Posted on 04/11/2013 5:19:43 AM PDT by SJackson
The urban political machine was born in New York but died in Chicago. It’s no longer a separate entity from the rest of the country; one of the inconveniences of urban life along with smog, muggings and excessive regulation. The urban political machine has gone national. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere.
You may disapprove of New York’s soda ban or Chicago’s love affair with gun control or Los Angeles’ pandering to illegal aliens; but what happens in the country’s blighted metropolises no longer stays there. You can live surrounded by ten thousand acres of wilderness on one side and the deep blue sea on the other and it will still find you because the urban political machine has gone national.
The last election was the triumph of the urban political machine. In 2008, Obama ran as a national candidate. In 2012, he ran as the figurehead for the urban political machines and let their voter turnout and voter fraud efforts carry the day. In 2008, he tried inspiring people. In 2012, he ran the same tired campaign run by a hundred corrupt mayors in a hundred cities who know that they can’t lose because the game is rigged and the voters have no choice.
The urban political machine went national in 2012. The old paeans to unity were drowned in a sack. In their place was the usual urban coalition between wealthy liberal elites and poor minorities that has been running major cities into the ground for much of the old 20th and is finishing the job in the 21st. Chicago had thrown presidential elections before; but this was the first time that Chicago found itself running America.
The machine doesn’t care about individuals. It only counts bloc votes. It doesn’t care about making life better for people. Its genius is for finding ways to make life worse because it knows that it has more leverage over people looking for the next meal than over people looking to buy a house in the suburbs. The political machine doesn’t budget; it loots. It breaks the bank, raises taxes, drives out industries and rules over war zones divided between the rich and the poor.
Reborn in fragmented cities that were multicultural before it was even a word, let alone a buzzword, the machine feeds off misery and conflict. During the 1860s, the machine sent German and Irish immigrants to riot and kill African-Americans to protest the Civil War. During the 1960s, it sent African-American mobs to riot and kill to protest the Vietnam War. The machine does not care about black or white. It only cares about power.
Power, the machine understands, is division. The machine plots out segregated neighborhoods the way that generals deploy battalions. It promotes violence and suspicion and then meets with both sides to offer them a truce. It got big again as the frontier got small and a thousand peoples crowded into overcrowded cities speaking a babble of different languages and knowing nothing except the transplanted micro-communities that they had brought with them.
The machine built on that. It took as their leaders anyone who could deliver a bloc vote. And it traded entitlements for votes. The community leaders became barons, the machine operators became kings and everyone else living in narrow streets, meeting in bursts of gang violence at the boundaries, and voting in blocs to keep the other side from getting better access to the goodies offered by the machine, got to be the peasants.
In 2012, tribal politics became national politics. The country was divided and conquered. A campaign run on convincing a dozen separate groups to be afraid of each other and of the majority made all the difference, not in some urban slum, but from sea to shining sea. The country had at last become the city.
Amnesty for illegal aliens is the natural next step for the machine. The urban machines always wanted their cities to be big. They never cared if the people could feed themselves or if they could feed them. More people meant more votes. More votes meant more money.
The bigger the big cities get, the more micro-districts can be carved out, gerrymandered by race, divided by language, and capable of carrying more and more of the treasury back home to the machine. And if the cities can get big enough, fast enough, then they can outrace their own inevitable bankruptcies to seize control of the wealth of a nation. It’s the only hope of municipalities bulging with unfunded pensions, unfundable social welfare and a next generation of workers that doesn’t exist.
Money is not the issue. Urban political machines have always spent money like water, counting on their cities being too big to fail. Right off City Hall in New York City sits the Tweed Courthouse, named after one of the most infamous bosses of the Tammany Hall political machine. Despite being a modest building, it cost more four times more to build than London’s Houses of Parliament. Today it houses the headquarters of the Department of Education which is spending the city deep into debt. That just goes to show you that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Obama’s crazed spending spree is nothing new in big cities where the debt is sky high and there is no way to cover it. Detroit is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Chicago is facing a frightening pile of debt. California’s municipalities are taking the entire state down with them and Bloomberg doubled New York’s debt during his time as mayor.
The urban political machines don’t fear bankruptcy. They embrace it. Crises create more opportunities. When people are hungry, it’s childishly easy to get them to march round demanding this and that and then using this and that as cover for even bigger thefts. Bailouts and recovery programs are rich wells full of money that can be plundered.
