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!

Gangster-Chic, Mafiazation and The State: Fugitive Notes

1.) Thrill-killer Charles Starkweather was finally captured on January 29, 1958. The poet Ed Sanders writes about it this way:

Starkweather caught: "It was Front Page time for another murd-punk

in the multi-century American fascination 

of come-and-get-me-copper!-ism

Jesse James, the Younger Brothers

Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone

the Cagney movies

and th' panem et circenses of Juvenal

now broadened to 

bread, circuses, and thrill-kill"

- pp.347-348, America: A History In Verse: Volume 2: 1940-1961

                                      Charles Starkweather, an American product.

                                      See Martin Sheen play his story in (a heavily-fictionalized)

                                      1973 film by Terence Malick, Badlands. 

[Ed Sanders is also one of the main scholars of the career of another notorious "murd-punk" named Charles: Manson. Manson was a protege of Ma Barker gang member Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. Learned his trade in prison. How does all this relate? I'm not sure. Let's see.]

2.) Poet and English professor and critic of United States foreign policy, Peter Dale Scott:

Virgil's rebuke of frenzy

of war and passion for gain

or Augustine what are states

when they lack justice

if not organized crime?

[...]

there was John Adams a nation

at height of power

never fails to lose

her Wisdom & Moderation...

-Minding the Darkness, p.188

-PDS cites The Aeneid 8.327; City of God 4.4; Adams: Diary and Autobiography

                        Frank Sinatra and friends Tommy "Fatso" Marson, Carlo Gambino,

                            and Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno. Businessmen, all.

3.) There's a famous short essay by Robert Warshow from 1948 called The Gangster As Tragic Hero. I found it in a collection of his essays, The Immediate Experience. Warshow was a New York Intellectual who died young, but I find some of his stuff fascinating. In the gangster essay, which I found a link to HERE, sorry about some professor or grad student's underlining, argues that the function of mass culture is to maintain public morale, which flies in the face of our immediate experience. "At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot." 

Warshow says we revel in the figure of the gangster (remember: this guy's writing 50 years before The Sopranos, and 25 years before Martin Scorsese hits the scene with Mean Streets) because the gangster rejects "Americanism." He gets his own way with street smarts, muscle, violence, and he lives it up big-time, before falling. He's required to fall, of course. The Metropolis we live in creates rather dull criminals; the City of our imaginations creates the Gangster-Hero, tragic figure. As TS Eliot noticed in Shakespeare, often the tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves dramatically, as if their identity is something outside themselves. Think of Edward G. Robinson at the end of Little Caesar: "Mother of mercy...is this the end of Rico?" (see clip at the end of this post)

For ourselves and our involvement with the celluloid image of the gangster, Warshow writes that "He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become." What? He explains that the gangster is "doomed because he's under the obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful." And we are obligated to "succeed" also, but on some Freudian - or socially repressed - level, all means to succeed are unlawful, because they involve aggression. The crime film, in which the gangster plays the anti-hero or even the protagonist, allows us to allay our anxieties. For a couple of hours?

"Envy of the criminal, which borders on a secret American nostalgia, lies - very logically - in the fact that crime is one area where individuality is taken for granted." - not sure if this quote if by the avant garde composer Harry Partch, or the author of the article, but found on p.85 of Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices

Or: Why are we so enamored of gangsters?

                                          Smedley Butler, US Marines for 33 years and very many 

                                          campaigns. Two-time Medal of Honor winner. At the end of 

                                          his life he confessed, after a life of military service to the State,

                                          that he was a "high class muscle man for Big Business, for 

                                          Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer,

                                          a gangster for capitalism." For some odd reason a major 

                                          motion picture has not been made about his story.

4.) Speaking of the criminals of our world and the gangsters of our...entertainments? I'm reminded of some lyrics from Woody Guthrie:

Yes, as through this world I've wandered

I've seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain-pen.

