Amerika

As we approach another dubious election in a dying society, it makes sense to remember the warning from Plato that democracy and oligarchy overlap and trundle back and forth before the final transition to tyranny.

Oligarchy, or rule by those who have money, is the inverse of aristocracy, or rule by those who are the best people. Democracy is just oligarchy by whatever vocal minority browbeats the rest.

We have to consider that for a long time, special interests have ruled America like an oligarchy. Corporate lobbyists, ethnic groups, foreign powers, unions, bureaucrats, religious groups, and of course, organized crime.

Organized crime seems to go hand-in-hand with unions and Leftist politics. Maybe smoke does not cause fire, but when the two are always together, you know some kind of causal relationship exists even if the direction is not yet clear.

It turns out that not only does vote fraud on the immigrant vote have a long history in America, but so does election fixing by organized crime:

On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the Mob was playing both sides, to place themselves as brokers in the Democratic nomination process.

Roosevelt needed the full New York state delegation’s support — and thus Tammany’s — if he was going to win the floor vote at the convention. But he also needed to avoid being tainted by the whiff of scandal that hung stubbornly around Tammany — and the Mafia.

Roosevelt responded to the split by issuing a statement denouncing civic corruption, while carefully noting that he had not seen adequate evidence to date to warrant the prosecution of sitting Tammany leaders, despite an ongoing investigation run by an independent-minded prosecutor, Sam Seabury. Picking up his signal, Marinelli threw his support behind Roosevelt, giving him the full delegate slate and helping him gain the momentum needed to claim the nomination.

FDR is remembering for dissolving Tammany Hall, but more likely, he simply took over, renamed it, and moved headquarters just like any corporate merger tends to do. He had more to offer as president than they had previously.

Even better, he would be remembered as fighting organized crime, so no one would find it easy to believe that the hero was also a villain adept in exactly what he promised to banish.

It is like the Pied Piper scattering snakes and rats around to ensure his job security.

This set a precedent by which presidential candidates required some degree of buy-in from organized crime like any other lobbyist or special interest group.

It no longer shocks us when candidates need the approval of the Catholic lobby, the Black lobby, the Jewish lobby, the Oil and Gas industry, the military-industrial complex, and so on.

But organized crime, like government, is a business too.

Not surprisingly organized crime featured in later elections:

The money, muscle and influence of organized crime helped John F. Kennedy win the closely contested 1960 election, investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh contends in a new book on the Kennedy presidency.

And once Kennedy was inaugurated, Robert F. Kennedy, his brother and attorney general, refused to pursue FBI evidence into widespread voting fraud, Hersh alleges.

In “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Hersh claims that the Mafia was brought into the Kennedy presidential campaign–and helped the Democrat carry the key state of Illinois–mainly at the instigation of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., founder of the family political dynasty.

The same pattern holds that triggered the American civil war: big cities, needing fungible labor, recruit foreigners like the Irish, and then use their votes to enforce an agenda of more uniformity, standardization, and social engineering.

This is how governments get powerful. This power, like empire, then makes them beholden to too many stakeholders and every action becomes a lengthy compromise.

In the end, the civilization loses its center and drowns in a mass of meetings, dialogues, critiques, and neurotic navel-gazing.

Nothing is left but the organized crime.

Tags: franklin delano roosevelt, john f. kennedy, organized crime