The Visible Black Hand of Economics

The world is nothing more than all the tiny things you left behind.

- Gran Torino 

In reading the powerful essay on Highland Park, Michigan (Return to a Darker Age) that HW put together, the whole concept of the Visible Black Hand governing economics came to me in a moment of clarity rivaling the epiphany the esteemed Dr. Emmett Brown had when he visualized the flux capacitor. 

A movie set where the Visible Black Hand of Economics is on its finest display

By a strange twist of fate, the Clint Eastwood-directed film Gran Torino was set in Highland Park. Odd, the population of the actual city is 93 percent Black; watching Eastwood's insipid movie, you'd have never known this fact. 

If you've been a regular reader of Stuff Black People Don't Like, then you are aware that some key terms for understanding life in Black-Run America (BRA) originated here: Climate Change; the Black Undertow; Man-Made Climate Change; Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs); Black Fictional Heroes; and now, we give you the reality of the Visible Black Hand governing economics. 

While reading about the nearly all-Black inhabitants of Highland Park and their inability to create, innovate and even maintain an economy (with the telltale remains of a long-gone civilization providing them shelter, signs of structural inequality built by a people who fled for a safer city), my mind drifted to the city envisioned by Henry Ford once his Highland Park Ford Plant was built and thriving roughly 100 years ago. 

Is 2012 Highland Park, where the Highland Park Schools recently failed an Emergency Manager Review, the vision Ford had as he looked upon plant back in 1912 is dead. Between 1910 - 1920, Highland Park would expand more than an order of magnitude in its population (from 4,000 to 46,000). Now, the population of Highland Park is around 11,000 and the last inhabitant to leave won't have to be reminded to turn the lights off: just as 42,000 home owners in Wayne County could soon lose their homes because they can't pay the taxes, Highland Park recently turned off 66 percent of its streetlights:

Highland Park, Michigan, a city in the greater Detroit area, is the latest town to implement dramatic austerity measures, according to the Associated Press.

With $58 million in municipal debt and a $60,000 monthly electric bill that it can't pay, Highland Park has elected to remove 1,000 of its 1,500 streetlights -- not just turning the power off, but tearing the poles themselves out of the ground.

It's a strategy that's unlikely to fix most of Highland Park's economic woes. The town's unemployment rate is 22 percent -- more than twice the national rate -- and 42 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

 How many millions of people worked in Detroit, punched their card, worked long-shifts at the factory,all  the while hoping that their children would one day live in a better city than they did? How many thousands of people raised families in Highland Park, walking their children down the same sidewalks that are now bathed in the silent darkness where laughter once preceded it?

 White people left Highland Park - well, they abandoned it really - to the current Black inhabitants of the city. Just like thousands of other cities across the nation, the fate of Highland Park was sealed when the whites left. No formal surrender took place nor was a ceremony commemorating the transfer of power necessary.

Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand goes something like this:

In economics, invisible hand or invisible hand of the market is the term economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace... individual ambition benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions.

 In Black-Run America, the ultimate aim of the government, the church, the media, the entertainment industry, combined with the academic sector and the private sector is the enhancement of the quality of life for Black people to the expense of everyone else.

Worse still, it all comes off the dime of everyone else through a redistribution of tax-revenue that flows to Black people via TANF/Welfare, EBT/Food Stamps, Section 8 housing, and the prison industry with the attendant costs of police protection, incarceration, probation, and court system maintenance, all of which disproportionately incur against whites.

It has been official government policy for some time that the collective needs of Black people trump individual ambitions in America, negating the entire concept of Smith's invisible hand. DWLs understand, hence their desire to live in Whitopia's like Portland, San Francisco, Boulder, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. (where DWLs priced Blacks out of the housing market and drove them into Prince George's County) where the nullifying presence of visible Black Hand governing economics has been minimized.

Consider Frédéric Bastiat parable of the broken window:

[It] illustrate[s] why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is actually not a net-benefit to society.The parable, also known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy, demonstrates how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are "unseen" or ignored.

The Climate Change in major metropolitan areas like Detroit, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Milwaukee is a form of destruction. Knowing that the Black people who inherit the city will face structural inequality because they lack the ability to collectively sustain an economy - whether it's a major city like Detroit or a small one like Highland Park - the destruction of that city's tax base is foreordained.

You can see the visible Black Hand of economics at work when you drive into areas of city where commerce was once prevalent. Be it a mall, a shopping center, a restaurant, a strip mall, or an autonomous car dealership, an infallible indicator you have drifted into a Black Undertow city is the sign that civilization once flourished there but has since been replaced with hair accessory stores, liquor stores, pawn shops, and title-loan lenders.

