Can you imagine the media shitstorm if someone with Jim Hensley's rap sheet were Barack...

[arendt]

...Obama's father-in-law?

Jim Hensley and his older brother Eugene first began working in the liquor distribution business before World War II, being in the employ of Kemper Marley, Sr., an Arizona rancher who had become wealthy in the liquor distribution business in Phoenix and Tucson following the end of Prohibition.

Following his discharge in 1945, Hensley and his brother went back to work for Marley in his United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson. In 1948, both brothers were prosecuted by the federal government and convicted of falsifying liquor records to conceal illegal distribution of whiskey against post-war rationing regulations. Jim Hensley received a six-month suspended sentence while his brother received a year in federal prison. In 1953, Jim Hensley and Marley were charged by federal prosecutors with falsifying liquor records. Defended by future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, they were acquitted.

In December 1952, the Hensley brothers bought into the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in New Mexico, with Eugene running it and Jim returning to Phoenix. In a May 1953 hearing before the New Mexico State Racing Commission, the Hensley brothers concealed the existence an equal partner, Clarence "Teak" Baldwin, who had been banned from any ownership role due to illegal bookmaking activities. A 1953 New Mexico State Police investigation found further that Kemper Marley was a financial backer for bookmakers and had connections with Baldwin and with the bookmaking operations of organized crime,

In 1955, Hensley founded the beer distributorship to have his own name, borrowing $10,000 against everything he had to buy a small existing distributorship. He was given a state liquor license despite his normally disqualifying past felony conviction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Hensley

Cindy McCain makes Geraldine Ferraro look like a member of the DAR. They didn't skip even one generation on the ride from organized crime to the WH. Oh, and isn't it "interesting" that Rehnquist got his start defending mobsters.

I know that Arizona is a cesspool - Sheriff Joe A. of Maricopa County, a string of crooked governors, the home of Barry Goldwater. But, the rest of America doesn't and the media is never going to mention this.

I mean, at least America knew that Joe Kennedy Sr. was a rum-running crook. They still voted for his kid. But, does "family values" America understand that ALL of McCain's money and influence comes from mob/beer money? I sorta doubt it.

I am convinced this country is run by gangsters. DC is nothing but Cicero, IL on the Potomac.

Isn't it fascinating how a crime-obsessed media can manage not to talk about the criminal links of McCain's sugar daddy/father-in-law. Who just happened to be part of the Keating Five scandal? Keating Five? What was that?

Keating's relationship with McCain came under particularly intense press scrutiny. McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981. Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in lawful political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

I got this info in two seconds flat on the internet. I could wait ten years for the corporate media to mention it. But, look, look, look. Obama is skinny. Obama is elitist. Obama gives terrorist fist jabs.

I am so sick of the propaganda machine in this country.

Feel free to point these Wikipedia links to anyone who is interested.

arendt

[blondeatlast]

1. Marley was heavily suspected, but never charged, in the bombing of AZ Republic reporter Don Bolles'

car. The hit man never implicated Marley but locals knew damn good and well he was involved somehow.

I remember that well, although I was quite young. I went with my mom and sister to the Clarendon Hotel (where Bolles was going to meet his source) that day to help sis plan her wedding--the bomb exploded a few minutes after we left--I heard it.

[arendt]

2. Sounds like an AZ version of the BFEE. BHO won't go here, but we need to. n/t

[blondeatlast]

3. It was a rather landmark moment in time. You need to understand that at the time,

the Arizona Republic was part of the political machine here--but they were so shocked and disgusted that they turned on all the parties involved (and did their damndest to implicate Marley to no avail).

Before then, AZ's organized crime operated very under the radar--but Bolles' murder (he was, by all reports, a very good guy, family man, Mormon, and a DAMN good investigative reporter) was the end to all that.

It was a major turning point--the Arizona Republic no longer greased the skids for state government and the organized crime problem was put in the public arena.

[arendt]

5. So, how are things working out? I mean Sheriff Joe is still on the loose. n/t

[blondeatlast]

6. He's got stiff, but woefully underfunded competition in Dan Saban.

Sadly, I think we're still 20 years behind here. However, the Sun City vote isn't what it once was since Maricopa County has annexed a lot more suburbs. Those voters tend to be younger and more liberal.

