Oh, I myself live in one of the most ethnically-mixed cities in the country, we have the stats to prove it. Here, what we deal with is discrimination by economic class. We don't care what you are any more, except poor, or really, really rich. Ain't true of course, but the economic disparities are so huge it trumps everything else.
Middle class is right out. You middle class folks with your unions are too damn uppity, you speak up at meetings and you go out and vote and you just cause trouble. (Remember seeing anti-union rants against state employees? Against teachers? Against "greedy auto workers?" ) So, hey, we have pundits and we have media and stuff to work on turning everybody against you. We have ways of dealing with *you*.

Now, one thing I really don't understand about all of this... if a ruling elite of a very few families is running the place, and they consider the rest of us about as useful as a few more Haitians dying of dysentery in those cardboard shacks outside the barbwire fences, then why do they even bother acting like we're any threat? Why are they trashing the place into a third world country? (There's stats on the economics of that, too.)
Mexico has regular issues with their ruling elites being stupid about things from ignorance, but they aren't all idiots. And it's not just a difference in population we're talking about here.
China has a lot more bodies to deal with than America, and they want economic prosperity as much as possible, as widely as possible. (And clamp down the censors so nobody talks about the pollution they're grappling with, or failing to.) Doesn't mean they're gonna share much of it, but they're not trying to tear down *all* of their own people.
Another thing... I understand any given corporation (like Wallyworld) wants to minimize their expenses and push as much of the cost of, say, their employees' health care off onto the common tax burden. Many of their people have to go on welfare when they get sick. Makes perfect sense, right?
Besides, the oligarchic streak of Republicans love high unemployment--everybody shuts up about abusive supervisors and nobody dares report safety problems and labor gets cheaper and cheaper. If your corporation has deep enough pockets, you love the failure of smaller business, it means you're squeezing out competitors and you'll eventually be able to jack up your monopolistic prices, when nobody has anywhere else to go for energy or property loans or media or cars or whatever. (Yeah, Comcast, lookin' at you.) Hey, from a robber baron POV, it's all good news.
But how useful is it to maintain all your young black and Hispanic or skinhead guys as drug runners? Sure, useful for armies, lots of desperate cannon fodder. But drugs? Whut? There's no return on investment generated there. The junkies are a net drain on resources, though they extract money from their relatives and robbery victims pretty well. Drug gangs are like pyramid schemes, nobody at the bottom makes any money. They engender fear and disruption, make people cower in fear of both them and of the police.
Sure, individuals may be scrabbling along and getting a little wealthier from organized crime, so that's enough to explain why they're all promoting another type of pyramid scheme--same as all those collapsed Wall Street schemes.
But why is that tolerated at the top? Why am I looking at a pack of blithering Xtian idiots in office shamelessly trying to extract wealth like a sucking drain? ("We're not arguing about the label, we're just arguing about the price, madam.") Going too far, taking it to the point the place isn't even able to function as a consumer culture, which is what we've been raised to produce.
Stack all of this up together, and it means *nobody* has any money for consumer goods.
"Hey, we're all livin' under the bridge as long as we can 'fore the cops roust us, bro, where you bin?"
I'm sorry, 12 per cent unemployment is not a functioning consumer culture buying weird doodads of plastic from China any more. People stop buying things like food, it's so *downer* you know.
Which leaves us with a mystery. You'd think various of the monolithic authoritarian religious groups would be alarmed by all this failure of investments--talk about the long haul. Even if they're into shame and guilt as power tools, and fear is great for controlling the unwashed masses, a wealthy elite who's in it for the long term should want prosperity with a steady net improvement building their investments, not devastating "oops!-wreckage!" in all directions.
I can't help but wonder what the logic really is.
And if it really is entirely fallout from "oopsie, my bad!" from Wall Street's games, shouldn't we be seeing cracks as the retribution begins?