Gangsters and The State; The State as Gangsters: On the Semantics of "Gangster"

As we keep learning over and over, the NSA's spying into our every move has stopped zero terrorist attacks. So, this is not only a massive abuse of civil liberties and an absurdly gross violation of the 4th Amendment, it's very costly and so yet another welfare program for people already well-off.

It seems only natural to ask: is catching a terrorist really the main purpose behind the building of the total information awareness of the Panopticon? Because no War Criminals or Wall Street crooks have been prosecuted - almost everyone seems to be doing "better than ever" among those crowds - are they preparing for the inevitable uprising when the economy collapses again?

Is this all merely well-dressed gangsters from Ivy League schools seeing The People as a threat to their interests and taking precautions to smash any person(s) who deign to stop their gluttonous lust for cash and power? It's probably more complex than that, but I don't think I'm drilling in a dry hole here. There's just too much historical precedent.

Historical precedent for what? WTF is the OG on about now? Just this: most of the citizenry are garden-variety brainwashed to believe that "gangsters" are only Italian guys from New Jersey, or Mexican guys selling drugs and using machine guns, or some other Hollywood fantasy-image. I think it semantically fruitful to open up the definition of "gangster." Stick with me on this; it's brilliant. I may be paranoid, but I'm also a free-thinker.

UK Now
If gangsters can buy off juries, cops, lawyers, issue "get out of jail free" cards for a nominal fee, and infiltrate Scotland Yard, then who would be the gangsters and who would be the government? This is not an idle postulate, as Operation Tiberius, in effect since 2003, shows. UK gangsters even used a little-known but historically effective trick of infiltrating the Freemasons in order to aid in their corruption of cops. As William S. Burroughs might say were he alive to hear this: "It's the old game from here to eternity: it helps the pay The Boys off..."

Using a secret society in order to further the goals of your own secret society goes back at least to Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati, which many Masons seem proud about after the fact. So far my research suggests Weishaupt's goals were what most of us would consider from the "Left;" the Propaganda Due (P2) secret society that corrupted the Italian justice system were right wing fascists who had infiltrated the Freemasons, starting (probably?) in the early 1970s.

Rather black (gangsters and thugs and criminals) and white (those sworn to uphold the law, truth, justice, and maybe even a modicum of fairness), the color I see when I look at various "justice" systems more often looks like this:

                                         Rather than "good guys" vs. "bad guys"?

No, but seriously: grok in its fullness the rot in the UK. I think this sort of thing is historically inevitable when the wealthiest 10% can buy the political system. And this is greatly aided by income inequality, perhaps the biggest social justice issue in the Northern Hemisphere since anthropogenic global warming, but this is mere opinion on my part.

US Allowing Sinaloan Drug Cartel to Flood US Cities With Drugs
In exchange for info on the members of other drug cartels, the DEA made deals with the members of the upper hierarchy of the notorious Sinaloan cartel, circa 2000-2012. It's estimated that 80% of the drugs - cocaine and heroin - entering the Chicago area were allowed under this deal.

A daily-repeated trope among right wingers in Unistat is that, since Chicago is Democratically-controlled and Obama came from there, (and other "reasons"), this explains all the corruption and murder in Chicago. It's a lot more complicated than that. (Of course it would be: the right wing's concocted stories seem increasingly designed to appeal to a 5th grade reading level.) This State-crime - the DEA agents are paid for with our tax money - is a FACT. Or to put it another way: children and other destitute people in Chicago and all over Unistat are murdered and terrorized by the decisions made about "information gathering" by members of the Unistat government, paid for by us. (See the gray area above.)

I have not seen this story covered in the mainstream corporate electronic news, but it may have been. And it should be covered and many members of the DEA and the Unistat government who sanctioned this should go to jail for a long time. But I've lived long enough to have grave doubts any white-collar of Unistat government-gangsters will do any jail time. Why? Because when I was twenty I read Alfred W. McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. I saw what happened to Gary Webb. I had worked for the Christic Institute, which was smashed by the Bush41 Admin. I attended talks and read the book by Michael Levine, a former DEA agent who revealed how corrupt the whole international drug smuggling scene was. I knew enough about the CIA dealing with Lucky Luciano and heroin trafficking in the 1940s. I read Chomsky, Peter Dale Scott, and others...like Ryan Grim, in his book This Is Your Country On Drugs, see especially pp. 171-192 for stories on Unistat-State-gangsters aligned with the Mafia and other syndicates and drug smuggling. I could go on and on.

