongers in society because it eliminates internal sources of resistance. The goal is to purposely weakened any and all such institutions, keep the citizens poor, dependent, fearful and willing to turn on their neighbors and willing to exchange their rights and freedoms for "security."

By way of circumlocution: Ferguson and black and white communities over the years have been deliberately weakened in order to prevent them from rebelling against authority, local state or national.
They have been weakened by infusion of drugs, by attacking the family, by sowing internal divisions in communities between blacks and whites, between the sexes, gay and straight, police and blacks, over teachers and schools, and violence if necessary if none of that works. These are classic maneuvers used by elites for centuries.

Time to get smart about it.

All this is not random; this is what is taught elites in those ivy league colleges and boarding schools.

9/4/14

Is local government an answer and counter weight to state and national power. How is that working out?

Small Towns: Why Some Hate Them and Leave and Why Some Stay.

For an insightful look at the dictatorial tendencies of local authority and typical small town politics see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2j0p1Zs78bU

Next time we detail how liberals lost their hard won victories and, however, how they can get their mojo back.
 
Hint:
The focus on government power changes totally if counter forces capture government power and imagery.

9/5/14

Here is what went wrong with liberal adherents:

1. Their victory complete, liberals simply did not remain vigilant against the counter revolution state power-mongers mounted after the 1890's in the United States. The era of the robber barons and the rise of modern industrial capitalism caught the liberal thinkers by surprise and they had no ready answer to the re-concentration of wealth and power in the hands of these new capitalist elites.

2. Their power base lay in small groups, in the so-called petite bourgeoisie,

in the guild system and in labor groups; in small family merchant and farm sectors were also eroded. Their think tanks moved from face to face discussions, from the solon to idea generation being taken over by the university set.

3. They failed to see that economic power increasingly captured political power and limited government became increasingly powerful government.

4. They failed to understand the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve Bank controlled by bankers was as a direct threat to liberal ideas, politics and governmental structure.

5. They failed to see how this new statism, masking itself as patriotism, would and did lead to World War 1 where that war would destroy the basis of prosperity in most countries and that war against the "Hun" would allow resurgent elites to introduce a racism which would combine with nationalism and fascism and ultimately lead to Hitler and World War 11.

In sum, the resurgence of over-weaning state power was back now with an admixture of the above elements and you get the far-right of today. One strain ant-government but having also absorbed fascist, Nazi, nationalist, and aggressive tendencies which themselves gave the world imperialism as a book-end to these nationalist tendencies.

6. Add to these in later decades, Reaganism, Thatcherism, Globalism in the 20th and 21st centuries and the liberal plight came into sharp focus. Insult to injury classical liberals bemoaned this as "neo-liberalism" besmirching their own past.

Prosperity which was  so key to the rise of liberalism facilitated the rise of the middle class 190 years ago is and had been replaced by wars which destroyed value, and created boom and bust cycles, which have and currently do destabilize the poor and middle class, appropriating their wealth in these recurrent boom and bust cycles. These groups and other institutions in society have been weakened or co-opted such that they do not and have been made to believe they cannot challenge these new wall street led elites. This weakening of liberal institutions, mind you, is and was no accident.

Ok, now that I have depressed you; next time we look at solutions

 See Part Two of the Ferguson Chronicles at:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=61495