In an interview Tuesday evening with Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, Donald Trump said he would get rid of gangs in America.
Boom.
Much,
much easier said than done, but why is Trump, that fast-talking cowboy,
the only presidential candidate in memory who has put elimination of
gangs near the top of his to-do list or even mentioned them at all?
Why
does Trump, whom so many people think of as nothing more than a
predatory capitalist, spend a second talking about the gang scourge that
locks up and imprisons so many Americans in inner cities and makes them
fearful of leaving their homes or allowing their children to make "new
friends"---aka recruiters for gangs.
Why is Trump touching the never-touched electric wire called gangs?
Has
Barack Obama, who professes to make all Americans equal, ever seriously
mentioned gangs? Has he ever mentioned that the fate of so many
Americans in city slums are deeply affected by gang crime and gang
control?
Has he ever discussed, in public, the murder and maiming numbers---the human numbers racked up by gangs?
He must be too busy getting the Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty passed, thus sinking the economy to new lows.
Well, there is this: the drug business.
Yes.
US
gangs transport and sell drugs for the cartels. The recent case of
Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla in Chicago exposed the long-suspected US
government partnership with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.
Basically,
the US feds permit Sinaloa clean drugs routes all the way up to
Chicago, where lesser gangs handle distribution to other American
cities, via still other gangs.
In return, Sinaloa provides the feds actionable intelligence on its rival Mexican cartels.
And of course, when you talk about the drug business, you talk about banks laundering billions and billions and billions.
Trump
might want to think about all this. It explains a great deal. It
explains why more heavily scripted politicians avoid the subject of
gangs altogether.
Drug money is sugar for banks. US based gangs
sell the drugs. All sorts of people, usual and unusual suspects, scrape
off pieces of the action. In cash.
Businesses and companies, including some on Wall Street here and there, do very nicely as a result of drug money.
The
unofficial US government policy includes this principle: if the drug
business needs US gangs as a vital component, then sacrificing the lives
and futures and day-to-day safety of millions of people living with
gangs in inner cities is a small price to pay.
Meanwhile,
mountains of bullshit rhetoric can be expended on "concern" for those
very same inner-city residents. Whole agendas consisting of politically
correct this and politically incorrect that can be formed, enlisting
the innocent and brain-addled youth of the nation.
Hollywood can
make a few thousand movies about the drug biz and never reveal the
actual set-up, from the lowest to the highest levels.
And colleges? You can forget about professors laying out the real story.
So Trump has just taken another crazy turn. He's mentioned gangs. He's said he intends to get rid of them. What a lunatic.
Watch
his poll numbers rise even higher if he keeps talking about this
issue. Because untold millions of Americans have felt, for a long time,
that a going after gangs is exactly what this country needs to do.
Of course, the American people must be crazy, too. What do they know?
We don't need a war on gangs. What we need is another HBO series about drug gangsters in prison. Yes, absolutely.
And
for those who think ending the war on drugs and legalizing every
chemical known to man will eliminate gangs, I have news for you.
The
products don't create the culture. Not at the core. The people who
rob the lives of decent citizens will always find a way to do that.
Just as mega-corporations will always find a way.
But
don't worry. Surely, Hillary Clinton will present a major policy on
gangs. Surely she will come out swinging and...wait. I seem to
remember something about her husband Bill and Mena, Arkansas; an
airport, wasn't it? Cocaine deliveries? And then there was a CIA
project to build munitions factories in Arkansas, which Bill
greenlighted. The Agency thought it would be easier to make their own
guns rather than trade cocaine for them? Terry Reed and John Cummings
wrote a book about all this:
Compromised.
But that's old history. Who cares? Maybe it's just a bad dream.
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