I just finished reading “Gang Leader for A Day,” by Sudhir Venkatesh.
While Sudhir was studying Sociology at the University of Chicago, he was gaining valuable experience by embedding himself into one of Chicago’s most notorious and poorest housing projects, the Robert Taylor Homes. He would visit these projects with complete access to the local gang for more than a decade. It gave him a never before seen inside look into one of America’s most notorious ghettos.
The Robert Taylor Homes consisted of 28 sixteen-storey buildings stretching 2 miles. At the time of construction, it was the largest low-income housing project of its kind in America. All of the residents were low-income, creating a vast concentration of poor. At its peak, over 27,000 people lived in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project that was originally built for only 11,000. The buildings have since been demolished.
While conventional sociologists would use simple surveys to try and discover what life was like in the projects, Sudhir’s experience gave more life to Americans who live in poverty.
When Sudhir visited the Robert Taylor Homes for the first time, he was confronted by a gang leader named J.T. Sudhir quickly befriends J.T. and discovers how a Chicago gang operates.
This friendship does cause conflict throughout the book. People who live in the community associate Sudhir with the gang, so they are reluctant to give him certain information. This kind of scenario happens a few times when Sudhir befriends another person and is associated with them. Eventually Sudhir befriends more people, including a building manager, a police officer, a man who runs the local boys and girls club and a wide range of “hustlers” and single mothers.
“Gang Leader for a Day,” shows the reader why gangs form in certain communities, and the kind of services a gang can provide that government neglects. And answers the question, why don’t Robert Taylor residents call 911 when they hear gun shots or someone needs to go to the hospital?
J.T. was in the Black Kings gang. Black Kings was a city wide gang with various chapters throughout the city, J.T was the leader of one of these chapters. The gang was ran much like a business, with a Board of Directors, and its main function was selling crack-cocaine.
Others in the community would make money by hustling. There were local prostitutes and people who did odd jobs, but some woman would sell food out of their homes or cut children’s hair. So what appeared from the outside to be a dead economy was actually a very active underground economy.
J.T. did not like gang wars, and would try to avoid them as it would interfere with business. According to Sudhir, it was usually “shorties” (High-School gang members) that would start a gang war. As J.T. would so eloquently put it, “They mostly just beat the shit out of each other in high school or at parties,” while the more senior members would concentrate their efforts on the “business.”
The local gangs would use extortion to extract funds from local hustlers and businesses to provide “protection.” J.T. saw his motives as altruistic, and would constantly tell himself he was doing this for “the community.”
Sudhir also obtained financial records from the gang, and this information has been used in various studies since. One of the most surprising facts found in these documents was the incredibly low wages paid to the youngest members who did the most dangerous and deadly work: selling drugs on the street. According to the records, they barely earned minimum wage, which explains why many of them would supplement their income by working at McDonad’s. Local leaders made only about thirty to forty thousand dollars a year.
The book also shows the failure of public housing strategies in the United States. This included housing low-income families in large scale projects. I believe this book should be read by municipal politicians when they think about implementing affordable housing policies. Affordable Housing is a crisis in Alberta right now, and this book is a good example of why options such as inclusionary zoning are good options for Albertans.
NDP leader Brian Mason has called on Solicitor General Fred Lindsay to ban the use of Tasers by law enforcement personnel in Alberta, following the death of a Brooks man.
“Sadly, Grant Prentice is the fifth person to die in Alberta following police use of a Taser,” Mason said. “Enough is enough. It’s time for Alberta to ban Tasers.
A male adult died in Brooks, located between Calgary and Medicine Hat, after RCMP shocked him with a Taser.
Police say they responded to a man “observed to be injured and causing a disturbance in a residential area of the community.” Ambulance service also arrived.
Note from Naomi: The Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post has a “Spring Cleaning Special” in which ten writers make the case for something that deserves to be tossed out this spring. On the trash heap is everything from academic tenure to the White House press corps to the phrase “Muslim world.” I chose to argue for the elimination of Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers. The good news is that Washington Post readers seem to agree. Last I checked, readers were voting to toss out Summers more than anyone or anything else on the list. So add your voice and vote out Summers here.
