[Peace-discuss] Drug Cartels and the Growing Border War

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2970/luis_fernando_c225rdenas_noam/

...[The drug war in the U.S. is] a way of getting rid of a superfluous 
population. There is a very close race/class correlation---not perfect but 
close---and in fact, black males are being removed. If it were in Colombia, 
they'd call it /limpieza social/. Here they put them in jails.

Since the drug war started, there's been a very sharp increase in incarceration 
rates; the U.S.'s incarceration rate is way beyond maybe five, ten times as high 
as comparable countries, and its target is primarily black males, Hispanic 
males, some women, some whites---very disproportionately to the population. 
After all, think of the history of this country. After the Emancipation 
Proclamation, there were about 10 years in which blacks were formally sort of 
free, and then slavery was reintroduced by incarceration. By the 1870s the 
states had passed laws, and federal government approved them, in which 
essentially black life was criminalized. If a black man was found standing on a 
street corner, he could be arrested for vagrancy. If somebody claimed he looked 
the wrong way at a white woman, he'd be incarcerated for attempted rape. Pretty 
soon, you had the black male population mostly in jail, and they were a slave 
labor force. A lot of the American industrial revolution was based on slave 
labor from leased prisoners in U.S. steel, the mines.

This went on until the Second World War, when there was a need for labor. There 
was a post-war boom, and during that period black men could begin to integrate 
into the work force and get a job in an auto plant---a fairly decent job with 
wages---buy a house, send their kids to school, and so on. Well, by the '70s it 
was over. The economy was being financialized, production was being exported, 
there was a rust belt developing where the manufacturing jobs were essentially 
no longer available. So what do you do with the black population? Well, the 
answer was throw them back in jail under the pretext of the drug war...

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