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Banned
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Originally Posted by roachboy
o let's see: inside the logic of the globalizing capitalist order, you could see alot of problems flowing from the ideological assumption that a firms only coherent task and so only real obligation is to make money for shareholders---this is a royal road to irresponsibility...
personally, i think the main structural problem that lay behind all others is the division between wage labor and capital, but that leads in a more radical direction: the first could be addressed within the existing order--the second requires a transformation of that order.
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Since we can count on one hand, the number of us who even are of the opinion that there is a problem, does it really matter what approach we take to describe it and attempt to attract interest enough to discuss it?
We have some excellent historical resources....The IRE.org "Arizona Project", and the study of the Phoenix 40, from the information in those two resources, and our knowledge of the development of Las Vegas, and of Arizona, it isn't a leap to have the opinion that two of our most recent states in the lower 48, were corrupted during their boom phases, openly and dramatically, with connections to organized crime that run so deep that they surface today in examples like the one I attempted....leading to the question of when, if it was profits from organized crime activity, and it can be directly traced to that....the millions of dollars now residing in US presidential frontrunner John McCain, became "clean" money....what was the date that the money was transformed from mob money to clean, respectable money?
This reporter had his legs and arm blown off, his life snuffed out, for reporting about the man, Kemper Marley, who was the employer, and source of McCain's in-law's money, business, and connections....and about the company the in-law and his brother contracted to manage the Hensley's NM horse racing track concession, and financed the sale of the track when they sold it:
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http://www.apfn.net/dcia/chapter1.html<br>
http://www.amazon.com/Arizona-Projec...3441892&sr=1-2
The Arizona Project
By Michael Wendland
Chapter One: The Death Of A Reporter
......Once more, briefly, as paramedics from the Phoenix Fire Department worked over him, Don Bolles regained consciousness.
<h3>"They finally got me," he said. "Emprise-the Mafia-John Adamson-Find him."....</h3>
......By 1970, Bolles was enmeshed in the tangled world of the Emprise Corporation, a many-tentacled sports concession firm based in Buffalo which was closely linked to organized crime in a number of states. Bolles' reporting stopped the firm from taking over horse and dog racing in Arizona after Bolles discovered, and wrote stories about the taps Emprise had placed on his telephone in an effort to learn his sources. Bolles became such an expert on Emprise that he was flown to Washington,D.C., to testify on the firm before state Senate investigating committee. His Emprise work introduced him to the ways by which organized crime takes over legitimate businesses. Months of careful record checking gave Bolles a list of nearly 200 known Mafia members or associates who had recently settled in Arizona. With another Republic reporter, he wrote a series called "The New Comers" which named the mobsters and their new business associations in Arizona. All of this Don Bolles shared with reporters around the country. In a craft crowded with huge egos and ruled by fierce competition, Don Bolles' generosity was rare. When checking into a mobster from Chicago or Detroit or New York, Bolles was quick to get on the telephone and urge colleagues from those cities to join him. He did not hog glory. He felt too strongly about what he was doing.
But paranoia got him in the end. He tired of attaching a piece of Scotch tape to the hood of his car to make sure no one tampered with his engine, a routine practice when working on particularly sensitive stories. He became frustrated with the pious platitudes of politicians who vowed action on his stories but never did a thing. He began drinking too much and told his friends that the only things he believed in anymore were "God and children." He blamed his malaise on a policy of "official gutlessness in town." and said he had his fill of muckraking because "no one cares." His first marriage broke up. He was a burnt-out case.
The business does that to good reporters. It's nothing new. After a while, it just isn't worth it. The twenty-four-hour-a-day pressure; the worry of million-dollar libel suits; the late-night anonymous phone threats; the anger that comes when no one cares; indifferent, timid editors; the difficulty in making a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary support two families-all eventually overwhelmed Don Bolles. He had done his part. So, in September of 1975, as he entered middle age, Don Bolles asked to be taken off the investigative beat.
His life began to come together again. Transferred to the legislative bureau in the state capital, he adjusted to the beat of a new drum, working a basic ten-to-six day. The job finally took a back seat to his wife and seven children. Six-year-old Diane, who was born deaf, was his and Rosalie's. Four of the kids came from his first marriage and two were Rosalie's by a previous marriage. He started playing tennis and jogging, trimming his six-foot-two frame into the muscled leanness of his youth. Friends said he was happier than he had been in a long time. In early 1976, he turned over his extensive files on the Mafia and organized crime to John Winters, another Republic staffer.
Bolles came up with a couple of pretty good pieces on the legislative beat. Most notably, he forced the resignation of millionaire rancher Kemper Marley from the state racing commission. When Arizona Governor Raul Castro nominated Marley for the position in March, Bolles searched the records and found that Marley had been Castro's largest single campaign contributor in 1974. Bolles pressed further, discovering that back in the forties Marley had been charged, though later acquitted, of grand theft while serving as a highway commissioner. Marley had allegedly taken a truck engine owned by the state. A few years later, Marley was appointed a member of the Arizona State Fair Commission, where, Bolles learned, he had been accused of financial mismanagement and flagrant nepotism.
