Cicero (Illinois) on the Potomac

[arendt]

Cicero (Illinois) on the Potomac
by arendt


...."My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way."

....- Al Capone

...."Donald Rumsfeld often quotes a line from Al Capone: 'You will get more with a
....kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.' But should the guiding philosophy
....of the world's leading democracy really be the tough talk of a Chicago mobster?

....- Fareed Zakaria, "The Arrogant Empire", Newsweek, March 24, 2004


During Prohibition, when citizens broke the law en masse to get a drink, they knew (but
did not care) that they were enabling gangsters to prosper. They just wanted what they
had always had: easy access to cheap liquor. But, it was precisely the violence, neglect,
and financial ruin that cheap drunkenness inflicted on families which had fueled the cause
of temperance among newly-enfranchised women. It was they, along with their children, who
were usually on the receiving end of liquor's vices. So, for a few years we, as a nation,
tried temperance; and we are still paying for the criminal syndicates it spawned, down
to this day.

In retrospect, the high-minded moral ideal of temperance could not be enforced by absolute
prohibition. It was too Draconian and too easily evaded in a country with porous borders,
ample access to guns, and no history of harsh internal policing. The political enforcement
of morality instead produced its opposite: corruption of officials, disrespect for the
law by the ordinary citizen, and a loosening of social morals in the atmosphere of
bathtub gin, speakeasies, and gambling dens.

Lately I wonder if the New Deal and the Great Society might done something similarly high-minded,
but short-sightedly stupid, in their attempt to progressively ban corporations from getting
easy access to the cheap, docile, exploitable, non-unionized, American labor.

For twenty five years after World War 2, this lack of access didn't matter. It was as if
corporate America was on a permanent high, fueled by the destruction of the industrial base
of the rest of the world. They also weren't completely cut off from cheap labor. In the
60s, corporations moved huge numbers of factories and jobs from the unionized North to the "open
shop" South. But, by the 1970s, foreign competition was back; and corporations began taking
advantage of their post-war overseas expansion by moving their non-union shops from the South to
the third world, where they could evade the 1960s wave of profit-consumming regulations:
the ones designed to protect the environment, health, and safety.

...."The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.
....This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all
....strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation,
....the mob always will shout for the 'strong man', the 'great leader'.

....- Hannah Arendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

It was at this point that legal evasion of regulation, in the hands of the most aggressive
corporate sharks, crossed the line into outright criminality. There were many honest and
honorable corporations and corporate executives. But Wall Street stepped in to overthrow
the prudent and socially responsible management that had evolved over the past four decades
of government regulation and prosperity. Wall Street favored a new doctrine: that shareholders
deserved maximum return on their investment; that anyone who didn't do their best to evade
the law and even break the law in the quest to maximize profit should be fired.

The 1980s gave us Chainsaw Al Dunlop, Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, the crash of 1987, the S&L
debacle, and the general looting of responsibly-run corporations by bucket shops, conglomerates,
multi-nationals with shady practices, and their partners, the crooked bankers like Neil Bush and
BCCI.

But the American people still wanted their extravagant but affordable life style, and were easily
persuaded that union labor was a bunch of crybabies who would shut up if you hit them hard enough.
This same sentiment was common among the drunks who beat their children during Prohibition. Non-union
workers of the 1980s didn't understand that it was, indeed, their own children whom they were cheating
out of the next generation of well-paying jobs merely in order to have cheap consumer goods, junk
food, and entertainment. They also didn't notice that access to really important family goods -
education, health care, job security, retirement plans - was either being priced out of their reach
or legislated out of existence at the behest of sharp corporate cost cutters.

By the 1990s, the corporate bootleggers were in full swing, running boatloads of sweatshopped
and prison labor goods into every port in America without any interference. Borders became totally
porous to corporate entities and to illegal immigrants. Just as the 20s mob had gambling/drinking
boats floating just outside the 3-mile limit; the multi-nationals had their maquiladoras sitting
just across the border from San Diego.

The corporations could get away with this because they had basically turned Washington DC into their
version of Cicero, IL. They bought the government; they bought the press; and they ruthlessly
intimidated anyone they had neglected or been unable to buy, bribe, or silence.

