Where is Meyer Lansky when you need him?

[arendt]

After 28 years of counter-revolution by the radical right, I live in a country where my basic expectation is to be lied to, cheated, and outright betrayed by businessmen, politicians, media personalities, and government officials. As a member of the non-elite 99%, my designated role is to be a victim and to shut up.

I expect HMOs to shaft me. I expect credit card companies to have the ethics of loan sharks. I expect all kinds of businesses to "nuisance shift" me, chisel me, and stick me in a voice mail system or have me talk to someone in India when I try to actually get what I over-payed for. I expect half the Democratic party to be in the pocket of big business, whether Wall St. or the military-industrial-prison complex. I expect the corporate media to be blatantly pro-GOP and to lie to me about what is going on in the world. I expect GOP-appointed officials to be secretive, anti-labor, anti-middle class, and often para-military thugs.

Given all of that, would someone please tell me what the hell is left of America to rescue? It has been totally trashed. It looks like some third-world kleptocracy. They are now openly looting the U.S Treasury - shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars, without any strings attached, to the very same banks and hedge fund crooks who got us into the financial mess we are in. Meanwhile, our infrastructure has been left to rot; and major companies are posting tens of billions of dollars in losses or being bought out by European or Chinese concerns.

We have no more Constitutional rights. Just say the magic word "terrorist", and "all your rights are belong to us". They have been systematically eliminated, right back to the thousand-year-old right of Habeus Corpus. We can't get any honest news from a corporate media that is nothing more than a conglomerated propaganda ministry. My personal information has been stolen nine times over. There are spies everywhere - Homeland Security spies, neo-COINTELPRO spies, Blackwater private-CIA spies. Hell, even the NRA has spies. The whole country looks like some version of the X Files on steroids - a CIA/military/BFEE/neocon undercover civil war.

We live in a country that honors fundamentalist lunacy more than science, a country that would sooner elect a backwoods fraud like Mike Huckabee than a comptent atheist. A country that pays real money for crap like "absitinence only" education and "just say no" drug programs and "tough love" boot camps, and gay de-programming. A country that finds accomplishment to be "elitist", unless that accomplishment came from inherited wealth - in which case it proves the right of aristocratic privilege. We live in a country that is no longer a meritocracy, but simply a royal court, full of courtiers, blackmailers, and all the slime that swirls around the drain of nobility.

America has always had a dark side that it has loved. It has romanticized the genocide of native Americans, the nobility of the Confederate slave-ocracy, the Robber Barons, countless wars of aggression, prohibition gangsters, the corrupt blackmailer J. Edgar Hoover, and murderous Cold War coups and covert operations. Large parts of our population love violence, accept corruption, and look only for vicarious excitement to brighten their otherwise dull lives. To this pantheon of thugs, over the last thirty years, we have added the "greed is good", check your ethics at the door, fundamentalist businessman and the sexually-crazed, Armageddon-craving, fundamentalist preacher. These sociopaths are now the face that America presents to the world.

After eight years of looting and crony capitalism, after watching us ship our manufacturing base to China, the rest of the world is looking for a way to dump their American assets without committing economic suicide. That financial conundrum is the only reason why the dollar has any value left at all. America stands on the verge of being a society without trust; and it stands to reap exactly what such a society reaps:

Adam Smith reminded us that honesty is really the best policy, especially in business. To get a glimpse at the other side of that realization - at the downside, a society without trust - you can take a look at several countries...Latin America is full of family-run cartels that hand out loans to relatives (and then fail to cut off credit when the debtor begins to default)...An Iranian student at MIT told me that business there lacks a platform of trust. Because of this, no one pays in advance, no one offers credit, and no one is willing to take risks. People must hire within their families, where some level of trust still exists. Would you like to live in such a world? Be careful, because without honesty we might get there faster than you'd imagine.

- Dan Ariely (Prof. of Behavioral Economics, MIT), "Predictably Irrational"

Basically, we live in a formerly first-world, formerly Western Enlightenment democracy which has been hijacked by world-historical-scale crooks, pig rich traitors, and rogue intelligence assets. The hijacking was accomplished by trashing the intellectual and vocational resources of the nation. With the nation created by the Constitution thus blinded, it has been child's play to murder it.

My basic stance is that America is over, but I'm still here. There isn't much I can do about the destruction of my Constitution, my economy, and my way of life. Its already happened, and the weak-tea Democrats are unlikely to fix it. (More likely, they will put some air fresheners around the corpse, so it doesn't stink as it decomposes. Let's see will it be Evan Bayh scent? Is that too PNACish?)