[arendt]

7. He should have a stiff jail sentence for those junkets to Central America...

the guy is a thug and a crook. Sounds like he runs a police state; and the best that can be done is to give him "stiff, but underfunded competion"?

Just FMI - was that crooked governor, Evan Mecham, the son of a former governor?

arendt

[arendt]

4. Geez, google "jim hensley" & nascar...

one thing that turns up is:

Jim Hensley and his brother Eugene went to work after World War II for Kemper Marley, a wealthy wholesale liquor distributor. Marley, in fact, had once been a bookie, getting his start working for the Transamerica Wire Service, a betting service established by mafiosi Gus Greenbaum (who was murdered with his wife when their throats were slashed in bed in 1958). Until 1947, liquor was rationed by the government. Apparently Marley did quite well in spite of the restrictions, and in 1948 the reason why became clear. Eugene and Jim Hensley were convicted of falsifying records on behalf of Marley’s distributorship, United Liquor (along with fifty other Marley employees) to conceal the illegal distribution of hundreds of cases of liquor. Jim Hensley got a six month suspended sentence.

In 1953, Jim Hensley, then the General Manager for United Liquor, was once more charged for doing the same thing again. Marley paid for top notch legal representation though (future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.) Hensley still went to prison, but took the fall when the rest of the company was cleared. According to an article in American Mafia.com, Marley rewarded Hensley for his loyalty to the organization:

When Hensley strolled out of the joint, Marley bought his silence with a lucrative Phoenix-based Budweiser beer distributorship.


http://tiodt.blogspot.com/2006/12/married-to-mob.html

Transamerica Wire Service set off all kinds of bells for me:

At one point Marley served as Chairman of the Board of the Valley National Bank. When Bugsy Siegel, on instructions from Meyer Lansky, built the FLAMINGO CLUB, Las Vegas's first casino, the money was borrowed from the Valley National Bank. Involvements in narcotics trafficking on the part of Valley National Bank are hinted in the ARIZONA PROJECT.

http://2164th.blogspot.com/2008/04/pakistan-rethinking-war-on-terror.html

And there we are, right back to my old friend Meyer Lansky. See my thread from yesterday: "Where is Meyer Lansky when you need him?"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3732318#3732326

-----------

Why don't we play a game? Six degrees of separation from Meyer Lansky in the GOP.

arendt

[starroute]

8. Goldwater and his brother were also tied in with these guys

US politicians since Nixon have been far too intimate with the Mob for anyone's comfort -- the Democrats probably not so much so following Kennedy's assassination, but the GOP continuingly and in spades.

The articles cited below, which deal with the same set of people as the Hensley stories, are too long to quote all the good stuff -- there's much more at the links. (And note that the story brings in some of those dirty real estate connections I was referring to at the Lansky thread.)

http://weeklywire.com/ww/06-22-98/tw_curr4.html

More telling is how Bob Goldwater skipped those charming tales of when he and his sibling hobnobbed with known Mafia thugs, ran shady citrus farms, exploited illegal aliens and were linked to land deals that stank to high heaven, in a state already reeking with real-estate scullduggery. And maybe he just forgot about the pack of angry journalists that descended upon Phoenix 20 years ago, dispatched by the national Investigative Reporters and Editors organization to uncover facts surrounding the grisly assassination of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. . . .

In March 1977, the IRE reporters began publishing a series of stories incriminating the Goldwaters in newspapers across the country, including The Arizona Daily Star.

For his part, Robert Goldwater was longtime buddies with Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland gangster who made extensive investments in Arizona in the late '30s. A decade later, Dalitz confederate and Mafia underboss Peter Licavoli Sr. bought a Tucson ranch, while Dalitz set up shop in Las Vegas with the help of Licavoli and Mafia moneyman Meyer Lansky.

Before long the Goldwaters had opened a Vegas store exclusively placed in Dalitz' Desert Inn, and Robert Goldwater even went into the restaurant business with a tight pal of Licavoli's.


http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_219.html

Another pal with a questionable background who was close to the Goldwater camp, was Willie Bioff, labor extortionist, paid goon, pimp and government informant.

