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May 30, 2007

Gangocracy-The Downside Of Abolishing The Nation-State
By Brenda Walker

The Senate's Bush-Kennedy Amnesty/Immigration Acceleration Act, whose
fate is now being decided across the country during the recess,
contains a provision that, in Congressman Ron Paul's words,

"explicitly calls for an `acceleration' of the March 2005
agreement between the US president, the president of Mexico ,
and the prime minister of Canada , known as the `Security and
Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America .' This
somewhat secretive agreement-a treaty in all but name-aims to
erase the borders between the United States, Canada, and
Mexico and threatens our sovereignty and national security.
The SPP was agreed by the president without the participation
of Congress." [Immigration `compromise' sells out our
sovereignty, May 30, 2007]

No surprise. Everywhere, the nation-state is now being undermined by
powerful forces as never before. Elites of the Davos-man mold think
the future requires a post-national framework that fits with their
one-world ideology based on the global economy and multiculturalism.

Bush and his cronies in suits and sombreros believe that Mexichurian
capitalism can be better accomplished after the annoying rights of US
citizenship are enfeebled in a sovereignty-dismantling North American
Union.

But simultaneously, civil society itself is being similarly weakened
by another group: the lowlife characters in gangs around the world who
are building their own warlord future, in which criminal fiefdoms have
more power than the ostensible governments. These criminal syndicates
have a lot in common with the traditional clan associations, such as
those that have run Somalia for years. Gang turf, defined broadly,
ranges from neighborhoods in Los Angeles to swaths of Mexico and major
chunks of Africa.

As far as entire failed states go, "About 2 billion people live in
countries that are in danger of collapse" according to the Index of
Failed States from Foreign Policy magazine. Some of the nations at the
top of the failure list never had abundant state apparatus to begin
with, so the additional pressures of economic globalization and
organized crime don't meet much resistance.

Colombia's vice-president Francisco Santos has warned, "Crime is the
biggest problem of the next decade... In most countries, you have very
weak judicial and police systems. If governments do not act they will
lose control of the streets."

Warlords thrive on successful crime-particularly the drug trade in
which cash is measured by the pound. Financial proceeds of such
magnitude enable criminal organizations to challenge governments,
police and armies, such as in Colombia. Furthermore there are great
fortunes to be made from society's breakdown as well as in its
creation. For every builder like Andrew Carnegie, there is a Pablo
Escobar making billions by destruction, chaos and crime.

We can see one battle line being drawn in Mexico. Presidente Calderon
is trying to get some of his country back from the drug cartels after
Vicente Fox's somnambulist tenure. "The state has become much weaker
under his watch," Mexico scholar George Grayson remarked last year
before the election of Calderon.

"In Mexico, President Felipe Calderon may be the constitutionally
elected leader of the nation, but in reality, drug cartels and
warlords exercise de facto authority over much of the area," according
to a paper from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, The Government and
the Drug Lords: Who Rules Mexico?

When then-Presidente Fox sent the army to take back Nuevo Laredo from
the narcos in 2005, an occupation of several weeks' duration left the
beleaguered city "more violent" than before. Fox's military action was
an embarrassing failure, like gaining weight on a diet.

Sadly, many honest business people of Nuevo Laredo have had to close
up shop because of ongoing warfare between cartels: 700 small- to
medium-sized businesses have shut down on account of street warfare
with bazookas, machine guns and RPGs. Some call the place Narco
Laredo, an example of black humor being used to adjust to a new and
worsening normal.

The jury is still out on whether Calderon can retrieve substantial
Mexican territory back from the grasp of the drug cartels (see map).
Part of the problem is the little belief the people have in the
country's governance, shown in particular by a poll last year which
revealed that "50 percent of respondents feared the government was on
the brink of losing control." At this point, the number of narco-dead
is up, which suggests that a real war is going on. But the odds must
be given to the narcos, since corruption in Mexico is everywhere.

Furthermore, the Stratfor intelligence group opines that a successful
quashing of the Gulf cartel would cause at least some of its Zeta
enforcement arm to "flee into the United States, spreading their
particularly brutal style of violence north of the border."

This is the difficulty with having a country-sized crackhouse for a
next-door neighbor.

Another template for a failing state is the clan rivalry in Somalia.
The warring families have deprived the country of a functioning
government for the past 16 years. In fact, a long-time warlord was
recently appointed mayor of the capital Mogadishu. Of course, a large
land area with no responsible government attracts terrorist groups
like ants to a picnic.

It is Brazil, however, where the shape of the post-national future is
coming into focus. That's particularly interesting, because as the
American middle class shrinks and the imported poor remain in their
barrios, the US is starting to look much more like Brazil,
particularly the favela (slum) in places of high immigration.

In addition, Americans of wealth are moving to "gated communities" to
keep out criminals and other riff-raff. Their new homes are modern
castles of self-defense. The only thing missing is the moat.