If we're going to live in a gangster state, can't we at least have competent gangsters running the show? Smart gangsters who know that overt violence is bad for business. Gangsters who take care of the "mad dog" gangsters and guys with their hands in the Combination's till (e.g., Bugsy Siegel) with a bullet to the head instead of a bank account in Lichtenstein. If your going to run the United States like a banana republic, you need someone with that kind of experience. Where is Meyer Lansky when you need him?

arendt

[marmar]

1. I think even Meyer and Bugsy would be afraid of these NeoCon criminals....

:scared:

[arendt]

5. Meyer would find a way to cut the ground out from under them.

Meyer was a "fixer", more than a hit man. He made connections, formed alliances, and liked to stay behind the scenes.

Cheney and the neocons are mad dogs. They are out in the daylight, snarling at everyone. If there were a Meyer around, Cheney and his gang would "meet with an accident".

arendt

[baldguy]

2. We don't need Meyer Lansky, we need Che Guevara.

[arendt]

7. Interesting reference. I'm reading Havana Nocturne.

I'm assuming you intended the connection between Lansky's Cuban operations and the Cuban revolution (i.e., Che).

arendt

[baldguy]

10. We've had enough with rich criminals running things.

Given a choice between that and a poor freedom-fighter, I'll take the poor freedom-fighter.

[arendt]

11. Maybe I needed to add a sarcasm tag to my title. I do agree with you. n/t

[Ian David]

3. Myer Lansky put a hit on one of my toys when I was a kid.

I used to have a plastic motor cycle with a little mechanical siren on it that I would ride around on at The Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach.

One day, tired of the distraction during his card games, Lansky paid the cabana boy to use a power drill on my siren.

[arendt]

4. Holy Shit. That's some story.

I'm just reading "Havana Nocturne", so I had a facefull of Meyer.

America has never dealt with the karma from Prohibition Gangsterism. It has metastastized all these decades, passing down through the mob in Cuba to the Miami Cuban CIA operatives to the Contras to the BFEE. Finally, right now, America is getting back what it always dished out to others.

Karma is a bitch.

arendt

[starroute]

26. "Our new Cuba"

I also read Havana Nocturne recently and was particularly struck by this statement:

These mobsters had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country, a place where they could provide gambling, narcotics, booze, prostitution, and other forms of vice free from government or law enforcement intrusion.

Gaming and leisure were only part of the equation. The idea formulated by Luciano, Lansky, and others was for Havana to serve as the front for a far more ambitious agenda: the creation of a criminal state whose gross national product, union pension funds, public utilities, banks, and other financial institutions would become the means to launch further criminal enterprises around the globe. The Havana Mob could then bury the profits from these criminal operations underneath the patina of a 'legitimate' government in Cuba and no one would be able to touch them.

That got me checking my files for related materials -- and one of the more interesting items I found was this piece from 2006 on Indian casinos:

http://www.alternet.org/story/30612

When sleaze meets sleaze, magic happens. One glance across a crowded room, and they instantly recognize kinship. But when supersleaze teams up with supersleaze, a fusion-like chain reaction flashes to life, consuming everything in range. And that's what happened when Jack Abramoff met Indian gambling. . . .

This is how Indian gaming began. After being chased out of Las Vegas and New Jersey by state and federal heat, the mob discovered Indian reservations. It was like a gift from the Mob Gods. One mobster testifying before Congress was asked how the mob viewed Indian reservations. He replied, "As our new Cuba."

That's because Indian reservations are sovereign nations within a sovereign nation. The mob could set up casinos, pay off tribal leaders and skim casino proceeds with impunity. If the FBI showed up, they had tribal security usher them out the gate, because they had no jurisdiction on reservation property. . . .

Indian gaming proponents are quick to counter, "That was then; things have changed." They've changed all right; they got smart. The likes of one-time Republican National Committee chairman Frank Farenkopf, and later, GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, stepped in. While Democrats saw Indian gaming as supporting another downtrodden minority, something "we have to put up with because of how we screwed the American Indians in the past," the GOP saw it another way. The GOP saw Indian gaming the same way the mob saw it: as a cash cow.

