How The Cookie Crumbles

 I watched the movie The Big Short again the other night.

It's still a pretty grim docupic.

All the people that caused the 2008/2009 meltdown of the world economy are still unindicted and still out of jail pursuing whatever nefarious new schticks they have come up with.

I guess that's good for the country.

Until their new schticks sink us again.

It must have been - good for the country - because, not only are the architects of that criminal opus out of jail, they all got their bonuses, paid for out of the tax the rest of us pay (they themselves make too much money to pay taxes, as Leona Helmsley so aptly pointed out).

It is totally accidental that I am in the finishing stages of reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

But the counterpoint of the intelligently designed system of racial control known as "the war on drugs" - the school to prison pipeline -  described by Ms. Alexander and the good ol' boy (white), you can't catch us because the crimes we commit are so big that, you can't jail us, there are too many of us, we are too rich, and we own the political system that lets people who almost crashed our so-called civilization be free on the streets and financially buoyed by tax dollars from the rest of us is unsettling.

The counterpoint is even more unsettling when one follows it to its nucleic essence: mega criminals are home free in America; decent little people (almost all black) are in jail because Reagan endorsed a new way to re-institute Klan control without the Klan; he swore the police of our country into a search and frisk invasion of America's black locales (sad that there still were then and still are now such places 115 years or so after emancipation) that, not surprisingly found some violators of drug laws.

A similar invasion of dominantly white places like the one where Trevon Martin was murdered would have found a similar number of similar violations if such invasions had ever taken place, if the statistics and data are to be believed.

But those invasions of white places have never happened.

There's too much political peril involved in invading god fearing white people's homes and communities.

And really, the point of the invasions had nothing to do with drugs; drugs were just a convenient premise with which to whip all the white people into some sort of racist froth.

Those invasions had nothing to do with drugs; they were just step one of the New Jim Crow which was and is a new way to deny our non white citizens their citizenship.

And it is working to the nines.

The counterpoint is that rich white guys are exempt from the law and poor black male youth are targets for a bounty incented police, targets that, once intercepted by the bounty hunters, have no future, no home, no job, no right to vote, no right to public housing, no right to food assistance, no family.

And they owe debts to the state that they can't pay.

Because they were in prison and don't have any money.

Because if they had any money at point of arrest the war on drugs authorizes the police to take it and pass it out as bounty and spoils to the officers.

So that is the new state of most of our young black male citizens.

And there are millions of them.

And they have all been systematically erased from citizenship.

Unsettling seems to be a rather vapid description of that state.

America crumbles.

But we know in the next financial shuck and jive the white bankers will come out whole.

How nice.