On Monday, the New York Times featured, on the front page of its website, a long piece of giddy gush about the latest trend in luxury hoteling: super-suites for the super-rich, costing up to $28,000 a night.

For more than 1,100 words, the Times gives us an uncritical (indeed, adoring) panorama of the new high-swankery expected by our owners as they perambulate around the global plantation. There’s the $25,000-per-night room in the New York Palace, a three-story “penthouse Versailles,” the Times, all atremble with excitement, tells us, which comes complete with a million dollars’ worth of designer jewellery on display to refresh the weary eyes of the travelling titan. Or New York’s Mandarin Oriental, 3,300 square feet of even greater opulence — a steal at $28,000 a night.

Such elite enclaves are springing up all over the country, say the many industry insiders and financiers quoted in the piece. (Despite the vast acreage of news-hole available, the ‘paper of record’ could not find any space for comments voicing even the slightest hint of unease at these developments. Of course, it would be very hard to find anyone within the ambit of a NY Times business reporter who would object to such brutal ostentation; still, you’d think the paper could drag out some wheezing moderate-liberal-centrist type academic who could offer up a bromide on how this trend is, potentially, something that could possibly be somewhat troubling. I mean, the paper’s rolodex is crammed with such worthies. But apparently not even the mildest moderate’s most gentle murmur was to be allowed to besmirch the story’s sweet, glossy bussing of oligarchical posteriors.)

However, you shouldn’t think the frenzied construction of these gilded hog pens is simply a matter of Heep-like toadying to every whim of super-rich (although it is that). No, it’s also a question of ‘brand-building,’ of luring in envious middle-class patrons who want to catch a faint whiff of elite effluent as it wafts down from on high. As the Times notes:

“Hotel industry professionals say these over-the-top suites serve a dual purpose. “A large part of what we do is creating an image,” Mr. Tisch said. Super-suites cater to the needs of billionaire travelers as well as the imaginations of middle-class tourists.

“This hotel already had a fantastic flow of high-net-worth people using our suites,” Mr. Chase said, listing Saudi diplomats and royalty, as well as Hollywood and sports stars, as regular guests.

They also indirectly attract a middle-class, aspirational traveler, Mr. Chase said. “It is the attention — the halo effect — doing a suite like this brings,” he said. Even if they’ll never be able to drop the cost of a new compact car on a night’s stay at a hotel, some travelers want to brush elbows with that level of wealth.”

Yes, work really, really hard, and you too might one day be able to afford one night on the bottom floor of a hotel where a Saudi prince or a movie star once actually took a dump hundreds of feet above you.  Now there’s something to fire up your pathetic little middle-class imagination!

The story is summed up with a piercingly accurate phrase from one of the chief quotees in the piece, Pam Danziger, the “president of the luxury marketing firm Unity Marketing and author ofPutting the Luxe Back in Luxury. (Follow-up volumes will include Putting the Use Back in Usury: From Payday Loan-Sharking to the Penthouse, and Putting the Pen Back in Penury: Parking the Poor Where We Don’t Have to See Them.) Eschewing the gauzy rhetoric of “halo effect” and other euphemisms for protecting the unearned power and privilege of the rich by exciting envy in everyone else, Danziger cuts right to the heart of the matter:

“Ms. Danziger described it as a “shock and awe” campaign that would help drive bookings of regular rooms.”

Shock and awe, baby: that’s right, it’s war — class war. And guess who won?

But it’s not enough just to win; you must be seento have won, you must have your conqueror’s status confirmed for you, at every turn, in the most ostentatious way, so that your victims know they have been crushed and dare not rise again.

2.

On the same day — the same day — that the NYT’s grovel-and-gush piece appeared, Oxfam released a report on the astonishing, well-nigh incomprehensible level of inequality between the Times’ celebrated super-rich and the rest of the human race.

The Oxfam study showed that the richest 85 individuals on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet. 85 people control as much wealth as 3.5 billion.

