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The Mafia, The Roman Empire
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The Senators of the Roman Empire may have been the Mafia big-time, but they were small-time crooks compared to the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys and GW Bushes of today. After all, the Roman legions only stole what they could carry, or drive off, like the thousands of captives sold into slavery and the golden candelabra of the Temple of Jerusalem. Their descendants in the fifth century drove people off the land and claimed it as their own, but they were working with inferior weapons. Today, the Halliburtons and Bechtels, the Lockheeds and Blackwaters, and the Chases and City Banks, have the weapons of capitalism, of finance and debt, of blocked assets, the IRS, the World Bank and the IMF to loot devastated countries--and their own.
Why, in Lebanon our war-profiteers didn't even have to lift a finger--they just kept the Israelis well-supplied with weapons. And now Lebanon is driven further into debt to all those who fatten on war and its aftermath. After all, Lebanon has to be rebuilt, and the money isn't going to come from nowhere, even though Lebanon was already in debt far beyond what it should have been before Israel and Hezbollah had at each other this summer.
Is it any coincidence that business is recording high profits in the US, but workers wages have only kept pace with inflation for this quarter, and have been falling in purchasing power for years? Workers have to keep their heads down, and if they get too uppity, start demanding wage increases, why the Fed decides there are "inflationary pressures," and has to raise interest rates--or their companies can threaten to relocate production to Mexico, or China, or India.
It's as if the Mafia was ruling the world, taking their cut--because they are protecting us--and killing anyone who gets in their way.
Except, of course, that our ruling gangsters are much more sophisticated than the Mafia; they don't have to kill the opposition, at least not usually. They just gain control of the election machinery, and of the media, declare a few "illegal enemy combatants," to show that anyone can end up in someplace like Guantànamo if they don't watch it, and then they sell fear: "Stay the course;" "Democrats are traitors;" "The Global War on Terror."
It's been very profitable. Their cut? Virtually all the productivity gains the US has sustained since 1980: those gains haven't ended up in the workers' pockets, but in the pockets of "investors" and of CEO's.
Think about it: has the Mafia ever been able to rip off the wealth not just of the powerless poor but of virtually everyone except themselves, to put shell corporations like Halliburton into place to skim off the cream from the whole society? The trick is to persuade enough people (50% plus or minus one will do, plus some Election Day chicanery) that they would be in more danger if they voted for the other guys. Look for a lot of expensive campaign ads claiming that the Democrats are soft on terrorism, and against Mom and apple pie. They only have to persuade enough to make the elections close; then the election machine companies can take care of the rest.
And after all, it isn't as if dollars can't substitute for votes. Long ago our then more liberal judiciary ruled in favor of "one man, one vote." But if you have a lot of dollars…our more conservative judiciary of today has ruled that dollars are equivalent to free speech, and no one wants to curtail free speech... For more on how to control election outcomes
No wonder the top 5% has sustained such income growth; no wonder the top 1/10th of 1% has garnered the greatest gains of all! They are the ones closest to the great Mafia organization affectionately known as the GOP, or to the big-time Mafia dons: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hastert….
