I
It is time to start
taking the near absolute perversity of both Protestantism and
Capitalism more seriously as a matter of language, which is also a
matter of linguistic and psychological domination.
They
manifest themselves in the United States in seemingly mindless
anti-slogans like, "I never got a job from a poor person."
This
has been repeated so often it becomes part of the Calvinist
Capitalist landscape, and in effect constructs that landscape
psychologically.
No doubt the vast majority who voice it are
merely repeating what they see as an economic insight--to wit, that
"jobs" mean money and obtaining money means working for
those who have money, to wit, rich people.
As a matter of
grammar and semantic reference it is not far from Willie Sutton's
legended answer to a reporter who asked him why he robbed banks.
According to the reporter Sutton answered with the famous and
obvious, "Because that is where the money is".
"Why
work for rich people", the radical Leftist asks. "Because
that's where the money is" answers the petit bourgeois eager to
have a "job" that pays money, or rather answers the
Capitalist anti-sloganeer who crafts or disseminates this response
for him.
The putative obviousness of Sutton's answer later
became a diagnostic rule of thumb in symptomatology, to the effect
that in diagnosis one first investigates the more likely causes of a
collection of symptoms, and, until those have been ruled out, leaves
the least likely to hang fire.
Using Sutton's law, then, is to
discount the unlikely until the likely has been disproved. This
advances the hypothesis, therefore, that in any particular case the
likely and unlikely can be known, and urges diagnostic action on the
distinction as a matter of common sense.
A patient appears
with all the symptoms of morning sickness. It is a good bet, reasons
the doctor, that if the patient is female and fertile, she may be
pregnant.
If the patient is male or female but prepubescent or
octogenarian, all such bets are off.
In that case the modern
physician may very likely consider "sympathetic pregnancy"
the most likely and call in the psychiatrists as the first
application of Sutton's law.
The same Sutton's law is also now
a rule of thumb in the diagnosis of problems in computer hardware and
software.
If the computer, for example, has lost power, it is
best to see if it is plugged in before investigating other
possibilities.
Another application is Activity-based
Costing--”ABC”--in Management accounting, where Sutton's Law
provides that ABC be applied "where the money is", that is,
where the highest costs are incurred, thus where the potential for
the highest savings are.
In most businesses the
highest costs are invariably labor and wages.
Application of
Sutton's law, therefore, often results in huge layoffs and firings as
the first response to any attempt to cut losses or invigorate the
profit margin.
This only shows how rustic and informal
is modern diagnostic reasoning and investigation.
In practice,
actually, the physician, who in the United States is also mainly a
businessman and works for personal profit, will apply in his
diagnosis any one of a score of automated technical tests, whatever
the symptoms may be.
Another likelihood is that, again
motivated by profit, whatever the diagnosis turns out to be, and
curable or not, it will be treated, usually by drugs or surgery or
some other far from inexpensive prescription.
Noting this, by the way, is just
another application of Sutton's law, founded on the principle that
the best diagnosis of physicians in the United States is the profit
motive.
In the US in particular, the only
industrial nation without national health care, the businesses which
are physicians and hospitals have the luxury of another perversely
profitable rule, that is, to be paid for treatment not cure.
If, say, plumbers enjoyed the benefit
of the same rule, when they treated your toilet, they would be paid
their high hourly wage whether or not the “treatment”
worked.
The real irony is that Sutton's law is a complete
failure when applied to what Willie Sutton said or did not say in
response to the reporter, a certain Mitch Ohnstad, who reported his
repartee.
In fact, Sutton himself denied the story, though his
denial is at least as interesting as the legendary response:
"The
irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching
medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never
said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who
apparently felt a need to fill out his copy...
If anybody had
asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would
say...it couldn't be more obvious.
Or could it?
Why did
I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when
I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I
enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd
be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips,
that's all.
Go where the money is...and go there
often."
Notice Sutton's use of "job" to
describe robbing banks.