This is not the natural fruit of the market’s mythical “invisible hand.” It is the result of carefully crafted, deliberate policies put in place over the past 40 years by elected leaders who have been bought, like chattel, by the rich, and have used the power of the state to skew the political, economic and social structure of nation after nation toward the ever-increasing domination of an ever-smaller circle of elites. As Larry Elliot points out in the Guardian:

For much of the 20th century, the more far-sighted business leaders … understood that their workers needed reasonable wages so that they could buy the goods and services they were making. They grasped the idea that a market system in its rawest form was incompatible with democracy and so acquiesced while some of the rough edges were knocked off via progressive taxation, welfare states and curbs on capital. Deep down, they feared that the Russian revolution would provide a template for disaffected workers in the west.

Attitudes have changed in the past 30 years. The so-called Great Compression of incomes seen from the 1930s to the 1970s went into reverse, with the top 1% grabbing the fruits of growth. The rich used their money and their influence to ensure that governments did their bidding. After the Berlin Wall came down, there was no rival model and less need to show restraint. With the arrival of a unipolar world came a return to a more aggressive form of market economics that had not been seen since the early days of industrialisation.

Elliot then quotes the Oxfam report:

“When wealth captures government policymaking, the rules bend to favour the rich, often to the detriment of everyone else. The consequences include the erosion of democratic governance, the pulling apart of social cohesion, and the vanishing of equal opportunities for all. Unless bold political solutions are instituted to curb the influence of wealth on politics, governments will work for the interests of the rich.”

Anyboyd see any sign of one of these fatcat-curbing “bold political solutions” coming down the pike anytime soon? In most countries — including most emphatically the US and UK — the so-called “progressive” or “liberal” factions who one might wistfully expect to wanly offer such solutions long ago sold themselves, happily, giddily, to Big Money. Who dismantled most of the (few) “curbs on capital” that had been instituted during those 40 years of growing income equality (and more widespread prosperity)? Why, Democrat Bill Clinton and Labour’s Tony Blair, who else? Both of these cool, young, swinging liberal-type guys did more to unleash the elite dogs of domination than their conservative predecessors such as Reagan and Thatcher.

And the beat goes on under the even cooler, younger, hipper more liberal progressive-type guy in the White House today. As Elliot notes, one of “the most striking findings of the Oxfam report is this little nugget:

“…In the US, the wealthiest 1% have captured 95% of post-financial crisis growth since 2009 while the bottom 90% have got poorer.”

Yes, this is the real truth of the much-vaunted “recovery” of the U.S. economy under the leadership of Barack Obama: 95 percent of the tepid growth since he took office has gone to the 1 percent. A full 90 percent of the American people have grown poorer. This is because Obama’s carefully crafted, deliberately chosen economic policies have been designed to use the power of the state to skew the nation’s economic, social and political structures toward the super-rich, in some of the most brazen ways imaginable. From the very beginning, the focus has been almost exclusively on “saving” the financial sector that caused the crisis, bailing it out, protecting its privileges, extending its reach and — as the statistics clearly show — enriching it at the expense of every other sector of American society.

Obama’s defenders point to the intransigence of the Republicans as the reason why the rich are getting obscenely richer under Obama while the rest get poorer and the ‘safety net’ and social structures (and infrastructure) of American life are relentlessly degraded. But of course, it is only this intransigence that has saved us so far from the even greater degradation that Obama has been seeking since his first days in office: the “Grand Bargain” that will slash the remaining threads of the safety net and gut all non-military spending in order to “balance the budget” (while maintaining a world-encircling military machine and all-pervasive “security” apparatus).

Over and over, Obama has offered the Republicans savage budget cuts and safety-net gutting that were beyond the wildest dreams of the arch-conservatives of yore — or even, say, Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, or George W. Bush’s administration. But the GOP is now dominated electorally by theocratic extremists who believe any tax rise (even the minuscule bumping Obama meekly suggests as part of his “bargain’) is of the devil, while the corporate interests who let these theocrats front for them have decided to vanquish even the pretense of any restraint on their power once and for all. Their scorched-earth campaign and the zero-cooperation stance of the zealots have blocked Obama’s frantic efforts to destroy the remnants of the New Deal, but one day, they may take the bait — and then you can tell Granny to go dumpster-diving, because the state ain’t gonna feed no useless eaters no more.