In 1943, Bioff testified against the top leadership of the Chicago mob about their role in a massive Hollywood extortion scandal. That testimony resulted in convictions for mob boss Paul Ricca, Johnny Roselli and others. In exchange for selling out his partners, Bioff walked away from prosecution a free man and got to keep the millions he had stolen as well. Willie moved to Arizona, where he lived under the name Willie Nelson, Nelson being his wife's maiden name.

Contrary to what's usually written, Willie Bioff wasn't hiding out in Arizona. In fact, he worked at the Riviera Casino in Vegas as the entertainment director for Gus Greenbaum, Chicago's man in Nevada. Outgoing, likable and very rich, Willie was a natural for politics, and was soon popular within the golden elite of Phoenix society, which is how he met Barry Goldwater, in November of 1952. The two men became fast friends. . . .

In 1955, Peter Licavoli, Moe Dalitz's old pal, and Paul Ricca, boss of the Chicago mob, started to shake Bioff down for cash. Willie paid off for a while, but then he started making noise about going to the feds through his new pal, Barry Goldwater. The next morning, Bioff stepped into his Ford pick up, stepped on the gas, and was blown to kingdom come. Barry Goldwater showed up for the funeral and denied, with a straight face, knowing who Willie Bioff really was.


http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Aug-28-Sun-2005/news/26985900.html

If modern Las Vegas has a founding father worthy of the title, it isn't Ben Siegel or some ordinary tough guy, but an infinitely savvier fellow named Morris Barney Dalitz.

His friends called him Moe.

Moe Dalitz was an important casino operator, developer, and philanthropist. Although no criminal case against him ever succeeded, mob cops and FBI men perceived him differently. They saw him as a major racket boss, Teamsters Pension Fund conduit, and "first among equals" peer of Meyer Lansky.

At the height of Dalitz's power and influence, he had the endorsement of senators and governors and was worth well in excess of $100 million. Along the way, Dalitz also made multimillionaires of several devoted apprentices and partners. These were men who gathered their fortunes not on the casino floor, but by building homes and creating hit television series.

[arendt]

9. Compared to your knowledge, I'm in kindergarten...

and I have lived in Chicago, New Jersey, and Boston - all places where "money talks and BS walks".

I mean, it doesn't take much to put Arizona corruption together with Las Vegas - they're right next to each other. But, for my whole life, I never made the connection.

So, Barry Goldwater was mobbed up? So much for his "strong moral stance" about being conservative.

----

Really, America belongs to the gangsters. It has since Prohibition. Sometimes their political frontmen are obvious thugs (Nixon, W), sometimes they are slick (Reagan, Clinton); but no one gets to DC without making his bones with the mob.

I have no problem believing McCain is a mobbed-up crook. I have come to accept that the Bush regime has totally destroyed our governmental structures. Now I see that it has been made possible by seventy years of creeping corruption, blackmail, and bribery.

Forgive me if I step back and vomit.

arendt

[starroute]

11. I didn't know any of this stuff myself until a few months ago

Then I got curious about whether Jack Abramoff had any Mob ties -- and that led to what Daniel Hopsicker had to say about Adam Kidan and Rosario Spadaro -- and that led me to Meyer Lansky. Since then, I've been collecting Mob connections whenever I catch wind of them.

I never did find anything useful on Abramoff, but I've learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Mob and US politicians. Reagan's another one with Las Vegas ties -- though it still isn't clear to me whether his alleged Mob connections ever amounted to more than a kind of generic Hollywood readiness to associate with underworld figures:

http://www.moldea.com/MCA.html

The same year that Reagan was elected governor of California, Paul Laxalt was elected governor of Nevada. Both Laxalt and Reagan had been heavily involved in the Goldwater campaign. The two men, as governors of neighboring states, became close friends while the latter tried to "clean up" Nevada's image. . . .