In American English, when a member of
the criminal class, says he is “on a job”, it usually means he is
robbing or killing someone or something.
Damon Runyon made a whole new genre and
a career using such a vocabulary, some of which he invented out of
whole cloth, and which criminals, taking fiction for fact,
imitated.
Notice also Sutton's recognition of the irony that a
law named after him is not founded on what he said, but on what a
reporter wrote, and at best what he might have said had he been asked
the question.
This confirms beyond much doubt that
the original question, "Why do you rob banks", was never
actually asked of Willie Sutton but was invented and answered for him
in absentia, so to speak.
It is scarcely encouraging, either
in a rule of diagnostics and symptomatology or in a historical
investigation of a now often quoted dictum, that Sutton himself
allows that it is what he would have said had he been asked.
But
this is just the surface.
Stylistically the reporter who
invented the story seems to have been playing on the ambiguity of the
question.
Ohnstad prefaced the question so:
“Willie, tell me something ... I'm looking for a motive, you
understand. Why do you rob banks?”
The ordinary
understanding would be, "Willie, whatever came over you that you
became a bank robber and robbed banks?"
Instead, the
question is answered with a quip to the effect that Willie Sutton was
after money by whatever means necessary and therefore found banks the
most promising depository for what he was after, sometimes with a
pistol, sometimes with a Thompson submachine gun.
Was Ohnstad a fan of Damon
Runyon?
Sutton later claimed that in all his robberies his
weapons were unloaded, "so no one would get hurt."
Why
in the world anyone would believe this testimony, unsupported by
other evidence, is a mystery of journalism and naivety only Americans
can explain.
In the end, Sutton's law is just another way of
saying, in answer to question X or question Y, "Stupid
question--it is patent on its face”.
But to American culture, such as it is,
P. T. Barnum is mother's milk.
Is the proposition about jobs
and working for the rich, as phrased, an empirical observation by an
"individual" (the "I")?
Or is it not
rather a finely crafted act of reactionary anti-sloganeering designed
to keep both the poor, and more importantly, also the petit
bourgeois, working for the rich?
Likely it was not a chorus
and only one person said it originally, so the act of repetition by
others suggests it is the latter.
Except for Guy Debord and
the Situationists, who rightly made a philosophic and poetic exercise
out of responses in graffiti, the Left has ignored the Capitalist and
bourgeois use of just such anti-slogans, or, when confronting the
person who uses them as an insight into universal reality, often goes
off on some long-winded dialectical tangent, valid enough perhaps
theoretically, but lost on the likes of those mesmerized by the
deceptive logic of an “I” that “never got a job from a poor
person.”
What they do not do is bother to deconstruct, not
for the speaker or his audience, but first of all for themselves, the
anti-slogan and how it works semantically and psychologically.
“Anti-slogan” is defined as the
antithesis of a slogan, not in the sense that it is a response to
another slogan, but in the sense that, whereas a slogan is a battle
cry or call to action, an anti-slogan is a call to inaction and
futility.
It has not been noticed hitherto how
much Capitalist propaganda is psychological warfare and also of the
nature of anti-slogans, directed, obviously, at keeping workers and
poor and other malcontents inactive and passive, and resigned
inevitably to “working for the rich.”
Actually, this
particular anti-slogan, which one saw for the hundredth time
recently, appeared in a comment on an article about how to stimulate
an economic recovery in the crypto-Neo-Conservative newspaper that
now goes by the name of the Christian Science Monitor
Note
that the form--the statement of an individual "I" about his
or her supposed "experience"--is unanswerable except by
concluding that the statement about individual experience is
false.
This might work factually as an answer in a
biographical context: "What you say is untrue," the
biographer answers, "five years ago you worked for a group of
poor people, and cheated them out of their eye teeth."
But,
as said above, repetition by many different voices shows that a
biographical critique based on the statement of an individual about
his own experience is misdirected.
Did Willie Sutton rob banks
because he enjoyed it, and the money was just “chips" in a
game, or did he rob banks because that is where the money is?
