Book: On The Take

This 1978 book by a UW professor, subtitled "From Petty Crooks to Presidents," details Seattle's seedier side in the 1950s-1970s.  During this time it was a hotbed of illegal gambling, whorehouses, card rooms, peep shows and a wide-spread and very ingrained police protection racket.  Some of this same story was covered in "An Evening at the Garden of Allah."

I remember, as a kid of 16 or 17, wandering the peepshows and adult bookstores along First Avenue back when it was the epicenter of sin in the city.  I remember reading about the constant arrests of various bingo parlor operators, and the eventual exposure of the Vice Squad's members for turning a blind eye to licensing issues.  By the time the whole thing reached a head ('75-76) I was away at college, but it was a very big deal in Seattle.

It always seemed odd that Seattle's influence was bigger than it should have been.  National congressmen and senators and presidential candidates all played parts in our "local scandal."

Turns out William Chambliss unlocked the puzzle.

Seattle, and Vancouver BC, had by this time become major import hubs for the heroin trade out of SE Asia, and thus some very major organized crime networks -- and their pet politicians -- took a keen interest in the goings-on.  Our little burg was a vital link in an international drug trade that reached all the way to the White House.  We of course knew nothing of this.

Chambliss makes the point that the drug trade, and all the other illegal activities that surrounded it, were not really directed by the Mafia or a Cosa Nostra.  Instead there dozens and dozens, hundreds, of independent operators who formed linkages and partnerships with people above and below them, but there was very little overall coordination.  Rather, the corruption and "petty" crime infected pretty much everything, from top to bottom.  It was a thoroughly corrupt time and nearly everyone who was anyone was in on some little pieces of it.

And it didn't suddenly stop in 1978, nor begin in the 1950s.  A lot of the infrastructure was created after 1920 (prohibition) and continued throughout the '60s and '70s with other drugs-of-choice under prohibition -- which of course was the true purpose of these laws, centralizing production and distribution.

Incidentally, the "heroin trade out of SE Asia" also explains the war in Viet Nam.

It's equally clear, on retrospect, that Trump's nomination and election and presidency are the result of large-scale organized criminal networks. No doubt they're scared shitless that his incredibly incompetent handling of any number of issues threatens their hold on power. The electorate may not be as easily bought as the Senate.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Incidentally, the "heroin trade out of SE Asia" also explains the war in Viet Nam.

Among many other things that supposedly explained it.
Among many non-proveable explanations not to my satisfaction.

_Howard wrote:

Among many other things that supposedly explained it.
Among many non-proveable explanations not to my satisfaction.

Here's a pretty good article on Vietnam.

Quote :

During the war years, America’s leaders insisted that military force was necessary to defend a sovereign nation — South Vietnam — from external Communist aggression. Even more disturbing, Johnson quickly added (following a script written by his predecessors Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy), the Communists in Vietnam were supported and guided by the Soviet Union and China. Therefore, the war in South Vietnam was not an isolated, local conflict, irrelevant to American national security, but rather one that was inseparable from the nation’s highest priority — the Cold War struggle to contain Communism around the globe.

Further raising the stakes, policymakers warned that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, neighboring countries would inevitably fall in turn, one after another, like a row of dominoes.

In fact, however, in the 1960s, when McNamara advocated massive military escalation in Vietnam, he simply rejected or ignored any evidence that contradicted Cold War orthodoxy. It’s not as if contrary views were unavailable. In the work of the scholar-journalist Bernard Fall, the pages of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, speeches at university teach-ins and antiwar rallies and countless other venues, critics pointed out that after World War II the United States made a clear choice to support the French effort to re-establish its colonial rule in Indochina, and eventually assumed the bulk of France’s cost for the first Indochina War. It should have been no surprise, therefore, that Vietnamese revolutionaries perceived the United States as a neocolonial power when it committed its own military forces in the next war.

Indeed, from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s the bulk of Communist-led fighting was carried out by southern guerrillas of the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Vietcong. Only after the war was well underway did large units from North Vietnam arrive on the southern front.

Antiwar opponents also challenged the claim that South Vietnam was an “independent nation” established by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Those agreements called for a temporary partition of Vietnam to be shortly followed by a nationwide election to choose a single leader for a unified Vietnam. When it became clear to both Saigon and Washington that the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming victor, the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, with American support, decided to cancel the election.

Armed with these criticisms, many opponents of American policy in the 1960s described Vietnam as a civil war — not like the relatively clear-cut North-South division of the American Civil War, but a nationwide struggle of Communist-led forces of the South and North against the American-backed government in the South. But alongside the “civil war” interpretation, a more radical critique developed — the view that America’s enemy in Vietnam was engaged in a long-term war for national liberation and independence, first from the French and then the United States. According to this position, the war was best understood not as a Cold War struggle between East and West, or a Vietnamese civil war, but as an anticolonial struggle, similar to dozens of others that erupted throughout the Third World in the wake of World War II. When the French were defeated by Vietnamese revolutionaries (despite enormous American support), the United States stepped in directly to wage a counterrevolutionary war against an enemy determined to achieve full and final independence from foreign control.

Let’s try a thought experiment. What if our own Civil War bore some resemblance to the Vietnamese “civil war”? For starters, we would have to imagine that in 1860 a global superpower — say Britain — had strongly promoted Southern secession, provided virtually all of the funding for the ensuing war and dedicated its vast military to the battle. We must also imagine that in every Southern state, local, pro-Union forces took up arms against the Confederacy. Despite enormous British support, Union forces prevailed. What would Americans call such a war?

Most, I think, would remember it as the Second War of Independence.

Perhaps African-Americans would call it the First War of Liberation.

Only former Confederates and the British might recall it as a “civil war.”

Daniel Ellsberg wrote:

A war in which one side is entirely financed and equipped and supported by foreigners is not a civil war. The question used to be, might it be possible that we were on the wrong side in the Vietnamese war?

We weren’t on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.

I'm still going with heroin.

And maybe titanium.