Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Emma West, a Lonely Nation Turns Its Eye to You

Emma West.

Enoch Powell.

Their words fell on deaf ears.
Why is this guy in England? Seriously? Why?

How about this? [Blood on his hands, hatred in his eyes: 2.30pm on a suburban high street, Islamic fanatics wielding meat cleavers butcher a British soldier, taking their war on the West to a new level of horror, Daily Mail, May 22, 2013]:
Clutching a bloodied meat cleaver after executing a soldier on a crowded street, he delivers a  chilling message of hate.
‘You people will never be safe,’ he declares in a clear south London accent. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
In broad daylight, he and an accomplice had just repeatedly stabbed and tried to behead an off-duty soldier in front of  dozens of passers-by.
Throughout the frenzied attack they shouted ‘Allah Akbar’ – Arabic for ‘God is great’ – then demanded horrified witnesses film them as they ranted over the  crumpled body.
The two black men in their 20s, waited calmly for armed police to arrive before charging at officers brandishing a rusty revolver, knives and meat cleavers.
Why are these people in England?

Emma West was right; Enoch Powell was right; hell, Marcus Garvey was right. 
 
 
 

The Lesson of the 1971 McDonald's Built in the Shadow of the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects in Chicago


PK NOTE -- Yr: Five starts tomorrow. Today marks the four-year anniversary of the start of SBPDL. This past year was to be the final year of this site, but SBPDL has grown into something beyond a parody Web site. In 2009, an experiment began on May 22 -- today, that experiment has birthed Second City Confidential: The Black Experience in Chicagoland. The fourth book in an ongoing series documenting the collapse of America's great cities, no work is more timely than the account of the black experience in Chicago. 


“Standing up and Standing Out: how I teamed with a few Black men, changed the face of McDonald’s, and shook up corporate America,” is Roland L. Jones account of the founding the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association (NBMOA) and his ascension up the corporate ladder at a company that eventually 100 percent 365Black.
The blueprint for how McDonald's - and all corporate America - went 365Black


His book offers a virtual timeline in how the ‘365Black’ marketing strategy came into place at McDonald’s – even in the 1960s, McDonald’s main corporate office in Chicago was spending more money to help keep afloat franchises owned by blacks – and a powerful lesson in why corporate America is firmly in the pocket of what we dubbed Black-Run America (BRA).

One lesson from Jones’ book reminds us of the story of the closed Wal-Mart in Tuskegee. As we approach the start of Year 5 (four-year anniversary of the site is today), allow us this one moment to highlight this great moment in black history:
An unforgettable illustration of the kind of difficulties we ran into was Cabrini-Green. In 1971, the company [McDonald’s] decided to build a new restaurant across the street from the massive cluster of government housing projects called Cabrini-Green, in the old “Little Italy” section of Chicago. The company had great hopes for the Cabrini-Green venture, which was the first new store constructed in a majority black area in Chicago. The potential market was huge: more than 15,000 people lived in the projects. Unemployment was extremely high, but our black McDonald’s owners in other low-income Chicago areas were already showing increased sales and earnings, so everyone thought it was do-able in the projects. I was convinced that the Cabrini-Green store would provide employment and the kind of job training that would translate into wider opportunities for project residents. 
 The new store seemed to me an ideal opportunity to act on Ray Kroc’s commitment to give back to the community. 
 The plan went forward in a real spirit of optimism. The flaw was that no one, myself included, dug deeply enough into the situation at Cabrini-Green to really grasp the inherent problems. We badly misjudged the economic viability of the location. Most of the people in the projects lived entirely or partly on welfare or Social Security, and they only had money to spend on the few days after their government checks arrived (or, for the fortunate few, when they received their pay checks). Also, Cabrini-Green was among the worst maintained and most dangerous housing projects in the whole country, and many of the residents didn’t feel safe leaving their apartments, much less visiting the restaurant or sending their kids there. Although situated near some of the city’s most affluent areas, Cabrini-Green was like an isolated island. Non-residents rarely came into the projects unless they had to, and they left as soon as they could, so there was very little pass-through traffic to sustain businesses when the locals stayed away. 
 The Cabrini-Green projects were often compared to a prison, and prisons breed lawlessness. The first trouble came almost immediately when a local black preacher and a so-called “activist,” backed up by young men from the projects, began pressuring the owner-operator, Andrew Davis, for jobs and favors in what was basically a shakedown scheme. 
 The situation was similar to what Sherman Claypool faced in Milwaukee, and there was always the potential that it could flare into a mini-version of the 1969 Cleveland boycott [PK NOTE: we wrote about that here]. I was Andy’s field consultant, and I supported him when he stood up to the pressure. Frustrated, the troublemakers went around us to corporate, and Pat Flynn, the area manager for McOpCo (the company owned stores), and Joe Brown… were drawn in to negotiate some kind of settlement, with help from those of us in the regional office. Both Pat and Joe got death threats, but they also refused to cave. Joe was adept at turning the activists’ demands back on themselves: They would call for a jobs program; Joe would ask them to present their plan for the program; then they would back off because, of course, they had no plan. Jobs weren’t what they were really after. Joe and Pat eventually did negotiate for landscaping work, and McDonald’s helped the group start a landscaping business. But the whole thing petered out when the would-be extortionists lost interest.
The Cabrini-Green McDonald's -- like the Wal-Mart in Tuskegee, a near 100 percent black community couldn't sustain a private business; nor could they sustain the Cabrini-Green projects...