It sometimes seems as though everywhere I look for Jack Abramoff, I find traces of Lansky. It was Lansky who first set the Seminoles in Florida up in the bingo business, even before the casino boom got underway. And, as Daniel Hopsicker discovered, Abramoff's mob-connected associate in SunCruz, Adam Kidan, had previously worked in a casino on St. Maarten's for a one-time minor Lansky associate, Rosario Spadaro. (Spadaro was the former partner of Eduardo Cellini, whose more prominent brother, Dino Cellini, had run the Riviera Casino and Tropicana Club in Cuba and was later connected with Operation Mongoose.)

(There are even rumors that Lansky got the Israeli Mafia going when he was hiding out there from the feds in 1970-72, but I'm not sure the LaRouchies didn't make those up. They like to start Lansky rumors because he fits into their conspiracy theories -- though they do have to strain a bit to tie him to the British royal family.)

Lansky was also a money-laundering genius. Starting when Al Capone was sent away for tax evasion in 1931, he began looking for ways the Mob could conceal its profits, and when Switzerland invented confidential bank accounts in 1934, Lansky was one of the first to recognize their advantages.

It's starting to seem as though the CIA had two primary sources for its later money-laundering expertise. One of them was this skinny Jewish kid from the Lower East Side -- who first formed an alliance with the OSS during World War II to uncover Nazi sabotage on the docks -- and the other was Allen Dulles, who had spent the 30's plying essentially the same trade on behalf of Nazi industrialists. There's probably a moral there somewhere, if I could only figure out what it was.

[arendt]

28. Wow. You're a step ahead of me. I was going to use the Hav.Noct quote; but I was unware...

of the "our new Cuba" quote.

Fascinating and repellant at the same time. I do think our country is descending into gangsterism. And, as the saying goes, "the fish rots from the head first".

arendt

P.S. Why is Daniel Hopsicker still alive? His stuff is damning. Or does everyone just blow him off as a CT?

[starroute]

29. I keep wondering about casino skimming

Supposedly Lansky had skimmed off $300 million from Las Vegas casinos before his death in 1982 (though no one ever found it when he died) -- and how much more would that be in today's money? And he was just one man.

Things like the Alternet article make it clear that the Indians aren't managing their casinos themselves -- which means there's just as much opportunity for the real managers to skim as there was in Vegas 30 years ago. The fact that government regulations were supposedly tightened -- I think in 1998 -- is irrelevant to the real professionals, the heirs of Lansky.

But if there's a skim in the hundreds of millions potentially floating around, that makes the tens of millions in semi-honest lobbying fees Abramoff and Scanlon were chortling about extracting from the tribes look seriously penny-ante.

If there is, though, just where is it going and what is it doing? Hopsicker suggests it all gets channeled into one big slush fund in Washington, DC -- presumably with Karl Rove perched atop the moneybags like Scrooge McDuck -- but he doesn't offer any details.

It's also scary how many Republican presidents and presidential candidates have had strong Mob connections. Nixon, of course. Goldwater. Reagan, mainly by way of the film industry. Bush Sr. had indirect ties through his Houston business connections as well as questionable pals down in Florida. Even McCain, whose father-in-law started as a Mob bootlegger in the late 40's and got into the beer distributor business from there.

(As for the Democrats, you can find dubious donations here and there, but none of them since John Kennedy has had personal Mob connections of the sort the GOP seems to specialize in.)

The GOP has been running this country like the Mob, stripping its assets in the same way as the Mob is known for stripping businesses, and using Mob methods to enforce its control. But that's not just a sickening metaphor -- used right, it's a key to what's been going on and possibly to stopping it.

[arendt]

30. That's all so depressing. Itsl like the 1940s never ended. Mobsters and Dulles brothers...

hand in hand, looting and murdering their way to profit and power.

Are you aware of the connections between Bill Clinton's uncle, Raymond, and Carlos Marcello? Apparently Raymond ran a part of Arkansas for Carlos, although the documentation on that is a bit thin. I always wondered how Bill, son of nobody, got to go to DC and shake JFK's hand when he was 15 or so.

Have we traded in the Robber Barons for another pack of rich gangsters? Seems like it to me.

arendt

[starroute]

31. The Mob isn't what is used to be

The old-timers who came up in the heroic age of the 20's and 30's are all dead now, and even their surviving lieutenants are very old and mostly retired. And the third generation -- like the Gotti Jr. who just got arrested -- just isn't their equals.

What most concerning now is the way in which Mob expertise and Mob practices seem to have gotten generalized and spread around the world. The Russian-Israeli Mafia owns a fair chunk of what the US Mob used to -- including connections with Caribbean money-laundering banks and casinos. Nigerian heroin smugglers have another piece. A third piece somehow cloned off by way of BCCI and is now being carried along by dozens of mostly terrorist-connected drugs-and-arms smuggling groups in the Middle East and Central Asia.

