NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — For the country as a whole, the unemployment rate fell in 2011. That’s good news, right?

Not so much for African Americans.

As the economy slowly improved last year, the unemployment rate fell for both whites and Latinos.

But at the end of the year the black unemployment rate was 15.8%, exactly where it started out 2011, according to the government’sDecember jobs report released Friday. That’s a sharp contrast to the white unemployment rate, which fell to 7.5% last month.

The broad trend is unfortunately nothing new, said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. The black unemployment rate has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.

But there’s a new story emerging too.

Black men captured about 237,000 job gains in 2011, whereas black women actually ended the year with fewer jobs than they had a year ago.

Black men still have a higher unemployment rate overall, but their’s at least improved — while for black women, it got worse.

White House to propose raise for federal workers

Rodgers attributes this trend to massive government job cuts during the year.

“Minorities and women are heavily concentrated in public sector jobs,” he said. “With these major cuts we’re seeing in public employment, you’re going to see minorities pushed out of these jobs.”

Overall, blacks accounted for only 9% of the nation’s job gains during the year, even though they make up 12% of the civilian population, according to Department of Labor. 

After several months of protests at Occupy Wall Street camps all over the US and hundreds of arrests, RT takes a look at some of the increasingly militarized tactics the police have been using against American citizens.

Popular uprisings abroad get applauded in the United States, but  similar uprisings within the US turn into a crackdown on that same democratic will. Has America been in a war on its own territory – against its own people – during the last several months of the nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrations?

“For basically our entire history we’ve been an imperialist state, so I think it’s only a matter of time before imperialism abroad starts affecting individual liberties at home,” said Occupy Wall Street activist Katie Davison.

The methods being used to end civil disobedience in the US have been increasingly reminiscent of war tactics.

“There is a lot of casualties, so you can say it’s a war zone,” said one New York protester to RT.

Peaceful students have been pepper-sprayed while seated, demonstrating Americans have been getting beaten until they bleed, and even war veterans have gotten injured into unconsciousness.

“Our police forces have been militarized. They are working more in cooperation with the Pentagon. They’re buying and being given military surplus equipment that has been kind of designed for use in war, and this is something that leads to treating the public as you would treat an enemy,” said film maker and blogger Danny Schechter. 

“As if they were hugging me, like, ‘Don’t make a move, just put your hands behind your back.’ And then 6 people jumped on me, they tried to wrestle me to the ground, they wrestled me to the ground, and then kneed me in the back for about 5 minutes,” 37-year-old lawyer and artist Amin Husain recalled of his own arrest.

Amin said the only political right not cracked down on in the US is the right to vote on Election Day. Everything else, according to the Occupy Wall Street activist, is seen as a threat.

“The United States has created a space for people to shop. For people to buy cards, go on picnics, do things like that – but the moment they are politicized in any way – that’s a problem,” said Amin.

Hundreds of arrests throughout months of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have shown the world an image of America not seen for a long time. An image authorities have tried their best to hide by demanding special credentialing for journalists covering demonstrations and evictions, as well as threatening to take media passes away.

“We’re seeing this pattern, and it’s very disturbing, and a lot of reporters aren’t seeing it because they’re getting thrown out of the action and arrested, and this is something that’s outrageous also,” added Schechter.

Police presence and aggression has been overwhelming at non-violent protests.

“Since the Patriot Act was passed, they’ve used instances of violence to revoke liberties,” said Occupy Wall Street activist Jesse La Greca.

Some of those who’ve been part of the protests since day one, have said officials turned the movement into a civil war.

“The show of police force and the coordinated attempts with Homeland Security show that this is coming from a federal level,” explained Occupy Wall street activist Katie Davison.

Even with the use of militarized tactics on the rise, those who have been fighting for change are not planning to give up on their battle.

“The police overreaction and the political overreaction only emboldens us, only strengthens our resolve,” said Jesse La Greca.

Many are saying the real fight is yet to come.

“The actions of a dying regime become more aggressive and crazier. We’re just going to see more of that. 2012 will be the year of American Revolution,” editorial columnist and author Ted Rall said to RT.

The aggressive vigor with which America’s biggest protests in years have been met is the latest example of the fact that what the US preaches is not necessarily what it practices – only heating the outrage of its citizens who want the system to change.

A crime scene in Monterrey, Mexico, last week. Drug-related violence has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people since late 2006, Mexican officials say.

WASHINGTON — Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.

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The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.

The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.

