Keith, you said: It's a pity that Virginia Postrel didn't mention the useful role of the Mafia in modern Russia (and in many other countries). Because the Duma have still not passed legislation concerning property law* (nor of an objective judiciary to uphold it), an entrepreneur (if he's sensible) will seek the services of the local Mafia which, for a (moderate) fee will bribe the local officials and ensure that the land is registered 'adequately'. The local officials dare not renege on the situation. I understand the fees are of the order of about 5-10% of the notional value of the land. (Of course, the entrepreneur will also be paying a 'rent' from then onwards!)
(*The Duma is just on the verge of passing such legislation but, considering the vast bureaucracy that a small entrepreneur must also satisfy, it is likely that the Mafia's services will still be required for a long time to come in order to get a business off the ground.) ------------------------------------------------------------- That is a good point. In NYCity during the last administration, (the culturally "Italian" Giuliani administration), people in the minority communities often formed organizations that were outside the law because the law often operated like a occupying force in a foreign land. (This was the "dirty little secret" of the Giuliani adminstrations "stopping crime" and "keeping the streets clean.") These two sets of laws were similar to the "local" and "federal" in process with the same hostility towards the City Police as Republicans have toward the Federal government. One of the Immigrant families that I know has two of four brothers in jail because they chose to protect their Mother against a gang and in the process killed the gang leader who was threatening the Mother. The politics of the situation are murky at best with the police taking the side of the gang leader, who was Black, against the Immigrant "family". All the way through the trial the Black family insisted that the Immigrants were "working voodoo and black magic on them", muddying the waters deeper each time. What is truly strange is that the Immigrant family (Hispanic) was prominent in the community with another brother being well connected and a "city" official himself while the Black family had moved to Pennsylvania. A very complicated situation with many strains flowing through it. Worthy indeed of a Russian story to say the least. Especially given the education level of the Immigrant family which was Master's Degrees, and above, at important schools. There is the issue of belief that often hurts people here where the competant and even Masterful are "put back in their class" by the self image propagated by the official myths. It became bizarre not long ago when the local Indians protesting Columbus day irritating the Italians, were graduates of America's largest Music Conservatory and experts themselves in singing Italian Opera. A complicated story indeed that began with the local "Council" that had the job of fostering protection in the neighborhood where the police would not go or make a mess of things. These "Councils" then became labeled Mafia, which I don't believe they were if you have to be accurate about it. I also know of a similar situation in Texas that has to do with Financial Securities issues where a sixty year old first offending woman was tried on selling Securities without a license and recieved nine years. She worked as the office manager in a firm where those who hired her absconded with the funds to a foreign country. She went to jail (it is probably a life sentence considering the healthiness of Texas jails and her age, she is over sixty and a Grandmother who worked two jobs. This was the part time one.). Meanwhile violent felons are serving an average of one month per year of sentence because of overcrowding in the Texas jails. She has already served ten months and shows no liklihood of parole at this point. She and her husband were two honest parents who were real entrepreneurs working in various legal businesses throughout their lives going from boom to bust as happens in capitalism, while the rest of their family worked in the large "authorized" company, religious and civil service units of the society with health care and retirements intact. Except not quite. You know the type I mean, the ones who love to call themselves capitalist entrepreneurs but who are in reality "hired hands" for the local mega company, school, church, civil service or local "business" association. These people now lost money in Securities and so Texas is "on the warpath" due to the loss of security for the average person. But it is not the CEOs who will end up in jail. It will be the ones, like this poor woman, who managed the office and signed checks for her boss as ordered. If she had the bad luck to have a well connected relative then she will also be pressured to lie about that relative or spend the rest of her life in jail. The immediate family is, of course, devastated never again to see their wife and grandmother except behind a plexiglass partition and over a telephone. (I've known murderers who had conjugal rights!) As I watched this situation play out it was interesting to see the immediate family's local church abandon the family while the woman, a devoutly religious fundamentalist, was highly praised for "not giving up" but "bringing souls to Jesus" even in jail. Evidently the local church had people who had lost money in it as well. It was even suggested by one that this was the holy mission for her in this terrible situation. I thought of the statement by the Communists about "religion being the opiate of the people." I'm reminded of the snarl that the Conservative lawyers had during the Clinton era when they said "If you have nothing to hide then you can tell everything and be safe." Over-simplicities often are evil both in effect and intent. I suspect a lot of English education is still involved in justifying their conquest of the world through the use of guns and drugs. Of course the US is not "Russia" and neither is England, but have you ever been to Picher, Oklahoma; Pine Ridge, South Dakota; or the ghettos here in NYCity? How about the coal mines in Wales that Richard Burton used to speak so passionately about? Here, helpless people are not into revolution. The situation with the handling of minority groups from Andrew Jackson to the present has meant that the majority was too difficult to resist, especially with their holding the reins of the courts as the conservatives do at present. In the Aristocratic and Dictator societies the oppressors of the past were always minorities or outsiders. Today's oppressors are majorities. There is not much you can do more than "get by" if your enemy holds the reins of business and the courts. And if they are self-righteous and have their stories well positioned, things are pretty well hopeless for minorities and the poor. The occassional "success" is usually absorbed into the majority thus forgetting who they were and where they came from. The myth that makes that possible is the "Hero's Journey" Myth of the West that Joseph Campbell used to speak so euphorically about. This is not an example