Let’s not forget that it was Obama’s choice not to spend the enormous political capital of his first election triumph to rescue the millions of workers and homeowners going under, but to instead put all his energy into “saving” the perpetrators of the global collapse — and pushing a  “health reform” plan created by a right-wing think tank in the 1990s: a wretched piece of  corporate profiteering that cleverly, and completely, co-opted the “left” into defending an elitist boondoggle and effectively killing genuine health care reform for years, perhaps for generations.

No; we are where we are because our elected officials, of both parties, on both sides of the ocean, have long been and still are the prostituted servants of a rarefied, ravening, bellicose elite. The elite have won the war; they’ve imposed a brutal occupation on the vanquished — and now they are withdrawing beyond the clouds, to golden citadels and ‘specialist suites,’ where they can disport themselves in luxury and safety, while looking down, with a satisfied smile, on the billions and billions of worthless suckers they’ve left behind.

Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

Climate skeptics in Congress, and oil and coal industry lobbyists like the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Coal Council (ACC) may be preventing any significant action in the US on reducing this country’s emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, but at the Pentagon, and in the executive suites of the oil industry giants, there is no doubt about the reality of climate change.

As Admiral Robert J. Papp of the US Coast Guard wrote in 2012 in the magazine of the US Naval Institute:

“The world may seem to be growing smaller, but its seas are growing bigger—particularly in the great North, where a widening water-highway beckons both with resources and challenges.”

Admiral Papp didn’t futz around. Without any caveats or bows to corrupted scientists on the payroll of the Koch Brothers, he wrote:

“The Arctic Ocean, in the northern region of the Arctic Circle, is changing from a solid expanse of inaccessible ice fields into a growing navigable sea, attracting increased human activity and unlocking access to vast economic potential and energy resources. In the 35 years since I first saw Kotzebue, Alaska, on the Chukchi Sea as a junior officer, the sea ice has receded from the coast so much that when I returned last year the coastal area was ice-free. The shipping, oil-and-gas, and tourism industries continue to expand with the promise of opportunity and fortune in previously inaccessible areas. Experts estimate that in another 25 years the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free during the summer months.”

Meanwhile, as the Navy plans for an expanded role in the far north [1], oil companies, from ExxonMobil to ARCO, Chevron, Shell, BP, Norway’s Statoil and Russia’s Gazprom, are gearing up to begin drilling for oil and gas in parts of the Arctic Ocean that are already becoming free of ice in summer months, knowing that even in winter, the returned ice sheet will be manageably thin in coming years. (They are also covetously looking to drill in the soon to be ice-free parts of Greenland, and and are even contemplating the prospect of being able to drill for oil in a warmer Antarctica–as though an ice-less or much less ice-bound Antarctica would be a good thing!)

How can executives of these companies, whose scientists are assuring them that there’s big money to be made tapping the vast oil and gas reserves known to lie beneath the shallow Arctic waters now being relieved of their ice cover for the first time in millions of years, be simultaneously lobbying Congress and paying for propaganda campaigns designed to sow doubts among the public about the true climate-change situation? How can Congress and the Obama administration, who know that the Navy is gearing up to patrol and defend a whole new coast line and vast new stretches of heretofore inaccessible territorial waters north of Alaska — even contemplating confrontations and boundary disputes with a newly assertive Canada — be failing to adopt even minimal efforts to slow rampaging climate change by working to significantly limit the burning of fossil fuels in the US?

Yet that is what is happening. A group of 18 environmental organizations which includes organizations like the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the League of Conservation Voters wrote in a Jan. 16 letter to President Obama that his administration’s “all of the above” approach to boosting exploration for more oil, more gas and even increased coal for export, was unacceptable in view of the growing climate change crisis, and said:

“An ‘all of the above’ strategy is a compromise that future generations can’t afford. It fails to prioritize clean energy and solutions that have already begun to replace fossil fuels, revitalize American industry, and save Americans money. It increases environmental injustice while it locks in the extraction of fossil fuels that will inevitably lead to a catastrophic climate future. It threatens our health, our homes, our most sensitive public lands, our oceans and our most precious wild places. Such a policy accelerates development of fuel sources that can negate the important progress you’ve already made on lowering U.S. carbon pollution, and it undermines U.S. credibility in the international community.”

