Freedom Of Choice-- Which Organized Crime Syndicate?

- By NOAH

When President Obama got elected, I thought that there were a couple of obvious good things that went, more or less, unnoticed in the corporate media. One was that, hard as it might be to contemplate, it would have been even worse if McCain won and placed Phil Graham in charge of the U.S. Treasury to lead the charge in privatizing the Social Security program. There is no sane rationale for doing that when the stock market can be so volatile. The other thing was more subtle. For the first time, the President of the United States would have a black face. Not only would that provide a symbol of hope for non-white children, it would also show white children something good about the society which they were born into. The same thing will be true when a woman is sitting in the White House. It’s about role models, aspirations and possibility!
 
Then came the fight over healthcare and insurance reform. True, we have always known about crooked politicians but, rarely have we had such a view into the mind-boggling immensity of their world of slime. The mainstream corporate owned media is no longer the sole provider of knowledge. A carefully controlled and polished fairy tale message is no longer the only message. Those of us who were around back around 1970, knew that President Nixon and Vice President Agnew were crooks. We knew it so well that one of the most enduring clips of Tricky Dick is his “I am not a crook!” utterance. Nixon impersonators still get a laugh every time they use that line. It’s had 40 years of being a sure fire laugh generator simply because the truth of his crookedness is part of the national fabric. We didn’t even need his tapes, but they certainly go a long way toward revealing the inner Nixon. As for Agnew; a sitting Vice President had to resign when it was revealed that, among other things, people had been delivering him cash in envelopes and grocery bags, right to his office, right to the office of the Vice President of The United States. The lunacy of our system is that, other than their forced resignations, both men escaped the punishment that both ordinary citizens and mafia gangsters would have received for the same or similar offenses. Both sleazebags walked free into a life of Riley. Had they been made men in the mob, they might have ended up where they belonged, Alcatraz. Instead, the fact that they got away with their pensions and freedom intact set an example and showed Americans that laws simply don’t matter. American society started eroding faster and faster.
 
Personally, I’ve never had any illusions about Washington, at least not since 11/22. That and the Vietnam War opened my teenage eyes at the time. Nothing was going to stop a war and its attendant war profiteering, not even a President, when even a helicopter company stood to rake in $350 million, in 1964 dollars!
 
Now, 45 or so years later, though, it seems that almost every politician is a dirtbag and a hypocrite. One after another, they parade before us, a parade of knuckle-dragging chimps, assholes and morons; emperors dressed in a cloak of legitimacy. Yet, due mostly to the Internet, we can now see the truth and share documented information about those, like Joe Lieberman for instance, who would have us respect them simply because of their position. Another fraud, Rep. Michelle Bachmann who is both a lawyer and a politician, rails against socialism while she accepts government subsidies to go along with her government run health plan.
 
Sniveling, beady-eyed media rodents fawn all over politicians and, one, Chris Matthews even wants to be one. It is all part of a never-ending Establishment shadow play. Washington is so full of the criminal element that I can’t imagine how people can even breathe there. Decent people must have to shower three times a day after mingling with an endless assortment of wiseguys, bagmen, lawyers, pocket-pickers, pimps, and assassins, political and otherwise. Going to Washington and being a Senator was once an honorable and respectable career choice. Now it is a career choice that is made, not to improve the country for its citizens, but to get on board the gravy train, the K Street Bribery Express! Today’s politicians would laugh at Agnew’s envelopes. They would laugh at the puny amounts that Agnew collected from favor seekers. If there’s an Internet in Hell, Agnew must be spinning with envy at the amounts that even a freshman $enator can take in nowadays. Talk about being born too soon!
 
Just imagine if the NFL Referees were able to devise and legalize a bribery system where they could accept money from “companies” to blatantly pre-determine the outcome of NFL games, and do it right out in public. That is what the current “campaign contribution” system is. And, only public financing reform can repair it. Of course, then we’d have to ask those who benefit most from the system being the way it is to change it. I can just see a $enator on the tube now, saying “A, er, what’s my motivation.”
 
Back in the 1990s, Speaker of The House Newt Gingrich took influence peddling to such heights that corporate lawyers were literally invited into the halls of Congress to write the legislation designed to put their own companies’ interests above those of the citizenry. Who needs a middleman? In the present day, if the healthcare and insurance reform farce has shown the current generation of Americans one very important thing, it’s that virtually the entire $enate is on the take and on the take to 7 figure amounts. There’s no such thing as a down market for them! The $enate and the House are little more than an arm of the Medical Industrial Complex. They may euphemistically call their cash prizes “campaign contributions,” but outside the Beltway, out in the very REAL world where people have to do REAL work just to make ends meet, we know them as something else. With the information advantages that the Internet now offers, we can even look up the dollar amounts that lowlifes like Max Baucus and Jim DeMint take in. We can go to sites like opensecrets.org and put a price on the selling of integrity. We can actually put a price on the selling out of our health. In 2010, we will be able to watch again as energy companies pay off the same crew. Why give us health care when they can just freeze us to death in the winter.
 
In the early part of the 20th century, the Mafia was able to grow, in part, because so many were shut out of the larger society. It offered a way up the ladder, not an especially good way or healthy way, but a way just the same. Dealing drugs also offered a way. Eventually, the Mafia took over the drug dealing. The CIA did the same. It’s a constant process of merger. Now, it’s nearly impossible to tell where one organized crime syndicate ends and another begins. It’s all one big, fat, cigar chomping, fists full of dollars family.
 
The thing is that in the world that youngsters see now, there is virtually no difference between what is traditionally called organized crime and the crime organization that is the business of Washington and our government, regardless of which party holds which branch at any given time. Both feature a system of power brokers, good earners, and muscle. In fact, they both seem to have merged into one all-encompassing system right before our eyes. How difficult it must be for a parent to impart the concepts of honesty, respect, and honor to a child when all they see is an approved system of greed and bribery and worse. We have devolved from the “me generation” to the “greed generation.” The façade has been stripped away and dispensed with. The emperors are as naked as their avarice.
 
I think I’ll go buy a lottery ticket.