The
value of the statement about jobs and the poor to the Capitalist
anti-sloganeer is that it is repeated by many different people as a
supposedly plain and incontrovertible proposition about their own
individual experience.
Actually Debord's "Ne travaillez
jamais"--"Never work" happens to be a brilliantly
crafted answer. Why? Because in working as commoditized labor, one
actively contributes to one's own economic
exploitation.
Interestingly enough, however, another of
Debord's slogans, "Boredom is always reactionary" also
jibes nicely with Sutton's revisionist implication of excitement and
enjoyment, and also with Abbie Hoffman's "Revolution for the
hell of it".
But perhaps another, distinctively American
and radical response is possible.
"I never got a job
from a poor person," the born Capitalist factotum says.
"That's
what Willie Sutton didn't say about banks" answers the American
radical.
But this is still skimming the surface.
II
In fact all "jobs" in the
Capitalist system are founded on exploiting the poor, including
"workers", who have no other possibility of earning a
livelihood in the system except to sell themselves and their time in
wage slavery to the "rich".
Or do they?
That
puts into a different context, not only Willie Sutton, but Josef
Stalin, who began his career robbing banks for the Communist
Party.
Is there anyone with any insight at all who will deny
that Stalin was patently not after the money obtained for himself or
his gang, and that he enjoyed what he did enormously?
Moreover,
Stalin did not pretend he robbed banks with unloaded firearms or that
nobody got hurt.
So enthusiastic was Stalin about robbing
banks as a way to raise funds for the Party that he continued to do
so for some time after the Party ordered him to stop.
This
was a man, plainly, who loved his job.
It is only a short step
from that to Che Guevara in the Cuban mountains.
In fact, rich
people have money exactly because the "jobs" they offer not
only exploit the poor and jobless, but systematically keep them poor,
with or without a job.
That is all already obvious in Ricardo,
though unlike Marx, Ricardo was part of the system and merely an
honest witness of how he and the other Capitalists operated and why.
This is no doubt why reading David
Ricardo is not a popular past time among the Capitalist economists
nor even the supposedly antiwar but hyper-Capitalist “free market”
Libertarians.
The simple fact of the matter is that
Ricardo, too wed to truth, gave away the game.
One of the cliches in various American
newspaper articles and books about Willie Sutton is that he robbed
American banks of around two million dollars and spent thirty years
in prison.
Adjusting for inflation, the amount
Wille Sutton robbed from banks may range beyond $200,000, 000 in
currently valued USD.
It is not now easy to derive the
original source of the play on “spent”. The more interesting
question, always left unnoted, is what he spent the money he made on,
not how he spent thirty years in prison.
Another interesting aside is that
Willie Sutton twice escaped from prison, and was sent up for the last
time because he was spotted on the New York subway by an amateur
detective whose report to the police led to Sutton's capture.
Arnold Schuster, the amateur detective,
was shot down outside his home on March 9, 1952.
The story goes that Albert Anastasia,
enforcer for the New York Gambino family, saw Schuster's appearance
on a television show celebrating Sutton's arrest, interpreted
“amateur detective” as “squealer” or “stool pigeon”--
that is as police informant--and ordered the amateur detective
whacked.
The popular portrayal of Willie Sutton
in the American media of the time leaned toward the picture of a
twinkly-eyed, polite, non-violent criminal, who just happened to like
to rob banks.
The Outfit connection is usually
portrayed as coincidental, to the effect that the likes of Lucky
Luciano and Al Capone also found Sutton fascinating and likeable and
had him protected during his earlier stints in prison.
This is very likely another media
legend. Sutton, as these matters usually transpire, probably paid
the Outfit a doing business fee in their territories, and this was
perhaps also the source of his being protected and even avenged.
Schuster was a distant cousin of the
Schuster in Simon & Schuster, the New York publishers.
He was shot at close range once in the
groin and once in each eye.