 Andy Davis was an experienced operator and became a valued member of the BMOA [Black McDonald’s Operating Association]… but even he couldn’t make the Cabrini-Green restaurant successful. With so little money in the housing projects and no outside traffic, the store could not build volume and was frequently empty. It struggled on for several years but was eventually closed by McDonald’s. In financial terms, it was a failure. The company never gave up on any store without a fight, so I’m sure there were also some bruised egos inside the Ivory Tower when the Cabrini-Green store was shut down.  (p. 223-225)

Cabrini-Green, like Robert Taylor Homes, is no more.

In the absence of whiteness, you get a situation like that found at the former Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) Cabrini-Green or Robert Taylor Homes -- like a black hole, everything near it was sucked into the nothingness of the 365Black community.

Not even McDonald's was spared. 

The moral of the story? 

The era of 365Black - not just McDonald's marketing strategy, but Black-Run America as well - will pass. 

Our job is to survive. 



Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Aesop's Fable of the Ant and Grasshopper Come to Life: Zip Code 53206 in Milwaukee

Everyone knows the fable of the grasshopper and ant, perhaps Aesop's most important moral lesson -- that of future-time orientation. What happens when a society no longer rewards those who practice the virtues of the ant, and instead redistributes what the ants have worked so hard to create/save, giving it to a grasshopper population. 

A grasshopper population that keeps growing, while the ant population decreases...
Zip Code 53206 -- a hellish world not even Aesop could have warned against in one of his fables


You get zip code 53206 in Milwaukee [RACE AND VIOLENCE IN THE 'WELFARE MAGNET': 2/3 of young men in one Zip Code have been or are incarcerated, WND.com, 5-20-13]:



The details from this neighborhood, and its city, aren’t what you’d find on a chamber of commerce brochure either.
An official report from the Milwaukee police department reveals more: In the city, the homicide rate for black residents is 27.9 per 100,000 compared to 9.7 for Latinos and 1.7 per 100,000 white residents.

