Sometimes we have to take stock of that which is old hat before we can glimpse the new hat, so to speak. So many of the facts of our lives that anger us are old hat that we forget to be Mad as Hell about them, accepting them as normalcy. Imagine hundreds of companies with billions in revenues, and profits in the billions, paying no taxes at all: worse, getting refunds from our Government, from us. Imagine the scandalous waste of $9000 coffee makers and $300 toilet seats, but only after you have imagined the purposeful padding of the bills presented by our defense contractors for hundreds of millions of hours that weren't worked, materials that were never used, salaries for workers perhaps long since dead. In Boss Tweed's day this was called the "looting of the Treasury," robbing us, the people who pay for it all, looting blinked at by the Government we elected to protect us.

This is not a 20th-century invention. Just travel back in time to 19th-century China when the Empress snatched from the Treasury the taxes wrung from the rice workers (money earmarked for the rebuilding of the Chinese Navy to protect the country from the Foreign Devils) and built a marble pleasure barge for herself instead (which you can still see today). Travel back in time to France when thousands of fieldhands were put to the useful (if unpaid) task of snaring the tiny, elusive ortolan so that its tongue could be used in a kind of shepherd's pie. Tens of thousands of tongues might have served one dish of hors d'oeuvres for the Sun King and his Court. Or travel back in time to the Caesars and their orgies where vomitoria were erected so that the rich could stuff, regurgitate, and stuff again while the poor stayed poor. All of this is old hat, the mulcting of the masses, the filching even of the crumbs from the filthy and ragged, the rich gorging, the poor slaving for rinds from the rich man's table.

Yet, there is an opposite aspect of this phenomenon that needs to be juxtaposed. It too is old hat. Because the multitudes have always known the lash of the "driver" and known the inhumanity of the powerful and their limitless greed, they have known that if they, the ordinary Joes, were to get to taste more than one crumb they would have to be inventive. Not surprisingly, invent they did: piracy, smuggling, poaching, kidnapping -- the list goes on; anything to avoid corvee (conscript, forced labor for no pay), incessant taxes, Powerlessness, Poverty. They always understood that it wasn't the King or the Empress or the Chancellor or whomever. It was the System, the State, the Way Things Were, that was their enemy. So those who were inventive and daring enough set about changing the way things were in order to redress their own state of things -- not for everyone, not for the world, not for the idea of Revolution, but for themselves.

Poaching (eating the King's deer) was good for feeding your hungry family, but extremely risky, and, except for Robin Hood and his Merry Men, mostly a solitary crime. Piracy was a group activity but smacked too much of the "cult of personality" to achieve status as an Establishment for the Have-nots. Smuggling and kidnapping (and in our day drugs, prostitution, numbers, even knocked-off recordings) were the ideal activities around which whole groups of Have-nots could organize.

In a world of Them (the powerful) against Us (the powerless), the idea of our thing (translated in Italian as La Cosa Nostra but the activities hardly limited to La Cosa Nostra or Italians) was a very attractive notion. Whole communities depended on smuggling (all over the world) in order to better their lot, whole towns. The Mafia itself is only an Establishment based upon thousands of gangs like the smuggler's gang in Carmen, groups who developed their own power, their own way of handling grievances, and, no question, did succeed in putting real meat on their own tables instead of waiting for crumbs.

Such Power, once gained, does vitiate (only slightly, which is why it's tolerated at all) the real Power, the Power of the State. No one understands this fact more quickly than a Dictator, and Mussolini immediately upon coming into power waged all-out war against the Mafia and drove them to cover, and many of the Mafiosi in turn carried on armed struggle against the Fascisti in war-time Italy, unwilling to relinquish the small share of Power they had wrested from the State. When the U.S. Army marched into Sicily they looked for people who had been busy fighting the Fascists. They found, not the Partisans of Open City, but the Mafia!

We installed hundreds of Mafiosi in the Mayor's Office in town halls all over Sicily's countryside. In defense of what may seem a peculiar blind spot it should be remembered that if you want to find real anti-Communists you'll find them in the Mafia. We respected these "men of respect" who had learned how to carve a small Power of their own out of the Power of the State. They are not malcontents. They like the way things are (which is good for business). They want nothing changed (quite appealing to those in Power in our State). These men of respect have always known that when you lose Power you lose all. When you have Power (even a little goes a long way) you have all. Ask Marcos. Ask Duvalier.

Just as Power is inherent in position (congressmen, for example have unimaginable power to press for nuclear subs off Staten Island or job creation for hundreds in pinpointed localities), so any Establishment from Corporations to the Mafia to the Chilean Junta has its own power to operate efficiently, deploy money and forces, create new enterprises and new jobs simultaneously, jobs that they can control.

By happenstance I was given a new insight into the question of job creation the other evening on the Turnpike and coincidentally a new perspective on the Mafia. I had always known that those who had figured out how to Get Theirs were inventive. I now learned other reasons for respect and saw things under a "new hat."

I was getting Mad as Hell at the interminable wait to pay my money at one manned booth (of four available) for the privilege of continuing on my trip with my three companions. I mooted aloud the simple solution to this frustrating delay. Place a small tax (maybe $35, to pick a number), paid when you renew your registration or your license, allowing you to travel anywhere without constant harassment. After all, a great deal of the collected toll money is used to pay the salaries of the countless thousands of people all over the country doing a totally useless, unhealthful, and essentially foolish job. Salaries could then be saved and the motorist would not be inconvenienced. The argument I got from those in my car was immediate. What would happen to the jobs of these good people who would then have to join the ranks of the unemployed?