Frederick J. “The Angel” Tenuto,
was eventually identified as the likely killer. He had escaped with
Sutton in one of his prison breaks and was also, like Sutton, on the
FBI's “Ten Most Wanted List.”
Joseph Valachi, the government
informer, later testified that Anastasia had ordered Tenuto to kill
Schuster and later had Tenuto killed to erase any trail to the
Outfit.
Some speculate that the Schuster murder
may also have led to Anastasia's assassination in 1957 because of
the bad publicity it generated, establishing to other members of the
Outfit that Anastasia was out of control.
The Outfit's rule here is simply
stated, “Killing civilians is bad for business.”
It was apparently Schuster's appearance
on the television show, “I've Got A Secret”, that led to
Anastasia's ire.
Schuster's estate eventually won a
landmark ruling in Schuster versus the City of New York (1958),
allowing them to sue the city for failing to protect a citizen who
had furnished the police with information in a dangerous case. The
city eventually settled for damages of $41,000.
Fingered by Schuster, Sutton was
sentenced to thirty years for one bank robbery, with additional
sentences for others. In the end he served only seventeen years and
through the efforts of a New York lawyer, who got Sutton's sentences
reduced, was released from New York's Attica Prison on December 24,
1969.
Public contrition, religious and
economic, also as American as P.T. Barnum, was an integral part of
the release.
Suffering from emphysema, Sutton broke
down in tears and told the press that all he wanted to do was serve
as an example to the youth:
"Any kid who wants a life of
crime can look at me and see what I have. I'm the best living example
of the fact that crime doesn't pay."
To reinforce the
point it was noted Sutton now had only a few hundred dollars from his
wages in prison.
With contrition came also an ode to the
Protestant work ethic, even in a life of crime, and all the more
impressive as coming from an American Irishman and professional:
"Times have really changed. In
my time, you had to get up at 5 AM or 6 AM on cold winter mornings
and case a job for a month or two. People don't seem to want to work
hard for anything anymore....These young kids, they don't believe in
hard work. All these kids want to do is run into a bank, grab the
money and run out."
So were Capitalism and banks,
the work ethic, and the law, along with the mercy of the American
justice system, validated by the wheezing pale criminal, without the
courage of his convictions, and on Christmas Eve to boot.
Is there such a thing as chronological
irony?
On December 3, 1969 the Black Panther
Fred Hampton was executed sleeping in his bed and drugged by an
undercover police agent in a predawn raid by the Cook County State's
Attorney and the FBI. In the raid, another Black Panther, Mark Clark,
was also killed.
"We expected about twenty Panthers
to be in the apartment when the police raided the place,” noted FBI
Special Agent Gregg York, and without even 'but' continued: “Only
two of those black nigger fuckers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark."
Hampton's crime?
To this day, as far as ever has been
established in a court of law, mainly being Marxist-Leninist, a
gifted and effective organizer, and worst crime of all in those
years, being black into the bargain. Wounded but sill alive in his
drugged sleep, Hampton was polished off still in bed with two shots
point blank to the head.
Though Hampton's and Clark's families
finally won a civil suit in 1990 and damages of more than a million
dollars, and though later testimony all but established a
premeditated act of murder, neither Hanrahan nor any of the police or
FBI were ever prosecuted.
Hanrahan, a graduate of Harvard Law
School, lost the endorsement of the Cook County Democrats in his run
for reelection as Cook County State's Attorney, won the primary
anyhow, but was defeated in the election.
He ran unsuccessfully twice for mayor
of Chicago in later years, and also failed in a run for Alderman.
He died at 88 in June, 2009 still
practicing law.
Is there such a thing as economic
irony?
Willie Sutton lived another eleven
years after his final release from prison.
In October, 1970—less than a year
after his release from prison--Sutton appeared in his first
television commercial, hawking a Connecticut bank's new Master Charge
credit card.
“They call it the Face Card,” says
Sutton showing the card with his photo on it, “Now when I say I'm
Willie Sutton, people believe me.”
The commercial fades out to an
announcer saying, “Tell them Willie Sutton sent you.”
The commercial was produced by a New
Haven advertising agency. Sutton was paid $1500 dollars for a few
minutes work.
Said Sutton about the commercial, “It's
an unusual relationship, all right, but it's a very pleasant way to
make money.”
III
By far the most revolutionary work, in
the West at least, about the young bank robber Josef Stalin, is that
of the Britisher Simon Sebag Montefiore under the title, Stalin:
The Court of the Red Tsar.
Montefiore, who is the first biographer
to have full access to the old Soviet archives and even Stalin's
personal notes, concludes, ''It is no longer enough to describe him
as an 'enigma.' . . . The man inside was a superintelligent and
gifted politician for whom his own historic role was paramount, a
nervy intellectual who manically read history and literature.”
One of the more interesting items in
the book is that Stalin often told the same hunting story about
himself when he was exiled in Siberia.
The story goes something as follows.
Out hunting one day, Stalin ran across
birds in a tree. He opened fire and killed a number of birds but ran
out of ammunition. He then walked back to the village, got more
rounds, and returned to the tree, where the remainder of the birds
were still perching.
He finished them off.
After telling the story, he would laugh
uproariously, eyes twinkling, especially when drinking or pretending
to drink (as he often did).
Many of his inner circle, including
Nikita Khrushchev, listened politely to the same story over and over,
and often discussed it among themselves, all agreeing that it was
fantastic and could not be believed.
Was it a Georgian folk tale? Was Stalin
testing them or trying to tell them something?
It is not known how much Stalin raked
in during his bank robbing days. Some have even expressed doubt
whether he was ever personally involved in the action.
One story has it that sometime in June,
1907, after the Party had ordered bank robberies to cease, Stalin was
present nearby with a Mauser pistol when his outfit expropriated a
shipment of close to a million rubles on the way to the State Bank in
Tiflis.
Scores were killed and scores more were
wounded, including the Cossacks and police guarding the shipment.
The leader on the scene was Kamo, but
it is universally agreed that Koba ('the pock-marked one”) was the
organizer and director.
Stalin never denied his career as a
bank robber for the Bolsheviks, and stopped only when personally
confronted by Lenin.
It is known beyond any shadow of a
doubt that Stalin was never fingered by an amateur detective, was,
like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, never on the FBI's “Ten Most
Wanted List”, and also never did a lucrative television commercial
advertising a credit card for a bank.
Did he later in life aspire to be an
example to the youth?
How did Willie Sutton spend the
millions he robbed from banks? The question keeps recurring.
The answer is simple as ABC: from all
available evidence he spent it just like a banker or a Finance
Capitalist, that is, selfishly and even worse, unimaginatively.
He was, for example, when out of the
joint at least, and like most bankers and Finance Capitalists, and
also like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Albert Anastasia (as well as
Arnold Schuster, who was a clothing salesman when he was not an
amateur detective)--a dapper and expensive dresser.
His taste in firearms, including the
Thompson submachine gun, was also an expensive addition, loaded or
unloaded, and especially on the black market.
Did he not earn his wages then, in his
various enterprises, from robbing their banks to doing television
commercials for them, in the much the same fashion, if a bit more
openly and blatantly?
At this pass occurs an intriguing
question no reporter ever asked or invented about Willie Sutton.
It might be phrased as follows,
“Willie, how and the world did you, a bank robber, become a media
celebrity and hireling of the very bankers you robbed from?”
The answer is also as plain as ABC.
Because Willie Sutton perversely but, still very effectively,
validated money obtained by whatever means necessary by a
self-interested, autonomous individual outside the law as the very
essence of how Capitalism operates psychologically not only on the
rich and not so rich, but also on the poor.
About the only distinction is that
Sutton did indeed never get a job from poor people.
And what of Fred Hampton and Josef
Stalin?
(copyright E. A. Costa, 2010)
E. A.Costa 25 September, 2015
Granada, Nicaragua