Of known 2011 homicide suspects in Milwaukee, 93 percent are black, while 4 percent are white and Latino. The city itself is 40 percent black, 17 percent Latino, and 37 percent white, according to Census figures.
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee sociology professor Aki Roberts shared his view of these troubling patterns with WND.
“Milwaukee’s discrepancy does appear to be larger than the national average. Part of the reason may be that Milwaukee is one of most racially segregated cities in the United States,” he says.
Roberts added, “In 2011, the black unemployment rate in Milwaukee was 22.4 percent compared to 9.6 percent for whites and 16.7 percent for Hispanics,” which “parallels the racial disparity in homicide rates in Milwaukee.”
However, as the homicide report shows, the black murder rate is 14 times the white murder rate, while the black unemployment rate is double the white unemployment rate. From a different angle, Hispanics and blacks have a similar unemployment rate, yet the Hispanic murder rate is one third of the black rate.
The relationship between unemployment and crime is murky at best. Harvard sociologist Christopher Winship tells WND, “Research on the relationship between unemployment and crime, although considerable in quantity, has produced ambiguous results, with some work showing a positive relationship and other work a negative relationship.”
There have been times when severe unemployment has occurred while crime rates drop. “Most surprising, crime rates went down during the Great Depression. In the current recession they have been at 40-year lows,” Winship points out.
Milwaukee is among the 20 most violent cities in the country. By far, the largest number of homicides in Milwaukee occurred in one much-discussed Zip Code, 53206.
A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee project says, “The 53206 Zip Code neighborhood serves as a bellwether for poverty changes in Milwaukee and nationally.”
The report also notes, “In the 1990s prior to welfare reform in Wisconsin it had the largest number of families receiving AFDC.”
In 2011, 17 of the 86 homicides in Milwaukee occurred in 53206. Between 2005-2009, there were 95 homicides in this Zip Code out of 473 in the city as a whole. That’s 20 percent of all homicides, occurring in a Zip Code with less than 5 percent (28,210) of the city’s 594,833 population.
Blacks comprise 96 percent of the Zip Code, Latinos are 2.1 percent, and whites are 1.6 percent.
There would have been far more homicides had some of the hundreds of non-fatal shootings resulted in their intended outcome. Between 2006-2009 there were 501 nonfatal shootings in 53206, comprising 27 percent of all nonfatal shootings in Milwaukee.
Between 2010 and 2011, there were 873 non-fatal shootings in Milwaukee, and 182 (20 percent) were in Zip Code 53206.
Overall, Milwaukee is also one of the 10 poorest cities in America, and the state of Wisconsin was once known as a “welfare magnet.”
Like a demented Pac-Man, this chart (from City-Data) shows who the 'grasshopper'  population is in zip code 53206
Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Wisconsin’s welfare benefits grew to be more generous than benefits in neighboring Illinois. By 1985, a Chicago family of three on welfare (AFDC) could increase their monthly cash benefit by roughly $200 by moving 90 miles to Milwaukee. By 1989, Wisconsin’s governor at the time, Tommy Thompson, worried that the state was becoming ”a welfare magnet.”
A Democratic state senator named Joseph Andrea complained that Wisconsin benefits were too high, and that welfare had no work requirement. Milwaukee was one of the Wisconsin cities that became a magnet to certain Chicago residents throughout the l980s.
By 1991, nearly a quarter of Milwaukee’s new AFDC cases were families that had moved to Wisconsin within just the prior three months. With close to a quarter of new welfare cases arising from people who had recently moved into the state, harsh skepticism mounted. There was also evidence that people posing as state residents were collecting welfare and simply returning home to Chicago with their payouts.
As Professor Lawrence Mead wrote, “stories of fraud and abuse fatally undercut Wisconsin’s liberal welfare consensus.” Wisconsin soon pioneered rigorous welfare reforms, which became the model for the 1996 AFDC overhaul.
The Zip Code 53206, with the highest murder rate in Milwaukee, also had the highest level of welfare dependence. Prior to Wisconsin’s welfare reform, 53206 “had the largest number of families receiving AFDC,” according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee report.
Striking numbers of those born in that pre-welfare era went on to have encounters with the law: A 2007 report by UWM’s Employment and Training Institute noted that, “Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of men ages 30-34 from Zip Code 53206 have been incarcerated in state Department of Corrections facilities or are currently incarcerated.”
The Milwaukee homicide report also shows that most people involved with murder are no strangers to the criminal justice system. Seventy six percent (65) of 2011 homicide victims had prior arrest and/or citation. Ninety percent(74) of known homicide suspects had prior arrests/citations. The same pattern is found among nonfatal shooting victims and suspects.
In addition to poverty, the UWM report reveals the broad scale of social disorganization in 53206. Among the findings of that report:
  • Nearly half of housing loans are for investors
  • 60 subprime lenders operating in Zip Code 53206
  • Over 90 percent of family income tax filers are single-parent
  • [A] majority of workers at 53206 jobsites are white, even though the resident workforce is black
  • 90 percent of jobs in the Zip Code are held by non-residents
Considering that just 1.6 percent of those living in 53206 are white, it is perplexing that a majority of workers are white.
Milwaukee public radio reporting revealed that local residents attribute the violence to a breakdown in family structure, unemployment, and a loss of hope. Some blame the construction of a freeway in the 1960s, which displaced families and communities, according to Claiborne Benson, the Founder of the Wisconsin Black Historical Museum.
Benson said, “The expressway divided us straight in half and where we had families together it created separate clusters of neighborhoods so it caused irreparable harm to the African American community.”
Benson, who founded the black history museum, describes how pleasant the 53206 area used to be, in the not-too-distant past.
“I would pass this intersection as a young kid – how nice it was 40 years ago, 50 years ago,” he recalled.
Benson noted that 50 years ago “you would’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone here not of European ancestry.”
Isn't the condition of zip code 53206 in 2013 a more fitting tribute to black history in the city then any 'history' Mr. Benson can cobble together and display in a museum?