I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn’t be nice. Just from public life.
The criticisms of President Obama’s chief economic adviser are well known. He’s too close to Wall Street. And he’s a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we’re told we shouldn’t care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.
And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we’ve got.
Brain Bubbles start with an innocuous “whiz kid” moniker in undergrad, which later escalates to “wunderkind.” Next comes the requisite foray as an economic adviser to a small crisis-wracked country, where the kid is declared a “savior.” By 30, our Bubble Boy is tenured and officially a “genius.” By 40, he’s a “guru,” by 50 an “oracle.” After a few drinks: “messiah.”
The superhuman powers bestowed upon these men — and yes, they are all men — shield them from the scrutiny that might have prevented the current crisis. Alan Greenspan’s Brain Bubble allowed him to put the economy at great risk: When he made no sense, people assumed that it was their own fault. Brain Bubbles also formed the key argument Greenspan and Summers used to explain why lawmakers couldn’t regulate the derivatives market: The wizards on Wall Street were too brilliant, their models too complex, for mere mortals to understand.
Back in 1991, Summers argued that the subject of economics was no longer up for debate: The answers had all been found by men like him. “The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering,” he said. “One set of laws works everywhere.” Summers subsequently laid out those laws as the three “-ations”: privatization, stabilization and liberalization. Some “kinds of ideas,” he explained a few years later in a PBS interview, have already become too “passé” for discussion. Like “the idea that a huge spending program is the way to stimulate the economy.”
And that’s the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.
Word is that Summers’s current post may be a pit stop on the way to the big prize, Federal Reserve chairman. That means he could actually make “maestro.”
Mr. President, please: Pop this bubble before it’s too late.
British MP and outspoken critic of Canada’s role in Afghanistan, George Galloway, is being barred entry to Canada because of his opposition to NATO’s deployment of troops in Afghanistan. Spokesperson for the Minister of Immigration was quoted as saying, “we don’t want him to pee on our carpet.”
This is an affront to free speech and our democracy. We have laws in this country to protect our national security, but when they are abused to prevent someone from opposing government decisions, they are not serving their purposes.
The Immigration Minister is becoming the Censorship Minister. We need to give the Immigration Minister an ear full about this.
Call Jason Kenny, Minister of Immigration, to tell him that censoring free speech is not acceptable in Canada.
EMAILS:
Please send an email to the Minister and your Member of Parliament.
Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism
Hon. Jason Kenney
House of Commons
Ottawa, Canada
E-mail: minister@cic.gc.ca, Kennej@parl.gc.ca
Disclaimer: This email is a phising scam. If you receive it, please don’t respond. I’m only pointing out how poorly it was done.
CRA must be saving money by using gmail accounts.
After the last anual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $475.20
From 2009, we process refunds through your VISA / Mastercard Please fill the form below and e-mail it to canada.revenue.agency.org@gmail.com or simply reply it from this curent e-mail !
First Name:
Last Name:
Address:
City:
Province:
Postal Code:
Home Phone Number:
Mother’s Maiden Name:
Date of Birth:
Social Insurance Number:
Credit/Debit Card Number:
Expiration date [ MM/YYYY ] :
Card Verification Code:
Card Signature/ATM PIN:
Bank Name:
We are asking for your personal information to ensure we access the correct account, enabling us to provide the tax return.
Internal Revenue Code Section 6105 allows us to request your Social Insurance Number, Credit/Debit Card number, Expiration Date, Cvv Code ( located on the back of your card ) and ATM PIN CODE for use in maintaining and accessing tax return information.
If you do not enter complete and valid information we cannot provide tax return.
Even before the financial and home foreclosure crisis hit full stride, the number of homeless children in America had reached an alarming level. The National Center on Family Homelessness released a report today that estimates that one in every 50 American children was homeless between 2005 and 2006. That totals roughly 1.5 million kids. While the center provided no previous statistic to compare against that figure, a study conducted with different measures published in 2000 put the total at 1.35 million children living in homelessness each year. The numbers are likely to get worse as the economy continues to decline. “We know the numbers are going to skyrocket,” says Ellen Bassuk, president of the Newton, Mass.-based Center and an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. -TIME
