I’m beginning to agree with those who think American Exceptionalism is deplorable, but, as usual in our Orwell topsy-turvy land, it’s another case of Goebbels’s rule: always accuse your enemies of what you’re doing. For some people seem to really believe that, unlike every other country that’s tried Democracy of any sort for any length of time in history, our fair land is immune to the obvious temptation for any who’ve gained power through democratic means: use that power to make sure you never get unelected, and to get your buddies elected.
In this respect, America is not exceptional. Our fine leaders are every bit as likely to see free, open elections not as a sacred blessing to be preserved and defended, but as a problem to be solved, as any number of the other illustrious leaders of democracies history puts before us.
Let’s take one example, one of many, one I’ve mentioned before: Fred Roti. Born in 1920, Roti was the son of a Chicago grocery store owner, one of 11 children. Roti began his public service career in road repair, shoveling asphalt, and went on to serve as a machine gunner on a boat in France in WWII. In 1950, Roti, in the words of the Oracle Wikipedia, “was tapped by the Democratic Party organization to run for Illinois state senator from the 1st District.” He won, and served until redistricting broke up his district in 1956.
Going back to his public service roots, he then took a job as a drain inspector, while staying active in Democratic politics as a precinct captain. In 1968, he was again “tapped” by the Democratic Party to run for Chicago Alderman. He won handily, and won reelection handily until he left office in 1993. Over his 25 years in office, he was well known for helping others get their start in government work and elected office.
So, another heart-warming American success story? A few other details: Fred’s father was Bruno “The Bomber” Roti, a capo under Al Capone and a Mafia hitman. That grocery store where he was born was a few blocks down the street from Capone’s headquarters. Bruno managed to get all 11 of his children jobs in government. Fred, the youngest and the runt of the litter, rose to the most prominence.
Fred’s side interests were very profitable. He was estimated to be one of the richest men in America in the 1970s, despite having held only a number of what one would assume were full-time government jobs. He used his wealth and influence to become a major player, although a low-profile one, in state and national Democratic politics. He was a close friend, at least (FBI said: made man), of the Chicago Outfit, a mafia gang that controls much business in the Midwest, with fingers in pies from Florida to California, to this day.
Fred was known as a ‘fixer’ – if you got in trouble with the law, Roti could fix it for you. He managed this via continuing a long-standing Chicago tradition of having police chiefs and judges vetted by the Mob; e.g., “Roti was instrumental in the appointment of William Hanhardt as Chief of Detectives of the Chicago Police Department. Hanhardt was the Chicago Outfit’s main plant, was convicted in 2001 of masterminding multi-million-dollar jewelry thefts, and served 10 years in prison.” (Wikipedia, again. Being a bit lazy this morning.) A good fixer also has his people in the state law enforcement and the FBI. Roti certainly did.
Roti worked closely with Richard Daly and other Chicago mayors. Whenever an important vote came up in city council, all the other aldermen would – out of deep respect, no doubt – let Roti vote first. Then, they would all vote whichever way he did.
Roti won reelection all but unopposed all those years. Would you want to campaign in the first district, put your face and name on campaign signs to run against a guy whose daddy and friends killed people for a living, knowing that, if you were wronged, you would need to go through the police whose leadership Roti controlled, then before judges Roti got appointed? Once this level of power is obtained, you no longer need to do anything so crass as throw ballot boxes in the river or have dead people vote. You win by default.
So, when the FBI finally caught up with Roti, and managed, Al Capone style, to get him on some comparatively minor charges, there was a great purge of all his appointees and associates from all Chicago, state, and national positions of power as good American citizens were horrified that all these people were not already in jail.
Ha ha ha. I slay me. Nope, Roti took a bullet for the team. No one else was convicted, no one else lost their job, all those people he had helped get government jobs and elected office kept right on running things.
They still do.
