"When the Mafia went legitimate, there wasn't anything legitimate left." -- Will Slayton, 1975
If it had ever been more than the blind acceptance of a national myth, it seems at some point in our coming of age, the "American Dream" died. Its passing went mostly unheralded under the distracted tubular gaze of the general population. In the context of our state religion (Capital Uber Allis) with its own unique take on the "Golden Rule*," the dream's demise is roundly denied. As is the case with any dead messiah cult, as a psychological buffer in grim times, we will say, "It lives within my heart." We kneel and remember the rites of hard work and study, of good old American ingenuity and the building of that better mouse trap. This was, is, and forever will be, that blessed land of opportunity.
The deprived nation of the Great Depression viewed cinema newsreels and watched as their youth defended the dream against dark totalitarian forces and won. Then, like the dream come true, there splashed out an industrial plenty, cornucopialike, onto the peacetime sands of the nineteen fifties and early sixties. The returned world-warriors became daddies and took over mommies' production jobs. They worked in the rampant currents of the great war machine's productive inertia. It filled their pockets. The mommies kept the house and kids and selected the next appliance necessary to live the modern life. It seemed like the sun would shine every day. It was somewhere in those bright days when the heritors of classical gangland publicly proclaimed the turning of their new leaf. They had seen the error of their ways and from now on they were going to be "strictly legit."
Suddenly, into our warm, white, and happy middle class lives there exploded that spray of red November mist in Dallas, Texas. We wondered who and why? Something was said about Cubans and Communists. And then there was that Vietnam thing. Then Watergate and the public's skeptical reaction to a presidential pardon. Then we had that "Energy Crisis." Somoza and the Shah fell in revolutions left and right. Soon we were October Surprised to see Reagan-Bush and Iran-Contra. Next there surfaced a myriad of murky banking scandals. All these played out against the backdrop of an ongoing "War on Drugs" being fought, we're told, for the benefit of our domestic tranquillity.
Now, in these frigid fearful days of the mid-nineteen nineties, we kneel before a brazen idol, pockets bleeding. We emulate the three brass monkeys, holding our eyes, ears, and mouth, but failing to cover our gonads from the cold ignorance that will surely deprive us of our potency. Mommy, Daddy, the kids too, most everyone without the last name of I-N-C-period, Inc., is working more time for less benefit. (Is this what Chief Seattle called, "the end of living and the beginning of survival?")
Day's work done, we use what is left of our intellectual vigor to tie off and inject news and information from the corporately owned syringe. Hallucinatory images of crimes, wars, disasters, and sex scandals are punctuated by fleshy commercial directives. Strangled in a tangle of yellow ribbons, we accepted the sermon of victory in Iraq. Modeling his desert camies was the new sex symbol, Norman Schwartzkopf?
Except in its undying mythical ideal, when did the American Dream die? Sometimes when dealing with the slow death of a complex organism it can be hard to pinpoint the exact moment of extinction. This is especially true when corporate state ministers do their jobs so well. They quash rumors and assuage our acute fears. (Chronic seems to be the desired type of fear. Perhaps we consume more readily in that mode as we seek to escape the specter of what it is we deny). Bishop Dan Rather looks us straight in the eye each evening from his pulpit in a box and tells us our thoughts for the day. We repeat the chant and bolster our belief in the dream, deferring for one more wobbly planetary rotation, the realization of our political impotence.
So it was, that the man on the street did not see the glowing green line on the dream's ICU monitor flatten. But, upon noticing some people scrambling over each other to loot Savings & Loans and gobble up mega-properties--by the power of negotiable paper widely called "junk,"--shouldn't we have been relatively certain that the dream's demise was becoming known in some circles?
(Was the germ that sickened the dream growing in organs of the public and private spheres all along? Perhaps a spore blew in with the three little ships from España. One would expect that to the original inhabitants of this hemisphere, our cultural dream was fast seen as a pathogen.)
During World War II, a man from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), armed with an introduction from a Mr. Meyer Lansky, paid a visit to mobster and convicted super-pimp, Charles "Lucky" Luciano in his New York prison cell. Our forces, it happened, needed to move against the Axis occupation of Sicily. In this endeavor, the good Mr. Luciano could be of help. At roughly the same time, the ONI, and soon after, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS--the WW II equivalent of the CIA), fearing Reds in labor unions, delivered security of the east coast ports and their long shoremans unions into the hands of Mr. Luciano's friends and associates. Though maybe not killing the dream outright, a poisonous ferment was spreading. (Exclude that the fix was in [on the waterfront] and, you know? "We coulda' been a contender...")
Luciano got his "get out of jail free" card and retired back to Sicily, taking extended vacations in Havana. He, his homies and friends, including Mr. Lansky, witnessed the growth and flowering of Turkish poppies turning into a great new service industry--one with the most loyal of customers. They controlled this trade stateside, but were dependent on the help of their "French Connections," the Corsican Brotherhood and the Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre Espionage (SDECE). These two being the French equivalents of the Mafia and the CIA. Curiously, these (death squads, by any other name) had made basically the same bargain for the maintenance of a French rightist political influence in Northwest Africa, as had the ONI and the gangster for the liberation of Sicily.