This is all out there, but you have to READ; this won't be covered by Eyewitless News. If it is covered - and every now and then it is, and well-done, too - it's talked about for two days and then disappears; no public discussion emerges. Because it's...taboo to think about the implications? Robert Anton Wilson thought so. See his essay, "The Godfather, Part IV," in The Gemstone File, ed. by Jim Keith, pp.133-143.

And therefore, there will be no justice, only smashed lives in a terminally criminal and evil and stupid "War On Certain People Who Use The Wrong Drugs."

This may seem a bit glib or histrionic to you. But think about the mothers whose children are now dead, shot in the streets of the south side of Chicago. And then realize that sworn officials of the government allowed the drugs that were being warred over to flood those Chicago streets. Picture a mother at a funeral, crying for her baby who never had a chance. Who are the "gangsters" here? It's not so black-and-white, is it?

       CIA aid for Thailand
   was channeled through a front established

by a CIA agent
             with underworld bank connections
    thus helping to open up the world

to a flood of heroin through Thailand
             while the mob in Manilla
     helped to Westernize the Philippines

by its control of gambling
             and later child prostitution
     carried on in the big hotels

Can we be surprised this happened
              when the mob was being protected
     both by Hoover in the FBI

and Angleton in the CIA
             who vetoed a Justice Department investigation
     and almost no one in the US seemed to care

at least in its universities
             When I wanted to pinpoint
    the center of the corruption

I did not point to the CIA
            who seemed to think they were doing their job
    or even the government

which has always been corrupt
             so much as to universities
    for having sanctioned this system

-from Peter Dale Scott, Minding The Darkness, pp.178-179, and he gives footnotes for all his sources and assertions in the margins. NB PDS has the harshest criticism for his own: the universities who "sanction" this gangsterism.

Legalized Gangsterism

According to Simon Johnson of MIT, the "Most Dangerous Man in America" right now is Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan Chase. Dimon seems to have contempt for Congress, the laws, and anyone who will challenge him, anyone not as rich as himself, or anyone who would try to reign in his Too Big To Fail (TBTF) bank. Recall that We the People bailed him out.

                                   Jamie Dimon: "The Most Dangerous Man in America"

                                        

Here's an article that describes how angry Dimon was with Obama for leaving him out of the team that was supposed to re-write the rules for the way Wall St worked. It links to a better and longer piece on this guy, who now knows he's TBTF, and can do just about any evil he wants in the world, and he'll only be fined if caught. He doesn't really produce ANY WEALTH with his own hands; he merely gambles with other people's money and wins even if he loses. And he wants MORE. He's worth an estimated $400,000,000 and "earns" an annual salary of $27.5 million. He may wear a nice suit. He may have a Harvard MBA. He may belong to all the best private clubs and be asked to give his opinions on the stock market on CNBC or Faux News, but to me, he's a gangster. But I'm only entitled to my opinion.

JP Morgan-Chase/Jamie Dimon studies:
Too Big to Charge?
Despite Eight Ongoing Criminal/Civil Investigations, the Bank's a Law-Enforcement Partner With the NYPD
JP Morgan-Chase: "Incredibly Guilty"
Now We Know: JP Morgan-Chase Is More Criminal Than Enron
Matt Taibbi Explains JP Morgan-Chase's Crime Spree

Jamie Dimon's feelings are hurt: people don't appreciate him enough. I'm not making this up. Sociopath? I'll go: yes. Gangster? Oh hell yea. I know, I know: I have a very active imagination. What do I know? I'm just some dipshit blogger sitting in his living room, among his books, worrying about paying the utility bills. Dimon's rich! He must be a Good Guy! Did he actually use an automatic rifle to kill a bunch of people over money? No. Well there you go: he's cool.

And I could've picked 30 or 40 other white collar Business Criminals here; Dimon just seems stellar to me.