And the GOP inherited yet another piece, mainly tied to some of the more semi-respectable Mob enterprises, like real estate. (Which is a whole other story in itself. Lansky was heavily into real estate development in Florida in the 50's. There are Mob connections to developers in Texas and along the Gulf Coast, some of which links up with the GOP. Real estate is also a leading method for money-laundering drug profits -- there was stuff going on in Spain a few years ago involving, as I recall, beachfront development, drugs, and the Russian Mafia. If you put together all the recent scandals and anomalies involving real estate development, leasing, management, insurance, lobbying, and wealthy donors, you might just find you have a pretty good snapshot of the black understructure of the last 10 years or so.)

So the real question becomes whether these guys are ever likely to put together the broken fragments -- like some insane mirror-universe video game -- and take over the world. Frankly, I don't think they are. The mobsters in the late 20's were able to create the Syndicate as a way of reducing intra-Mob violence and divying up the profits equitably, but they had a lot of mutual relationships and some basis for establishing trust. The present-day global underworld doesn't have anything in common except greed and ruthlessness, and that's no basis for cooperation.

[arendt]

33. True. The Russian-Israeli mob is much scarier today than the old Mob.

First, any mob that could have survived under the Commies must be one tough, smart mob. Second, they are known for their total ruthlessness - kill the family, kill the neighbors, nuke the neighborhood. Third, the Israeli connection gives them unwarranted political cover - the AIPAC lobby has to be tiptoed around.

I used to ignore all the lurid "true crime" stuff; but, lately, as I keep reading "deep politics", the interconnections between the mob and the intelligence community are just impossible to ignore. The Iran-Contra network, the Miami Cubans, the Israeli intelligence ops in South America. There has been a secret war going on for the last thirty years, and the American people have been losing it. Losing it when Bush/North took the Sandinista War off the books, loosing it when BCCI was buying half of Washington.

Your points about real estate are new territory for me. I never put two and two together, despite knowing that Neil Bush was up to his eyeballs in the S&L looting, and that most of the RTC payouts were in Texas and other oil patch places.

As to your point that they have nothing in common but greed, I have always called the current criminal elites the WTO - the Weasels and Thugs Organization. I think that the corporate lawyer crooks (weasels) and the gangster/secret police crooks (thugs) need each other. Unfortunately, the weasels are quite capable of coming to an agreement and dumping the cost of said agreement onto their victims (the American people). The thugs will take orders. That's what thugs do.

I am not as sanguine as you. There is no organized opposition left. Obama is half in the DLC camp, half a U of C-boy, and half part of the crooked Daley machine. (Three halves is no problem for someone as glib as Obama) Ritual declaration: I will vote for Obama.

Anyone who sticks his head up, gets it cut off (see Edwards, Kucinich, Wexler) or gets an offer he can't refuse (Conyers). IMHO, the mob is more capable of cooperating than the opposition to fascism is.

That said, I am very interested to learn more of what you are saying about the RI mob and the real estate connection. Can you give me some links?

Thanks

arendt

[starroute]

35. Coming up with links is hard -- this stuff *sprawls*

I've been frantically saving articles for years -- Scrapbook for Firefox plus Copernic as a desktop search engine provides a good reference library -- but I haven't assembled this stuff myself and don't have a list of links at my fingertips.

On the Russian-Israeli Mafia, googling on the book title "Red Mafiya" will get you materials derived from a lurid but apparently reasonably reliable volume from a few years back that fills in much of the mob-level activity in the US. For the more upper-level stuff, checking out the Russian oligarchs -- and particularly Peter Dale Scott's Global Drug Meta-Group (http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/global-drug.htm) -- is a good starting point.

Another possible starting point is an extensive blog entry at http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/11/red-mafia-and-its-connectivity.html that touches on the Kislin family, the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal, the Chernoy brothers, and Semion Mogilevich (who's also featured in Red Mafiya.)

From there, the Kislin connection can take you to stuff about recent cocaine plane crashes -- see the long DU thread at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1927518.

Following out the Bank of New York connection will lead you to figures like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Swiss-Israeli banker Bruce Rappaport, who formerly had both BCCI and Iran-Contra connections -- see, for example, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/global/082299ny-bank-russia-mob.html.

Following out Mikhail Chernoy (aka Michael Cherney) will lead you to John Loftus's Intel Summit and the Jerusalem Summit -- where all the most extreme warhawks, Neocons, and anti-Islamic crazies hang out (and which have considerable overlap with the client list of Benador Associates.)