The national Democratic party paid no price for having had a mafia don in their inner circle for decades. In fact, the team Roti put in place and their protégés got to “tap” a Presidential candidate only 14 years after Fred went to jail. Yes, sports fans, these are the people who discovered and nurtured Barack Obama’s career, grooming him for high office. These are the people on the Lightbringer’s team.
These are the people who ran the country for 8 years.
You may have noticed nothing much happened during the Barry’s reign, except the attempt to place 1/6th of the economy – medical care – under the mob’s indirect management. Gotta get your skim. But that’s because the true work was more subtle: Barack – well, his team, he was an absolute figurehead – got to be “fixers” on a national level. Instead of vetting chief inspectors and local judges, they got to vet FBI directors and Supreme Court justices.
For 8 years.
This is why I always told people that claims that Trump wasn’t moving fast enough misunderstood the situation: he had to replace enough of Obama’s team’s people at the FBI, regulatory agencies, military, judges, and so on and on – you couldn’t get to be federal equivalent of dog catcher unless O’s team knew they could control you.
Now with complete control of the FBI, the Chicago team could use it to research and intimidate anybody who had somehow gotten into office without their approval. If they fail to squash some investigation they didn’t like, they can make sure cases against their people get put before their judges. A Flynn, for one example, must be crushed – as the Dread Pirate Robert says: “Once word leaks out that a pirate has gone soft, people begin to disobey you and then it’s nothing but work, work, work, all the time.”
Almost as an afterthought: You want to run a news organization, or even work as a reporter? These same mechanisms are in place. You want to do that devastating expose against people who know how your kids get to school? So, effectively, cutting out the middle men, our press has been vetted by the mob. (Note: this does not mean the press isn’t also a nest of Marxists and their useful idiots. The two are hardly mutually exclusive, as history amply shows.)
This is what Trump was up against, and why they were terrified of him and hated him. That’s why they’re loosing their sh*t right now. Chips are being called in, people are being reminded of certain dirt they’d rather not have see the light of day. Anything but complete compliance means your career, and possibly life, are over. It’s frankly a miracle anyone in office is still standing with the President.
Of course, Roti was just a piece in a bigger story. Crime makes what at first might look like strange bedfellows. Marxists and mobsters agree: the police should be defunded. Unions and mobsters agree: businesses need to be brought under out control. Critical Theorists and mobsters agree: right and wrong are all a matter of how you look at it.
For our purposes here, we should note that mobsters fall under C.S. Lewis’s general rule: they just want money and power, and so are willing to let people alone at least some of the time. Therefore, they are not the ultimate threat here. It’s the people who believe that they, in their state of glorious enlightenment, need to fix (or destroy) any who don’t get with their program that will get us killed. Sooner, I mean.
On the plus side, when push comes to shove in the inevitable power struggle and purge, my money is on the mob. In America, at least, that seems more likely.
William Thompson won election as Chicago’s mayor in 1927, the last non-Democrat to hold the office. He had very good relations with Capone. Once he was gone, the Chicago Democratic Party refined its controls of elections, such that no non-Democrat has stood a snowball’s chance of getting elected ever since. Consider: Chicago has –
- The highest paid teachers in America – AND the worst schools
- An extensive set of Progressive social programs – AND endemic areas of poverty and despair
- Some of the tightest gun control in the nation – AND an appalling amount of gun violence
BUT – for 90 years, no one has ever successfully been able to mount any alternative. Nope, the good people of Chicago just keep electing the same old people to keep doing the same old stuff. Chicago must be a paradise. Guess they’re just the most politically contented people on earth.
Boston, Philly, New York, LA, San Francisco, etc. – similar story: demonstrably terrible local governments that, somehow, keep getting reelected, year after year, almost always all but unopposed. At first, as a baby step, you might have to do stuff in actual elections – Roti was a precinct captain, after all – but, once you’ve got it refined, actual outside challenges are simply not allowed to happen.
So, in this light, is stealing a national election some sort of unheard-of crazy conspiracy theory? Or just the next logical step?
It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Just too bad my family and I – and you and yours – get to live through it.