From a poem about the year 1934:

He was a hero in Oklahoma
helping the oppressed by
              stealing from the eye-rollers
                                 & now and then giving to the poor

He hated bankers
and finally he was killed by FBI agents on 10-22
                                               &
Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him
with those great lines: 
  
                                       Yes, as through this world I ramble,
                                            I see lots of funny men,
                                       Some will rob you with a 6-gun,
                                           and some will rob you with a fountain-pen.
                                       But as through your life you'll travel,
                                           wherever you may roam,
                                       You won't never see an outlaw drive
                                            a family from their home.
-from "Pretty Boy Floyd," by Ed Sanders, America: A History In Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939, p.323
["JP Morgan Chase Settles: Is $13B For Role in Mortgage Crisis Fair?"]

Note: Sanders regularly uses the term "eye-rollers" for the wealthy class, who, if you bring up anything like the ideas presented in this particular blog-spew, they merely roll their eyes, as if you're crazy.

This has been a ramble on the semantics of "gangster" and I hope at least one person found a modicum of edification. Thanks for reading!

Trust Me On This: Deception, Biology, Politics

"Reality is the temporary resultant of the struggle between rival gangs of programmers." - Robert Anton Wilson

When I was 16 I lived with my father just outside of Denver, and he and his childhood friend and drinking buddy got into watching pro-wrestling on TV. The absurdity and theatricality of it all made them howl with laughter. Later I attended a few live shows in downtown Denver, and was struck by the idea that a few people sitting near us seemed to believe the "matches" were on the up-and-up.

Later I read then-structuralist Roland Barthes's Mythologies (I should say I tried to read Barthes, but the  epistemological [semiotic] assumptions - derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, who I had not read at the time - rendered much of Barthes's work opaque to me) and this 1957 book had an essay on pro wrestling, which I'll link to here, if anyone is interested. Barthes contrasted boxing - in which the thrust is to see who wins, with wrestling, which was a sum of episodes, the point not being about winning, but the sheer spectacle of the thing, which with its pantomimes of characters Good and Evil, had an underlying message of playing on the ideas in mass culture about Justice.

Later I read much of Murray Edelman's work in sociology. He had a lot to say about politics as a spectacle. (Here's the NYT obit for Edelman, which gives a thumbnail of his concerns.) Edelman seems a quite underrated figure; he was writing about things that Jean Baudrillard took up much later, and, while in academic language, Edelman was still quite readable. Some have called him the first postmodern political scientist. Politics? It's a show, sorta like wrestling. Edelman says that people fall into the drama, play parts, internalize the totality of the show, and increasingly take it seriously. What? I'll try to elaborate.

Look at the foggy, mystifying language surrounding politics and its main delivery system, the mass media. Look at how many people seem to not question the semantic content of the jargon and glossary in political-speak. (Because they don't know how? Or they'd rather stick with the "fun" of playing inside the melodrama of politics? I don't know. Edelman seemed to wonder too.) Political institutions are symbolic acts that must be interpreted within some schema or another. But the institutions and acts tend to serve to more or less keep things the same rather than change things. Oh, changes do occur. If they didn't, the Show would get stale, and the players wouldn't be able to take it seriously anymore. It must perpetually seem vital to the players within. Voters who don't show up or who don't follow politics? They're onto the game and don't want to play. They see the game as bullshit. I think Edelman is right here to an extent, but I also think there are people who would rather not know anything; they don't see into/through Edelman's elaborate socio-political spectacle because they never had a serious look in the first place.

Rituals in politics are elaborate. The quantity of them is large and they are repeated so often that people cannot "see" the rituals as rituals. Rather, something solemn about Justice and Freedom and Democracy and The Good and Fairness and Meritocracy is being upheld. (Sorta like...wrestling?) The rituals of politics invest in the authority of the main players on the stage, and we are meant to hold the whole show in awe.

Now, irony and provocation being two of my favorite tropes from intellectuals, I appreciate Edelman's ouvre and I think quite a lot of it is accurate and generally edifying discourse, but, like most of those thinkers we call postmodern, there tends to be an inexorable taking of the thesis to extremes, so that something begins to waft up...what's that? Do you smell it? You do? Then it's not just me, thankgod. Yea, but what is it? Does it smell like burning garbage to you? No? Like unpleasant incense? Really? Oh! Now I know what it is! We've been reading postmodernists, and we smell a reductio ad absurdum. Whew! I was about to get the fire extinguisher.

