Misadministration [View all]

[H2O Man]

“Judges, lawyers and politicians have a license to steal. We don’t need one.”
-- Carlo Gambino


The announcement about Charlie Kushner brings to mind the very topic that I was going to discuss on the last essay I posted upon this forum. What are the connections between business, politics, and organized crime? In that last essay, I sought to document the dangers we face due to corporations having far, far more socio-political power than citizens. Here, I'd like to talk about organized crime and politics.

Now, among many other relatives employed at all levels of law enforcement & intelligence, I had two uncles who were NYS BCI Senior Investigators. One of these two often worked under cover in his younger years. From my uncles, I learned that there were all types of organized crime. "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" are a specific ethnic group. "Mob" is the general term they used for organized gangs of criminals of all types.

"We don't really care when they kill each other," my uncle told me. "It's when they kill human beings that we do." I learned about his experiences undercover in Albany, NY, where he infiltrated the Irish mob that was connected to Boston. Of being in a meeting in a room in a highrise, where the group suspected they had been infiltrated by a cop. They hung some poor fool out a window, thinking it was him. My uncle joined the chorus of, "Drop him!"

His widow told my son & I about an event from that time that haunted him. One night, he was hanging with other members. For no reason, the others beat an old man to death. My uncle couldn't break cover to rescue the guy. So I think he had a pretty good idea of the nature of the mob. His brother -- the other legendary senior investigator -- worked with federal agents to put the mobsters that ran boxing in our region into the federal pen. (This despite these men being really extra nice to my brothers & I when we boxed. We were dumb teenagers!)

I remember my uncle saying there are two things to keep in mind. The first was that the belief the top mobsters were smart was false. They were guys who couldn't make a living in business without having to break the law. They just dared to break the law violently, often using tough guys who couldn't spell their own names for muscle. (They did attempt to "hire" my oldest brother, who was savage when he fought.)

The second thing, he said, was that up to the 1970s, they had a code of honor and would rather spend time in prison than cut a deal to help themselves. He said that generation's kids were pampered bullies, who used cocaine, were violent for fun, and couldn't keep their mouth shut. They usually took the first deal offered to them.

Maybe it's just me, but I find myself thinking about two connvicted felons ....... the one who was had started in real estate in 1968, declared bankruptcy a few times, and is about to inhabit the White House again, and Charlie Kushner, who started in real estate in 1985. And how both donated to politicians in order to get good treatment and not prosecuted .... until both were.

Now, buying influence is one thing. But buying politicians is another. For many years, corporations have written the laws on things like the environment that politicians have eagerly passed. They set limits on how much toxic chemicals they can expose human beings to. They have figured out how to do what mob bosses weren't intelligent enough to do. Pass the laws that make their crimes legal. More than that, they dictate much of our country's foreign policy. So they have way, way more political power than you or I. Heck, they've even hypnotized a large enough percentage of the population to elect the ass clown of mob bosses as president. Twice.

That is what we are up against, from top to bottom. It can seem somewhat overwhelming, I suspect. But it is up to us to do our best to halt this decline. So the first thing is to try to slow down the rate of decay. I'll suggest looking to the US Constitution to start. Studying the who thing, including the Bill of Rights. Not in the Amendment 2 fixation the brain-dead maga cult does, of course, but in a positive way. This is just my opinion, of course, but it might prove better than hand-wringing. I could be wrong.