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Selling the biggest lie of them all – Capitalism

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 21:51:59 -0800

 

 

 

http://www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0375.html

 

 

Selling the biggest lie of them all – Capitalism

 

Review: Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global rise of

Organized Crime by Michael Woodiwiss

William Bowles,

 

 

November 27, 2005

 

The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American Spirit.

– Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 1902

 

Well the jury is no longer out, there is no doubt about it – the

history of Western 'civilisation' is an unmitigated disaster and one

based upon a lie from beginning to what might well be its end in a

short space of time.

 

Perhaps the worst aspect of it all is the hypocrisy involved and don't

get me wrong here, we've all been taken in by it, from buying into it

starting from the 'Age of Enlightenment' onwards even as a minority of

us benefit from the 'progress' it has bought us at a cost that is

incalculable not only to humanity but ultimately to the planet itself.

 

Documenting the disaster is not that difficult, the problem is getting

people not only to take in the sheer scale of it but to get off our

tired and sorry arses and do something about it. However, documenting

it is something that has to be done if only to set the record straight.

 

The statistics are horrendous; in the Américas alone, perhaps 80

million people exterminated between the 1600s and 1800s; in Africa,

perhaps 40 million – 20 million-plus just in the Congo. 20 million

exported into slavery of which it's calculated 10 million never made

it to the 'New World'. In what is now South Africa, the indigenous

Khoi San people were all but wiped off the face of the planet; I could

go on but I think you get the point; wherever Western 'civilisation'

has gone, it has first exterminated and then expropriated.

 

And in the 20th century, the combined effects of wars, engineered

famines that killed milions, and murderous economic policies add up to

perhaps another 100-150 million and all of it in the name of Western

'civilisation'.

 

So all-told we are talking of maybe a quarter of a billion people but

the numbers make one's head spin and ultimately the total will never

be known and in any case, the point is not the numbers but the fact

that it has been so well hidden and worse, justified in one way or

another. Very often, the apologists merely recount the events brushing

them off as 'history', regrettable but worth it in the long run, we,

after all, are better off for it, aren't we? But then the arrogance of

the powerful and those who do their bidding is legend and in any case,

it relies on an inculcated racist mindset that enables us to justify

the exterminations, they were, after all, 'not like us'.

 

But Holocausts are only 'news' when they justify the ravages of

capital, else how is it that they can sell only one Holocaust in a

relentless sales job that ignores the far greater and just as

calculated exterminations that have taken place. The double standard

is breathtaking in its audacity but it relies on the simple fact that

those of us in the West are complicit in the crimes, we have after

all, benefited from them – we still do, every day we go shopping or

hop on a plane to some far-off (former) 'paradise' and get waited on

by the recipients of 'progress'.

 

For the better part of the 20th century the mass media has done an

excellent job of selling the biggest lie of all, that we in the West

live in democratic societies ruled by a political class that allegedly

represents us and our interests, and the country where this lie has

been sold to the greatest effect is undoubtedly the United States of

America.

 

'Gangster Capitalism' documents the lie in all its sordid details from

the days of the 'Robber Barons' through to the 'War on Terror' and all

the stops in-between, the 'War on Communism', the 'War on Drugs'.

Between them, they are responsible for an assault of unparalleled

brutality that is global in scope and a lie that has been so

successfully sold, it has dragged much of the planet into going along

with it.

 

From the United Nations to so-called independent states, all have been

bribed, blackmailed, threatened or finally invaded/occupied into

participating in the various 'wars' the US is waging, ultimately to

the benefit of capital. That all of it has been done in the name of

'morality', mostly of a Christian flavour, is perhaps what makes it

all so sordid, so disgusting and hypocritical.

 

There is a direct relationship between the extermination of 'inferior'

peoples and the crimes of the Gangster Capitalists, from the owners of

the plantations, to those who built the railroads that opened up the

interior of America, to those who built the stockyards of Chicago, the

auto plants of Detroit that consumed the immigrants in their millions

and co-opted them into swallowing the 'American Dream'.

