Without the mobilized counterweight of angry protest, Southcentral L.A. has been betrayed by virtually every level of government. In particular, the deafening public silence about youth unemployment and the juvenation of poverty has left many thousands of young street people with little alternative but to enlist in the crypto-Keynesian youth employment program operated by the cocaine cartels. Revisiting Watts nearly a generation after a famous pioneering study of its problems, UCLA industrial relations economist Paul Bullock discovered that the worsening conditions described by the Times’s ‘Watts: 10 Years Later’ team in 1975 had deteriorated still further, and that endemic unemployment was at the core of the community’s despair. Bullock observed that the last rational option open to Watts youth – at least in the neoclassical sense of utility-maximizing economic behavior – was to sell drugs.