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The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems

The police had to see everything, know, understand and have power over everything. The strength and perfection of their machinery appears all the more terrible because of the unsuspected resources they dragged up from the depth of the human soul. But nonetheless they were powerless to prevent what happened. For half a century they vainly defended the autocracy against the revolution, which grew stronger every year. It would in fact be wrong to let oneself be taken in by the apparently perfect mechanism of Tsarist security. It is true that at the top there were some intelligent men, technicians of high professional standing; but the whole machine rested on the work of a mass of ignorant civil servants. In the best prepared reports some quite amusing discrepancies appear. Money oiled the wheels of this enormous machine; and gain is a strong but inadequate stimulus. Nothing great is achieved without disinterestedness. And the autocracy had no disinterested supporters. Should it still, after the overthrow of March 26, 1917, be necessary to demonstrate, with facts taken from the history of the Russian Revolution, that the efforts of the Head of the Police Department were in vain, we could quote a whole number of arguments like that put forward by the ex-policeman M.E. Bakai. In 1906, after the suppression of the first revolution, when the Chief of Police, Trusevich, reorganised the Okhrana, the revolutionary organisations of Warsaw, and in particular the Polish Socialist Party [14], in the course of the year liquidated 20 military, 7 constables and 56 policemen and wounded 92; in all, they put 179 officers out of action. They also destroyed 149 consignments of excise alcohol. In the preparation of these actions hundreds of men took part, most of them remaining unknown to the police. M.E. Bakai observes that, in periods of revolutionary upsurge, agents provocateurs often lay low; but they reappeared as reaction gained the upper hand. Like carrion crows over the battle-fie