And of course there's Boris Berezhovsky and the Litvinenko poisoning -- and Berezhovsky's connections to Neil Bush. (Peter Dale Scott covers some of that.)

As I say, I haven't really put all this together myself -- and I can find it hard to tell which Russian-Israeli oligarchs are allies and which are deadly enemies -- but if you can keep from getting lost in the Russian names (which isn't easy, especially given the variant spellings -- it's like reading Anna Karenina without the cast of characters at the front), you'll find that the same ones keep recurring and start falling into some sort of order.

If you can keep that straight, you may be ready to take on the peculiar relationship between the Russian Mafia and the Chechen Mafia. Or the role played by Hasidic diamond merchants and their tendency to get murdered in public places in broad daylight. (Though that may lead you to explicitly racist websites, which like to think all this has something to do with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

If you've still got a stomach for more at that point, you might want to pull up some articles from 9/11 websites about Israeli art students hanging around the DEA, white vans, and corrupt furniture movers -- all of which probably have more to do with the Russian Mafia (which, among other things, seems to control the Ecstasy trade) than with 9/11.

Or you could try thinking about the South African associations with the Russian-Israeli Mafia, ranging from A.Q. Khan's nuclear supermarket to Jack Abramoff and the apartheid regime.

And that's just for starters. These guys essentially inherited the whole BCCI/Iran-Contra infrastructure and ran with it in all directions.

[arendt]

37. Thank you. It looks like I will have to swim through this sewer.

It will take a while.

Interesting about Firefox Scrapbook. Does it use tags? I am convinced that tagging is the only way to organize info. Any hierarchical or DB organization is just too much administration/cleanup headache.

I really do appreciate your interest and the time you took to get me this info. My wife is going to hate me again. She begs me to study something a little happier. She calls me "mister doom and gloom". But, I feel the oppression building.

Best to you.

arendt

[starroute]

39. Scrapbook doesn't use tags -- at least not yet

I've become more interested in tagging myself lately (and I've been playing around with an interesting non-hierarchical data organizer called Tobu), but Scrapbook isn't set up for that.

Scrapbook is best for saving either complete webpages or large chunks of them, together with the original urls, and then finding them again from within your browser. You can also organize them in any number of hierarchical trees, add highlights and annotations, and include your own plain text notes in the trees -- but that's as far as it goes. That's why I mostly just dump things in catch-all folders marked "foreign" or "corruption" and use Copernic to retrieve the information.

I also use a Firefox extension called TiddlySnip which has a tag system, but although it's excellent for saving small snippets of information, it doesn't preserve formatting or images and it can't conveniently handle the big stuff.

And hey, the Russian Mafia may not be a happy topic, but at least it's colorful and exotic. Beats out our domestic political thugs, who somehow manage to be both evil and boring at the same time.


On edit: In a quick search, I also find mentions of a Firefox extension called Zotero which offers tagging. It seems more geared towards formal academic research, but might be worth checking out.
http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/addons.php#Integrated

[Cooley Hurd]

6. Sounds like you got off easy!

He could've done a "Sonny-Corleone-and-the-camera-at-the-wedding" routine to it, and then chucked a few bucks at you...;)

[cayuga]

8. The Meyer Lansky you describe is no different than bush.

Do you ever wonder why we haven't heard anything about the Mafia and organized crime in 8 years? That's because they ARE the government.

[arendt]

9. I might buy Cheney as Lansky (secretive), but W? He's a frontman, a nasty thug. n/t

[leftchick]

12. bush = Carmine Galante

imo.....

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


Prison and gang rivalry



1943 NYPD mugshot of Carmine Galante

Galante's rise to power was halted temporarily in 1962 when he was sentenced to twenty years for drug offences in a drug bust engineered by Frank Costello and other enemies. While in prison, psychiatrists diagnosed Galante as having a psychopathic personality disorder. Although Costello had died in 1973 of natural causes, Galante nevertheless ordered the bombing of his hated enemy's tomb, blowing the doors off the mausoleum.

When Bonanno was forced into retirement Phillip "Rusty" Rastelli took over the Bonanno family. In 1974, Galante was released on parole and tried to take control of the family while Rastelli himself was still in prison. During the 1970s, Galante supposedly organized the murders of at least eight members of the Gambino Family, with whom he had an intense rivalry, in order to take over a massive drug-trafficking operation. Galante was briefly jailed in 1978 for violating his parole by associating with known criminals, but he was released after being defended by the famous Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn.