The score was never as big and rich as it was during the first heady days of Hope and Change. The machine operators are no longer playing around with a few billion here or there for urban recovery programs. Instead they’re juggling trillions. The amount of money at their disposal is mind boggling and so is their thievery.
Paying it back is not their problem. America, like Chicago, is too big to fail.
The machine operators live in a world where the people and the cities are collateral to be borrowed against. As long as they control governments, they imagine that there will always be greedy suckers ponying up a few trillion which the next generation will pay off and the one after that.
It never occurs to them that the rest of the world is filled with starving human collateral and the ruins of old cities. It never occurs to them that Chicago, Detroit and New York are just places where people made things and earned a living. And that a city without an economy is just Somalia or El Salvador with a lot of tall buildings.
America is now being run by the logic of the urban machine. The rules on which the cities run are being applied to the rest of the country when it comes to gun control, health care and race. The rules broke the cities and they are breaking the country. And there is no escaping the rules without breaking the power of the urban political machine that now controls the country.
Excellent article
Beautifully written.
I believe the voter fraud part of this story. There is just no way Obama could have won EVERY single toss up state, except what, North Carolina? It just doesn’t seem plausible...
The machine doesn’t care about individuals. It only counts bloc votes. It doesn’t care about making life better for people. Its genius is for finding ways to make life worse because it knows that it has more leverage over people looking for the next meal than over people looking to buy a house in the suburbs. The political machine doesn’t budget; it loots. It breaks the bank, raises taxes, drives out industries and rules over war zones divided between the rich and the poor.
Divide and conquer. Divide and conquer. Divide and conquer—and count on the narcotics gangs to do most of the job the police used to do. The gangs keep things orderly enough, plus instead of costing cities tax dollars, they deliver substantial sums of money to the Democratic [sic] party, plus they keep the workers and peasants in a state of constant fear.
Who said oligarchs don't care about efficiency?
Daniel Greenfield has written a masterpiece.
We can’t break this power without first cracking through, if not smashing, the enabling control of the low info voter’s news media: i.e. the old media.
Our Founders never dreamed a FREE PRESS would climb into bed with such a big government, one party political machine.
Marxist bump
The author should cite an instance or I will believe he's talking about the tired old canard of the election of 1960, when if all of Illinois electoral votes had gone to Nixon, he still would have lost to Kennedy.
+1. This column doesn't just lay it at the feet of Democrats. It also applies to RINOs and Wall Street crony capitalists that enable those bent on destroying America.
Amen!
Civil (or uncivil) disobedience. Seriously.
Whatever it takes.
It can be broken the old fashioned way: siege. Three days without food and water and that “machine” will eat itself.
Why can’t the old media be defeated? They can be attacked through their sponsors. We must use Alinsky tactics on the sponsors of media propaganda.
Hopefully, someone will show up who can do that. Relying on the Republican Party to do so would be like relying on Monty Python to win the Crusades.
We have to get on it!
A huge, organized effort.
Thomas Jefferson
I disagree.
I think voter fraud plays only a small role.
For the last 20 years Democrats have relentlessly increased their focus on voter turnout.
By 2008 and 2012 the voter participation rate for Blacks was almost the same as whites.
Hispanic participation has also dramatically increased in recent elections.
And, Democrats have brilliantly increased participation by Left-leaning white voters, like poor white single women.
You mentioned North Carolina.
My best friend's sister and brother-in-law are both paid six figure salaries to run a non-profit organization in North Carolina that is exclusively focused on voter registration and turn out for poor white women.
The GOP faces a number of problems that may have no solution:
Demography - the non-white Hard Left population is growing much faster than the white Conservative population.
Temperament - the Democrats can easily convince 200 Blacks to walk out of church on Sunday, get on buses, and vote early. Conservatives are much more independent and self-reliant. I would never do that, and I think most other Conservatives feel the same way.
I used to live in the SF bay area and there are so many non profits making so much money “educating” people as to why those greedy for profits need to pay more taxes. What a scam.
Exactly.
I would also guess that my friend’s sister gets federal or state money, too, but I have never asked her.
If her organization does not conspicuously support one party or another, I’ll guess her work qualifies as taxpayer funded “outreach.”
I researched a few organizations. Most of them presented themselves as education (for social issues) or some BS like that, then when I researched who they were funded by, a lot of it was big liberal orgs like Tide Foundation, labor unions,etc.
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