From: Jasper
Date: 13 May 2000
Time: 23:20:53
Jean,
I'm about as liberal a democrat as you can get I'm for proactive government, strong labor unions, strict gun control, public education, foreign aid, public assistance for the poor and disabled, women's rights, gay rights, ethnic rights, religious and non-religious rights, Communist rights, KKK rights, Nazi rights, etc. I'm against censorship in any form, unrestricted big business, punishment of "criminals" as the preferred solution to crime, sink or swim economics as solution to poverty and anybody's religion as a moral guideline for everybody. I have never voted for a Republican in my life and the only time I didn't vote for a Democratic President was when Bill Clinton was running. I'd vote for a snake (the kind with scales) before I'd vote for Clinton.
My preference for the Democrats is strictly a choice between the lesser of what I see as two evils. From the second half of the 20th century onward the real world record of the Democrats has been marginally better than the record of the Republicans for most of the people I know. The Republicans' record on civil rights is predictable and terrifying. I am always astonished when people who are as passionately opposed to racism as liberals are supposed to be call them selves Republicans. I'll never figure that one out.
Now that we have that out of the way, let me tell you that I don't believe for one minute that the big decisions in the United States and Canada have a hell of a lot to do with political parties. I think they have to do with personal connections-friends, relatives, private clubs and allies in single-issue causes. I think that people rise to power in one political party or another because of the local conditions that favor their election. At some point "the people" sill have to choose. Most people never figure out that who they get to choose from is what matters. I think that the only thing that saves us is that the people who make those decisions don't always agree with each other on what matters. Sometimes they fight and kill each other. The American Civil War is one example. The civil rights movement is another. The Drug War is a third. I think that the Impeachment of President Clinton was the latest big one. It appears that the biggest divide is race.
To find out who is really running things in any given situation I think we have to trace the "influence links" from the individual in question to the institutions they came out of (universities, corporations, military and quasi-military organizations, etc.) Then you have to look at the institutions within the institutions, the fraternities, the country clubs, the boards, the special committees and the real leaders within those organizations.
What I mean by real leaders is what brings us together. Fuhrman was a real leader in the LAPD. As an officer in the Police Protective League, it's hard to know just how much power he had but it was enough to overrule executive officers in the normal chain of command with respect to job assignments. That is to say, a man like Fuhrman could effectively outrank his boss (Phillips) and his boss' bosses (Spangler) in putting "his people" where he wanted them and choosing what jobs he would be assigned. Because he would have been exempt from the rules, regulations and the oversight that the official leaders were subject to, Fuhrman would have more power real power than they did. Think of the power that Oliver North had on the NSC (commander of an corps-level operation like a three star general) as opposed to his official rank of lieutenant colonel in the USMC (two levels blow the lowest rank of general).
When I was working out characters and their relationships to each other in The Random Factor, I realized how important it was for any secret association of evil-doers to work within a framework of a legitimate organization. All you need is one or two (or one or two percent) in the right place and enough who are willing to go along with the program as long as they can't see the whole picture and don't know whose program they're following.
I saw that pattern over and over at Ford when they set up employee committees to look at one problem or another (big problems for the company). Every committee and a guy from personnel to "help out" and you could ALWAYS tell which way things were going to go simply by seeing who sat where, who took notes and which topics were off limits. Rarely did more than one or two others see the pattern no matter how many times they went through the same routine. Where the ringers gave themselves away was in their "off-duty" associations with the execs and their upward mobility in their careers. I think you can see the same pattern in the LAPD if you can find out who the officers were in the PPL that Fuhrman represented and the FBI and BATF officers who attended that racist picnic a few years back. If the real FBI, BATF or DEA wanted to bust the neo-nazis in their organizations that cops like Fuhrman are linked to, don't you think the picnic would be a good place to start? --Jasper