Agency officials declined to publicly discuss details of their work, citing concerns about compromising their investigations. But Michael S. Vigil, a former senior agency official who is currently working for a private contracting company called Mission Essential Personnel, said, “We tried to make sure there was always close supervision of these operations so that we were accomplishing our objectives, and agents weren’t laundering money for the sake of laundering money.”

Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”

Those are precisely the kinds of concerns members of Congress have raised about a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed people suspected of being low-level smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border in the hope that they would lead to higher-level operatives working for Mexican cartels. After the agency lost track of hundreds of weapons, some later turned up in Mexico; two were found on the United States side of the border where an American Border Patrol agent had been shot to death.

Former D.E.A. officials rejected comparisons between letting guns and money walk away. Money, they said, poses far less of a threat to public safety. And unlike guns, it can lead more directly to the top ranks of criminal organizations.

“These are not the people whose faces are known on the street,” said Robert Mazur, a former D.E.A. agent and the author of a book about his years as an undercover agent inside the Medellín cartel in Colombia. “They are super-insulated. And the only way to get to them is to follow their money.”

Another former drug agency official offered this explanation for the laundering operations: “Building up the evidence to connect the cash to drugs, and connect the first cash pickup to a cartel’s command and control, is a very time consuming process. These people aren’t running a drugstore in downtown L.A. that we can go and lock the doors and place a seizure sticker on the window. These are sophisticated, international operations that practice very tight security. And as far as the Mexican cartels go, they operate in a corrupt country, from cities that the cops can’t even go into.”

The laundering operations that the United States conducts elsewhere — about 50 so-called Attorney General Exempt Operations are under way around the world — had been forbidden in Mexico after American customs agents conducted a cross-border sting without notifying Mexican authorities in 1998, which was how most American undercover work was conducted there up to that point.

But that changed in recent years after President Felipe Calderón declared war against the country’s drug cartels and enlisted the United States to play a leading role in fighting them because of concerns that his security forces had little experience and long histories of corruption.

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

Former counternarcotics officials, who also would speak only on the condition of anonymity about clandestine operations, offered a clearer glimpse of their scale and how they worked. In some cases, the officials said, Mexican agents, posing as smugglers and accompanied by American authorities, pick up traffickers’ cash in Mexico. American agents transport the cash on government flights to the United States, where it is deposited into traffickers’ accounts, and then wired to companies that provide goods and services to the cartel.

In other cases, D.E.A. agents, posing as launderers, pick up drug proceeds in the United States, deposit them in banks in this country and then wire them to the traffickers in Mexico.

The former officials said that the drug agency tried to seize as much money as it laundered — partly in the fees the operatives charged traffickers for their services and another part in carefully choreographed arrests at pickup points identified by their undercover operatives.

And the former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.

“They tell you they’re bringing you $250,000, and they bring you a million,” one former agent said of the traffickers. “What’s the agent supposed to do then, tell them no, he can’t do it? They’ll kill him.”

It is not clear whether such operations are worth the risks. So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels’ operations, and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain. Last year, the D.E.A. seized about $1 billion in cash and drug assets, while Mexico seized an estimated $26 million in money laundering investigations, a tiny fraction of the estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in drug money that flows between the countries each year.

Mexico has tightened restrictions on large cash purchases and on bank deposits in dollars in the past five years. But a proposed overhaul of the Mexican attorney general’s office has stalled, its architects said, as have proposed laws that would crack down on money laundered through big corporations and retail chains.

“Mexico still thinks the best way to seize dirty money is to arrest a trafficker, then turn him upside down to see how much change falls out of his pockets,” said Sergio Ferragut, a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and the author of a book on money laundering, which he said was “still a sensitive subject for Mexican authorities.”

Mr. Calderón boasts that his government’s efforts — deploying the military across the country — have fractured many of the country’s powerful cartels and led to the arrests of about two dozen high-level and midlevel traffickers.

But there has been no significant dip in the volume of drugs moving across the country. Reports of human rights violations by police officers and soldiers have soared. And drug-related violence has left more than 40,000 people dead since Mr. Calderón took office in December 2006.

The death toll is greater than in any period since Mexico’s revolution a century ago, and the policy of close cooperation with Washington may not survive.

“We need to concentrate all our efforts on combating violence and crime that affects people, instead of concentrating on the drug issue,” said a former foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, at a conference hosted last month by the Cato Institute in Washington. “It makes absolutely no sense for us to put up 50,000 body bags to stop drugs from entering the United States.”