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arendt (1000+ posts) Tue Aug-05-08 08:24 AMOriginal message Where is Meyer Lansky when you need him? Advertisements [?]Edited on Tue Aug-05-08 09:00 AM by arendtAfter 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:QuoteAdam 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
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"
Meyer Lansky (born Majer SuchowliÅ„ski, July 4, 1902 – January 15, 1983) was a gangster who, with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, was instrumental in the development of The Commission (and possibly the "National Crime Syndicate") in the United States.Lansky also headed up Murder, Inc. for The Commission and was largely responsible for the Mafia's development of Las Vegas and a financially beneficial relationship with the corrupt Cuban regime of Fulgencio Batista y ZaldÃvar. Although Jewish, Lansky undoubtedly played a central role in the Italian Mafia's organization and consolidation of the criminal underworld (although the full extent of this role has come under some debate).
