American Cartel: How America’s Two Major Parties Helped Destroy Democracy
Cartel: An association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.
A little over two decades ago, on December 2, 1993, the principle engineer of Colombia’s infamous cocaine empire, Pablo Escobar, was killed while fleeing police on the barrio rooftops of his hometown, Medellin. Before he died he had amassed an organization of state-like power, challenging, in fact, the government of Columbia itself over the question of its extradition policies — and winning. Dubbed the Medellin drug cartel, his international cocaine operation grew to prominence functioning similarly to the corporations which dominate today’s global economy. Escobar knew, by controlling every possible link in the drug chain from production to retail, he could corral suppliers under a single umbrella, dictate the price of his product, and severely limit any would-be competitors from challenging his power.
Escobar was not alone in learning from the strategies of corporate giants. If anything he was late. Few organizations have pervasively and durably monopolized a market as well as America’s Republican and Democratic parties. The two dominant machines steering the U.S. electorate have consistently diminished the potential for a freer America. That’s because the reality is, rather than arch rivals, liberals and conservatives are two factions of the same team. Both are capitalist. Both are imperialist. Both are white supremacist surrogates. And both are controlled by a plutocratic elite who have discovered what Escobar learned in his early twenties, that competition is best neutralized by eliminating all possible outliers. We merely perceive the two parties as markedly different because of the degree to which the spectrum of possibilities has been narrowed.
American Cartel
Politics, at its barest, is a market characterized by power — and the struggle for how power will be distributed. As CrimethInc illustrated some time ago, in this market ideas function similar to currency. Delineated by ideas which can build capital enough for the acquisition of more power, and those which might unbind power, political parties are tethered to the same basic operating principles of any capitalist enterprise. They must solidify market share in the realm of ideas and grow, wherever and whenever possible, or go bankrupt. Incubated within this constant power play, self-preservation becomes the party’s central priority; and it does not matter if the ideas which accomplish this outcome are beneficial to the electorate or detrimental, so long as it achieves the imperative to survive.
Political organizations which maintain growth long enough to survive often do so by normalizing their ideological framework. When they have obtained a disproportionate amount of influence over their immediate surroundings, they can metastasize into monopolies and control large swaths of the idea-economy. New ideas about how society ought to function can enter the market to contest old ideas, but usually encapsulated within reforms incapable of unseating the dominant paradigm. Characteristic of any capitalist system, once market monopolies are established “power tends to flow upward to the top of a hierarchy, from which the masters, the ones qualified to employ it, decide matters for everyone else.”
Remember the age-old question, what do all those with power want? More power. As such, two monopolies have dominated American politics for over 150 years — the Democratic Party, founded in 1828, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Together, they form a political cartel, or an association of political parties with the purpose of maintaining concentrated power and restricting or repressing competition. Throughout the past century its loosely managed agreements, often wholly unofficial, but embedded deep within its standard operation, have been the quasi-coordinated production, distribution, and enforcement of a set of normalized choices which reflect only the range of needs of private corporate power.
Essentially, to solidify and gain greater control, the two parties staked out a set of positions within a predetermined and standardized framework which express the basic ideas of the status quo. This way any “new” solutions about what might be possible tend toward ideas which pose no serious danger to the framework itself, which produce reforms only capable of gutting radical resistance while leaving the underlying problems intact. Any outliers are assimilated or positioned to enhance the strength of current institutions. In other words, all ideas must first be filtered through the umbrella of the Democrat-Republican cartel, which dictates the pedigree of ideas both old and new, and therefore severely limiting any competition from threatening its hegemony.
American Sicarios
Central to the project of any cartel is control. And within most drug cartels there is an armed group responsible for carrying out violence in an effort to maintain it. In Colombia they were called sicarios. Though the violence is systematically different, American sicarios are most accurately found in state institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Maybe this is what’s behind the Koch brothers’ mission to destroy the U.S. government as we know it—the government started it way back in 1944 when U.S. bombers destroyed an oil refinery built by their father, Fred Koch, in Nazi Germany. Yes, Koch money came in part from Nazi Germany, and that’s not all. All of this is detailed in a new book from investigative reporter Jane Mayer, and examined more deeply by Gawker.
Mayer reveals Fred Koch’s involvement in the refinery in an early section of Dark Money detailing the making of the Koch patriarch's—and thus the Koch family's—vast wealth. “Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family’s early fortune,” she writes, referencing refineries Fred Koch previously constructed in Joseph Stalin’s U.S.S.R. The implication is clear: the fortune of one of the American right’s most influential families was built in part on work performed under oppressive regimes.
Europaeische Tanklager, or Eurotank, was a converted oil storage facility that sat on the Elbe River, about seven miles northwest of the industrial city of Hamburg. According to Mayer, Eurotank was owned by William Rhodes Davis, an American businessman and Nazi sympathizer, who contracted Koch’s company Koch-Winkler to provide its engineering plans and oversee construction. Construction on the plant began in 1934, about a year after the establishment of the Third Reich, she writes, and its primary client was the German military, to which it sold high-octane gasoline for use in fighter planes and bombers during World War II.Eurotank was “a key component of the Nazi war machine,” according to Dale Harrington, a Davis biographer whom Mayer quotes in Dark Money. Evidently, the allied forces agreed with that analysis. In September 1945, an expert panel called the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey published a 78-page report on a series of six attacks on Eurotank by the U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force beginning June 18, 1944, and ending April 10, 1945. The introduction to this formerly confidential document, which was provided to Gawker this week, calls the facility “one of the largest modern oil refineries in Germany,” and estimates that the hundreds of bombs dropped by the allied air forces destroyed 80 percent of Eurotank’s buildings, tankage, and equipment. The attacks also killed one person and injured another, though the casualties “did not affect operations,” the report alleges.
The refinery was destroyed before it could provide a great deal of support to the Nazi war effort, but if it hadn’t been bombed, the Kochs equipment “could have more than doubled Eurotank’s production, refining an estimated 250,000 tons of oil between 1944 and 1945.” It was Fred Koch’s invention of “a better thermal cracking process for converting heavy oil to gasoline, one that was less expensive, provided higher yields, and involved less downtime than competitive processes,” as Charles Koch described in his book Good Profit (yeah, how about the irony in that one?) that would have made Eurotank so dangerous to the Allies. That is if Germany had enough access to imported crude oil. …
Waging war on another oppressed person never ends with our freedom. There is only more blood — and deeper trenches.
If you met some guy who kept telling you how great he was, and everyone wants to be like him, how would you diagnose him? He’s got a grandiose personality disorder. In other words, what he is actually doing is compensating for his deep insecurity. So that, this is a country [the United States] that in its very rhetoric betrays extraordinary insecurity.