In that decade, corporate loan sharking, known as the credit card industry was allowed to rewrite
the bankruptcy laws in their favor. Just as cheap liquor ruined families in the 1920s, cheap
credit ruined families in the 1990s. Just as the mob found loan sharking to be a profitable line
of business, so did General Motors, General Electric, and many other formerly-industrial corporations.

With the outright theft of the last three elections, gangsterism has occupied the White House,
the Pentagon, and the CIA. The US budget is being run like a mob "bustout". Enron is simply the
most visible of a batallion of corporate racketeers. The only real action in government is when
corporate gangs go against each other for turf, like with telecom bills or defense appropriations.

The corporate media do "kneecappings" (Howard Dean, Dan Rather) at the behest of Consigliere Karl.
And, to complete the similarity, all the crooks, pundits, and Pharisaical, on-the-take ministers
preach and enforce "family values" - just like in The Godfather. Meanwhile, the suckers in the
American population go continue to flock to the speakeasies - I mean the WalMarts - and say
"Sam sent me".

America today makes the Pottersville of "Its a Wonderful Life" look like Boys Town. We have
craven newspapers in which crime goes unreported; bought cops that let criminals go free; and
crooked politicians to take the heat off.

American society has been drifting back to the gangster worship of the 1920s for quite some time.
Jack Kennedy was "mobbed up", and probably paid for it with his life. From that time forward, the
mob has been a media celebrity: the Godfather and goomba movies, anything by Brian DePalma,
Miami Vice, Hannibal Lecter, the Sopranos, gangster rappers, and ever downward into the gutter with
professional wrestlers becoming a talent pool for Hollywood. In the real world, "concealed carry" laws
have become part of the glorification of gun violence; and video games have been deemed
"desensitization training for murder" by army generals.

...."With the open consent of the people, they have proclaimed before the world the failure of
....their 'democracy'...A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is
....no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne."

....- G. Clemenceau, "Contre la Justice" (1900)


To return to my original question as to whether the New Deal and the Great Society were high-
minded but stupid, I must admit that large segments of the American people have failed to grasp
how they are being robbed of every asset their country has amassed over its two centuries of
existence, and how a radical, anti-democratic ideology is blared at them in coordinated propaganda
campaigns that are used to start wars and steal civil liberties.

Perhaps we can look to FDR's walking away from Prohibition as a model for putting practical
considerations ahead of ideology in an extremely troubled time. Instead of banning alcohol, he
legalized, regulated, and taxed it.

Today, we desperately need some way to get the American people to accept legitimate regulation
of corporations before we are all bankrupt and enslaved. But, contrary to the best hopes of the
best people, the American people are drunk on cheap consumer junk and insulted that liberal preachers
look down upon their consumerist binges. Still, workers who have lost their jobs, their benefits,
their hopes for the future are getting fed up with corporations and their relentless robbing of
the American taxpayer, e.g., WalMart workers on state Medicaid, subsidies for oil companies at
a time of record profits.

The good news about sky-high oil prices is that they signal the end of cheap goods shipped
around the world from China. Not only transport, but raw materials costs are about to force
production back to a more local scale. Still, this is not automatically a good thing.
Corporations have been playing U.S. states and cities against one another for decades,
extorting tax holidays, subsidies, exemptions, etc. in return for corporate feudalism.

We must use the current wave of corruption scandals to elect honest, but realistic, politicians
who will stop the corporate encroachment on our rights as citizens - our rights to sue, to
regulate, to tax. There must be public funding of campaigns, including free air time, to
eliminate corporate dominance of the election process. There must be a corporate death penalty
for murderous incompetence or massive fraud. Corporations can no longer be allowed to claim
all the rights and none of the duties of indivduals. These are issues that genuine conservatives
and genuine liberals must unite around or self-government is dead. The alternative is rapacious
government bycorporate bagmen masquerading as "conservative" Republicans (neocons) and as "fighting"
Democrats (the latest black propaganda from the DLC).

...."Led by the Jesuits and aided by the mob, the army at last stepped into the (Dreyfus Affair)
....confident of victory...The organization of the mob by the general staff was remarkable. The trail
....leads straight from the army to the Libre Parole (newspaper) which...through its articles or
....the personal intervention of its editors, mobilized students, monarchists, adventurers, and
....plain gangsters and pushed them into the streets. If Zola uttered a word, at once his windows
....were stoned. If Scheurer-Kestner wrote to the colonial minister, he was at once beaten up on
....the streets while the papers made scurrilous attacks on his private life.