 

'Gangster Capitalism' does one heck of a job in documenting the

process, indeed it is relentless in its exposure and all the while

revealing the underlying motivations; power and control by the few

over the many. Underpinning the process has been the use of a twisted

Christian 'morality' that in reality justified a system of

exploitation that is unparalleled in history. And, Woodiwiss

emphasises the role that race plays in the process, something that

cannot be stated too strongly if we are to understand why US

capitalism has been so successful at persuading so many to go along

with the lie.

 

" Property is King "

 

I think it is entirely proper to describe US capitalism as organised

crime on a gigantic scale largely, because as Woodiwiss makes clear,

until Roosevelt's 'New Deal', business was almost completely

unregulated and since the days of Nixon presidency, the US has

returned to those heady days of the Robber Barons but one that now

spans the globe. The emergence of the 'Robber Barons' at the turn of

the century, mistakenly described as we have seen from the Enrons and

Global Crossings scams, as a thing of the past, are in fact, only

possible because they exist in a free-for-all society, where property

rules. The Enrons are not merely a couple of 'rotten apples in the

barrel' but illustrate a barrel that is rotten to the core.

 

By the 1920s America had " become a land of criminal opportunity " due

largely to a completely unregulated business environment made all the

more possible through the creation of giant business corporations and

where it was impossible " to draw a line between legitimate business

practice and genuine rackets " . The irony of a society which is based

upon 'moral authoritarianism' is not lost on me, an hypocrisy which

Prohibition threw into sharp relief. Worse still, Prohibition impacted

mostly on the poor; the rich and connected not only carried on with

business (and pleasure) as usual but were well placed to exploit the

business opportunities that Prohibition opened up, after all, the

wealth of the Kennedy clan was based upon illegal liquer.

 

'Organised crime' as it is called, whether the so-called Mafia or

Colombian drug cartels are a drop in the capitalist bucket, even the

figures upon which the mass media bases its headlines, are fictitious,

based upon nothing more than grossly inflated figures for which there

is no statistical basis.

 

From the womb to beyond the grave

 

Chapter 1 deals with fraudulent fertility clinics, medicare scams,

morticians that dump bodies, trade in body parts, medical insurance

scams involving literally hundreds of millions of dollars, price

fixing by the pharmaceutical companies, the list goes on and, as the

author points out,

 

" Adult, working Americans are far more likely to die young as a

result of organised, corporate crime than from any other form of

criminal activity. " (p.30)

 

And so too with the food industry

 

" Every day … roughly 200,000 people sickened by food-borne

disease, 900 are hospitalized, and fourteen die… [M]ore than a quarter

of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning every

year. " (p.34)

 

And once more the cause is the almost total lack of government

regulation. Forget OSHA and government oversight not only of the food

itself but also the working conditions. The meat processing industry

is the most dangerous occupation in the US. The stark reality is

revealed by the fact that

 

" None of the cases [mentioned] involves a member of the Mafia or

any of the other supercriminal organisations that constitute organised

crime according government sources. " (p.39)

 

The book explodes the myth of organised crime as being a major threat

to society and illustrates the reality that the real threat to society

comes from the government's own policies and the economic class it

represents. And although the book doesn't mention the 'war on terror'

at all, the policies enacted and forced on the rest of the world,

especially the 'war on drugs' that Nixon introduced, served as the

ideal model for the 'war on terror', based as they both are, on a

mythical globe-spanning network of 'supercriminals' dedicated to the

destruction of Western 'civilisation' whether by accident or design as

in the case of 'al-Qu'eda'.

