from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 28 Sep 2009 08:15 PM PDT

Government is essentially a national management system, taking
on those tasks that it would be unwise or unworkable to turn over to the
free market. Good government functions as intended. Bad government takes
over the nation and becomes an absolute force, looting and raiding public
resources, suppressing individual freedoms in order to keep itself in
power. In olden days this sort of government was considered a
tyranny.

Since government exists at public expense and distributes the
money for itself, there is plenty of temptation for government to abuse
its prerogatives by taking too much. Democracy is meant to force
government to justify its actions to the public, and to give the public a
veto over government power. For government in a democratic country to
abuse its power and draw excessive funds from the public, it must first
co-opt a sizable portion of the public by arguing that the funds will be
used for their benefit. This is called power sharing.

Government
shares its revenues with whoever holds power within a political system. In
a non-democratic system, the number of people who receive their share is
smaller. For example a king may share a portion of revenues obtained from
the peasants with his nobility for the simple and practical reasons, that
they can rise up against him and remove him, and that they function as
local governments over the peasantry. Similarly a mob boss collects a
share of the money stolen and seized by his soldiers, and then passes it
back down to them. Nazi Germany implemented much the same system within
the Nazi party, as did the Soviet Union within the Communist party and now
in Putin's Russia, through a system of bribes.

Such non-democratic
systems form a pyramid in which a large number of money goes up the chain
to a small number of people. Those at the top live very well. Those at the
bottom live very poorly. As a result the system itself is impoverished. It
can only thrive when it is parasitic on the free market. That is why the
mob had to focus on America. It is why Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
had to continually expand and find new countries to loot. It is why
Putin's Russia, having burned through a lot of the resources seized from
its businessmen, is pushing forward on the military front. It is why King
George III began pressing America, resulting in the American
Revolution.

The situation in a democratic system is more
complicated, but the end result is the same. In the United States, Tammany
Hall set a model by harnessing the New York bureaucracy as their own
revenue mill, expecting every municipal employee to pay to receive a job,
and then pay for a promotion. The employees themselves would have to find
ways to make money "on the job." So for example an appointment as a New
York Police Sergeant would cost 200 dollars. The Sergeant would have to
"make money" either through bribes or shakedowns to pay the officers above
him, while receiving a cut from the officers below him. If he did well, he
could pay 500 dollars to become a New York Police Captain, moving up the
ladder for greater rewards. This was the disastrous situation that Teddy
Roosevelt would try to remedy as New York's Police Commissioner in
1895.

Tammany Hall leaders, better known as the New York State
Democratic Party, lived lavish lifestyles. Corruption was everywhere. No
one trusted the police. The fire department was the province of gangs.
Organized crime was inseparable from the political system. Ward leaders
ran gambling and prostitution rings. Rival police forces beat each other
bloody on the steps of City Hall over a political dispute between the
Mayor and the Governor over who had the right to a lucrative appointment
of the sanitation commissioner.

What made all this interesting, was
that the system that we today associate with places like Russia or
Nigeria, was taking place under a facade of democracy. Tammany Hall
understood that it had to succeed at both corruption and populism.
Corruption without public support meant that sooner or later, the people
would rise up and bring them down. Despite rigged elections, voter
intimidation and gangs that beat Republican or rival Democratic voters--
Tammany Hall understood that it could not hold absolute power in a
democracy. It still had to answer to the voters. Sooner or
later.

What happened was that the pyramid got bigger, by sharing
more of the money with the people. Tammany Hall cultivated populism
through ward leaders who traded votes by offering favors for their
constituents. The Democratic party leadership focused on cultivating and
controlling immigrant groups, who were newcomers and often ignorant, as a
counterbalance to the old New York Republican WASP reformers. The
immigrant groups were kept impoverished in low paying slum jobs, while
being given free turkeys and the occasional medical clinic, as Democratic
leaders played patron to them in exchange for their votes. Meanwhile
whatever they gave, they took back tenfold through bribes and government
corruption, such as rigging the price of ice, via the Ice
Trust.

Tammany Hall is dead today, but the system is still alive and
well in the Democratic Party. Tammany Hall claimed to help immigrants, but
what it actually did was oppress them. Behind the holiday gift baskets,
the politicians who spoke German, Italian, Yiddish, Polish-- and all the
talk about "sticking it to the rich", was a political system that was
nothing more than organized crime. Those same politicians played "divide
and conquer" pitting the Irish against the Jews, the Germans against the
Blacks, and promising to fight for whatever ethnic group they were
speaking to at the time. All the while they were robbing everyone
blind.

The money they spent on their constituents was a small share
of the taxes they collected. Most of the money instead went to the
municipal bureaucracy and the Tammany Hall leaders at the top. As
corruption crackdowns came, the Democratic party began to eschew open
bribery in favor of "Honest Graft". This moved the party up and away from
street level crime and low level paid appointments. Instead the focus
became on appropriating government revenues for their own benefit.
Municipal appointments no longer depended on direct payments, but on party
loyalty. Taxes had to be raised to offer more services administered by
that same ever growing bureaucracy. Organized crime had become
socialism.

LBJ's Southern Strategy applied the same principles that
had been used for new immigrants, whose number was dying down, to blacks
in the South. Just as in its Tammany Hall days, the New York Democratic
party had quickly gone from being anti-Irish to the best friends of the
Irish. A process they repeated with Jews, Italians and Puerto Ricans,
among many others. So too the Party of Segregation, became the Civil
Rights Party.