Although Laxalt chose not to seek a second term as governor, Reagan did and was reelected. Laxalt returned to practicing law and then opened a gambling casino in Nevada - which failed. Laxalt then ran for the U.S. Senate and won. While serving as a senator, Laxalt ran Reagan's campaigns for the presidency in 1976 and again in 1980. Laxalt then became general chairman of the Republican National Committee. . . .

During the presidential campaign, Reagan met privately with known associates of organized crime and appointed others to his personal campaign staff. Several of these people were later given high positions in the Reagan administration after his election. President Reagan talked tough about the organized crime problem in the United States, while surrounding himself with many who were closely linked to those who have created it.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Laxalt

Paul Laxalt was elected lieutenant governor of Nevada in 1962 and served until 1966. In 1964 he ran for the U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Howard Cannon and lost a controversial election by less than one hundred votes. Two years later, he was elected Governor of Nevada, defeating a two-term incumbent (Grant Sawyer) and served until 1970 when he decided against seeking re-election. He ran for the U.S. Senate in the Watergate year of 1974, defeating Lieutenant Governor Harry Reid in an election that was decided by less than 600 votes.

Laxalt's tenure as Governor of Nevada was noteworthy for coinciding with the purcahse of a large number of hotel-casinos by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Laxalt's tenure also marked an increase of corporate ownership of gaming operations in the State of Nevada.


http://www.casinogaming.com/features/stories/hughes.html

Federal grand juries in Los Angeles and around the country, as far as New York City, began fishing expeditions into gambling. By 1966, Chicago newspapers claimed under-reporting of casino revenue - skimming - was siphoning $3,000 a day into underworld channels. . . .

Hughes had been in an awful fight over his method of running Trans World Airlines. He was forced to sell his TWA stock, for which he got a check for $546,549,771.

"We were talking about tens of thousands of dollars interest per day," Maheu said in his revealing book, "Next To Hughes; Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes." Hughes discovered that gross casino revenue could offset the interest that $546 million was amassing. "Suddenly he was saved," said Maheu, "and in one giant whoosh his tax problems went out the window."

"How many more of these places are available?" Hughes wanted to know. "Let's buy 'em all!"


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1075098-1,00.html

After he was Governor of Nevada, Laxalt was the principal owner of the Ormsby House Hotel-Casino in Carson City. Laxalt is currently embroiled in a libel suit against McClatchy Newspapers, which reported that organized crime was involved in skimming nearly $2 million in receipts from the casino. Though the paper did not claim that Laxalt was involved in or knew about the illegal operation, he has vigorously pursued the lawsuit, and other newspapers have given extensive coverage to the story.


http://www.nevadalabor.com/barbwire/barb97/barb4-13-97.html

On that fateful 1974 November night, former Gov. Laxalt edged then-Lt. Gov. Harry Reid, who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by unnecessarily attacking. Despite a big lead in the polls, Reid chose to question Laxalt's Ormsby House financing. As history would prove, there were a lot of embarrassing questions to ask. Laxalt's spinmeisters termed Reid's questions a personal attack on Laxalt's family, including his sister, a Carmelite nun.

----------------------------

Frank Fahrenkopf, a friend of Laxalt's who worked under him in the 1980 Reagan campaign, is also somebody I've wondered about. Fahrenkopf became RNC chairman in 1983 and in 1984 he founded the International Republican Institute (where John McCain has been chairman since 1993.)

In 1995, Fahrenkopf became president and CEO of the American Gaming Association, the casino industry's national trade association, which apparently also makes him their top lobbyist. He was working a few years back with Haley Barbour -- another former RNC chairman and now governor of Mississippi -- to expedite the expansion there of riverboat gambling.

[arendt]

13. I guess its my turn to educate myself...

I had previously come at the underworld from the spooks/drugs/banks side. My introduction to this was the fabulous book: "Hot Money and the Politics of Debt", R. T. by Naylor, who is Canadian. Here's a book review from The Washington Monthly:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_v19/ai_5264890

I think the book has a second edition, sometime in the 2000s.