Carmine Galante after his gangland execution

On July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante was murdered just as he finished eating lunch at Joe and Mary's Italian-American Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn along with his bodyguard, Leonard Coppola, and restaurant owner/cousin Giuseppe Turano. Cigar in mouth, the 69-year-old mobster was blasted in the face and chest at point-blank range with a shotgun. He was murdered by Anthony "Bruno" Indelicato, Dominick "Big Trin" Trinchera, Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano, Cesare "CJ" Bonventre and Louis "Louie Gaeta" Giongetti. These men were all hired by Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, Bruno's father.

[arendt]

14. It wasn't my intention, but maybe we should do a "separated at birth" thread on BFEE/mob. n/t

[leftchick]

15. "psychopathic personality disorder"

pretty much sums up *. I agree that cheney is much like Lansky. He even tells Lucky Luciano to....

"go fuck yourself" in this video bio!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6luEPhZyE1M

[arendt]

17. I could never decide if Bush was Fredo or Sonny. Both incompetent, for different reasons. n/t

[cayuga]

18. bush = bugsy siegel

Maybe georgie has syphllis.

[leftchick]

19. That was capone

Bugsey got a bullet to the head.

[cayuga]

27. I know.

[jtrockville]

13. Competent Gangsters? As in "corrupt but content"?

That would certainly be an improvement.

[arendt]

16. Sort of domesticated - you know, like modern syphillis vs the original deadly pox. n/t

[appal_jack]

20. K&R with a caveat

arendt,

You have such an incisive mind and skillful way of word-smithing that your posts get just about a guaranteed rec from me (Mods: I DO read arendt's posts before rec'ing).

However, I disagree wholeheartedly with one of your final points:

"My basic stance is that America is over, but I'm still here. There isn't much I can do about the destruction of my Constitution, my economy, and my way of life."

No doubt that the Constitution is being ignored and the economy is being trashed by men (mostly, with the occasional CondiLiar, etc.) far more powerful than I. I take what economic precautions I can, but most of all, I am committed to living my life as if the Constitution is 100% intact. I try to speak my mind, protect my privacy, and otherwise exercise my fundamental and inalienable rights whenever I can. This is not revolutionary on my part: it is simply being an American, and I hope more Americans try it. Soon.

Of course, sometimes I lose: like when the cops stopped me and wanted to search my old Ford Econoline (this was years back). I refused consent, just because I could as an American (I had nothing illegal in the van, but I look like a hippie, and the cops were jumping to conclusions...). They kept me sitting on the curb and detained for 3 hours until they realized that they were barking up the wrong tree (not too bad a loss all things considered). If I were to fly (haven't in years: won't anytime soon), I would of course lose-out to the TSA fools. But sometimes I win too: heck, our postings here at DU are (very minor) victories for free speech.

Either way, win or lose, I am proud to have the founding document of our nation, the US Constitution, on my side. It's the oppressors who are traitors, not me (even though I endured the "Go Back to Russia!" taunts more than once back in the 1980's while doing anti-militarism work). I love my country, and I am committed to living-out some American ideals. I hope that more of my brother and sister Americans adopt the same attitude. Even under the present dire circumstances, I believe that a lot of good could come from it.

"the weak-tea Democrats are unlikely to fix it."

Word, it's up to us regular folks. Democrats will only do something useful when pressured. Republicans too for that matter.

-app

Edit for spelling and to finish a thought I'd left hanging...

[arendt]

21. I wish there were more thoughtful posts like yours at DU.

Thanks for some extended dialogue. I get so tired of one-line responses.

When I say the Constitution is destroyed, I say it as a matter of fact - like saying "JFK has been assassinated".

I don't like it, but its a fact. Constitutions, like human beings, are living things, not machines. The Bush gang have killed this living thing. They have poisoned it with many species of hideous toxins (rabid judges, corporate apparatchiks, religious nutcases, bigots, homophobes). There is no way to flush all the crap they have injected out of the system without bringing the Civil Service to a standstill. They have chopped off its arms (regulatory agencies) and poked out its eyes (investigatory agencies). They have starved it to death with budget deficits.

If you have read my journal, I have been saying that the Constitution is a writeoff for years now. But, what I also say is that we need to write a new Constitution that is resistant to what killed the late and lamented one (e.g., corporate media, out of control intelligence agencies, protection of authoritarianism under the guise of fundamentalist religion).