What I like about Edelman's work is the Things Are Not As They Seem-ishness of it all; I also like that he concentrated on language and semiotic/symbolic analysis, which fits into my main model and along with valued thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan, George Lakoff, and even, in a way, Noam Chomsky. Also, there's a thread running from Giambattista Vico's 2000+ years of class warfare of the Rich vs. Everyone Else that Edelman can fit with.

What I don't like about the over-baked aspect of Edelman is the lingering hopelessness, and there's quite a clash between an idea that I think holds much sway - that if you don't "do" politics it'll be done to you - and the sort of paralysis via analysis I get from Edelman, which leads to passivity. He has made me question my role in the political Show, and now I'm far more ironic about it all, but I'm verging away. Back to deception.

In the blogpost from four days ago, I briefly discussed Edward O. Wilson. Another giant in Sociobiology, who was there at creation, was Robert Trivers. In the bibliography for Wilson's revolutionary 1975 work, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis a handful of Trivers's papers are listed. Trivers has been perhaps most noted for being a sort of hardcore exponent of Dawkins's kin selection idea, but with particular emphasis on reciprocal altruism (shorthand: "you scratch my back and then I'll scratch yours" in Biology). When you get into reciprocal altruism, you also allow for "deals" between non-kin. It gets very abstruse when you start to run with it, especially when you're trying to keep in mind what Hamilton wrote, how EOW took it compared to Dawkins, how they sought to create new ideas to separate themselves as the first-line sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists, etc.

As Trivers elaborated on reciprocal altruism, he began to concentrate on something that seemed to spin out of it: deception. And now, after a few decades of writing and thinking about it, he's maybe the foremost thinker on deception from biology on up to humans.

Trivers, a manic-depressive genius since childhood, a longtime pot smoker, classic anti-authoritarian, who, in May of 1979 joined the Black Panthers and, according to David Jay Brown, Trivers's colleague Burney Le Boeuf, called Trivers "the blackest white man I know." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.54)

In John Horgan's review of Trivers's book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, we see this passage:

Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune system. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

So how much of this stuff goes on, in all the domains of our lives? It seems easy to fall into paranoia when contemplating The Spectacle, language as virus, conspiracy, double and triple crosses and agents, counterfeiting, prevarication (the very word seems to be hiding something, no?), "spin," fakes, secrecy, claims of "transparency," the information deformations that occur within status hierarchies, advertising and PR and hypnotic techniques, etc. Let us consider this list as The Shadow of ourselves, vis a vis what we'd prefer to think about "reality": that most of us care about the Truth and act trustworthy, because we want others to act honestly with us. The Shadow would be all that which is...less than trustworthy? 

The vast data from the animal kingdom shows how common camouflage is, how many animals have developed a way to APPEAR far more menacing than they are, on and on. Is deceit built into the fabric of all biology? It appears so. But then so is the attempt to detect...

It's common to read about deceit and lying and note the linkage between our very complex intra-species signaling system (i.e, human language) and how it's exquisitely available for the purposes of deceit. When ants communicate via very elaborate pheromones, the lying has its limits, it seems, at least compared to our signaling systems.

What I also note is the biological metaphor often used in writings on deceit: that lying is "parasitic" upon the truth, and that too many people engaged in deceit tend to ruin a system. From The Oxford Companion To The Mind:

Conveying useful information from one person to another about 'facts' is the essence of this extraordinary human invention. Lying is therefore parasitic upon general truthfulness, and if its incidence becomes too high the system becomes useless.

So here we have a reason for truthfulness that's not lame-brained ("The Bible sez..." or "good people tell the truth!", etc): the system is preserved. But then we must ask, "Is the system worth preserving?" Since Ronald Reagan, people running for office as Republicans have made it part of their platform that government doesn't work and should get out of the way of "people's lives," by which they mean corporations should be able to do whatever they want. Convince people you want a job that you don't think should even exist? What "system" do they favor? And do they really believe what they say or are they being deceptive? Hoo-boy...