From Naylor, I went on to "Compromised: Bush, Clinton, and the CIA" by Terry Reed.

http://www.amazon.com/Compromised-Clinton-Bush-Terry-Reed/dp/1883955025

It gets a mention on PDS's site:

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/l28comp.htm

The author claims to have been a drug pilot at Mena, to have been at meetings between Ollie North and Clinton, to have known Barry Seal. He got referenced a lot by anti-Clinton folks in the 90s, but has dropped off the radar since then.

Then, there was a website, Public Information Research, that stopped being updated in the 90s, although I think its still alive. It has a linkage map between all the spook insiders.

http://www.namebase.org/

IIRC, the main writer, Daniel Brandt, got accused of being a conduit for disinformation. He either got fed up with being shit on by his own readers; or the accusations were true. In any case, I wouldn't accept what's there without cross-checking. Although, some of the older stuff is probably more trustworthy.

----

Bottom line: I stayed on the spook side of the mob/druggie/spook partnership. Time to load up who's who in gangsterland.

Thanks for your help and encouragement.

arendt

[arendt]

14. Oops, counterpunch thinks well of D Brandt...

Article from 2003:

http://www.counterpunch.org/hand01032003.html

arendt

[starroute]

16. I started by looking at the spook side too

But there's a big missing step, in that after the 1980's, the trail of Casolaro's Octopus goes totally cold. The CIA Old Boys' Network types like Ray Cline and E. Howard Hunt get old and retire or die. The slightly younger Enterprise figures like Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines also pass from the scene -- Richard Secord running around Azerbaijan in the early 90's is about as late as that lasts. BCCI falls and no other bank obviously replaces it.

Around the same time, the old-time mobsters die off, generally after being hounded into irrelevance by the Feds -- Lansky in 1982, Trafficante in 1987, Marcello in 1993. Even the Reverend Moon, one of the last survivors of that era, goes all sort of global and starts running high-level seminars for second-tier world leaders instead of setting up Iran-Contra front-groups.

This is why sites like NameBase aren't up to date -- the networks it tracks are very much *then* and not *now."

So I keep sniffing around like an old hound dog trying to find the trail, looking back and forward and trying to figure out who might be whose heirs.

One thing that's clear is that the Russian-Israeli Mafia is doing a lot of what both the CIA and the Mob used to do -- drugs, assorted rackets, money-laundering. I think there was a crucial transition in the late 70s/early 80's when the Israeli spooks and the CIA/Enterprise types were involved together in Latin American drugs-and-arms running, but after Iran-Contra came to its inglorious end, the US people got out of the business while the Israeli end got privatized.

Another is that money-laundering is no longer dependent on having a single major bank, like BCCI or Nugan Hand. Instead, there are all these little island nations, like the Caymans -- or not-quite nations, like Jersey and the Isle of Man -- or non-islands like Liechtenstein -- that have realized money-laundering is a far better way of supplementing the treasury than selling postage stamps to 12-year-olds.

A third is that the GOP seems to have inherited certain pieces, partly by way of all the eager young New Rightists of the 80's who were involved in the Iran-Contra front groups and have since soldiered on as GOP operatives. People like Roger Stone, who links Watergate, the 2000 recount, and Indian casinos.

It still doesn't quite add up, though, because there is no obvious global power center, and yet the black economy grows larger and larger. Last I looked, both drugs and arms were bigger than the planet's #3 money-maker, which is oil, and gambling and other vices made a substantial contribution as well. That's an awful lot of money, and even if much of it goes to the local suppliers and dealers, there's still got to be enough skim to buy a lot of small nations outright and significantly influence the policies of larger ones.

But who's buying what -- and why? The networks of the current black economy have been a-building since the 1930's -- but who controls the networks? Does anyone? Or is it just a kind of water main that's there to be tapped by anyone who's savvy enough to know where the levers are and ruthless enough to use them?

This is what drives me nuts. Watergate taught us to follow the money -- but these days, the money just seems to run in circles, enriching a lot of crooks along the way but not obviously landing anywhere.

There are too damn many mysteries out there -- not least being the spinelessness of the Democrats in Congress -- and a lot of them might be answered if certain people were being bought. But by whom, and to what ends remains as murky as ever.