While the new schemes were bubbling up along the post-war east coast, some of the late Al Capone's chums, looking west, decided that the movie industry was a great place to "invest." Persuasion being their forté, they put the "squeeze" on around Tinseltown. And, did anybody not notice what went on in Las Vegas, Lake Taho, and Reno during this span of time? All the while, the FBI continually denied the very existence of a Mafia. (Gee, perhaps J. Edgar Hoover should not have allowed himself to be photographed in that party dress.)
I believe these are the days
of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, and baby,
These are the days of miracle and wonder
--Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble" (1987)
"Territory." Mobsters will kill for it. Today it's called turf. Not completely geographical, it once included the extortion rackets wielded against the once ubiquitous neighborhood Mom & Pop markets. Behind today's corporate cloaking, who can say what are the current limits? With Mom & Pop definitely out of the picture, now it could run the whole spectrum from owning the controlling stock in Quick Stops, Stop & Gos, and 7-11s. Or, from Safeway and Fred Meyer to even the hottest addresses on Wall Street. Maybe it's motor home repair shops, or the national supply of pizza cheese, or where you can place a bet. It could be the people that import and sell nails wholesale, or who run professional sports leagues, or vending machine companies, or where you can rent pussy. Who knows, it could even be smuggling run through the tugboat outfits, serving river and port? On paper, there could be five companies with five owners, all in the same business, but in reality having just one covert boss. That's just the thing, you see. Doing business can be so much less of a hassle without real competition. So, "we can have this little thing of ours, capish?"
Did legitimate industries get taken over by mobsters or did they, themselves, learn to function more as mobsters? Chicken, egg? Egg, chicken? It can't be said for sure but the limited liability of the corporation would attract the investment of those involved in the highly profitable rackets. And, the enhanced profitability of racketeering practices would attract many corporate owner/operator's bottom liners. In the old days, the rackets weren't taxable but the corporations were. Of course now, the latter has changed. So Bugsy shit-cans the black shirt and silver tie, goes to the men's club and is not out of place. Life is good.
Let us construct for consideration, a hypothetical case: An imaginary person with some engineering skills needs a machine. Let's say it's one of those cherry picker cranes that linemen, tree toppers, and the like use. You know, it's a bucket on a telescoping or folding boom. What is also called a man lift. Anyway, say this person goes to buy one and everywhere he looks he finds that, in his opinion, the cost is too high. This person says, "I could build these and sell them at half the going price and make plenty." Having skills enough and the savings and credit required for the basic investment, the person designs, tools up, and begins to build the better cherry picker.
A year or so down the pike the first dozen roll off the assembly line. The ads went out months before and the response was nearly overwhelming. The only problem is an uneasy feeling lingering from an ominous message left on the new company's answering machine shortly after the first advertising blitz. It goes something like, "You're not going to sell any of your f#*@$%g cherry pickers. Don't even try it if you know what's good for you."
What can the guy do? He's invested too much to quit and, damn it anyway, who do these people think they are? His first buyer on the other coast wants the whole dozen and more so he ships them out. Funny thing is, the train arrived without the shipment. Twelve machines vanished into the ethers. The empty flatcar is found somewhere on a back siding. The insurance company pays off and then cancels. He looks for other insurers but finds the new rates would carve out most of his profit margin. He gambles, hiring three trucks and trailers and attempts to move the second dozen. One wrecks under suspicious circumstances, one is stolen, and to drive the point home, the other is firebombed at a truck stop. He unceremoniously folds his tent and takes a McJob to feed his family.
Of course, as a modern example, this would be pretty small time. But this is the predatory psychology, if not always the precise mode, of the big time. Mob-like functioning need not always be so crude. Those nearer the top can afford a façade of respectability. Monopolies become increasingly easier to work as they begin to approach the size of governments.
In World War II, in Europe and Asia, the Fascists lost. In America, they won. -- Author unknown
Benito Mussolini defined Fascism for us, and let's face it, he had every right. He said that fascism was a "Corporate State." The 1931 Funk & Wagnalls, New Standard Encyclopedia states;
Fascism (It. Fascismo), a movement to extricate Italy from chaos and give her moral unity. The original purpose of the movement, headed by Benito Mussolini, was to suppress communism and exalt patriotism.
People who don't know what Fascism means often react with hostility to every accurate use of the word. Understand now that if you should exercise your constitutional rights (like life, liberty, and the pursuit of...) and your boss (one of that shrinking number of bosses under the paradigm we've been discussing) doesn't like it, you're out on your ass. It's as simple as that. In the corporate world, you have few (and getting fewer) rights.
Besides understanding what a corporate charter originally was, and what it meant, what we as Americans desperately need to know now, is just who owns and controls the stocks? Can we put faces and names on the rulers of this very undemocratic system of Corporation as State? Can the charters that protect, rather than constrain these modern mobsters, be revoked?
The Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that corporations have the same rights as human beings. Well, screw us! Do they have the same rights to privacy, free speech, and press? Come on! They hold these rights now, and with lawyers enough to back them up. Can we balance the scales of justice when in modern America, "you are innocent until proven broke?" Are we going to be too Microsoft in the head to see the brave new McWorld that is coming if we don't correct this injustice?
There was a time when government ostensibly regulated commercial interests, though big finance, big oil, big timber, big mining, and big manufacturing have long been generally above their control. Along with the military industrial complex, its spooks and spies, and the modern additions of big agriculture, big merchandising, and big media, we have come a sad half circle to where these interests have grown so powerful as to openly regulate government. These organizations are huge, many having state sized economies, but their control falls to a tiny sliver of the population graph. What little can be learned about those at the switches, shows extensive cross-industry overlaps. (Yes, I could be accused here of trying to draw class distinctions.)
If the corporate owning class can convince us, the citizen-serfs, that their position is our position, it rides the wave of its self created populism. If it cannot, it turns the screws on government through its campaign cash, funnelled through its many overt and covert channels. It wields the power of ownership over the politicians it full well knows it elects.
Corporations and their commercial and trade organization lobbyists are now writing bills and submitting them to [their] Congresspersons, who then act out, on C-Span, the showbiz of legislating. Corporate metastasis of the frequency spectrum has turned all but a handful of community broadcast stations into an unregulated private sector "Ministry of Propaganda." Bishops Rather, Koppel, and even a resurrected Cronkite (on the PBS TV program, Nova) still insist that Lee Harvey Oswald performed the best riflery of his life in 1963.
"Government regulation" has, through the corporately owned media's manipulation of the language, become the replacement for "communism" as the great enemy of freedom. Pursuing their common interests, the controllers of the secret society of corporate ownership conduct their propaganda war. The media mouths can be anti-government but try to find one that's anti-corporation! Contending for bigger shares of the globally limited international market turf, their enemy is anyone and everyone they feel they can squeeze or finesse. A small corporation can't threaten if it can simply be taken over.
It might be hard on the national ego but our modern day mob has bigger fish to fry than the declining U.S. market. "Free trade" has become the rallying cry for the nineties. Both NAFTA and the GATT were pushed, passed, and signed, against popular opinion. Congress said yes to what Bush, Clinton, and not surprisingly, Rush Limbaugh too, all agreed was best for us. (What's wrong with this picture?)
Primary to the flow of power in the modern economy is sales. Primary to sales is production. And primary to any production are the resources and the means of production. Opposition to the acquisition of any of these is a barrier to trade (for whom?). The international mobster class won't care if a Russian Mafia rises up. They will use them while it's handy and then, one way or another, they'll "off 'em." When the post-communist pie is eventually all carved up, there will be no new military industrial complex, though it may have incorporated what were previously its foreign competitors. No new oil, mining, or timber barons will arise except possibly in junior partnership roles. To those few, I won't have to say, "Watch your backs, baby."
NAFTA, the GATT, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), have taken Mort Saul's description of U.S. governance to a global scale. It is; "Government of the people, by the corporations, for the rich."
Riddle: What game is played with "phoney money and real greed?" By the time it has become obvious who is going to be the single winner in the game of Monopoly, the other players will have long since ceased to be having much fun. Dejected, they may have tossed the remainders of their play money and piles of mortgaged deeds to the honorary tycoon-fat-cat. Ready for a change, they'll get up and wander off to watch TV.
If it so happens that we find ourselves to be the financial wizard of the game, to the degree of our own temporary megalomania, we may be pissed off at these gutless quitters, leaving just when we were starting to have some real fun. After all, we built all those hotels by the sweat of our brows and the brilliance of our prowess (soon forgetting that the welfare state had handed us a cool two hundred every time we passed Go, and this, regardless of all our acquired play-wealth).
Well, what if the imminent winner is sitting there with a loaded .357 Magnum** holding down his pile of money? He says, "Ain't nobody's gonna' quit right yet, fellers. Sit yerself back down now an' roll them dice again. Yes!" he screams gleefully, "Take a ride on the Reading, that'll be two hunnert more somolians, Yeeee-hah!"
Life is good.
This is our position today. In our finite world, as the supply of markets, resources, and the numbers of competitive players dwindle, those with the guns and the tokens probably won't remember that economy is a game and all that money isn't real (of course they know quite well what real wealth means in terms of control). Their understanding will most likely be, if they are serious about winning the game, for god's sake don't give the suckers an even break. Like homes, education, health care, or decent wages. They must make sure that we know without doubt (and ultimately, if push comes to shove, under penalty of death), that we must keep playing in the only game in town.
See you all down at the new Wal-Mart.
* He who has the gold, rules.
** Or the cops, courts, jails, the Pentagon, National Guard, The Wackenhut Corp., or the IRS, BATF, FBI, CIA, any and all of these armed acronymous organs of control.