The "parasite" metaphor brings us back to biology, but other writers have borrowed a metaphor from physics: that deception is like entropy. But I'd rather return to wrestling.

                                 Eric Weinstein, popularizer of the kayfabe idea
                                                  for thinkers caught in "ordinary" economic reality

Eric Weinstein, relating his ideas about information and deceit in economic systems, has drawn on the obscure wrestling term kayfabe. In an article in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (edited by John Brockman), Weinstein cites recent work in evolutionary biology by the aforementioned Trivers and Richard Alexander that says deceit plays a bigger role than accurate information transfer in systems with selective pressures. "Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information." (p.321) 

Weinstein says that in the early years of wrestling, matches went on for too long, guys got hurt, the matches became boring, and eventually the "sport" became a ritualized thing, "negotiated, choreographed and rehearsed," its complex dramaturgical "rules" closed to outsiders. This seems something like our financial system now, "an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears." Wait, there's more.

Why didn't the "freshwater" Chicago school of economists foresee the 2008 economic meltdown? Why didn't the "saltwater" Ivy Leaguers catch it? Probably because they're caught in the kayfabe: there is a quiet agreement to not let the outsiders know the game is fixed. Note: neither group suffered for not knowing. And still they are "experts." 

Weinstein says that, if you're wondering why there are no investigative journalists doing the real work they used to do and seemingly "bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts," we'd understand this better if we knew what a kayfabe is. And it comes out of the traveling-carnival of hokum that is professional wrestling. 

"What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery." (p.322) Weinstein sees kaybrification as an important feature of love, science, war, finance and politics. And we would all be better served to know this term and its mechanisms. The truly horrifying thing about kayfabe, as I read Weinstein about it, is that it shows the 1%/Ruling Class and its managers how many layers of disbelief the human mind is capable of suspending before fantasy melds seamlessly with reality.

Add to that: wrestling eventually became so over the top that it had to admit it was fake...but the public loved it anyway, or as Weinstein puts it, "Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience." (p.323) (an online link to the Weinstein article I'm drawing from is HERE.)

Going back to my idea about secrecy and spin and deceit and advertising and other such terms as part of the Shadow of truth, and given the kayfabe and Trivers's arguments (even bacteria and viruses employ subterfuge to sneak past your immune system)...to quote a famous painter: Who are we? Where are we going?

My favorite philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson, was not an academic and more like a great generalist-thinker. He gave an interview 36 years ago and here's one Q and his A that, I think, pertains to these topics, and provides a slight slant that allows us more perspective:

Science Fiction Review: How serious are you about the Illuminati and conspiracies in general?

Robert Anton Wilson: Being serious is not one of my vices. I will venture, however, that the idea that there are no conspiracies has been popularized by historians working for universities and institutes funded by the principle conspirators of our time: the Rockefeller-Morgan banking interests, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, the Trilateral Commission. This is not astonishing or depressing. Conspiracy is standard mammalian politics for reasons to be found in ethology and Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals. Entropy, in a word. Science is based on transmitting the signal accurately, accelerating the process of information transfer. Negentropy. The final war may be between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat.

However, I am profoundly suspicious about all conspiracy theories, including my own, because conspiracy buffs tend to forget the difference between a plausible argument and a real proof. Or between a legal proof, a proof in the behavioral sciences, a proof in physics, a mathematical or logical proof, or a parody of any of the above. My advice to all is Buddha's last words, "Doubt, and find your own light." Or, as Crowley wrote, "I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." Doubt suffereth long, but is kind; doubt covereth a multitude of sins; doubt puffeth not itself up into dogma. For now abideth doubt, hope, and charity, these three: and the greatest of these is doubt. With doubt all things are possible. Every other entity in the universe, including Goddess Herself, may be trying to con you. It's all Show Biz. Did you know that Billy Graham is a Bull Dyke in drag?
-The Illuminati Papers, p.47

Question from the OG: Where is The Shadow? 

Here's 7 minutes of Chomsky and Trivers, riffing on the topic of deception:

Political Corruption: Three Takes, Possibly Illuminating?