...."The disturbing thing about the Dreyfuss Affair is that it was not only the mob which had
....to work along extra-parliamentary lines. The entire minority, fighting as it was for
....Parliament, democracy, and the republic, was likewise constrained to wage its battle outside
....the Chamber. The only difference was that while one used the streets, the other resorted to
....the press and the courts. In other words, the whole of France's political life during the
....Dreyfus crisis as carried on outside Parliament.

....- Hannah Arendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism"


The Democratic platform should be nothing beyond the restoration of the Constitution. Just like the
repeal of Prohibition: put things back the way they were. The Restoration will inevitably diminish
corporate and theocratic power; but the beauty of the campaign is that this result is implicit.
Explicitly, you are taking a conservative stance and exposing the hypocrisy of the GOP. We can campaign
on balanced budgets, separation of powers, the Bill of Rights. We can call Bush "King George" and
ask people to repudiate the royalist concentration of power, the Star Chamber tactics, the torture,
the denial of habeus corpus even over a Supreme Court decision, the domestic spying.

The last thing we need to do is to get into a "quien es mas macho" contest with the GOP, which is
the preferred tactic of the rightwing DLC Dems. It plays to the only (relative) strength Bush has,
patriotism. Bush is going to run on "who do you want in the foxhole with you, me or some sissy
liberal?". We need to run on "why did Bush dig this foxhole and start this unnecessary war?" We
need to run this campaign right down the middle, not to the left or right.

To the left, anyone who pushes any tangential "liberal" issues is a fool. Those issues come along
automatically with the Restoration. To the right, running a polarizing pro-war waffler like Hillary
Clinton is suicide; especially since the front-running Republican is John McCain, one of the slimiest,
most pandering flag-waving hypocrites to appear in quite some time (not to mention being to the right
of Barry Goldwater). You can't out-military John McCain. The only contest would be to see who
can pander more to the theocrats.

Just to beat a dead donkey, moralism doesn't work when it is opposed to popular sentiment. Its
time for Democrats to find a way to fall back from a loosing position to something more defendable.
Why can't they pick up that old conservative chestnut "you can't legislate morality" and throw
it in the faces of the theocrats who have been pouring absinthe into the corporate hootch? We
need a program and candidates that unite all politically awake Americans. Its time to settle for
a draw with the corporate reality or be kowtowing to gangsters for the rest of our lives.

In closing, it is important to remeber that Prohibition did, over a longer time frame, cause a
re-evaluation of alcohol, the recognition of alcoholism as a medical condition, and a reduction
in the consumption of hard liquor versus beer and wine. When given information and a choice, people
changed their behavior. We need to have the same kind of education about the pathological political
condition called "the Divine Right of Capital".

[Bruce McAuley]

1. Yup

100% agree.
K+R

Bruce

[arendt]

2. front page kick n/t

[elehhhhna]

3. AL Capone wasn't responsible for anywhere near the deaths Rummy is

plus Great Aunt Nora said Al was a gentleman. Uncle SYL ran gambling for him at the Lexington and they never had trouble with him.

[arendt]

4. Al was a 'gentleman' who beat people with a baseball bat...

wasn't Don Corleone a "gentleman" also?

But I do agree with a paraphrase of the Don:

One man with an army can kill more people than a thousand
mobsters with guns.

----

Your post caused some reflection on my part. (Apologies in
advance if you feel that the following general statement
is directed at your comment in particular.)

I appreciate your sentiment; and at the same time, it's
connotations are colored by the glorification of gangsterism.
We have been taught that, while gangsters may be brutal,
they are polite.

So were Soviet Commissars.

We have to lose this mindset that gangster-like behavior
is an acceptable, if deviant, social norm.

arendt

[elehhhhna]

5. Hey, I'm just pointing out that Rummy killed more people

and caused more suffering than Al ever did.

I happen to have family who knew & worked for the man and they spoke well of him (although they surely feared him, too).