Eight days after the seventy-year-old Marley took his racing commission seat in 1976, the controversy unleashed by Bolles's stories prompted the legislature to force Marley's resignation....
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2...and-car-bombs/
Hot Dogs, Beer, And Car Bombs
By Don Bauder | Published Thursday, April 29, 2004
....While investigators haven't found organized-crime relationships in recent years, and the successor company now enjoys a reputation for professionalism, the malodor lingers on. When the company bids on a concessions contract, competitors disinter the sordid past. When the firm gets a prestigious contract, such as for concessions at Yosemite National Park, the press digs into its past.
The company says it has cleaned house, but as the Wall Street Journal pointed out in a story November 17, 1994, the question of whether efforts are a cleanup or a whitewash "seems destined to plague the company for at least another generation."
The exclusive food service and retail concessionaire at Petco is called Sportservice. It is part of Delaware North Companies of Buffalo, New York, a privately held company with more than $1.6 billion in sales, concessions contracts at major sports stadiums, and a big stake in the gambling industry through racetracks, casinos, slot machines, and, of late, combination racetracks and casinos, called "racinos."
The predecessor company was named Emprise. It was founded in 1915 by three brothers. One of them, the late Lou Jacobs -- longtime head and patriarch of the company -- became infamous for his underworld relationships. The Reader's retelling of Emprise's history won't make that hot dog any tastier, but it serves as another example of the historical connection between professional sports and the gambling industry.......
......I gave her a list of questions about Emprise's dubious past associations. She passed the queries to the company's outside counsel, who said that Emprise is "a twice-removed predecessor of Delaware North that was dissolved in 1978 -- 26 years ago -- and the management of Delaware North played no role whatsoever in the operations of Emprise."
However, Delaware North's website makes it clear that the Jacobs family, owners of Emprise, own Delaware North. The current chairman and chief executive, Jeremy M. Jacobs Sr., one of Lou Jacobs's sons, headed a Canadian subsidiary of the Jacobs empire as early as 1961 and became chairman in 1968 at age 28 upon his father's death. As John Emshwiller's 1994 Wall Street Journal article pointed out, Jeremy Jacobs took over the parent company at a time that "investigators were probing the intensely private company for evidence of organized-crime ties." Later, the company became Delaware North.
In 1972, after Howard Hughes had bought Las Vegas's Frontier Hotel and Casino, a jury in Los Angeles federal court concluded that the casino's real ownership had been illegally concealed. Among the actual owners had been Anthony J. Zerilli and Michael S. Polizzi, "two high-ranking members of the Detroit Mafia family," according to The Boardwalk Jungle by Ovid Demaris. Another owner was Emprise, which, according to the jury, had loaned a bundle of money to front men for the allegedly mob-related owners. According to Demaris, Emprise also jointly owned a Detroit racetrack with Zerilli and Polizzi.
As a result of the Frontier case, some of the alleged mobsters went to prison; Emprise was fined $10,000, according to both The Wall Street Journal and The Boardwalk Jungle. Lou Jacobs and his son, Max, were named as unindicted co-conspirators. "That same year [1972], Sports Illustrated put the late Lou Jacobs on its cover under the headline, 'The Godfather of Sports,' " wrote investigative reporter John R. Emshwiller in the Wall Street Journal's comprehensive 1994 piece on Delaware North and its predecessor, Emprise.
In that story, Emshwiller said that Jeremy Jacobs "doesn't deny that his father traveled in a rough-and-tumble world. Lou Jacobs built the company by obtaining lucrative concession contracts at sports facilities and other locations in return for providing millions of dollars in upfront payments and loans to stadium and team owners.".....
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I want to understand how others view this cleansing process, if it is a process?
I mentioned in the loquitur's "Inequality" thread, that the only investigation of power and wealth in the US, ended nearly 67 years ago, resulted in a collection of recorded data that is still partially sealed.....why?
More and more, participation here on this forum has opened my eyes to the nearly universal levels of deep denial, indoctrination, and objection to presentation of detailed information, in ....of all places, a political discussion forum....go figure?
I am left to sort out whether the aversion to progressive taxation as an obvious means to deal with the grwoing "problem" of wealth inequity, an aversion that has grown, since the '50s, in direct proportion to the amount spent to create and support conservative think tanks and the conservative owned media and funded advertising blitz, is more a result of the success in indoctrinating so many, especially the younger members of our population, or because of the intensity of the incuriousness and short attention span.
So, roachboy, I drive them away, the way I try to present the problem, but I think that on some level, some understand what I am trying to convey....I am not so sure that your way of trying to communicate, even reaches the pathetically poor level of connection I've achieved.....
Last edited by host; 02-19-2008 at 09:30 AM..
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