My claim is that we will advance further by starting from scratch than spending our energy trying to revive a corpse.

When I say these organizations/rules (Constitution, economy, etc.) are dead; I do not mean that people are dead. It is, as you say, the people who must fix things.

For now, we must elect Democrats, not GOP, in November. After that, we can get to work clearing the booby traps, decontaminating the site, and cleaning up the rubble.

arendt

[appal_jack]

32. Constitution: "I'm not dead yet!"

"we need to write a new Constitution that is resistant to what killed the late and lamented one (e.g., corporate media, out of control intelligence agencies, protection of authoritarianism under the guise of fundamentalist religion)."

I agree that our Constitution as written in 1789/1791 did not fully anticipate corporate power or the military industrial complex, and that we in America probably need further laws and/or Amendments to reign-in the tyrannical behemoths. But then again, will more 'words on paper' really halt such further abuses? Think about the words of Jefferson and Madison, then ask yourself it they would have tolerated the common oppression of these times. No, they would speak, educate, and agitate, and if necessary, rise up in revolution. They did it against the corporate masters of their time (Boston Tea Party, etc.) and they would do it now.


"My claim is that we will advance further by starting from scratch than spending our energy trying to revive a corpse."

I disagree, based on how truly progressive the US Constitution is as written and amended (vs as-interpreted/maligned over the past 200+ years). Do you really think that the average American today would support unrestricted free speech and assembly rights? How about the notion that any and all rights belong to We the People unless specifically denied in the Constitution? Or that citizens might possess military-grade small arms as one measure to prevent tyranny? We DU members can't even agree on these principles, never mind the greater US populace.

So, you might ask, if the Constitution is so darned progressive, why are we in this mess? I would answer that the root cause is a level of corporate distraction that dwarfs anything envisioned by Huxley in his Brave New World or Bradbury's F-451, combined with a deliberate dumbing-down of the populace. Why isn't the Constitution and Bill of Rights taught in every public school, and at multiple levels? Probably because a citizenry aware of its rights and empowered to exercise them troubles our rulers.

Nonetheless, I think it's worth administering CPR to this near-flatlined and shredded Constitution of ours. The ideals of "America" and patriotism are powerful indeed, though they have been lately used more for justifying torture and jingoism than to rally the public to defend our rights and historic legacy.

A more educated and vigilant public is an essential pre-requisite, whether we choose to embark on an entirely new framework for society, or to reinvigorate our Republic using its founding principles. I really think that we will be able to see farther and reach longer when standing upon the shoulders of such giants as Jefferson, Madison, and Paine.

-app

[arendt]

34. I applaud your idealism; and I respect the first Constitution. I have never seen a more docile...

"citizenry". Hell, they don't even know they're citizens. They don't even know they are "customers". They think of themselves as "consumers".

In some other thread I said that the causes of our problems are: suburbia, television, and corn syrup. Suburbia has isolated people and destroyed community; TV has hypnotized and brainwashed people; and corn syrup has made those TV-watching shlubs into obese, unhealthy, addicted cattle.

If you intend to undo the damage, you have to get people out of the suburbs, out of their cars, away from their TV sets, and onto a healthy diet. Only after you do all that will their brains begin to unfreeze. Then, you can show them the Constitution, and they might have an attention span long enough to get it, and enough time on their hands to do something about it.

As for a new Constitution vs some amendments to rein in corporations and the MIC, you can't get those amendments through the current political system. The current system is bought and paid for. Only millionaires and ideologues need apply. (Scratch that. John Edwards was a millionaire with a message, and he bailed for unexplained reasons.) Just look at the headlines. In the last week, a Federal judge handed Bush the power to indefinitely detain citizens on his say so. Jeb Bush can have a vote on funding religious schools with tax dollars. We are throwing money we don't have at the crooked banks. There simply isn't anything left of the old Constitution or the old country left to save. They are smashing it and looting it at an increasing rate. And THERE IS NO EFFECTIVE RESISTANCE.

I like everything you say. I just think that it assumes our Constitutional system is still alive. I think its dead. I look at the obliviousness of the average American, their willingness to swallow the increasingly rank BS dished out by the corporate media, and I think the first Constitution is overthrown. I think all it takes is one Executive Order from Busholini and America will make Berlusconi's neo-fascist Italy look like a bad Monty Python skit. The fundies are organized, stoked on hatred, and ready to implement a police state. The military is invested with them. Blackwater is now going on DEA raids. We live in a practice-run police state.