 

As ever, the mythology of organised crime has been peddled very

effectively by the mass media, playing on the fears of the 'alien' in

our midst from the 'Sicilian Mafia' through to the Colombian drug

cartels, both of which have attained the power they do possess

directly as a result of US government policies. Woodiwiss also points

out the fact that anti-Communism has been central to the creation of

the alien 'conspiracy' and once again it was US government policies in

fighting Communism in Afghanistan which saw the rise of the heroin

trade, supplanting the traditional source, Turkey. Massive

interdiction, for example Operation Intercept, designed in theory to

stop the supply of drugs from Mexico, resulted in the searching of 2

million people but was terminated after only three weeks. The sheer

futility of such exercises was made plain after the Turkish

government, for a payment of $35 million, banned poppy production

 

…when an economist calculated that the US demand for heroin could

be met by the amount of opium poppies growing on a 10- to

20-square-mile patch of land, roughly equivalent to the island of

Manhattan. (p.138)

 

The scale of the government's 'war on drugs' is amply illustrated with

the following figures

 

In 1969, $65 million was spent by the Nixon administration on the

drug war… In 1982 the Reagan administration increased this commitment

to $1.65 billion. In 2000 the Clinton administration massively

increased this figure to $17.9 billion. In 2002 the Bush

administration spent more than $18.822 billion. (p.108)

 

Predictably, these policies have resulted in a vast increase in the

prison population, mostly for simple possession,

 

In 1973, there were 328,670 arrests for drug law violations … In

1989, there were 1,361,700 drug arrests, nearly 10 per cent of all

arrests. In 2002, [the] number rose to 1,538,813. Forty-five per cent

of the 2002 arrests were for marijuana rather than for more dangerous

drugs … Between 1980 and 1994, the prison population tripled from

500,000 to 1.5 million. In 2002 the United State incarcerated

2,166,260 persons. (p.108)

 

And,

 

It has long been known that prisons were self-perpetuating

institutions because they reinforced existing criminal attitudes and

because they provided many opportunities for learning new criminal

techniques. (p.139)

 

The War on Organised Labour

 

Roosevelt's New Deal saw the state intervening into the affairs of

business unprecedented during peacetime in an effort to curb the

virtual anarchy that prevailed, an anarchy which played no small part

in the Crash of '29. Organised labour in turn made overtures to the

Democratic Party which were rejected and as Woodiwiss points out, this

led to the Democratic Party " incapable of defending the key

achievements of the New Deal. " (p.68)

 

Following a wave of massive strikes during 1945-46, a campaign aided

in no small part by the fear and paranoia instigated by the rising

anti-communism of the 1940s and 1950s. Big capital was determined to

reverse at all costs the gains made during the period of the New Deal

and to

 

" reeducate the public in the principles and benefits of the

American economic system. These campaigns successfully projected a

vision of America as the perfect society. Perfect because it was

'harmonious, classless, free, productive and, therefore, affluent and

successful. " (p.69)

 

Selling the capitalist system

 

What should not be let out sight in cataloguing the crimes of

capitalism is the plain fact that underpinning and rationalising the

'morality' of the capitalist way of life is an economic system that is

in a permanent state of crisis, lurching from boom to bust and with

every crisis the stark reality that to maintain the rate of profit it

must, perforce, extract ever more from our labours.

 

To justify this process, it must on the one hand, seek to justify and

cover up the robbery and on the other, create the right conditions for

an ever-increasing rate of profit, whether by 'fair' means or foul.

What the history of the United States reveals is that capitalism, when

left to its own devices is a system run by a gangster class whose

actions as Woodiwiss so clearly demonstrates, makes the affairs of the

'Mafia' pathetic and amateur copies of those whose 'morality' they

essentially seek to emulate.

 

Gangster Capitalism is a devastating exposé of the blanket propaganda

we have been subjected to for generations; propaganda that seeks to

present the capitalist system as just, moral and the 'best of all

possible worlds', when the reality is diametrically the opposite.

 

Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global rise of

Organized Crime by Michael Woodiwiss. Constable, London, 2005. Buy it

from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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