[arendt]

6. As I said, nothing personal...

but this is the Gene Kirkpatrick theory that
somehow, capitalist-loving thugs are OK for
us to cozy up to, while communist thugs are
evil.

We really have to stop idolizing gangsters.

As for speaking well of him, let's go back to
the gangster movies. Isn't it a truism that the
Don's neighborhood is always the safest
place in town? Doesn't the Don perform
very public works of charity and community
service to improve his image and to make
sure the locals tip him off to any trouble?

Is this "some of my best friends are gangsters"
attitude to be the default cultural assumption
in America?

Once again, nothing personal, but the man does
not deserve to be thought well of. He was a
sociopath. That doesn't mean he was stupid or
stupidly unkind to people near him. But its
like saying something nice about Ted Bundy.

arendt

[PATRICK]

7. If we ever

get out of the losing end of the suicidal crisis we could profit from the true reflective wisdom as described here. I long ago suggested the heinous web of high crimes and institutional corruption that has entwined itself into all political and institutional corners needs not impeachment, not one set of trials for a safe selection of crimes in a costly deflated and lengthy trial, but something along the lines of a truth commission that is truly sweeping and inclusive. Describing Prohibition and the sixties regulations by majority Dems you could add other things like removing Nixon where there was no impeachment, no full disclosure of the truth, no full legal proceedings. I am reminded too of the triumph of the socialists in post WWI Germany in punishing and humiliating war industrialists, but not in defanging them of their comeback resources. Reformers naively step into the old game of the war of power, a seesaw of payback, revenge and total war without resolution, where victory means the destruction of both parties or the whole society.

The seesaw must be abandoned or sawed in half. The surrender of power is an aspect of truth trials. A mutuality could arrive at ridding the society of evils and crimes even if originating wholly from one side. Punishing the losing side in a power game if the losing side is to be answered in a brutality commensurate to its threat and crimes is unlikely unless both sides are equally brutal and ruthless. use of the courts means the courts themselves will become swept up into the next round of power games(WWII German Courts, GOP crony SCOTUS). Hiding behind the "noble tool"(courts) or the great leader is simply not enough to make a society a healthy democracy. Accepting the narrow confines of victory because of the "strengths" of these kinds of democratic serving tools can be a fatal palliative.

The dilemma the next Dem President must face will be to limit the damage done by purging and healing and bringing to account so as not to add to the distractions of a vastly wounded and impatient society.
It seems apparent that much of the legitimacy granted to Bush are meant to divest themselves of the burden of even imagining holding a sacred predecessor truly accountable and wounding their own mythic prestige in the process. Doubly in denial of the crisis therefore and doubly weak, as in all things in oxymoronic appellature of the DLC they will guarantee the worst of all worlds. Their only success might be holding tempers and chaos in a balance that will turn off everyone until the next dictatorship revanche relaunches the cancer well rooted and still in place with all its tools and allies enriched and learning new strategies.

Something radical is needed and yet something as simple as law and punishment can actually be avoiding the total need and shortchanging democracy. The grass roots should demand the full truth. Part of the great divide between people and their government is the insulting chasm between the common sense of important truth and the condescending gatekeepers of institutional media and power Neither party, if they or democracy wishes to survive, should be spared or limits bargained for like negotiated TV debate shams. So vast is the fantasy horror our mythic government has degenerated into that the plans of the efficient and modest Dems seem as out of touch with reality as W himself. To avoid prosecution for crimes we can shatter the national debate between a varnished lie(the current Power) and the truth(suckers) by a truth commission. Or you can try legislating it by renewing the Fairness Doctrine or HAVA II and corporations can continue to oppose science with bought fantasy on the footing of 'reasonable" debate. You can't punish or oppress enough, nor come close without being the Beast. You can only start earning a democracy by getting everyone together on the truth and non-legalese, non lie confrontations.

We were taught to expect a bloodbath in South Africa. That went hand in hand with the tyrannical oppression and crimes against the black majority. Then came the black African response, twofold, one to avoid that descent and one to prevail against the government. Isolated from outside props, nothing having worked, the government caved like Gorbachev with a fizzled military and economy. The Bush regime is pushing quickly toward such a vast demise though its crimes and power have not yet reached their end. We have Democrats looking in effect not to sweep the crooks into jail and those who know there must be a vast sea change. Unlike their wise South African counterparts, the pacifiers are too confident in their control and use of ruined power to avoid trying to bully the party progressives and make a dumb pact with their true enemies. This, in other words, is not a neat proposition. The DLC could lose all fifty states but not the state of Denial. The vast river of propaganda and public mind control is their realm also, not the oppressed clarity of unfaced truth.

