Susanhu’s fine frontpaged diary Chicago: City of the Pinched Shoulders catalogues Chicago’s recent refusal…attempted and failed secret refusal… of an offer of discounted diesel fuel from Hugo Chavez.
A “humanitarian” offer.
Now unlike a number of people on the left, I have always been an admirer of the left wing leaders of the Caribbean and Central/South America, including Fidel Castro. I have traveled and worked extensively in the cities of that region, entertaining the real, working people who live there, and I have seen up close and personal just what has been going down in the region for the past 30 years or so. ANY leader, by any means necessary, who frees his country from the total domination of the United States in that region has my wholehearted admiration, and Mr. Chavez has done so.
So far.
Without an armed revolution.
This fact has made me think recently that perhaps Hugo Chavez is some sort of political genius.
The Citgo diesel fuel offer reinforces that idea.
What is “politics” really but the search for real win-win ideas?
And here he has found one.
Offer the corrupted American political infrastructure a deal that it both cannot refuse and MUST refuse. A combination of carrot and stick. Eat the carrot and become beholden to an erstwhile Third World client country or be pummeled by the stick when you refuse.
Brilliant.
Read on for more about the people who run our cities.
Chicago? The only real difference between the way the Daley gang runs things and any other major U.S. metropolitan autocracy (Like the Giuliani/Bloomberg axis right here in NYC) is one of style. They all have the same problems and the same kinds of solutions.
Problem: How to obtain a wealthy enough tax base….private AND business…to sustain the ongoing and solidly in place kleptocracy, simultaneously maintain the servant class…err, sorry, the working class…in a state of relative invisibility yet still pay them just enough to survive but NOT enough to prosper, yet not get kicked off of the federal aid teat for visible brutality and corruption.
Solution: A welfare and educational system that produces emotionally and mentally crippled people who will work for next to nothing and a brutally, criminally racist police force/justice system to keep the lid on those within that system who get angry and are willing to take the risks necessary to try to get more.
Daley pere always looked to me as if he was born in the wrong place to the wrong family. He belonged in the U.S.S.R with Stalin, Khruschev and the boys. Put him and his allies in a lineup wearing those shabby grey Soviet cut suits they always wore and present any group of people with a multiple choice questionnaire about their profession that had both Soviet apparatchik and leader of a major American city in the choices and the Soviet choice would have won by a landslide.
Remember… the governments of almost ALL of the major cities in America were quite recently clearly heavily influenced by ethnic white working class criminal enterprises. Boston, Chicago, NY, LA, Philadelphia, Providence, Miami, New Orleans…the list is both long and quite well documented.
Now as that money climbs the ladder to respectability, they are known as “real estate” interests.
“Business” people.
I got your real estate, right HERE!!!
Peel back the new layer of disguise, and who do you find?
Every time?
Thugs like Bernie Kerik.
BET on it.
Chicago.
City of the Pinched FACES.
Just like New York.
Same faces.
Better suits.
Excedrin headaches all around.
AG
All recs and tips gratefully accepted.
AG
P.S. And I’ve got a tip for YOU.
Buy your gas at Citgo.
VAYA!!!!
actually patronage politics is quite interesting. In many cities, the take over of city hall represented a hostile takeover by coalitions of recent immigrant groups over their waspy predecessors. And as the Irish, Italians, and eventually, African-Americans seized one city hall after another, they developed a new and quite sophisticated way of maintaining their support. It’s called ‘fixing people’s problems’.
Granny X has a broken step? She calls her ward leader and they come fix it. The Joneses don’t have enough money for a proper Thanksgiving dinner? Give them a free bird. Franky has racked up 30 parking tickets? Have them quashed. Joey’s brother in law is a low-life? Give him a no-work job.
The corruption is all part of what makes the cities go. But, at least for a generation or two, it is a populist type of kleptocracy. And that makes it interesting. And it ususally works quite well for a while.
I am WELL aware of this, on a cellular and familial level. I’ve got one of the early Irish mayors of NYC…a Tammany boy…as a great grandfather and one of his sons (my grandfather) lived with my family on and off for over 20 years.
The STORIES…!!!
AG
Hold on…
You’re a fan of Castro?
CASTRO?!
How on earth? How do you reconcile the authoritarian nightmare they have (like the stuff that happened to Armando Valladares)? It is said to be commonplace in Cuba.
Waiting for enlightment…
Cuba is a well-functioning society…the only one in the southern hemisphere with an overall plus literacy level and adequate health care for ALL of its people. It has done this under devastating pressure from American interests that want to turn it back into the slave state/whorehouse/Las Vegas South that it was before Castro appeared.
Has he made mistakes?
Yes.
Let me ask you something.
This question is unanswerable on any statistical level, but I will ask it nonetheless, because I think that anyone who has lived in the cultures in question…South/Central/Caribbean America and the minority areas of the U.S….that is not himself an agent of the corporate United States would have a very clear answer.
Per capita…the total population of Cuba versus the total population of the United States…what percentage of each population has most suffered from these kinds of “mistakes”? Now remember…I mean not just people who have been imprisoned for doubtful reasons (Although given the arrogantly classist and racist cast of our “justice” system, I think we would be way ahead on that count alone) , but the OVERALL population. The millions and millions of hopeless 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th generation welfare cases in our ghettoes. The MORE millions and millions of “illegal” immigrants (Wink wink, nudge nudge…read “cheap labor”) who must work at slave wages for at least two generations before they can even HOPE to escape their quondam servitude.
You want enlighhtenment?
Go to Cuba with an open mind and check it out.
