Friday, September 11, 2009

Mafioso in America

In the old days, the Mafia ran numbers games, gambling houses, prostitution rings and protection rackets. Even if you ran an honest business, you couldn't escape. You had to pay a percentage of your profit to the man who ran your block. If you didn't, you or your business would be attacked, possibly destroyed.

Today, the government runs the lotto and gives out casino licenses. ACORN helps entrepreneurs set up prostitution rings. Even if you run an honest business it doesn't matter. You have to pay the tax man or he'll kidnap you, throw you in jail, destroy your business.

Now, with the Chicago Butcher in office, the juice on business transactions is going up. The Democrats will Rahm through a new health care mandate that will fine people $3800 each for breathing, if they dare to do so without first having gotten health care insurance, either through the government or through the private insurers the government intends to destroy. Yeats had it right:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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