Unless you plan on removing the population that was instrumental in a city's decline, we have no reason to rebuild these cities (The population that was instrumental in its ascent left because of the influx of the Black Undertow, anyway). Thus, the money spent to try and bring recovery to Detroit or Birmingham is of no net-benefit to society. The visible Black Hand of economics is at work in these cities, just as Bastiat's parable.

Black people had nothing to do with building Detroit into a world-class city; they had everything to do with its removal from that select list of world-class destinations, though. The same goes for Highland Park, a city that Dirty Harry himself couldn't save now.

Aren't convinced of the awesome power that the visible Black Hand of economics has over our lives? Let's take a look at a city that experienced an unhealthy dose of Climate Change in a span of just 20 years. Spanish Lake (outside St. Louis) was 99 percent white in 1970; it is now 77 percent Black. It's a safe bet that when it was an all-white city, the police primarily dealt with ticketing teenagers driving too fast or drinking underage. Now, they are forced to deal with the Black Undertow which preys upon everyone:

County police have responded so many times to calls from Countryside Townhomes that they are now posting officers at the 787-unit apartment complex that has become synonymous with trouble in the Spanish Lake area.

Of the 6,525 calls for police help logged by the 1st Precinct since the start of 2009, more than 3,600 were from that area — for a murder, robberies, assaults, burglaries and other crimes, officials said.

Beginning Sept. 1, officers have been pushing back with foot patrols aimed at protecting the good residents and visitors — and routing out the bad. They made 18 arrests on just the first day.

Commanders said if they don't act aggressively and swiftly, the problems at the complex, along Rosado Drive off Bellefontaine Road, will just spill into the surrounding neighborhoods. The effort includes code enforcement and sobriety checkpoints.
Capt. Troy Doyle, the precinct commander, said he expects the tactics to continue as long as necessary. "Hopefully, until the problems get rectified," he said.

The Visible Black Hand of Economics on display. Phillip Andrew Morton, who grew up in Spanish Lake when it was that quintessential American city Norman Rockwell once celebrated, decided to make a movie about the changes there:

Phillip Andrew Morton has made two trips since 2007 to the house at 1238 Maple Street where he grew up.

On both occasions, he was shocked at the profound changes the little frame house had undergone in a matter of a few years.

Morton, 32, is now an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles. The rapid transformation of the north St. Louis County community he calls his hometown, though it has never been incorporated, forms the basis of his documentary, "Spanish Lake."

The movie combines the warm feelings that Morton has for the area with a case-study of what many feel was governmental action — or inaction — that changed its bucolic nature into one that, in some sections, is more befitting of an urban ghetto.

"I really wanted to research all the dynamics that went into the phenomenon of white flight in Spanish Lake," Morton said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. "I came away convinced that this is not an issue of race but of class and opportunities.

As recently as 1970, Spanish Lake was 99 percent white and 1 percent black.
But the 1970s also marked the beginning of a mass migration of African-Americans from the city of St. Louis. Many left failed housing complexes such as Pruitt-Igoe to settle in government-subsidized Section 8 housing in North County.

The city of Black Jack, which abuts Spanish Lake, feared that the poverty and crime that plagued the St. Louis complexes could recur in apartment complexes planned for their city. To thwart that possibility, Black Jack officials enacted zoning ordinances that prohibited multi-family housing.

In 1975, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Black Jack's zoning ordinance, ruling that it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act.

The construction of apartment complexes in North County proliferated during that period. Many were upscale, designed to attract well-heeled singles.

But as they lost their luster, they were transformed into Section 8 housing.

RISE IN BLACK POPULATION

By 1990, 17 percent of Spanish Lake's residents were African-American. By 2010, with the population at 19,650, the percentage of blacks had soared to 77 percent, with many living in Section 8 apartments.

Among the biggest of these Section 8 complexes is the Countryside Townhomes in Spanish Lake, built in 1971. In recent years, it has become a hotbed of crime.

Section 8 is the same as saying Man-made Climate Change. Just like Highland Park, Spanish Lake has been destroyed; having studied Basitat, you already know that any money spent trying to restore it is folly, because those responsible for the economic ruin of the city still reside there.

It's the economy! It's all about class! It's about the De-industriliazation of the country!

No.

Pittsburgh never experienced Climate Change, so the visible Black Hand governing economics never destroyed that city. Instead, the invisible hand of economics flourished there, with primarily white citizens trying to find new ways to a make a living as the steel industry collapsed.  Through innovation and via the free market, Pittsburgh is now even attracting DWLs from Portland.

Microsoft was smart to patent an "avoid ghetto" application. Basically, it's an avoid the Black Undertow app that documents where the visible Black Hand of economics is most pronounced.