-"Pretty Boy Floyd"

5.) The Mafia is an organization of Sicilian intermarried families with neither a formal hierarchy nor written constitution, but a 250 year old (at least?) code of operations. Maybe their main code is omerta, or "keep your mouth shut!" They first immigrated to Unistat in the 1880s and formed the "Little Italy"s in our large cities on the East Coast. Using the Black Hand of terror, they made very little progress until Prohibition. I agree with those sociologists who assert racism and a failure of the larger society to assimilate the new Italians as the main reason the Mafia got out of hand in Unistat...on the other hand, the gangsters themselves were living by a code their fathers had lived by, and probably truly thought they were providing "what the people want": alcohol, drugs, sex, good times. 

Al Capone - "Scarface" - made multimillions on illegal alcohol sales due to Prohibition. Lots of blood was shed; many cops were corrupted, bought off. The latest arsenal from the last big war made its way into the heart of the big cities: machine guns. Child's play compared to what they have out there now, but a hail of bullets is what it is... When the 21st Amendment made it into the Constitution, acknowledging that Prohibition was a miserable failure, the Mafia in Unistat began to shrink. Then they took up the dope trade. We never learn? HERE's a link to a June 19, 2011 New York Times Op-Ed piece written by that drug fiend, former President of Unistat Jimmy Carter. The part that caught my eye - and is germane to this blogspew - is his use of the word "mafiazation" regarding the so-called "War on Drugs."

6.) Get a load of this:

"The Mafia, one of the most picturesquely villainous secret societies the world has ever known, exists no more. After holding absolute sway over Sicily for centuries, murdering, blackmailing, terrorizing...it has met its fate at the hands of the Fascist Government."

from the New York Times, March 4, 1928. Article titled, "The Mafia Dead, a New Sicily Born," by Arnaldo Cortesi, found on p.71 of The Experts Speak

I think Cortesi was right. The State as criminal gang can't stand the competition and wipes them out, or forces them underground. But they do come back.

Noam Chomsky's political writings are chock-full of arguments and copious citations that cover this topic: the State - in this case, mostly Unistat - as the Ultimate Gangsters. See the Peter Dale Scott section #2 above. States that lack justice: organized crime. That's Saint Augustine he's quoting. And John Adams...

A large number of books flesh out the following, but I'm going to start to wrap this one up with an extended quote from an interview Chomsky gave in 1988:

Other aspects of it were the CIA in one of its earliest efforts, controlling food supplies, controlling the police in Italy so as to buy the 1948 election and prevent the Left from winning it, probably the major CIA operation since 1948 for preventing democracy in Italy in terms of actual money. In France, it meant rebuilding the drug racket, which had been knocked off by the fascists. The fascists run a very tight ship; they don't like any competition. The fascist states, Germany and Japan, had pretty well destroyed the mob. The mafia had been wiped out, since they didn't like competitors. As the United States liberated Italy from the South, it reconstructed the mafia. It was after all necessary to break up the unions, because the unions were a threat. You can't allow people to be independent and free. In order to break up the unions, it was necessary to hire goons, guys who will go and break up strikes, beat people up and so on, and the natural place to look was the mob. So one of the first CIA operations was to reconstruct the Corsican Mafia in early 1946-47 and use them as strikebreakers and goon squads. But of course they didn't do it for nothing. They don't do it just because they like to break peoples' bones. You've got to offer them something. They offered them the drug racket. That's where the famous French connection comes from. Up until the early 1970s Marseille was the center of the international heroin racket. The reason was that it was reconstructed by the U.S. and the CIA as part of the effort to destroy the democratic forces in the post-war world and to reconstruct the old order.

-Language and Politics, pp.615-616

A 30 second clip from the 1930 gangster film Little Caesar. Eddie G is "Rico," the top mobster for awhile, then he gets knocked off. Note how he refers to himself, just before dying, as if his identity existed somehow apart from himself, much like many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters: