Lecture 6

political crime at home


T. R. Young

The Red Feather Institute

Jan.1989


redfeather.gif (6856 bytes)
CRIME AND SOCIAL JUSTICE:
Theory and Policy for the
21st Century

RED FEATHER INSTITUTE

 

This is to let you no We have stoel a Sheep, For which the resson Was be cass you sold you Whet so dear and if you Will not loer prices of your Whet, we will com by night and set fiear to your barns. Gentlemen farm mers we be in Arnest now and That you will find to your sorrow soon.

...Anonymous Letter fixed to the Pillory in Salisbury Market, 1767

INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL CRIME: Some Definitions.

Some basic definitions of power which you will find helpful in understanding the social dynamics of crime are provided in this and in the other Lectures. Take time to learn and to think about them.

Political Crime Defined Political crime is the illegitimate use of power to advance the interests of one group within a society at the expense of another group.

The use of power is legitimate, in human terms, when it is deployed to solve one or more of the three structural problems listed below...even if powerful groups define the use of power as illegal.

All political power, if it is to be legitimate, comes from the people governed; to use it against the human rights of some of those people is illegitimate.

...The US Constitution

The word we use to talk about the use of the forms of power in public life is called politics (polis = city; by extension, the governance of public affairs). You will have to learn a bit more about politics than, perhaps, you meant to when you took this course...but, political crime is very, very serious and you will need to know how to spot it when it happens.

DEFINITION Power is defined as the ability to control the behavior of other people even against their own interests or wishes.

FORMS OF POWER There are four kinds of power used in every day politics which you can think about. There is a more complete discussion of this section in Appendix F which you should read along with this section.

*Moral power.

*social power.

*economic power.

*physical power.

Moral power is the power you have from sharing the basic values of a society. Everyone has moral power...it is the most democratic and the least susceptible to alienation. Moral power is based on the mores of a society. When you see someone violating those mores, you can call them to account. You can shame people who are older, bigger, richer, or better educated when they violate our standards for decent behavior...unless you live in a shameless society.

It is important to remember that moral power can be quite harmful to the human project. In racist, sexist, or authoritarian society, much crime is informed by the mores of a society. The lynching of Blacks in the South, the beatings of women in Anglo marriages, the prostitution of children in Denver, Seattle and San Diego are all informed by moral reasoning...if one believes in racial superiority, male dominance or market sex.

Social power is the power each of us have to control the actions, the thinking and the feelings of someone with whom we have a social relationship. When we come together to build a social occasion, we have the power to influence the way each other thinks, feels, and behaves. This mutual ability to influence each other is social power.

Social relationships and social occasions cannot be built unless people try to adjust their ways of thinking, feeling and acting to each other. Social power arises from symbolic interaction. We learn to respond the same way as others respond to significant symbols in our socialization in family, church, and play. Words, gestures, and activities are the repositories of social power.

Social power is often stratified in order to give some people advantages over others. It is a very important form of power in explaining both legitimate and illegal behavior. Discrimination strips women and minorities of social power and is, thus, a crime against the human process.

You respond to social power when you acknowledge the influence your friends have to get you to do things that are helpful or things that are harmful to your full humanity. We call that peer pressure.

Marcuse speaks of your right to say No! to your friends or to the state when you are asked to do immoral things as...the Great Refusal.

Economic power is, of course the power of the dollar. In a society stratified by wealth and...one in which material possession is important to the definition of personal worth, economic power can override both moral power and social power.

Economic power is very important in capitalist societies for several reasons;

1. Many essential resources have been commodified.

When essential goods and services are commodified, it gives power to those who own them. Economic power often trumps moral power, social power and buys physical power when people need such goods and services. Money can prostitute every cherished relationship in a society in which personal worth is judged in terms of material possessions.

2. When people are without jobs or other sources of income, they may have to give up social and moral power to get resources.

3. Corporations can use economic power to buy up competitors and thereby get monopolies with which they can fix prices.

4. Organized crime leaders can buy politicians and their social power with money. Thus economic power can be converted to social power in public life.

5. Economic power can be used to restore balance in social power relationships. Women who work are much less likely to be subjected to violence in the home. Single women with children in the Ghettos command economic power; welfare checks, food stamps, housing allotments, this gives them status with men and neighbors.

Physical power Physical power is the use of clubs, fists, guns, and bombs. It is power that people use to enforce their own will over others when moral or social power is not available.

Young men who are socialized to be macho, often use physical power when they don't have social or economic power with which to express this alienated sexuality.

 

Physical power stripped of moral or social power informs much street crime, political crime and more than a little organized crime. Physical Power has to be used when human rights are violated...since most people refuse to comply unless there is a threat of force.

As with moral power, physical power can not readily be alienated from people. However, women are taught early on, not to develop or use muscles in resisting men or rebelling against alienated gender politics. Children, students, members of formal church groups and others are required to sit quietly for long hours while others move, act, think and decide.

Politics is the use of power to generate and to enforce public policies. Politics are used to solve three structural problems:

A. Maintaining the existing social structures.

There are three levels of social control used in the politics of a society:

*the self system (values, mores, social identities, shared interests)

*informal group pressure (peer, family and significant others generally as well as the media, church, and school authorities)

*formal control systems. They include the criminal justice system and all of the other control systems used by the state.

B. Implementing new social structures.

There are several authority systems which claim the right to formulate and to implement new social relations. Max Weber, a German social scientist, analyzed authority:

1) Traditional authority grows out of established social relations. Parents, teachers, kings and popes have authority by virtue of the traditional relationships in a society.

Patriarchal Authority gives men the right to decide about where to live; how to use family income; who, when and what to discipline as well as other family matters.

2) Legal-Rational Authority grows out of the logics of a system of control set up to achieve a given goal.

Bureaucratic authority is a form of legal-rational authority; it gives bosses and managers the right to decide about new investments, new products, new factories, new jobs, new tools and new techniques.

State authority is another form of legal-rational authority; it gives politicians the right to make to make policy for collective problems as well as the right to use force legitimately to administer those policies.

3) Charismatic Authority comes from the values and mores of a society. When a person embodies the most cherished values of a society...or is thought to embody them, traditional and legal-rational authority can be set aside.

*Jesus of Nazareth, the Ayatollah Khomeini, St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King, Adolph Hitler, and Father Divine all reflected back to moral power that people projected unto them.

C. Managing the external environment of a society

All societies today live in constant contact with other nations, corporations, tourists, armies, scientists, and religious leaders. These external groups have interests which are in conflict with those of the host country.

Every society claims the legitimate right to control the way outsiders affect it at home and abroad. The history of the world has been a history of one society trying to solve its problems on the backs of other countries. Societies use several power tools to manage their INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL environment.

Power Tools The power tools by which the state controls it citizens rest, ultimately, upon physical power. However, there is a wide range of control practices which rest upon social power: for example, codes of conduct for officials. Economic power is mixed in with many government programs in farming, education, welfare, housing and such to shape the behavior of large masses of people.

A most important source of internal social control for the state rests upon moral power. Respect for the law, patriotism, nationalism, authoritarian attitudes built into family, church and school carry over to shape the moral life of the citizen.

Each form of power has its own tools which can be used by the state...or by authorities in the private sector...to control the behavior of people within the boundaries of a nation-state.

THE TOOLS OF STATE POWER

PHYSICAL SOCIAL ECONOMIC MORAL POWER

Police Elections Grants Law

Guards Political parties Tax policy Patriotic Soldiers Bureaucracies Loans Holidays

There are many measures one can use to determine how much political crime there is in a society. One way to measure political crime is to compare it with the harm done by other forms of crime. You have had that comparison in every other Lecture. Again:


TABLE I

COMPARATIVE ESTIMATES OF CRIME COSTS*

Kind of Crime Lives Lost Dollar Loss

each year each year


Corporate Crime 300,000 + 200 Billion

Street Crime 25,000 9 Billion

Organized Crime 5,000 150 Billion

White Collar 30,000+ 75 Billion

Political Crime varies** Trillions***


A second set of measures [in the next Lecture] helps you know how much crime a country is committing against other countries. These data are not gathered and reported in the Uniform Crime Reports of the FBI nor in the standard textbooks in criminology. It is a measure of the inadequacy of both that they are neglected.

If you want to know how much political crime is going on in your society or another one, take a look at the section below.

INDICATORS OF POLITICAL CRIME Among the more reliable measures of political crime within a given society are the following:

*the number of riots and uprisings in a society.

*the portion of political prisoners in a country.

*the number of underground structures

*the presence of terrorist groups

*the severity of inequality in politics and economic life.

*the number of dead and dying...both from direct police action and from the dislocation of the economy which produces disease, malnutrition, and despair of life.

*the number of refugees from a regime.

*the amount of national income spent on weapons and social control in a state.

*the number of police and prisons in a society.

Today there are millions of refugees, mostly from poor capitalist countries where American arms are used to support some 58 authoritarian or military governments. Most of those refugees are fleeing from the illegitimate use of physical or economic power.

As to the other measures, the various Human Rights agencies are helpful. Generally they report that most of the murder, torture, imprisonment without due process, and banishment of the citizens of a state is to be found in the poor capitalist countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Indonesia, Taiwan, Uganda, and South Africa to name a few.


THEORETICALLY INFORMED POLITICAL CRIME. We will spend more time on theoretically informed crime in the Lecture on political crime but for now you can begin to think about the conditions under which one might argue that crime is theoretically informed.

The essential attributes of theoretically informed crime are:

*It must entail a valid understanding of the sources of misery, oppression and exploitation. It must properly identify the persons, relations, institutions, and social formations which produce that misery and exploitation.

Much political crime is aimed at targets which do not create the problems political crime tries to solve.

*it must promote social organization oriented to social justice. It must have goals with which to transform those institutions, relations and individuals which exploit and oppress groups to a more cooperative, more constructive, more praxical social relations.

Much political crime benefits a few persons or one group at the expense of another.

*it must include an effective means to institute social justice. It must use the forms of power which are appropriate to the political life of a society. It must have effective leadership and a popular base.

Much political crime is pretheoretical since it does not have a support social base; uses violence when peaceful methods would work or has poor leadership.

FORMS OF POLITICAL CRIME: There are three major kinds of political crime for you to consider in this Lecture. All deal with the use of one or more of the forms of power against the interests of other members of a society...or against another society.

A. First crimes of the state against its own citizens.

B. Then crimes of citizens against their own state.

C. Finally, we will discuss crimes of one state against another state. That discussion comes in the next Lecture.

A. CRIMES OF THE STATE Generally crimes of a state against its citizens its own citizens arise as the powerful and the privileged attempt to use state power in order to produce or maintain five structures of domination: class, race, gender, bureaucratic authority and national chauvinism.

In feudal states, the nobility and landed gentry used the power of the state in order to impose and to preserve the privileges of feudality. In slave-holding societies, slavemasters used state power to get slaves, to control them and to catch them when they ran away.

There are cases in history in which state power was used against citizens, arguably, to improve the future of the next generations. The socialist countries often make this argument as did the Tokagawa regime in Japan in 1860s and the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s.

Few of us have trouble accepting that the American Civil War was justified, in terms of social justice, by the ending of slavery. The Lincoln administration committed many crimes against citizens of the North who sympathized with the South.

State Organized Crime In speaking of political crime, William Chambliss at the University of Delaware developed the concept of state organized crime. Chambliss defines it as:

acts defined by law as criminal and engaged in by state or government officials in the pursuance of their job as representatives of the government acting in the perceived interests of the nation.

Chambliss gives such examples as piracy, smuggling, and mass murder in his survey of state crime. Please note that this definition of state organized crime does not include acts which are harmful to people but are not defined by law as criminal. When the state does lawful but harmful things, it would be state organized crime if we were to use Human Rights and Human Obligations to define state crime.

We will begin this section with a brief history of state organized crime in America. Most of what follows comes from the work of the late Al Syzmanski, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.

It is important to remember that a democratic state has to respond to the moral and social power of citizens. In the USA, state power is used for and against social justice at the very same moment. This tangle of state policy is a direct result of the dialectics of class, racial and gender struggles.

As James F. O'Connor points out, the democratic capitalist state tries to do two contradictory things:

1. it tries to help capitalists accumulate profit

2. it tries to win political legitimacy from voters.

When times are good, the state responds in the direction of social justice. When times are bad, the capitalist state tries to help private business stay profitable; sometimes the democratic capitalist state uses physical power against its own citizens when they strike for higher wages, lower prices or safer conditions.

State Crime in the USA: There is a long history of state organized crime in the USA.

After the Revolutionary war, the new American government used state power to harass those citizens who supported the Royalist cause of England. About 10% of the population left the USA because they were no longer a privileged class. It was seen as morally right to repress the oppressors in early American life.

There was a struggle between the Jeffersonians and the Adamses which involved the use of state power to repress political opposition in Washington. Each clique took turns using state power against each other. We see that as the illegitimate use of state power since it is part of the democratic process to argue, to oppose and to dissent.

There was the repression of the South by the North after the Civil War. Those who benefitted from the oppression of slavery were repressed. We now see that as necessary repression since slavery violates human rights and distorts human obligations.

With the compromise of 1877, racism once again became official policy in the South and the power of the state was used, along with the power of the Klan, to oppress Blacks and liberals. We now view that oppression as unnecessary oppression since it was used to maintain the structure of racist domination.

With the labor troubles of the 1870's, 1890's, and 1920's, state power was used to support the owners against the workers. Today, this use of state power is viewed as unnecessary repression. It is used to support the structure of class privilege.

After the union victories of the 30's, the federal government and most of the state governments reduced the use of state power against workers. It still happens, but not often these days...workers have votes; they can use social power to elect congress and senate members and to defeat opponents to the rights of labor.

During WWII, F. D. Roosevelt, president, issued an executive order to put thousands of loyal citizens in concentration camps in California, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. They were of Japanese ancestry. Not one case of treason was ever found among them. Hundreds of Aleuts were also illegally deported to Alaska during WWII where a great many died.

During the Korean War, the Vietnamese war and currently, in Central America, state power was and is used to harass and discredit those opposed to state policy on the war. These waves of state repression are unnecessary repression in terms of human rights since Americans have the legal and moral right to protest such wars. The FBI mounted a secret war against political protesters in an infamous program called Cointel.

State Crime Today The F.B.I. illegally keeps files on those who oppose Reagan's policies in Central America. Between 1982 and 1987, the F.B.I. collected information on thousands of ordinary citizens, priests, professors and some Congresspersons in the effort to control dissent in America. The only crime they committed was to oppose the government's policies in Central America...legally and peacefully.

In 1988, the association of American Librarians sued the F.B.I. in order to prevent them recruiting librarians to spy on those who read things the F.B.I. thinks is unamerican. The F.B.I. wants to know who reads other documents which are in the public domain.

The National Labor Relations Board, packed with Reagan appointees, routinely exculpates corporations for violations of labor law and their violations of labor contracts. The Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Antitrust Section of the Justice Department, as well as the S.E.C., have softened treatment of corporate offenders these past five years.

The National Security Agency at the direction of President Reagan put together a secret military organization complete with secret, and illegal funding. The operation was revealed when a Colonel North was caught selling arms to Iran to give money to the Contras in Nicaragua...both activities were illegal.

You will find that the Reagan administration is, arguably, the most criminal administration in US history...when you add up all the political crime it committed with all the white collar crime of the Reagan team together with its use of organized crime to run arms for its secret wars.

Hiding Political Crime There are three basic tactics a state uses to hide the illegitimate use of force against its citizens:

1. Control the definition of political crime

2. Relabel political crime

3. Locate repression in the private [civil] sector.

1. Controlling the Definition of Crime The first tactic is to use the law making apparatus to define a citizen' quest for social justice illegal.

The State tends to define those things which it does as legal and those things which challenge it as illegal.

A complete analysis of political crime requires the criminologist to transcend a technical definition of crime and to base a concept of crime on substantive grounds. A substantive concept of crime is based upon a theory of human rights and human obligations working within a praxis society.

2. Relabelling the Crime A second way to disguise the amount of political crime in a society is to charge political criminals with street offenses. This practice disguises the number of political prisoners in a country.

The usual charges against those who resist and rebel on the streets include:

*trespass. Those who engage in active civil disobedience by sitting in at Rocky Flats or elsewhere are charged with trespass. Those young black students who sat-in at segregated restaurants and in white-only seats in buses were charged with trespass.

*Theft, arson, or assault. There were 105 riots in American cities on one day in 1968. Those involved in the explosion of anger after the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4th, 1968 burned buildings and cars, looted the stores of white merchants, and shot at firemen and police. The riots were a pretheoretical form of rebellion and resistance to racism...they were not forms of street crime...but forms of political crime.

*Obstructing traffic. 22 people were arrested in Oakland County, Michigan during a peace rally on Augsut 8, 1988. Instead of being charged with interfering with the production of first strike nuclear weapons...which they were, in fact, doing, they were charged with obstructing traffic in and out of Williams Internation Plant which manufactures cruise missile engines.

*Parading without a permit. When the civil rights activists marched in protest in Southern cities, they were charged with marching without a permit. When refused a permit, they marched anyhow...and were beaten by white police or by street thugs while police watched.

*Curfew violation. In the Union of South Africa and in the occupied areas in Palestine, protest against political oppression by the government is made illegal by enacting a curfew. Protesters are arrested when they are found in the streets after the curfew.

*Resisting arrest or

*Failure to obey a lawful command.

Although the official position of the U.S. government is that there are no political prisoners in the USA, the fact is that there are some 70 persons are currently serving time in prison...from two months to 17 years. And there have been thousands of arrests in the last five years (1984-1988) according to The Nuclear Resister (No. 60; Feb. 15, 1989):

NUCLEAR RESISTANCE ARRESTS, US AND CANADA, 1983-88

Year 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988

Total Arrests: 3,010 3,300 3,200 5,300 4,470

Number of Sites: 85 120 75 70 65

Number of Protests: 160 170 165 180 160

C. Controlling the Defense Strategy A third way of concealing the political character of crimes committed by citizens against its own state is to limit the kind of defense that a person charged with a crime can make.

*Catherine Hunziker, 40, was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to wear an electronic 'shackle' around her ankle for 6 months. She and 318 others protested the radiation dangers of Rocky Flats on Nagasaki Day, August 9, 1987. The protesters tried to use the 'Choice of Evils,' defense in which they claimed the right to commit a lesser offense to prevent a greater crime.

Rocky Flats has 43 vents which releases low level nuclear waste materials into the air. The plutonium levels in the soil downwind from the plant are among the highest in the world while cancer rate of neighbors is higher than in surrounding communities. The Judge denied the right to that defense thus denying the jury the right to judge her claim to be choosing the lesser of two evils.

Norman Rasulis, a professor at Central Michigan University was one of the 22 persons arrested for obstructing traffic in the Williams International case above. Rasulis and his codefendants were permitted to use the 'choice of evils' defense. The precedent exist that defendants can move criminals charges from the category of street crime to the category of political crime by recourse to that defense.

D. Private Repression A third way of hiding the amount of political crime in a country is by permitting private organizations to repress dissent. The agents of gender, racial and class repression are in the private sector instead of the state sector.

A good deal of repression occurs in business, schools, factories, shops, churches and mass media by owners, managers, and coworkers who are not agents of the government but who stifle political comment, dissent, and organization for social change.

In market or capitalist societies, the argument is made that all decisions should be private. The state should not be involved in matters of housing, education, religion, transport, child-care, communications or health.

Instead, these things should be negotiated by equal individuals freely bargaining for the best deal they can get. In such a system, the civil sphere [or the marketplace] should replace the public sphere as the location of decisions. The argument is that there is an invisible hand which will, in the long run, bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

There are several problems to the privatization of politics:

**people do not have equal powers in everyday politics ...especially in racist, sexist, or class organized societies.

**the general good tends to get lost in the quest for private advantage...who will tend the commons if only privately owned sheep graze on it.

**there is no means to share the point of view of others if there is no public discourse open to all persons affected by our decisions.

**Solidarity and mutual aid stops at the boundaries of small groups; crime and exploitation of outsiders carries little moral onus.

If the choice is between a strong state run by an elite OR the freedom of individuals or groups to exploit, there seems to be little choice. Both seem to be poor choices.

But there is another choice not ordinarily put forward in American politics...that is a well designed public sphere with open communications. Jurgen Habermas has done a lot of work to try to promote undistorted communications and the development of good politics inside a public sphere. There is less political crime when there are egalitarian politics...see Bernard Barber's ideas on strong democracy in the last Lecture.

By hiding political crime under different names and by locating most political repression in the private sector, the USA creates the dramaturgical appearance of political freedom. By using state power only during times of economic crises, the USA further creates the image of a open and free society.

Despite all this disguise of political crime, the USA still is one of the most liberal states in the world. There is still much to do to end state crime of officials in cities, the separate states and in the federal system. There are so few really democratic states in the world that, by comparison, the U.S.A looks good.

B. CRIMES OF CITIZENS The crimes of citizens against their own against the State state vary from the very common evasion of taxes discussed in the Lecture on white collar crime to crimes of treason and crimes of resistance and rebellion.

For the most part, crimes against the state involve a wide variety of right-wing groups together with very few left-oriented groups. These right-wing movements are efforts to oppose human rights and human obligations. They supplement the state when the state supports racism and class privilege; they oppose the state when the state tries to introduce social justice programs.

Since most right wing groups are also social control agents, these are covered in detail in Lecture 15, Underground Structures. All are illegal...but continue to exist and to police, judge and sentence those who disagree with the traditional values of racism, class privilege, Christianity, or anti-communism.

Resistance and Rebellion in the 1990s There are several organized groups on the Left which are committed to resist and rebel against the policies and practices of the federal government. They include:

A. the Sanctuary Movement (Over 200 church groups help political refugees from Right-wing terror in Central America. Mostly in the five southwestern states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and California).

Over two hundred church congregations in the U.S. have agreed to violate immigration laws and help refugees from brutal dictatorships in Central America settle down in the states. Each day thousands of people from Mexico and other Central American countries cross the U.S.-Mexican border. The Border patrol arrests, imprisons, and deports hundreds each day.

B. The National Mobilization for Peace and Justice Movement in Central America (some 200 groups participated in the April, 1987 in marches in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Some 20,000 have pledged peaceful resistance if the U.S. should send American troops into Nicaragua.

C. The Antinuclear Movement. There are thousands of people who have demonstrated against nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

The Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, together with Liz McAlister and some 30 other people have formed a civil disobedience group which opposes US foreign and domestic policy. The group, informed by the their understanding of the Scriptures, has illegally entered and destroyed the weapons of war around the country.

D. The Anti-apartheid Movement. Small groups of lawyers, doctors, housewives, actors, politicians, students and others are regularly arrested for picketing in front of the embassy of the Union of South Africa. They come from all over the country but mostly from the Washington area.

E. Leaking State Secrets. Several government employees have been arrested and jailed for releasing secret documents which reveal wrongdoing in the Office of the President, in the Pentagon, or in other government agencies.

The writings of former agents of the C.I.A. break the law when they write about the role of the C.I.A. in the third world. Americans cannot be responsible for the crimes their government commits if they don't know about them.

Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. The secret papers told how the Johnson administration faked an attack on American naval ships in order to win popular support for bombing North Vietnam.

John Stockwell, a high ranking CIA officer who was coordinator for the secret war in Angola for the National Security Council and Chief of Station in Africa now lectures around the country revealing the crimes of the CIA in the third world. Stockwell says that the United States illegally attempts to destabilize the governments of some 50 countries whose policies are not to the liking of the government. We will hear more of Stockwell in the Lecture on Political Crime.

Victor Marchetti and John Marks worked for the C.I.A. They wrote a book about the illegal activities of the U.S.A. inside the U.S. and overseas. Their book was censored. 168 sections were deleted by the Courts of America. Still they were able to report a lot of political crime.

The Marchetti and Marks book lays out the size and structure of secret policing by the federal government. Many of these agencies are unknown to Congress. They were established by secret presidential orders and have their budgets hidden. The C.I.A. hired experts from Wharton Business School to invest secret funds and to be independent of Congress even though the Constitution says that only Congress has the right to levy and spend state funds.

J. Fred Cook has reported at length the political crime of the F.B.I. Using former FBI agents, news reports and Congressional sources, Cook describes the way the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover used its police powers to control political dissent, workers' movements and even Congress and the President.

To the extent these crime contribute to democracy and to social justice, they may be considered to be theoretically informed political crime.

PARTIALLY THEORETICAL CRIME Sometimes crime is informed by a crude but accurate understanding of the sources of exploitation and oppression. When thieves, murderers, kidnappers, and bandits correctly identify their oppressors and take action against them, one can agree that there is some degree of validity in their analysis about the sources of their alienated condition.

When that action is only an accommodation to unjust conditions; when it is not oriented to eradicate unjust relations; when it answers one kind of crime with another, it is not theoretically oriented in terms of our theory of human rights or in terms of rationally adopted solutions to human despair.

Earth First This group of radical environmentalists take direct and illegal action against timber companies and construction equipment which are used to despoil the wilderness. They drive spikes in trees marked to be cut down; they slash the tires of machines to build roads in the National Forests; they cut down billboards and advertizing signs along the road.

Riots One example of partially informed rebellion and resistance can be seen in the 1980 Liberty City (Miami) riots. Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance agent living in Miami, Florida was stopped one evening by white police. Four policemen beat McDuffie to death. The police officers were later acquitted of crime by an all-white jury.

Riots broke out in Liberty City; its black residents burned and looted. They also stopped cars containing white citizens and beat and killed the occupants. Most of the businesses looted were white businesses. Blacks put signs on stores owned by other Blacks to protect them from looting.

The violence was clearly political in nature and it clearly was aimed at the people who had benefitted for so long by the structure of racial discrimination. It was partially theoretical in that, while the stores which were looted were almost always owned by white absentee owners, it did not change the objective conditions in which Blacks found themselves in the South.

After the riots, unemployment rates continued to be high. Housing continued to be inferior. Health care and community services were lacking. White police continued to occupy the suburb and harass young Black people.

After the food, clothing, appliances and cash looted was used up, Blacks had to go back to the same stores, buy inferior goods at inflated prices and speak humbly to the White owners in asking for credit.

The Black riots of the 60s lead to some programs of social justice. Many of these have been cut back as the federal government changed its priorities with the election of Mr. Reagan.

Robin Hood and Banditry Many people approve of bandits who steal from the rich and give to the poor. We have had a lot of bandits in American History. You might have heard the Guthrie song about Pretty Boy Floyd who robbed banks and shared with the poor in Oklahoma. In some societies, kidnappers are seen to be heroes since they extort money from the rich. In some places, drug dealers who sell expensive drugs are admired.

In his excellent article on banditry, Pat O'Malley of Monash University in Australia found that:

*bandits were supported by their rural community

*bandits tended to rob class enemies: merchants and squatters

*banditry tended to redistribute wealth downward

*bandits are symbols of resistance against the ruling class

O'Malley confirms Hobsbawm's theses that banditry disappears when there are better ways to resolve conflict between rich and poor available. Hobsbawm held that unorganized class conflict is the natural terrain for banditry. When the urban and rural poor are able to organize, such crime declines. The best solution to terrorism is social justice.

Many drug dealers in Columbia and Jamaica or Honduras are seen to be folk heroes because they sell drugs to the 'ugly Americans.' In Italy, young men kidnap the children of the rich in Rome, hold them for ransom, and share it with the very poor people in their mountain village. It is an old, old form of banditry. It is scarcely theoretical to victimize children in order to redress the crimes of their parents.

The Ku Klux Klan began as social banditry in the 1700s against the British landed gentry. Cromwell and other British rulers had given the best land in Ireland to the soldiers and followers of the Crown. Young Irish men did not take kindly to such exploitation. They stole cattle, horses, and funds from the tax collector. They were folk heroes to the Irish dispossessed of their lands.

What began as a theoretically informed resistance to the British in the 18th century ended as a sorry effort in scapegoating in the 20th century as the Klan tried to force Blacks to bear the economic burdens of competitive capitalism in America.

While unorganized political action does little to improve conditions for any length of time, organized political action by Blacks in America does have some beneficial results including a drop in crime rates for those who participate in progressive politics.

Solomon and his associates (1980: 35) found a substantial reduction in crime rates in three cities they studied during periods of organized social protest and 'direct action' for civil rights in those cities. They conclude that aggression occurring within the framework of community action may reduce the aggressive outbursts of street crime.

Migrants and Crime More than 30,000 people cross the U.S.- Mexican border every night. They are in violation of the Immigration laws of the USA. Most of these migrants are Hispanic. They come from 24 Latin American nations looking for economic opportunity and political refuge.

They work in the clothing industry in Los Angeles. They wash the cars and mow the lawns in Orange County. They build the houses for rich and poor in Arizona. They prepare, serve the food and clean up in half the restaurants between San Diego and Seattle. They tend the babies of the real estate agents in San Francisco and clean the houses of matrons in Palm Springs.

Illegal migrants plant the crops, work the fields and harvest the crops from Florida to New Jersey. They pick the cucumbers in Michigan and the avocados in California. They also bring in the pot and cocaine from South America. The young women and young men cater to the sexual appetite of middle class males in America.

Perhaps the most violent, dangerous and savage territory in the world is the strip of U.S. land North of the Mexican Border at San Ysidro. It is a barren land of canyons and mesas a mile East of San Diego. In it the illegal migrants are robbed, raped, murdered and cheated by the coyotes, the agents who charge them to herd them across.

The pollos [chickens as the migrants are called] are beset by corrupt police on the mexican side, bandits gangs in the canyons, and youth gangs on the American side. In addition to the street thugs who prey upon migrants, the construction contractors who hire them often refuse to pay them all that is coming to them.

**Darryl Snider, framing subcontractor, hired ten illegal migrants to frame in a housing development in Phoenix, Arizona. He told them that he would pay them on the 5th and 20th of every month. After three weeks, he gave them $100 each. At the end of the contract, Snider offered them $500 or nothing. They each had over $1400 coming. They had worked 60 and 70 hours a week at minimum wage with no overtime. The migrants had no legal recourse. They could not complain to the U.S. Labor Relations Board.

**Juan Puente, U.S. citizen and masonry contractor in El Paso, hired 30 illegal migrants to build the beautiful stone walls seen every where in El Paso. He disappeared owing his workers over $28,000 dollars. He turned up in another development with a new set of migrants building adobe walls for an exclusive suburb...which included his own 7 bedroom house.

PRETHEORETICAL POLITICAL CRIME There are a variety of crimes which, by our definition of theoretically informed crime, must be viewed as pretheoretical. They do not advance social justice; they are aimed at targets which have little to do with the problems of the activist; they use tactics which are counterproductive. Here are some examples of pretheoretical political crime of persons against the state.

Pretheoretical Terrorism Most terrorism on the Left is pretheoretical by any measure. While most terrorism is aimed at destabilizing elite control of state power, the displacement of one set of right-wing tyrants by Left-wing tyrants does little to advance the human project.

Assassination The use of murder for political ends is one of the more pretheoretical terrorist acts commonly used. If human problems come from social structures, then the murder of individuals is irrational. One does not change social structures by killing, exiling, imprisoning or buying individual persons. One must change the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors.

Neither the assassinations of Lincoln, J. F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy nor the attempts on the life of Ford and Reagan did or could change the vast structures of race, class or gender exploitation in U.S. society.

The logical result is that others will quickly replace assassinated leaders when there is general support for the policies of the leader.

The assassination of Martin Luther King did greatly reduce the movement toward social justice for Blacks in the USA...but there was a lot of social opposition to social justice for minorities. Had there been enough social power in support of civil rights, the death of King would have made no difference.

We will conclude this Lecture on political crime by looking at a form of political crime that is often found in American politics. It is usually pre-theoretical in that it involves the use of state power to help one group at the expense of another. When minority groups win state power through elections, they often use that power to reverse the discrimination by favoring members of their own group against the former power structure. Let's look at political banditry.

POLITICAL BANDITRY Every major U.S. city has known a political machine which uses its state power to enrich its own followers. This is a form of banditry in which the poor rob from everyone when they get in office. Political banditry usually involves a minority group using city power to gain economic power.

Sometimes the minority group is the Irish who were discriminated against by the Anglos in Boston and elsewhere. Sometimes the political bandits are Poles, Italians, or Blacks. When elections are used by special interest groups to advance their own interests, banditry is often the result.

Boss Tweed in New York; the Pendergast machine in Kansas City or the Orville Hubbard machine in Dearborn, Michigan are well known. Perhaps the best known was the Daley machine in Chicago. For years, Mayor Daley used municipal power to hire his own friends and supporters, to let contracts to the companies which donated to his election, to help his friends avoid legal problems.

Today, Black voters use their ballots to elect Black mayors, council members, and legislators. These officials use the same pretheoretical tactics to gain economic power as did the Anglos and other ethnic groups before them. We call it corruption.

You learned in the Lecture on White Collar Crime that some 105 top executives in the Reagan administration were indicted or resigned in disgrace for this kind of banditry on behalf of their friends. It is common in American politics at all levels. Again, strong democracy is the solution to political banditry.

A case in Point Mingo County in West Virginia is one of the poorest in the nation. Of the 36,000 residents in the county, only 8,700 have jobs...mostly low paying jobs.

In the past two years, 60 people have been convicted on state or federal charges of voter fraud or drug trade. On April 14, 1988. 15 of the county's most prominent politicians; state legislators, the county prosecutor, a mayor and others were arraigned on charges of conspiracy to subvert free elections and bribery.

Of the jobs available in Mingo county, 2,600 of them are controlled by politicians. It makes a difference who is elected. If you want a job, you'd better vote for your candidate or another candidate will give it to someone else. Teaching jobs, janitorial jobs, welfare jobs, clerking jobs and many more jobs are awarded to the winning team...but lost to the losers.

Times have been hard in Mingo County. There are deep social conflicts between kinship and friendship groups (have you heard the song about the Hatfields and the McCoys? They lived in Mingo County). The cleavages are based upon loyalties to the Union or the South during the Civil War but they are expressed today in the use of state power to the advantage of some people at the expense of others.

WORLD COMPARISONS If we compare the 3 worlds of developments in terms of political crime found, we would find the least amount of political crime in the 1st world, the most amount of political crime in the 3rd world while political crime remains high in the 2nd world.

Political crime in the 1st World. You will learn about some of the political crime of right wing and left wing terrorist groups in the Lecture on underground structures. Generally one can say that there is very little political crime of the state against its own citizens or crime of citizens against their own state in recent years when compared to crime in earlier periods or to other parts of the world.

This social peace is marred by acts of terrorism directed at those 1st World nations which sponsor repression in the 3rd world but there is little overt political crime of the sort seen in Nazi Germany or in southern states which used state power to maintain racism.

Political Crime in the 2nd World Political crime of the state remains high in many of the socialist countries...but still far lower than in the 3rd world.

Socialist governments repress people in several categories:

*those who are counterrevolutionaries. They benefitted from the prior social and economic relations and would like to restore those relations.

*those who are critics of the policies of the government. One should not underestimate the injustices which continue in a bureaucratic form of socialism.

*those in Ethnic groups whose culture and social practices differ from the majority. While a case can be made that indigenous peoples are treated far in socialist states than at comparable periods in history in the USA, Latin America, or Africa, still that does not justify present political crime.

*there is considerable evidence that the secret police of many of the socialist states: the USSR, Bulgaria, East Germany, for example are actively committing crime in both the 1st and 3rd worlds. That the CIA and the various spy organizations of the USA, Germany, France, England, and Israel do the same things for worst reasons is no argument if one uses human rights as a basis for the definition of crime.

*in the socialist bloc there has been unconscionable suppression of art, music, literature, honest political dialogue, protest in redress of real grievance together with the maintenance of political cults and cliques.

Political Crime in the 3rd World Most of the political crime in the world is found in the 120 or so poor countries which make up the 3rd World. Death Squads, disappearances, imprisonment without a trial, intimidation, voting fraud, a weak juridical system, terrible prison conditions, together with an elaborate system of police spies and informers mark third world politics.

You will learn about this in the next Lecture and in the Lecture on Underground structures. As in the 1st and 2nd worlds, most political crime arises out of the problems of class, race or gender exploitation. Those who benefit tend to use state power if they have it to keep their dominant position. When state power is not available, they often resort to private measures.

Those who do not benefit from that exploitation...indeed those who are its victims, engage in many forms of political crime which are harmful to the human process to the degree that they believe that it is their turn to be the exploiters and oppressors when they take state power.

Solutions to Political Crime

At home, democratic socialists call for peace with justice; not a peace which freezes existing inequalities but a peace built upon social justice. They call for social justice to replace the criminal justice system with its narrow understanding of justice.

Democratic socialists see some political crime at home as a theoretically informed rebellion against the structures of dominations which deny people authentic human needs...so they tend to call for social justice programs.

Jobs, fair wages, decent working conditions, control of pollution, and decent retirement programs are main agenda items in the USA as radicals see them. With social justice, crimes of the state against its own citizens would not be possible and crimes of citizens against their own state would not be necessary.

Radicals call for better schools, smaller classes, better teachings, more interesting courses and job opportunities for young people during their last three years in high school especially during the Summer months.

Radicals call for the necessary repression of drug abuse, of street crime, of corporate crime, and of the commodification of sex in prostitution and pornography. They call for the repression of Right Wing political crime as necessary to the human project: Nazis, Racists, those who bomb abortion clinics, and other overt acts of repression need be defined as crime and policed as such....the reasoned argument in the public sphere is not to be repressed; even for Nazis and racial bigots. How is democracy possible without open communication in the public sphere

The radical agenda is a complete transformation of society in which the ancient structures of domination are eliminated: class, racial, gender and age together with bureaucratic authority would be replaced by:

*democratic politics in every important realm of life

*the award of full adult status to every person engaged in prosocial work...paid or unpaid work as long as it is prosocial.

*the use of state power to augment social power joined with moral power.

Political Crime can only be solved by an information-rich and interactionally-rich democratic process. Benjamin Barber at Rutgers has provided an agenda for strong democracy. You can find it in the last Lecture.

When people are in direct control of the political process and create their own political programs, government officials cannot stay in power when they commit political crimes. When public policy helps facilitate the human process, there are few to rebel. When a society is a praxis society, it has political legitimacy and little political crime.

Crimes by the State on behalf of capitalist, feudal, or bureaucratic elites need to be repressed. Crimes against the state by those who wish to keep power and privilege to a class, racial, gender or other elite must be repressed. It is necessary to repress the oppressors if human rights and human obligations are to govern public affairs.

Crimes against the state by those on the Right can only be ended when social relations are developed in which bigots must share social power, economic power and moral power with outsiders.

Crimes against the state by those on the Left can only be solved by social justice programs. With jobs, health care, education, housing and political rights, Left wing crime has no social base.

The point which emerges from all this is that democratic socialism is the best solution yet discovered for political crime.

But sometimes, political peace can be bought at the expense of economic colonies elsewhere. The great progress toward social justice in England, France, and America was made possible, in large part, by the vast political crimes in the 3rd world.

As the world gets bigger, there is no particular reason to keep people locked up in poor countries as the wealth goes to rich countries. The structure of trade and industry has been internationalized in the past 50 years. Now is the time to eliminate border controls on migrants.

Migration will continue to be a problem of law and control as long as there is unequal trade relations between rich and poor countries. The solution is not more guards and more fences...they won't work. The solution is more social justice in the third world and more economic justice between first and third world countries.

Today, national boundaries are fading as the world capitalist system develops. In the same fashion, most political crime...the worse political crime...grows out of the dynamics of the world capitalist system. It is time to look at the social location of political crime. And you won't find it in genes, body chemistry or poor parenting.


 

Some could gaze and not be sick
But I could never learn the trick.
There's this to say for guise and guile,
They seldom last the little while.

There's this to say for guile and guise,
They often bring their own surprise.

            ...adapted from Housman