Breaking the diseased patterns of history is something that should be studied because it does happen. That is one reason the world is alive and still progressing. Tolstoy would say something about harnessing the moral power of the majority that in fact rejects consistently what exactly is happening today. That won't happen because we pick a charming passionate candidate or a clever and wise platform to fit the surly measure of media gravitas and navel oriented focus groups. We must reach a coalition and conjoining of grass roots demands to a clear and vast purpose with a simple goal. To know the truth and stop the crimes against our ideals in the whole national body.

[arendt]

13. This is a difficult post to respond to...

You take my point that we may have legislated beyond our power to enforce,
and deconstruct it to the point where ANY government seems doomed to
self-devolution to gangsterism.

I asked for practical solutions, and you seem to be saying there are none.
(just a second, I will get to a Truth Commission).

To get to a truth commission, you need to vote to have one, but the voting
machines are corrupt. To bring forth the truth you need a media, but it is
totally controlled by the corporations. In short, you need rules and channels.
But you seem to object to those on principle as being inevitably corruptable.

Are you proposing to have the Truth Commission unofficially, on the Net,
the way they are doing the 911 investigation?

I'm trying to be polite here (notice all the "seems" in my counter-claims).
Please enlighten me as to the mechanism you are proposing. (Perhaps a link
to your earlier exposition.)

thank you for your comments,

arendt

[arendt]

8. kick n/t

mt

[starroute]

9. The real devil's bargain was somewhere about 1950

The New Deal didn't create the mess we're in today. The New Deal didn't give the American middle class a sense of entitlement to consumer trinkets. All that happened after World War II -- and as part of a kind of bait-and-switch operation that took away the real New Deal and substituted dross.

I don't know all the pieces of how it happened -- the late 40's are a remarkably under-studied period -- but I know some of them.

One is that a lot of the veterans came back from World War II with utopian dreams for making a better world. That idealism permeated the college campuses where they headed on the GI Bill around 1946-47. But by 1948 or so it started to dribble away as they left college and were faced by the prospect of earning a living and raising families in a country that was already sinking back into recession.

Another is that the hard right-wing Congress that was elected in 1946 had as its primary mission the complete dismantlement of the New Deal. Truman managed to head that off -- but only at the cost of abandoning his own hopes for an expanded "Fair Deal" and signing on to the national security state.

A third is that the unions were somehow convinced to give up their 30's radicalism and hopes for economic democracy and settle for a piece of the ever-growing corporate pie. In the short run, that seemed to work -- but only until the pie started shrinking again in the 70's and Reagan began the job of dismantling the unions.

Finally, there were two things that happened around 1950 in response to the persistent economic sluggishness of the late 40's and the fear of sinking back into full-fledged depression. One was that the national security state, originally instituted as a response to the Cold War, was recognized to be a dandy profit-making machine -- thus the genesis of the military-industrial complex, which was sufficiently out of control by the end of the 50's to be working to undermine Eisenhower's initiatives.

The other was the invention of consumerism -- of planned obsolescence and rampant advertising to get Americans to buy, buy, buy. Again, I'm not as sharp on the details as I'd like to be, but I do know that this was very consciously undertaken and didn't just happen -- heck, I even saw a Bugs Bunny cartoon from the period once, boasting about the cleverness of it all.

Back before people stopped taking the Communists seriously, it was conventional wisdom that capitalism was doomed to periodic economic collapses because of its uncontrollable tendency towards over-production. Constant war (or preparation for war) and consumerism are two almost fool-proof ways in which an economic system can soak up as much as capitalism can produce and come back asking for more.

And it's worked -- since 1950, there hasn't been another Great Depression, or even a "panic" on the order of those of the 1870's and the 1890's.

Only right now, something is going very wrong.