[arendt]

17. That post should be a thread on its own. Very original thinking - you "old hound dog"...

I can't add much to who's who among spooks and gangsters, as everything after Iran-Contra is news to me. What follows are random thoughts, upon waking up.

When the whole BCCI/Iran-Contra firestorm burned out, I started following the right-wing , not-so-covert op against the U.S. government. That is, the militia movement, Scaiffe and the hit on Clinton (who himself is dirty), the shadowy CNP, the fundie ministers (Robertson, Dobson). It seemed to me that the far right had perfected its tactics overseas and felt strong enough to bring them back to the USA, cynically using freedom of religion as a base of operations via sugar-daddies like "Reverend" Moon.

I haven't had time to follow the money in minute detail, but I think a lot of it has gone into buying Congress and the media. You may recall what a watershed election 1994 was. Huge numbers of decent people from both parties just quit, and a class of fundie whackjobs took over. The Democrats have been split up. There are the sellouts and collaborators - DLC, Blue Dogs, etc. And there are the honest, but 3-1 outnumbered, real Democrats. The GOP has been pushed to the far right; and, it looks like, right over the edge. The only semblance of sanity left in the GOP is the Bush Sr. faction; and they are soooo old they won't last much longer. It may be that some new Meyer Lansky intends to crack heads and put the house in order. (But I can't see BHO as ML2, even though he comes from the Chicago Machine, a mob-connected operation if there ever was one.)

Still, as you say, there is a huge amount of money out there - more every day as they loot America down to the copper plumbing. Where is it going, besides a lot of off-shore bank accounts?

Clearly, the whole black economy and shadow Mob government are not rigid. This may be as close to organized as it gets - crime families with territories and some kind of coordinated, but decentralized, money laundering operation. They just keep buying more and more stuff. The line between gangsters and businessmen keeps getting blurrier, as the businessmen use evermore strong arm tactics and the gangsters put themselves behind layers of fronts much as businessmen use "contractors" to distance themselves from brutal labor practices.

It takes a lot of money to insulate yourself from the legal system and the iron discipline of the marketplace. You need small armies of lawyers and strong-arm men. You need huge piles of bribe money. And, you are always looking over your shoulder at your competitors.

May I respectfully offer a counter-hypothesis? What we have right now IS the new world. Privatized, crooked government. A totally corrupt financial system, which is a no-lose casino for the gangster elite and a parasite on the real economy. An economy that increasingly resembles indentured servitude, with an army of collection agencies, credit-rating agencies, repo men, and foreclosure folks. There is still a lot of meat left on the whale-carcass that is America. We haven't hit bottom yet. Its not clear where the final equilibrium will be. But the trajectory downward is clear.

One question for you. Now that Putin has kicked out the oligarchs and taken back the oil, what is his relationship with the RI mob? It would seem that he could control them and their money-laundering operation and use it to weaken and loot America. Has Putin reached an arrangement with the RI mob, something like they can operate overseas and use Russian banks so long as the pay Vlad a royalty? Is Putin just another mobster or an old-fashioned totalitarian dictator?

----

This is the best conversation I have had in years on DU. It shows me how rusty I am at the big picture. (This post is, by my standards, pretty incoherent.) The average conversation here has been reduced to sniping and rhetorical gamesmanship. Deep scholarship, such as yours, is called CT and dismissed. Is DU the place where you do most of your posting?

Regards,

arendt

[starroute]

18. "Distributed networking" as my son calls it

Maybe he and you are right. Maybe there was a unique period between about 1950 and 1990 when the impetus of anti-communism got an unusual number of underworld forces lined up and working in concert to defend the prerogatives of the free market -- spooks, mobsters, old Nazis, Arab oil sheikhs, what have you -- and the relative free-for-all that broke out with the fall of the Soviet Union represents a return to the historical norm.

It would make a lot of sense. If these people are the continuation of what Bucky Fuller called the "great pirates," it would be expectable that they'd operate similarly to lesser pirates -- who might get together once in a lifetime for a major raid but otherwise were just out for themselves. Or like Mongol tribesmen who could be whipped into line by a political genius like Genghis Khan but weren't normally interested in conquering the world. I'll have to think about that.