The corporate media will announce when its a full-blown police state.

arendt

[appal_jack]

36. suburbia, television, and corn syrup = root of our problems: agreed

suburbia, television, and corn syrup = root of our problems: agreed.

I also agree with your earlier point that at this particular time, it is absolutely essential to elect Democrats. It will at least afford us some breathing space, and hopefully (and with the right grass roots pressure) much more.

And I am more than a little afraid that you may be right about just how close we are to a police state. But I've got to keep believing in the possibility that we can rescue America and its core principles. I've just finished reading Peter Kropotkin's _Memoirs_of_a_Revolutionist_, and found it inspiring on a lot of different levels. He was a man who used his born-privilege for so much good. He pushed for the same liberties that you and I believe in now, but at a time and place when even openly stating such beliefs could (and did) lead to imprisonment and exile. He faced incredible oppression with calm equanimity, and somehow managed found the time and inclination to also achieve a happy marriage, a scientific career, and lots of good friends throughout it all. I really believe that much of the good social contract that Europeans still enjoy is due to Kropotkin's & colleagues' work of more than a century ago, combined with subsequent smaller-time unionists and radicals continuing that legacy.

When I embrace the US Constitution, it is partly because I think it's filled with good ideas and sound principles, but it's also because I hope that we Americans can build upon our own legacy. Of course, we are far behind Europe on many aspects of a sound social contract, but on liberties, we were once the leaders. I hope that we may someday gain on both fronts here.

Got to bike home now, and I've let it get dark with all this DU'ing (but I have lights for the bicycle...), but it's been worth it: thanks arendt for your reality check and tough analysis. We do indeed have a tough row to hoe.

-app

[arendt]

38. Today, people have been trained to mock self-government...

lefties are either unrealistic "granola eaters", disturbers of the almighty Invisible Hand, or Commie traitors. (Never mind that the Communist Chinese own us, lock, stock, and treasury bond.)

The FIRST Constitution of the U.S. is now a historical document that I revere and that I will mine for good ideas for the SECOND Constitution. The point is not to give up on democracy. What we need to give up on is American Exceptionalism. We are no different than any other country. We can go bad. We can fail.

Our society was founded when the resources of an entire continent were available to it. Our culture was formed in two centuries of exponential growth amid relative, and then absolute, luxury. But, the exponential growth has hit the boundaries not just of our continent, but of the entire planet. We are now feeling hitting the wall. It is just so unfortunate that, at this critical moment, the gangsters have gained control. They have driven us off a cliff, and the opportunity to adjust to the new ecological/economic situation has been squandered.

I am waiting to find out where this avalanche of bad news comes to rest. I can't even tell what my assets (the value of the dollar, of my house, of my education) are worth in the bad new world. You can't plan when the situation is totally in chaos. So the best thing to do at this point is to vote Democratic and squash cockroaches wherever you can.

Peace and a safe bike ride to you.

arendt

[arendt]

22. anthrax, anthrax, anthrax -- have I got your attention now? n/t

[starroute]

23. I'm reminded of C.M. Kornbluth's "The Syndic"

It's a somewhat disjointed but fascinating 50's science fiction novel that I encountered in the late 60's. Its premise is that organized crime -- the Syndicate -- has taken over running what used to be the United States and has done so in an eminently fair, orderly, and even utopian manner.

In the second half of the novel, the main character is sent to infiltrate what still claims to be the United States government, holed up on an island somewhere and plotting to return. The foiling of their plots forms the climax of the story.

After 40 years, my memories of the book are fuzzy, but I do recall being left with the disquieting sense that the nest of thugs and crazies it depicted was far too much like the actual US government for comfort. Even though it was written in 1953, as I recall, and meant as a commentary on the era of McCarthyism and the China Lobby, it still offered a devastating commentary on the world of 1968. Goodness knows how it would appear today.

[arendt]

25. Did Kornbluth do "The Marching Morons"? (inspiration for Idiocracy) n/t

[arendt]

24. How about Donald Rumsfeld = Crazy Joey Gallo

After his release from prison he became a figure with great status among elite society, a "must attend" on many guest lists. Members of the "in crowd" wanted him to attend their dinner parties, and hung on his every remark as if he was royalty. His elevated status among the jet-set trend setters started when Jerry Orbach played a role in the movie The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, based on the novel by Jimmy Breslin in which the main character supposedly depicts Gallo.

- wikipedia, Joey Gallo

arendt

[Greyhound]

40. I've said it for years. The difference between the government and the Mafia is

that when the Mafia says they will do something, they do it.