of what the potential of that minority or underclass might hold. This person is a "Hero", the exception to the rule of general medocrity as taught by the majority. He is then given a television show or a Judgship or even the Secretary of State as long as he remains a "Hero" to his those who "accepted" him in the first place. The majority even has their Hero revolutionaries who prove their righteousness by the viciousness of their self-criticism of the Majority. Advocate Dickens and Blake but don't read them. How interesting to see a Blake quote coming from a man who Blake would have despised. But that is what it means to be a paragon of "Western Civilization." You accept it all as your birthright even if it calls you a piece of shit. The question is always whether it is a case of "caring" or "being able to read at all." Capitalism claims the efficacy of contracts while stretching the temptation to cheat in a conflict of interest to its extreme. The situation reminds me of the window repair service that broke a string of windows on fifth avenue a few years back. The police caught them immediately because they left their business cards at the site. Such things happen every day in Capitalism but the general public seems not to notice that the man who left his card has something to benefit from having broken the window. But he was caught. By whom? If the people are too educated then they won't take the official conflict of interest crap of Capitalism. In this case the police were "educated" and "sophisticated" in detecting a liar when he claimed he didn't do it. But this is a two edged sword. What caught the "window breaker" in a small piece of larceny, allowed the "window breaker" to go free in both of the earlier cases while capturing the people who polished the glass in the "window breaker's" store. What seems ridiculous for windows on fifth avenues is normal in other situations. Doctors who only get paid if people are sick. CEOs who make more if the company is experiencing a "fire sale." Teachers who are paid so poorly that they have to be Saints to care or teach seriously and on and on. As for your Associations, I don't have time to consult my Braudel so I will just ask: Weren't those trade associations about export/imports and the arrival of the most recent "exotic"? The slowness of camels and sailing ship plus their relatively small amounts meant that quality was more of an issue, with "quality" being the synonym for "durability" and durability being a synonym for a "productive worker" rather than the current definition of productivity as "cheap and easy replacement." I remember when this was an issue for Japan as I'm sure you do as well. Japan conquered the "cheap and undependable" image by subsidizing automobiles that were two levels higher quality than they were being sold at in the American marketplace. That was the tactical side of Capitalism. My Honda Accord at the time even competed with the Jaguar according to one Jaguar owner who drove my car at the time. The Japanese flooded the market with a quality that Americans couldn't match at the price without being subsidized in the same manner. The balance would always be struck between availability and size of market with "time" being subsidized by the largest institutions for the sake of competition and an ultimate long range goal. Time is an issue for Mass production while quality and durability are issues for scarcity. Time is the big cost in "economies of scale" while scarcity is the big cost for such things as gold, platinum, diamonds etc. Durability adds to that when scarcity is married to the need for a durable product such as cesium beam tubes for example. Today, durability and scarcity relates to the old Grandiose projects like space programs and chip-fab laboratories. PCs on the other hand lowers the cost of such things as micro-chips and crystal lenses since their expense in production becomes less as the volume makes the initial cost less and less. Movies are the best example of all since they are tremendously expensive to produce but cost practically nothing to reproduce in video tape. The scarcity issue changed with the Industrial mass production era. Benjamin Franklin was very much a part of the Industrial Era's machine mentality where amount became more important than quality since it was easy to replace if it broke. They even invented a machine to make wampum and the Whites made and used more of it than the Indians. Which brings us to another example of the two models. Even today, Indians value hand made objects over the machine considering that all objects have a "life" and that a machine made object is "tortured" and has lost much of its life (durable power). I've seen Indians who valued the straight line of a sewing machine but considered the average machine made product to be inferior. They would take the motor of and work the machine by hand in order to get the quality but control the subtle crassness of the machine through personal mastery. I consider this to be a local example of the balance between size of population and durability of goods. Indian people do not have as big a families as non-Indian and "balance" is often given as the reason in traditional families. Today, assurance of contracts is rarely about quality but about whether you will get your local "widget hit" and whether the dealer will be paid or not. Honoring contracts in a relatively small import/export market over durable and high quality goods is still practiced amongst the wealthy. But impractical for the majority. You don't find a lot of the wealthy avoiding payment on such goods. But we just eleminated bankruptcy protection for the "less than wealthy" supported by Republicans and Democrats. Of course they blamed abuse by the non-upper crust wealthy as the reason but it hits the middle and lower classes not either of the uppercrust or non-upper crust wealthy. On the other hand I have found the wealthy to only be surpassed by organized crime in paying for services rendered on time. Mass production and the industrial era's concept of productivity destroyed the craft guilds and made the Mason's, for example, into a group that protected the powerless against the powerful wherever they were found. No Keith, I think it is about complexity and things not being as simple as they seem. History in the West is always about telling the story in as linear and simple a fashion as they can. That makes them go nuts when confronted by immigrants from cultures who speak English in the complexity of their original non-linear languages, like from India for example. It also makes those of us who speak English but were raised in those cultures, go a little bit nuts when hearing A simple explanation for things that are much less so than they seem in your authorized story. I have a lot of Timeline books in my library and none of them are really complicated enough to research a stage production for the most simple opera. Got to go. As you know, skill doesn't stand still. You have to practice whether you are paid or not. Otherwise you will be disgraced in the eyes of your audience. REH P.S. I apologize for not having the time to clean this up. But it was either publish or perish.
