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