I can't count how often I read some Citizen complain how the Democrats are so corrupt, always have been, always will. They're incurably rotten, those Democrats. Another Voter opines in three steady shades of black that the Republicans have ruined the country, because, why...dontcha see how "corrupt" they are?

I think I remember sorta buying this in my early twenties. I thought the Republicans were more corrupt than the Democrats. And of course this...needed to end? How could I have ever been so naive?

Since then I've changed my mind quite a lot. The charges of "corruption" on the part of one or both parties leave me a tad embarrassed for the naivete of the speaker. It's called "projection" in Freudian terms: I'm projecting myself onto the speaker who's agonizing over a world that, gosh dernit, would be so much better if not for all that corruption.

The unpleasant corollary for me in this is that I now realize how many times I've looked back and remembered that I actually sorta believed certain political ideas, and I blanche; this seems to strongly imply that whatever I think now might embarrass me a few years hence. It's a tough one to swallow, but I gotta live with it.

Perhaps it's a small price to pay if I'm trying to be intellectually "honest."

I said "trying." Gimme some slack? Some slack from the Slacktivists?
------------------------------------------------------------------
I remember reading a lot of history in my late twenties and just being overwhelmed to the point of amusement over how utterly normal political corruption is. And after awhile, maybe you start to develop your own scale of how much true damage corruption can do to the Average Joe, Mrs Calabash down the street, poor kids, someone's dad who's trying to eek out a living for his family, etc.

There's a sort of corruption that seems partisan. I guess it hurts almost everyone a little, but if almost everyone, then hardly anyone, right?

(Is there a sort of corruption that does hurt almost everyone? Say 1% hurt the other 99%? What sort of corruption would that be? What do you call it? I know it sounds far-fetched. Forget I ever brought it up.)

Then there's the kind of corruption that various factions of the Ruling Class deem too damaging to the official narratives. I think that's a big reason Nixon went down. (There are many more historical examples.)

I guess a Reader starts to develop some vague, inchoate and heterogeneous taxonomy of corruption. But the thing is, you do expect it. It's not cynicism, it's realpolitick, or maybe just "living in the real world." Hence, my visceral reaction when a fellow citizen complains about corruption. I often feel a mixture of contempt, embarrassment, and admiration of a naive yet noble worldview.
--------------------------------------------------------
1.) Noam Chomsky
When I started reading Noam Chomsky I quickly came across numerous variations of his views on corrupt politicians. Basically, the Chomsky view is this: He's glad when politicians are corrupt, because that's normal. One corrupt one undermines another, then the undermined one's allies return the favor. It cancels power out. If some dipshit politician is in it for the money and himself and his pals, the local machine: at least they'll eventually get busted by some other competing corrupt group of opposition. On and on, welt sans kaput.

For Chomsky, the problem is the True Believer with charisma, who really wants power in order to change Everything and make it right. Like Hitler. And Chomsky has been saying for at least 30 years that American fascism, just below the surface, harbors these creeps, and we're subject to one sooner of later. And that's scary. He's perfectly happy to see yet the same old narrative of some jackoff preacher-politician, railing about "morality" and then getting caught with 15 Rolls Royces and a homosexual boy in a motel room. On tape. On the Six O'Clock News. That's no threat.

Here's a typical Chomsky bit on corruption, among many variations:

"If Hitler had been a crook...We're very fortunate in the United States, we've never had a charismatic leader who weren't a gangster. Every one of them was a thug, or a robber, or something. Which is fine, they don't cause a lot of trouble. If you get one who's honest, like Hitler, then you're in trouble - they just want power." - interview with Matthew Rothschild, 1997.

                                                      Boss Tweed, synonymous with "political corruption" in 
                                                                 Unistatian history

2.) Robert Anton Wilson 
The middle period writings of RAW (which I consider as 1975-1985, with 1959-1974 the first period and 1986-2005 the third and last, not that anyone had asked) contains an abundance of non-Euclidean political writing, by which he meant that he saw value in left-libertarian and traditionally anarchist thought, and individualist-"right" libertarian ideas. Thinking beyond the stale left/right metaphor of political ideology. And other ideas too. (For a particularly brilliant elaboration of breaking out of right-left political thinking, see this Wilson essay here.) He rarely had much use for the Democratic or Republican parties. Which is an understatement. He seemed to pretty much loathe the Republicans always. And when I interviewed him we took a break on his balcony so he could smoke and I distinctly remember him talking about the Democratic party (in 2003) and ending his funny little diatribe with a big audible raspberry.