I realized instantly that this was a problem I had not considered in sufficient depth and immediately pondered the impact of my suggestion on, for example, the workers in Wichita, Kansas (or in Krasnoyarsk) currently making chemical weapons. Could it be that the correct answer was that making more chemical weapons was the solution to creating more jobs?

Is it implicit that jobs needn't be socially useful? If we can scrap social usefulness as a criterion for job creation then there is every reason to create jobs by creating monster-size standing armies, nerve gas plants, toll booths, and "bogus" in newspaper publishing. When such jobs are created (by Congressional or bureaucratic fiat and Power) certain individuals then do get jobs (a seeming "good in itself"). But "getting a job," while better than getting no job for someone unemployed, is not really an answer to the great disparity between rich and poor, between the skilled and the unskilled, between the Powerful and the Powerless. It is for this reason that the mode of choice used for millenia by those on the lowest rungs of Society and yearning for more than crumbs, has not been simply "getting a job." I believe then we can discern two subjects here: 1) Job creation. 2) Redress of the imbalance of, the monopoly of, Power. And yet we have at hand the patent success of an organization that has addressed both these questions with great competence and singular achievement.

A modest proposal then should be made here. Let's hear it for the Mafia who began as the dispossessed, fighting for scraps of meat among the crumbs. It makes me Mad as Hell that they don't receive the recognition they deserve for the enormous contribution they are making worldwide in the spirit of fighting unemployment through job creation. They are truly equal opportunity employers. In the face of a deteriorating infrastructure in our cities and international turmoil these little people (not to say that some few of them, pulling themselves up by their own shoulder holsters, so to speak, haven't achieved some recognition) have put their wits to work at a task they and their ancestors have understood for millenia -- How to Get Yours away from the grasp of the State and the Ruling Class.

Think how many they have employed at this task! Think of the job creation involved! Theirs has been an effort which dwarfs anything entire Governments have attempted. Consider the manpower involved as well as the massive sums of money generated. Think of the banks founded on the money derived from the importation of cocaine (and the bankers grown rich from it). Although (as is usual everywhere) much of the money stays with the entrepreneur, a lot of it does trickle down to the "mules," lab assistants, pushers, etc. All of this money gets spent, invested, makes the wheel go round. In the US alone whole towns, cities, whole States have benefited from the inundation of these funds so inventively- squeezed out of this Society.

We could stop this traffic tomorrow, if we chose to, by legalizing all these substances and making them readily available at cheap prices (but then we could also close down all the toll booths and stop the production of weapons destined for the rustpile). Think of the job loss that would ensue and then let us contemplate instead the truly impressive job gains already made in employing these previous unemployables, and our eye firmly on the goal of more jobs. Which one of us is Solomon-like enough to say that a job, any job, is not socially useful, or not a boon to someone now unemployed?

La Cosa Nostra, like other businesses, has its great Captains. Entrepreneurial bootleggers dissatisfied with the downturn of the sales statistics charted and monitored on their Apple Computers, switch production from rotgut to pot, and regain market share. Chop shops have sprung up all over the country to get you the car you want, even the color you want, at a price under what you'd normally pay. The customer comes first with these lads, not the way it is with less service-oriented businesses. All these enterprises need people, and job creation in this area has been little short of phenomenal. Where else can a poorly educated slum kid, unable in many cases to read anything more involved than a comic book, get the opportunity for a job, let alone a high-paying job? Sure there's risk, but in the ghetto or the barrio it's risky just to stay alive!

It would be erroneous to applaud this truly great effort of job creation without tempering our enthusiasm with some words of disappointment in those who simply cheat (white or blue collar, employed or unemployed), without risk, without job creation. Yes, there are some among us who would defend such means, saying that this too adds money to the economy and does grease the wheels. If job creation is what matters, however, then cheating itself does not help in that process, and job creation is what the Mafia does best. Thus, following the brilliant lead of our Governmental machinery in creating jobs in toll booth maintenance and missile-building, it took hustle, energy and inventiveness for organized crime to create as many jobs as they have in areas the Government had not yet reserved for itself.

It would not be surprising to me if our gross national product statistics were grossly understated, just as the unemployment statistics may be grossly overstated. If I'm right and this combination of cheating and job creation does really shift the figures, perhaps that is why we see so relatively few soup kitchens in these difficult times, so relatively few people begging in the streets. Where are the apple-sellers of the Great Depression? The ones you see today are not Forgotten Men. They are hustlers, Vietnamese boat people, selling for untaxable cash! Where are the Okies, the panhandlers, the hoboes? They are few indeed -- we all have acquired the money in whatever fashion for a ticket to Ryde.

Ask yourself -- could any Government have created jobs as efficiently as the Mafia and its associated entrepreneurial colleagues (not to mention the freelancers)? Of course not. Let's give praise where praise is due. Be Mad as Hell at the Power-Greed of the State, but hats off (old and new) to the normally Powerless who have figured out How to Get Theirs.

-- Jeremiah

 

This essay first appeared in the newsletter Jeremiah: I'm Mad as Hell (Volume 1, Number 4, April 1986).

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