Veto Corleone

You don’t have to go far to feel that very little gets done these days. I’m sure there’s a set of construction cones blocking off a roadway near you, disrupting traffic for the foreseeable. Most projects languish for years before someone even notices. The point is rarely to finish something, but merely to kick the cone down the road. Where’s the imagination? Today, our visionaries are engaged in mostly abstract thinking. Would it kill Musk to build a skyscraper? He’s thinking about Mars or drilling to the earth’s core, but isn’t there a middle ground out there, just waiting for his backhoe? 

If government has sat idle for years, afraid of the cost of things, it seems other businesses have also caught the bureaucratic bug. The mafia, once the living (not always living) embodiment of the American Dream, actually accomplished stuff. They built cities, moved massive amounts of drugs, and gallivanted across the globe like feudal lords. Today, they concentrate on cyber crime and other online transgressions. Like many others, they are glued to their phones, which is amazing when you consider that after J. Edgar Hoover and Rudy Giuliani, Alexander Graham Bell is the most hated man in the history of La Cosa Nostra. Put down the smartphone, Sal, and a pick up a baseball bat. You’ll know what to do with it. 

Mobsters, afraid of doing real time, object to basically every new idea that comes across their olive oil stained desks. They lack the can-do attitude of their ancestors. Why aren’t they trying to solve climate change, skimming a little off the top in the process? Instead you hear about harebrained operations to steal identities or get into crypto. 

It’s no surprise that the mob was once heavily in construction. Now that they’ve turned to other things, we have a housing crisis. Coincidence? How could it be? Making someone an offer they can’t refuse is taught in every Business school in the country.

Everyone would do a lot better if more people simply said, “yeah, okay.” Most successful people end up in prison or bankrupt and those are the facts. There isn’t the same stigma as in the old days for spending a few years in the slammer. Ask Elizabeth Holmes.

 

I believe in criminal justice reform for criminals who haven’t even committed their crimes yet. Try and beat that.