Putin is an interesting case. He seems to be more of an old-fashioned nationalist than anything else -- for example, putting a lid on foreign NGO's like the International Republican Institute, as well as warring against the oligarchs. And he seems to have plenty of legitimate financial resources in terms of energy, commodities, and high-level arms-dealing. But you might be right that he's also interested in using the RI mob in some way. If so, could the Litvinenko poisoning have been an opening move in a gang-style chess game?


I haven't been posting much of anywhere lately. Over the last few years, I've gone through spurts of posting at Rigorous Intuition and then Cannonfire, but both of those have definite limitations. I'd gotten to the point where I was mainly checking DU for the headlines and rarely posting -- but there suddenly seems to be more interest again in actual discussions. I've found these threads of yours correlating very closely with things I've been reading and thinking myself, and there have been some other good threads lately as well. I hope it keeps up.

(Heck, I'd even like to see serious discussions of a successor to capitalism that could combine the self-regulating quality the free marketeers worship -- without realizing that capitalism ain't that -- with the humanistic values that socialists subscribe to without noticing that bureaucracies are innately anti-humanistic.)

[arendt]

19. Its franchise dictatorship

The more I read, the more I think I don't know what the historical norm was.

It seems like capitalism bred imperialism, which turned inward into fascism. In all of those cases, the capitalist "center" was exploiting a colonial "periphery". (However awful its conditions were, the industrial proletariat of 19th century Europe was better off than the backward people in the Colonial World.)

The CIA was formed to keep that model going - i.e., to keep the first world exploiting the third world. The CIA supported the French colonial effort in Viet Nam. It threw out democratic governments in Latin America and installed dictators who kept their countries in colonial servitude.

The left in America was momentarily spared the full brunt of repression while the internationalist capitalists ("yankees" in the Carol Quigley terminology) fought for hegemony with the nationalist capitalists ("cowboys"). That fight went on until the Bush gang got in. Bush Sr. had a foot in both camps - born yankee, he made his reputation in the oil patch, working with the Cuban mafiosi. I think Bush Sr. was a Meyer Lansky-like fixer. In fact, he is still trying to fix things; but he's too old and his power base is dying out.

I buy Naomi Klein's thesis that The Shock Doctrine represents the New World Order. It is a rancid mixture of corporate fascism and criminal thuggery. It is worse than the old order of sui generis dictators, each in their own country. Now, we have a franchise for dictatorship. Come to the franchise, we will supply you with all the tools you need to take over and exploit your country - as long as you give us a rake off and let our corporations rape your country. As I said, the line between business practices and gangster practices is blurring.

There are new franchises opening each day around the world - haven't had time to look at the coup in Mauritania, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Carlyle Group fingerprints, like with that botched coup in West Africa with some famous Brit getting his tie caught in the wringer.

----

As for Putin, we need more nationalists (not because I like jingoism, but because its the only effective counter to international corporatism). If that's what Putin is, that's good news. The Russians got screwed by capitalism, and I think the Chinese are about to explode. So, maybe we go back to the 20th century power balance, only this time its corporatist vs nationalist.

----

DU is pretty boring lately. Everyone piles on the topics selected by the corporate media. I have tried to talk about alternative systems of governance, but it usually goes nowhere.

The business fundamentalists think that market=self-regulating system. They equate market with governance. That is their mistake. Markets don't self-regulate; they require regulation. Furthermore, the very establishment of a market requires that the society approves of legalizing trade in that market's resource. (E.g., we don't allow slave markets anymore.) Finally, markets are one dollar one vote; anti-democratic.

Markets are nothing more than information processing systems that determine the price of goods. Government is an information processing system that determines which lines of business and which business practices are legitimate. If we can stop them from castrating the internet, we have a good chance of creating a self-regulating business/government environment. But, they control the media; and the false consciousness they create with it is the strongest weapon in their arsenal.

Anyway, I will look for your threads. Thanks for all the discussion.

arendt

[elehhhhna]

10. "DC is nothing but Cicero, IL on the Potomac" LOL! Very accurate assessment!

[arendt]

12. Front page kick n/t

[arendt]

15. kick n/t