I'd hesitate to put a firm label on the underlying cause of the wrongness, though I can see some of the factors. One is globalization -- which cuts wages to the point where consumers find it harder and harder to consume as they're expected to and which also incites armed conflicts over resources, which turns all those shiny new weapons systems into something actively dangerous to human well-being.

But beyond globalization may lie some unpalatable truths that Americans haven't had to face in a long time -- like the fact that capitalism is built on exploitation. Again, you don't have to be a Marxist to see that for somebody to make a profit, it has to come out of somebody else's hide. You either charge more than something is worth, pay those making it less than they're worth, or rape the environment. Or all three.

As Americans, we were all on the profit side of the ledger for a couple of generations -- and it was people in other countries who were getting screwed. We told ourselves that we weren't really exploiters -- that we were entitled to what we had because we were clever and enterprising and favored by God. But now that we're falling back into the ranks of the exploited, we have to admit the reality of exploitation, and we don't like it.

I don't have any good answers to our current problems. In general, I think that what the world needs is a healthy dose of economic democracy. It's absurd that in a nominally democratic society, our major economic vehicle is the corporation, which is both radically un-democratic in its inner relationships and counter-democratic in its influence on the society as a whole. I just don't have a plaubible model of what a desirable alternative might look like.

[arendt]

12. Thank you for your contribution - good points

I also don't have any answers. But, I am slowly walking through the Kubler-Ross
stages of mourning. Soon, I will reach acceptance that they have killed America.

Your analysis of how the New Deal was bait-and-switched is spot on - "WTF really happened between 1945 and 1950?" How did a "hard right" Congress get elected in 1946? This was pre-Berlin blockade, pre Marshall Plan rejection, pre- all kinds of stuff. Was it all the Luce empire? (Time mag and Madame Chiang-kai-shek) In the same period, Taft-Hartley was passed to screw organized labor.
And, of course, the Natl Sec Act of 1947, establishing the CIA was hugely negative.

But, lets skip the causes and talk solutions.

<snips>

...underlying cause of the wrongness, though I can see some of the factors. One is globalization...

...capitalism is built on exploitation...

...As Americans, we were all on the profit side of the ledger for a couple of generations -- and it was people in other countries who were getting screwed. We told ourselves that we weren't really exploiters -- that we were entitled to what we had because we were clever and enterprising and favored by God. But now that we're falling back into the ranks of the exploited, we have to admit the reality of exploitation, and we don't like it...

</snips>

The U.S. is merely the latest in the line of countries used, raped, and left behind by international
capital. See Kevin Phillips. The list, in order, is: Venice (city), Holland(small country),
England(bigger, industrialized country), US (huge, industrialized country), and now China
(huge, overpopulated, industrialized country). Nothing new here. America is not exceptional.

My nom de plume, Hannah Arendt, brilliantly showed how excess production and excess capital
accumulation led to "superfluous" people, how these people became "the mass man" who destroyed
democracy and led to totalitarianism. Again, America is not exceptional. It is suffering the
same collapse of the middle class that led to Naziism in Germany. Only in America, the collapse
was not accidental. It has been planned.

What is new and discouraging is that America had a massive structure of corporate regulation in
place in a time of peace and prosperity. The fact that this structure barely slowed down the
corporate takeover and looting says that democracies do NOT know how to control corporations.
Multi-nationals are now "(fill in the blank) East India Companies". Only they are totally
cut free from any country's control; whereas the Dutch and British companies were NOMINALLY
under some control.

We seem to be headed straight for worldwide corporate feudalism. The American middle class is just the corporate version of the Kulaks. It has been starved, deported, and destroyed so that the Corporate Revolution can move forward. And, at the head of the corporations, gangsters rule.
As even Napoleon, leading the secular French Revolution, eventually concluded: the
masses need religion to keep them in line. So, the corporate gangsters are supporting theocrats.

Nothing is happening that hasn't happened before. It just hasn't happened before in America.
So sad.

arendt

[LSK]

10. K & R

Long but worth it.

[femrap]

11. thanks for the great ideas on campaigning!

RESTORE OUR DEMOCRACY! RESTORE OUR CONSTITUTION! Who can argue with that, right?

I'm going to a Progressive and Democratic Coalition meeting this evening.....and I will share your great ideas with them.

You're so right....the Corporations are killing us.

[arendt]

14. rush hour kick n/t