Here's another perspetive from Gerald Celente at Trends Research.
No link, subscription only. Website at:
http://www.trendsresearch.com/index.htmWritten from the perspective of an author in the year 2012:
The new breed of gangs made full use of the Internet —including MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. — to recruit new members, boast about their deeds, and do deals. And they were armed, trained and war zone ready. With the US military hungry for recruits, lowering standards and accepting some with criminal records, it should have come as no surprise that gang members had infiltrated the armed forces.
The killing skills learned, the weapons stolen and thecombat discipline acquired would manifest in a more organized, sophisticated, and deadly army of gangs. This wasn’t West Side Story with switchblades, zip guns and a score by Leonard Bernstein.
And then there were the 150,000 strong, tightly structured, disciplined criminal networks of prison gangs. Once released, members returned home, picked up with their former crime partners and organized them into branches of the national prison gangs.
In 2009, the fiscal crisis had forced governments to trim the prison population to cut costs. After Medicaid, at $50 billion a year, maintaining prisons and housing prisoners constituted the highest domestic expenditure.
As gang members and low level criminals hit the streets, gang membership would boom. In the best of economic times gangs were experiencing 6 percent annual growth. Now, with the economy on the skids, high school graduation rates in major cities under 50 percent, and employment for even the educated drying up, a career as a gang member held out the best job prospect for the otherwise unemployable.
With police budgets strapped and orders from the top to concentrate on apprehending minor violators (speed traps, parking tickets, public nuisances, etc.) to generate fines for depleted state and local treasuries, there was inadequate police power to fight gang-related crime.
There was a lot of press in 2009 on Mexican drug gangs routinely murdering top government officials and police with impunity. Concerted federal campaigns that deployed some 25,000 troops were met with yet fiercer retaliation by the drug lords. In many towns throughout Mexico, criminal elements ruled.
As violence spread, especially in border towns, there were fears — soon to be realized — that Mexican gang violence would spill over the US border.
MARKET OPPORTUNITIES
In the US, up to 2009, a good portion of violence was gang-on-gang and drug related, but it would not stay that way. The American appetite for drugs, though huge, had its limits. 20,000 gangs vying for the same market produced a power struggle that saw individual gangs looking to both diversify and merge with competitors. Other businesses gangs were involved in included auto theft, assault, burglary, extortion, home invasion robberies, homicide, identity theft, insurance fraud, mortgage fraud, prostitution rings and weapons trafficking.
But the most profitable gangland business model imported into the US from Mexico was kidnapping. Between 2007 and 2009, nearly 700 kidnappings for ransom were recorded in Phoenix. These were confined almost exclusively to Latinos involved in the drug or immigrant-trafficking industries. But by 2012, Phoenix, along with Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York City … would look like Mexico City. Kidnapping would become an equal opportunity criminal occupation with extraordinary profit potential.
It would expand exponentially beyond the current Latino/drug/trafficking market sectors to include anyone (white, black, old, young) able, or thought to be able, to pay a high ransom.
The Trends Journal • Spring 2009