Grasshoppers ran off the ant population - as Mr. Benson points out, the ant community in this analogy once populated the exact same environment of zip code  53206 without the deleterious side-effects - in this area of Milwaukee, yet survive through a redistribution of wealth from the very community they drove away. 

Come to think of it, none of Aesop's Fables accurately describe the above situation. 

Few lessons can be culled from history to describe it either. 


Monday, May 20, 2013

How Did the University of Chicago Survive the Black Undertow in the South Side of Chicago? By Taking Tom Buchanan's Advice...


How did the University of Chicago survive the Manifest Destruction of black migrants to the south side of Chicago?

Only through the creation of a private security force – some say the second largest private police in the world to only that of the one found in Vatican City to guard the Papacy – was the U of Chicago able to keep the school in the south side of the city.
Yeah, Tom Buchanan was right about the 'rising tide of color' stuff


Well, that and some nifty zoning planes to ensure the rising tide of color (black migrants from the south) didn’t overwhelm the area and drive away a white middle-class with the crime they imported to the city [A brief history of the UCPD: "There are no firm records, it may surprise you, on the history of the Department.", Chicago Maroon, 5-25-12]:
A greater culture of safety and protection can be traced to the University’s role in urban renewal in Hyde Park and Kenwood and the creation of the South East Chicago Commission (SECC) in 1952. The 1950s saw a greater concern in safety in the area, as neighborhood residents grew increasingly concerned with the state of dilapidated buildings and unsavory businesses. “In February of ‘52, there was a faculty wife assaulted and robbed on the Midway,” said Mason, who also served as the executive director of the SECC from 1982 to 2009. “That seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Numerous faculty members and senior staff members went in to see the Chancellor…and de- manded that something be done. Either move the University out of this horrible area or do something to clean [it] up.”

The institution of force was the primary mechanism to save the university; this same mechanism was instituted in Detroit (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets – STRESS), but it failed because the city had already been abandoned by too many of the people whose blood had helped build it.

White people.

White flight.

Robert Beauregard’s Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities includes a powerful quote about why cities shouldn’t be abandoned. William Zeckendorf, president of the real estate firm of Webb & Knapp believed “too much had been invested in the cities to abandon them.”
Lecturing in 1951 at the Harvard School Design, he said: “How can we keep cities that represent the toil and sweat and invested labor and capital of generations from becoming ghost towns.”
 He would close his talk by saying, “I don’t believe that cities are lost unless we are prepared to abandon them.” (p. 118)

Detroit was lost, because the people whose ancestors had toiled, sweated and invested their labor - and the capital of generations - to build, abandoned it.