Then go to Brownsville or East New York, Brooklyn on a good, hot, hostile Saturday night and check THAT out.
Or East LA.
Or most of urban Washington DC outside of the urban theme park I like to call DCLand.
Or the south side of Chicago.
Or East St. Louis.
Or Attica.
And check THAT out.
And then…if you need yet more enlightenment, come on over and we’ll talk again.
Without the constant threat of U.S. re-occupation, who KNOWS what Castro might have been able to accomplish.
What has happened in Cuba is a miracle anyway.
DESPITE the best efforts of the U.S. to the contrary.
Check it out.
AG
I’m going to have to take your word on them ubran areas…One of the most credible I’ve seen on cultural scenes around here, so that’s a fairly safe bet.
And yeah, justice systems have a way of not rendering justice. I’m still working on that one.
So…
You, having been to these places, are saying Castro’s work (achieving independence from the Corporate America, health care, education) justifies his disregard of civil rights and freedoms?
And… what of economic freedom? How does that work in Cuba (thinking about private property)? It doesn’t exactly work here, as you pointed out. There is, at least, a degree of freedom for the consumer. That freedom fuels your NEWSTRIKE, which could be a highly effective act of economic secession.
Something’s not adding up in my head…
I am saying that “civil rights and freedoms” are THEMSELVES terms that are open to interpretation. I cannot say that I would be free to express my disagreement with the government if I were a Cuban, for instance. But neither can I say that i would disagree if I were in the midst of that system. No system is perfect, but the Cuban system is most clearly one that as it is presently set up is biased towards the welfare of all rather than that of a ruling minority.
If I have the civil rights and freedoms to express myself in any way I choose but cannot in ANY way truly affect the actions of the ruling class…how free am I, really.
Free to jerk off?
A far as economic freedom is concerned…I also traveled some in pre-“democracy” Russia and in the ex-Iron Curtain countries a little as well, and I am definitely not pro-communism as a way of life. Not the way it worked in that area of the world, anyway. But again…and I have semi-voluntarily entered into a life of minimal possessions just for the sheer simplicity it offers me in other aspects of my life, so maybe I’m not one to be speaking for many people…I believe that we are ALL of us going to have to come to grips with the idea that our vaunted consumer socoiety and possession-oriented culture is going to have to be reined WAY back within the next 20 years or so, simply because we can no longer militarily enforce our dominance over the rest of the world. That is a lesson that we started to learn in Vietnam and continue to learn in the Middle East at the present.
What IS “economic freeedom”, actually?
The ability to provide the necessities of life for ourselves and for those who depend upon us?
Cubans have that. They have no homeless problem; no one is starving. People have families. Cities and towns and villages function. There is none of that filthy ghetto life so easily found in the cities of America or the grinding rural poverty of much of Central and South America, Africa or large parts of Asia. Neither are there vast Gold Coasts of the super-wealthy. There is a MUCH more even distribution of wealth in Cuba than in ANY straight capitalist society on earth. Which is a good thing, as far as I can see.
Are there people there who are unhappy with their situation or their prospects for bettering themselves?
Yes.
But as large a percentage of the population as there is here in the ranks of the permanent underclasses?
I think not.
There IS no “perfect system”.
Just better and worse ones.
And it appears to me that the system as it is constituted in the U.S. today is not working well.
Too much for too few; not enough for too many.
It is NOT that way in Cuba.
Not perfect…but better than here, by far.
And it is Fidel Castro’s vision, energy and administrative capabilities that have caused this to happen there. If there is ever a future “United States of South America” or some such entity and culture, it will be Castro to whom the Washingtonian “Father of our country” mantle will be bestowed, I think. He led the way.
Mistakes and all.
History will see him as a great man.
Unless, of course, BushCo and/or the PermaGov can succeed in rolling back the calendar to pre-Castro times in the near future. And seeing what is happening in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere…I kinda think that it is a little late to be rolling back much of anything down there. The energy has shifted, and it is NOT shifting back again. The people are arising, for better or for worse.
Let us pray that it is for the better.
AG
So Cuba works, more or less. I can get on board with that.
As far as rights and freedoms go, I prefer to look at them through the individual’s prespective, particularly when the individual dissents from social, economic, or political norms, something you said would not be done.
Of course, the fairly even distribution of wealth being the end goal…I dunno…It seems to be dangerous, making Castro’ successes a reason to give him a free pass does.
Even if he’s got that system working, I don’t see it as sustainable. After Castro’s gone, who’s going to keep Cuba going? Don’t seem possible. Even absent Corporate America, it’ll fall flat on its face because it discourages economic growth. It also discourages the consumer orgy we have…Arf?
Bloody hell. Arthur, I think the human race was designed to fail. There’s no other way to look at it. Well, I suppose there’s the absolutely ridiculous…
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/11/the_other_id.php?page=all&p=y
And I know that the human race was designed to succeed.
Just not all at once.
You ask what will hold Cuba together after Castro is gone.
I will answer with another question.
What held the AMERICAN COLONIES together after the founding fathers were gone?
Divine chance?
Good as any other explanation.
Keep the faith, Danny G.
Bottom line…it’s all we’ve got.
AG
P.S. Cuba is special. It really is. The jewel and the boss of the Caribbean. The alpha dog of that particular litter. Why? Feng shui is as good an answer as any. Feng shui and accidents of history that brought separate cultural and blood lines together there in a miniature version of the melting pot that arose in North America. A version that worked. Unlike say Haiti, which has NOT worked.
Life will try anything, and it will use what works.
Cuba works.
So it goes.