He used various sorts of libertarian ideas in a whole host of ironic moods, and I think he not only liked to play with any idea that was about individual freedom, but he thought there should be far more Ideas about politics in the public mind, period. And in his 1980 book The Illuminati Papers he used his pirate-libertarian free market anarchist-individualist character from his novels, Hagbard Celine, as a persona in articulating a set of "Celine's Laws."(see pp. 118-125) I consider each "Law" a gem of ingenious political satire, and yet each one holds a profound "truth," also. The First Law is National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. The Second Law states Accurate communication is only possible in a nonpunishing situation. It's the Third Law that applies to our subject of corruption.

Celine's Third Law states, An honest politician is a national calamity. Wilson explains that do-gooders, politicians who truly "mean well" tend to pass more and more laws, which creates more and more criminals. Why didn't I realize this before I read RAW? The more laws, the more restrictions on individual freedoms. "The chief cause of the rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby produces as many as several million new criminals."

The thing about RAW here: this is hilarious and sorta mostly "true." The man had a gift for being wise and cosmically comedic at the same time. An interviewer once told Wilson that when he read his books he was never sure when he was serious or when he was joking. And RAW replied:

"I'm most serious when I am joking."

Back to RAW's Hagbard and our topic of corruption, and that an honest politician is a national calamity.

"At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all shades of opinion agree at least on the axiom that we need more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember, however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that the Earth is flat."

Which then follows RAW's take on corruption, and compare and contrast this to Chomsky's:

"Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate species, and society has always been able to endure and survive it." (p.124, The Illuminati Papers)

3.) Gustav Papanek
Who he? Here's some background on Papanek. I encountered him a year or so ago when reading desultorily in economics. I was reading a bunch of sociology of religion stuff and was interested in emerging economies (like China and especially Indonesia and the Far East, but also Latin America) and how religions linked to development of markets, modernities (I'm convinced there are many variations of "modernity"), and just generally the weird mix of belief systems and economics. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss and Al Franken: O! The Things I Don't Know!

I took a load of notes, and I have some good ones from Papanek in a book with the boring title of Business and Democracy.


But more recently I read the semi-autobiography of one of my favorite intellectuals, Peter Berger,  who I tend to not harmonize with on politics, as he's too conservative for me, but I love his thought, his writing, and he's funny. His 2011 book is titled Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore.


Berger's talking about his collaborations with Papanek near the end of the book, about certain ideas that contribute to emerging economies - such as "the state pursues intelligent economic and social policies - that is, it favors economic growth and has a concern for the welfare of its population." Another item that caught my eye and which pertains to our subject: "Corruption should be kept within reasonable limits."

Berger wonders why economists can't seem to tell the difference between "bad" and "good" corruption, and Papanek tells Berger he can elucidate the difference, calling it "the Papanek principle of corruption." Very briefly, "the corruption may not exceed the corruption itself." Wha?

It gets unpacked this way by Berger, after talking with Papanek:

"It is acceptable corruption if the head of government appoints his wife's uncle to a position in which he has nothing whatsoever to do (indeed he may have an office without a telephone that he ritually visits once a month to collect his salary check). But, as a result of the position, he draws a huge salary, lives in a government-supplied villa, and drives a government-supplied Mercedes. However, the corruption becomes unacceptable if the position entails real power over a sector of the economy - such as the power to wreck the state-controlled electricity company." (p.219)
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There may or may not be a "lesson" to be learned by combining Chomsky, Wilson, and Papanek in these ideas about political corruption. I don't wanna get all didactic on my Dear Readers, if any. And besides I'm stoned and want to go play my guitar now, but before I send this blogspew into the Ethernet, I'm reminded of a zen anecdote I gleaned from the aforementioned Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

I remember it thus:

A zen student asks the zen master, "What is world peace?"

And the zen master replies, "Two drunks fighting in an alley."

Thanks for reading, grasshoppers!