But back to the University of Chicago.

In Jon C. Teaford’s “The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985,” we learn the demise of the south side of Chicago predated the institution of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” – meaning the blame for the dysfunction blacks brought to Chicago can’t be placed upon social/welfare programs.

In a short period of time, Teaford makes clear the leaders of the U of Chicago would have to enact decisions to save their university from the coming of the Black Undertow:
 At first the area’s dominant institution, the University of Chicago, refused to cooperate with the conference, but by 1952 worsening neighborhood conditions were causing a loss of faculty and students, thus requiring the university to intervene. A community activist reported that the trustees and administrators were “forced to admit that if they didn’t engage in community action, they might end up with a $200,000,000 investment in a slum, without anybody to do research or any students to educate.” Responding to the problem, the university was instrumental in organizing and funding the South East Chicago Commission headed by the university’s president. The commission stepped up pressure on the city to halt illegal conversions [illegal conversions of single-family dwellings into apartments and the threat of white flight as blacks moved into the area was the catalyst for the creation of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference], and the university’s private police force patrolled Hyde Park, supplementing the inadequate municipal protection. (p. 118)

From “The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America” we get an even clearer picture of how the University of Chicago was saved from the very threat F. Scott Fitzgerald’s supercilious character, Tom Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby,” warned about when he quoted ‘Goddard’:
Meanwhile, the University of Chicago was embarking on an even more ambitious program dedicated to saving its neighborhood for the middle class. Located in the Hyde Park district of Chicago’s South Side adjacent to Bronzeville, the university was in the path of the expanding African American community; by the late 1940s, an invasion of poor blacks seemed imminent. Responding to this threat, in 1952 the university established the South East Chicago Commission, which drafted a plan for spot clearance of the area’s most blighted structures and rehabilitation or conservation of the remaining buildings. The idea was to eliminate dilapidated housing with rents affordable to low-income blacks and upgrade or preserve the remaining dwelling units for middle-class occupants.
 In 1955 demolition began, and the following year the commission secured approval for $26 million in federal urban renewal funds. The neighborhood was not to be lily-white; middle-class blacks were not to be excluded. But Hyde Park was to remain a bastion against lower-class invaders. One comedian joked: “This is Hyde Park, whites and blacks shoulder to shoulder against the lower class.”

The measures to keep the University of Chicago safe from the black underclass – only attracted to Chicago, as they were Detroit, for the economic opportunities white people created – predate the introduction of the “Great Society” of the 1960s by a decade.

But that doesn’t compute.

Weren’t black people on the verge of becoming the model minority in America before then? Then why did the University of Chicago have to take such drastic steps to remain in the south side of Chicago as the entire community went black?

What seems like a throw-away line in Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” has lasting permanence when you consider the culture blacks brought to the south side of Chicago that the University of Chicago effectively fought against:
“The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” “We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

The Vatican has the largest private police in the world, with the task of protecting the Pope, Vatican City, and the Cardinals of the Catholic Church; the second largest private police force in the world, found in the south side of Chicago, is still tasked with protecting the students, administrators, and faculty from… the rising tide of color that gave it its birth.

All of which was prior to the institution of the Great Society…

Tom Buchanan was right, and the University of Chicago took his advice in fortifying the school from the rising tide of color that utterly submerged most of the south side of Chicago in a cocoon of violence, misery, and vice.