Does Sao Paulo (a very diverse city) suggest in more detail the Blade
Runner- style future of Los Angeles and similarly afflicted cities?
Perhaps.

Writer William Langewiesche investigated the shocking gang riots in
Sao Paulo Brazil that lasted for several days in May 2006, in a recent
Vanity Fair article.

Here's the opening to the piece:

Operating by cell phone, a highly organized prison gang
launched an attack that shut down Brazil's largest city last
May, with the authorities powerless to stop it.

"For seven days last May the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil,
teetered on the edge of a feral zone where governments barely
reach and countries lose their meaning. That zone is a
wilderness inhabited already by large populations worldwide,
but officially denied and rarely described. It is not a
throwback to the Dark Ages, but an evolution toward something
new-a companion to globalization, and an element in a
fundamental reordering that may gradually render national
boundaries obsolete. It is most obvious in the narco-lands of
Colombia and Mexico, in the fractured swaths of Africa, in
parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in much of Iraq. But it
also exists beneath the surface in places where governments
are believed to govern and countries still seem to be strong."
[City of Fear Vanity Fair, April 2007]

The coordinated attack was unique because the shock troops did not
loot and steal, but instead burned buses, banks and public buildings.
Dressed inconspicuously, the members and associates of the PCC (First
Capital Command Crime) prison gang used guns and firebombs to
terrorize and shatter the illusion of order.

The tactic worked. The city of 20 million shut down for days, as news
of the attacks spread and people hid in their homes.

Langewiesche believes that the Sao Paulo attack marked a new milestone
in the devolution of society: a basic criminal conspiracy with 21st
century technology. For example, the attacks were coordinated through
cell phones, gizmos that allow great advances in thuggery. And the
immediacy of news informed the public about the widespread danger.

Brazil's gang swarm of May 2006 was not a one-time occurrence. Another
episode was unleashed in December: 18 die in wave of violence staged
by Rio drug gangs. No wonder that Brazilian police use a tank-like
vehicle, the caveirao, to navigate violent street situations.

An analysis of the crime statistics shows that Brazil's murder rate is
similar to that of a war zone. In a country of 185 million, 55,000
Brazilians died from homicide in 2005. By comparison, the United
States (288 million then) had 16,692 deaths by murder that year. The
evidence suggests that crime at an elevated level approximates war-and
the combatants are gangs against civil society.

How bad is gang-engendered anarchy in Brazil? One telling marker is
that Amnesty International has issued a report calling attention to
the situation, in particular that innocent civilians are caught in the
crossfire between the police and gangsters:

"'Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have reached a tragic impasse.
Criminal gangs ... have rushed to fill the vacuum left by the
state, Balkanizing the cities into a patchwork of violent
fiefdoms,' said the report, which was based largely on news
reports and academic studies.

"Amnesty said the situation came to a head in Sao Paulo a year
ago when the First Capital Command Crime gang brought South
America's largest city to a standstill, torching buses,
attacking police stations and taking hostages. Police
responded by killing hundreds of suspects." [Amnesty
International: Brazilian cities fractured into violent
fiefdoms, Associated Press 5/02/07]

Interestingly, the PCC prison gang started as a soccer team and grew
into a sort of government of the dark side spread through numerous
prisons and on the outside. They initially organized across prisons
using cell phones in conference calls. They have their own rudimentary
code of ethics, which has decreased prison violence. But cross them
and the payback is brutal.

When some of the gang were chattering in the media about their
revolutionary intent, Langewiesche asked one what their goals for
society were. The gangster said they hadn't gotten that far yet.

No surprise in that. Their ideology is purely that of the gang: our
bunch gets the goodies.

When William Langewiesche was interviewed on NPR about his article,
Neal Conan remarked that the rioting represented "a fundamental shift
in a place where government is largely a fiction and there are more
Sao Paulos around the world, including in this country." (Listen to
the interview online.)

With larger forces slicing and dicing social glue into faster
fragmentation, it is counterproductive for Washington to pursue public
policies that make the problem worse. And extreme levels of legal and
illegal immigration must go at the top of the list.

As Prof. Robert Putnam has noted, "Diversity decreases trust."
Conversely, homogeneity increases the bonds of community, which is the
foundation stone of the state. A nation-state is not a flophouse or a
shopping center, although elites treat our country as such.

We citizens want the center to hold, not fly apart. The founders set
up a well designed nation-state with a structure that allows both
change and stability. Those who followed protected and improved upon
the original blueprint. Thousands of citizens in uniform died to
protect our unique form of government, though it has become corrupted
by money in politics in recent decades.

The least we can do is refrain from exacerbating the destructive
anti-national forces and the blowback of destabilizing levels of crime.

Brenda Walker once asked her Chinese-American bartender why his father
immigrated from China. "The warlords," he answered. "Pop wanted to get
away from the warlords."

Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes
two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Recent
events have convinced her that the Second Amendment should apply to
citizens only.

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