The change was not moral, it was political
calculation. FDR had implemented socialism by exploiting the economic
emergency of the Depression, and then wartime necessity in WW2, as
justifications. The old immigrant groups were moving up out of the urban
ghettos, and their transition to solid secure middle-classdom, combined
with the rising threat of the USSR, seriously endangered the Democratic
party and the future of liberalism.

The 50's saw a Republican
President for the first time since the rise of FDR who was moderate enough
to maintain the political center. Post-war prosperity and the Cold War
meant the focus would no longer be on domestic social reform programs, but
on national defense. The average American was well off and drifting toward
conservatism. No wonder the decade continues to be embodied in literature
and movies as a horrifying period of mindless conformity by liberal
authors and filmmakers, for whom there is nothing more horrifying than
living in a comfortable system.

The Democratic party took back the
initiative by focusing on the youth vote, because when no one really needs
change, it's still a safe bet that the youth would. By the 1960
Presidential election, a generation that had not fought in WW2 and had
been raised on post-war prosperity became the newest set of voters. And
many of them proved quite eager to hear a message of change, even if no
real change was actually needed. Kennedy's status as a transgressive
candidate because of his youth and catholicism made voting for him seem a
progressive act alone.

And the Southern Strategy meanwhile saw the Democrats
focusing increasingly on the black vote. The black vote was meant to
replace the ethnic working class vote that had steadily become more
conservative, and the Democratic strategy would be to promise reforms but
to make sure that the black community would be unable to do what the
immigrant communities had done, which is to leave their control. That
section of the strategy was to become Tammany Hall writ large on a
national scale, with regular commemorations and celebrations of black
heritage, combined with policies that created dependency and fostered
exploitation. The real face of the Democratic party's Southern Strategy
was a Socialist Strategy, creating an infrastructure of patronage and
propaganda to maintain a core constituency that would be under their
absolute control. (European socialist parties, themselves coping with the
lack of an aggrieved working class constituency, would attempt to
replicate the same strategy with disastrous results using Muslim
immigrants.)

When combined with the massive Chicago voter fraud,
the result was victory. That combination of youth appeal, minority
orientation and a transgressive candidate would fuel future Democratic
Presidential victories, most notably Clinton and Obama. The Kennedy vs
Nixon template of a youthful liberal against a stodgy conservative would
become a fundamental bit of branding. Defeats would be regularly
accredited to a failure of charisma, rather than policy. The key words
were to be reform and change, both of which when translated from Newspeak
meant building up a bureaucratic infrastructure composed primarily of
their own loyalists ever higher, creating a state within a state, and a
government within a government, that would in reality govern
everything.

As government bureaucracy became an ideological tool,
constant government expansion became a way of life. Government became
bigger and bigger and as it did the cost of government went completely out
of control. Under FDR the national debt zoomed up by 1600 percent. By the
time Truman left office, the National Debt had passed 250 billion dollars.
Under Carter it shot up to 900 billion dollars. Under Obama it is set to
hit 12 trillion dollars. And that's just for starters. The last time the
national debt approached 100 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, it was
WW2. Under Obama it is expected to pass 100 percent of the GDP by the end
of his first term. And that is a "friendly" projection from an
administration that has shown no facility with accurate projections or
spending controls whatsoever.

When that happens individual
production will match individual debt, and as social spending exceeds even
defense spending, and is projected to pass actual tax receipts, the
economy of the United States becomes unsustainable and is headed for a
major disaster. That disaster however is likely to only lead to further
socialist consolidation and the expansion of government. Which is why
invoking the ghost of FDR, Obama's policies have focused on
nationalization and running up an even bigger debt to expand government
programs to an even greater extent.

Meanwhile the US continues to
follow Europe's footsteps by trying to compensate for the generational
worker gap caused by baby boomer retirements with immigration, which only
further expands demands for social services spending. One unsustainable
policy piggybacking on another is how tyrannies are built.

The socialist strategy has been draining the American economy.
Within a decade it will lead to a major crisis and a climactic showdown
between the last remains of a free market economy and the expanding wave
of government. The outcome is likely to determine whether or not America
has a future as an independent nation, or will be reduced to a failed
nation, a faint shadow of its former self that will resemble a Latin
American nation, more than the former United States of
America.

This America will distribute its bottom of the barrel
culture around the world, its political culture will be histrionic and
irresponsible, its bureaucracy will be widely hated, incompetent and
omnipresent, it will be largely multicultural but divided between a small
envied upper class and a large lower class, it will have widespread
criminality and government corruption. Its rural areas will be
irretrievably impoverished, its urban areas will have a few slices of
culture and prosperity amid the ghettos. It will be loud and colorful,
brazen and constantly celebrating increasingly meaningless holidays based
around commercialism. It will also have very little freedom for anyone in
the middle class. It may be a one party state entirely. The bulk of its
economy will be black market and gray market. It will constantly be on the
receiving end of short term and high interest international loans. Its
taxes will be high and widely avoided. Governments will regularly fall
over economic crisis. It will not be the America we have known, it will be
an alien land, the kind of place that the ancestors of so many Americans
did their best to escape. And their descendants too will look for a way
out, constantly looking for a place to emigrate to and a way to take their
money with them.