All of which was prior to the institution of the Great Society…

CBS and NRA News Profile "The War in Chicago"


Ginny Simone is a reporter for National Rifle Association (NRA) – NRA News – who on April 17 of this year debut her investigation into the violence in Chicago. She, or one of her producers, titled it “America’s Deadliest City.”
The violence in Chicago-- almost entirely a non-white problem



Though the report was about as race-neutral as one can expect from the NRA – which proudly showcases Colion Noir’s videos as an example of enlightened Conservatism Inc. on all things black – it did include this powerful quote from Jim Arceo. A retired Chicago police officer, Arceo said:

“It’s disgusting. I was proud to be a Chicagoan. And now, it’s like, you see it crumbling. It’s terrible. And I see no hope for it. I don’t see anything getting better. It’s just dying.”

What has happened to Chicago is disgusting, but it merely serves as a microcosm, a powerful lesson of our nation’s problems.  If you can still call 2013 America a “nation.”

James Kirkpatrick, writing in the introduction to the upcoming Second City Confidential: The Black Experience in Chicagoland (Available on the Fourth Anniversary of the start of SBPDL, May 22), put the importance of Chicago this way:
“As the largest city in the Heartland, “Chicago” occupies a unique position in the American psyche.  New York looks across the Atlantic and Los Angeles across the Pacific, but Chicago looks to America itself, the vast continental empire that it fed and supplied with its plants and industry.”
Presently, Chicago sits at the nexus of yesterday/tomorrow for the rest of the nation -- a city where law and order is protected by the white population, whose institutions are now assigned to protect the very people uprooting civilization there.

The latest Paul Kersey at VDare.com is all about Chicago[Mexican Drug Gangs Only Part Of “The War In Chicago”Paul Kersey on May 19, 2013]:

The War In Chicago, the 48 Hours special with Maureen Maher and Armen Keteyian reporting that aired Saturday May 18, was a breakthrough—of sorts. It even had a logo that would make George Zimmerman blush: three hoodie-wearing thugs (eat your heart out, Trayvon Martin), one brandishing a gun, with a DEA Agent facing them. 
Strikingly, the report candidly admitted that the city’s drug problem—heroin—is almost entirely driven by Mexican cartels; that only 26 percent of the more than 500 homicides in 2012had been solved; and that in wake of the murder of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton—you know, the black girl that Barack and Michelle Obama tried to make the face of the gun control movement—the police surge launched by the city to try tomake the streets safer is already threatened by budget concerns: 
But like many big cities, Chicago has serious budget problems. The extra police on the streets is costing the city millions. Can they afford to keep up the fight?There are lines of demarcation in every city. For this uniquely American city, the death of Hadiya Pendleton may well be one of them. 
Since her murder on Jan. 29 in Chicago, the number of extra police on the streets has doubled to 400. Officers are working seven days a week, but this is a relative peace that comes with a price: an estimated $1 million a week in police overtime. 
The CBS special quoted a 28-year veteran of the DEA, Jack Riley, as saying: 
"We've got people dying ... and I'm not rolling over, I have not thrown the towel in," said Riley, who thinks he knows why so many of Chicago's children are dying."I wanted to retire a few years ago ... my wife's naggin' me every day... get outta the job," he said. "I can't do it!" 
… Riley says many Chicago shootings are carried out by the area's roughly 70,000 gang members who are going to war over one thing in particular: drugs.
Is this America? 
Yesthe very heartland of this nation…if America can be called a nation anymore.
 No, America can no longer be called a nation. More importantly, any effort to stop crime in Chicago is going to run into a problem: the perpetrators are almost all non-white [Addicted to guns: Is there a cure for Chicago's crippling dependence on firearms?, Chicago Reader, 5-8-2013]:

In parts of the city, it's far too common for lives to be shaped by the persistent threat of conflicts and the culture of resolving them with firearms. In fact, gun violence has come to seem as much a part of Chicago as the seasons. In the last 20 years, more than 12,000 people have been murdered in the city, more than 9,000 of them with firearms. Tens of thousands of others have survived being shot. 
Over the years, police, politicians, and community leaders have proposed all kinds of solutions, from banning high-powered squirt guns to bringing in the National Guard. Along with the weather—violence tends to spike during the warm months and mild stretches of winter—the size and deployment of the police force is always at the center of the discussion.