Meanwhile, the API announced that same day that it was launching an ad and lobbying campaign to promote increased gas and oil exploration in the US. This campaign makes the spurious claim that increased use of natural gas instead of oil will help reduce carbon emissions, and argues that for increased economic growth, the US needs to have more energy available.

I called API to ask how the oil industry executives could be, on the one hand, hearing from their own scientists that the Arctic ice cap is vanishing because of raging climate change, while on the other hand they are lobbying against any efforts to limit carbon emissions, and asked, “Are they simply ignoring the evidence, or is it a case of a thirst for near-term profits overriding any concern about the survivability of life on the planet for their own offspring?”

The media relations executive, Brian Straessle, while saying he would try to get me someone to talk to from API (so far nothing on that front), offered as a justification for this seemingly oxymoronic behavior, the claim that US carbon emissions in 2012 had fallen to an 20-year (sic — it’s 18) low “because of a shift to burning natural gas.”

I replied, “Well, I think it was mostly because of reduced economic activity from the long recession, right?” and was met with silence.

The truth is, while cheap natural gas did lead to some shifting by utilities away from coal, which is indeed a much worse producer of carbon dioxide, the bulk of the estimated 3.8 percent decline in carbon emissions in the US in 2012 was the result of continued lower economic activity (which reduced driving miles, air miles, and electricity use per capita) and, significantly, because of efforts, often encouraged by tax rebates or legislative mandates by states and localities, to reduce energy use. Moreover, there are warnings that once natural gas prices rise again, as they inevitably will as the global economy rebounds, utilities will shift back to more coal burning, making the downturn in US carbon emissions a short-lived phenomenon. (Also, there’s the unmentioned impact of leaked methane in the mining and use of gas and oil, which releases into the atmosphere a chemical that is 23 times as potent a global warming agent as CO2.)

The reality, as Pentagon and the oil industry know, is that climate change is progressing with frightening rapidity. Already, sea levels along the Atlantic seaboard have risen 8-10” since the 1930s, forcing places like Miami Beach to engage in costly major projects to stave off their inevitable future as new Atlantises. According to one expert at the University of Florida, Prof. Harold Wanless, increasingly rapid ice melting on Greenland’s 2-mile-thick ice sheet, and evidence that the much larger West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, could mean a devastating 15-foot global sea rise by as early as 2100, instead of the 3-6 foot predictions that are more commonly cited (bad as those would be).

That might be great news for the Navy, but for the rest of us it’s Armageddon.

How long will it take before Washington pols finally stop accepting bribes from the energy industry, and recognizes that this is not a matter of shifting military assets around and racing to exploit for oil reserves in newly ice-free oceans and once ice-covered landmasses, but rather that it is a time for crash measures to try and slow the pace of rising global temperatures?

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

There is one thing that the so-called peace conference on Syria is guaranteed to achieve and that is that when the last speech is made and the delegates leave the hall, the grotesque bloodletting and devastation will continue for the people of Syria. Why? Because for the Obama Administration, the diplomatic process was never intended to bring about a peaceful resolution to the war. Its main purpose was always to affect their main strategic objective – the removal of President Bashir al-Assad from power and the disappearance of Syria as an independent state.

Fidelity to this goal continues to drive U.S. policy. U.S. strategists care little about the fact that, in their quest to oust the Syrian President, they have created an unholy alliance between the U.S. and its Wahhabi allies from Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda as their “boots on the ground.” It is an alliance that ensures that, should the Al-Assad government fall, the Syrian people will either live under totalitarian fundamentalist Wahhabi rule or see their country disappear as a coherent state and into warring factions.

By juxtaposing U.S. rhetoric that expresses concerns for democracy, pluralism and the human rights of the Syrian people with actual U.S. decisions, we see a dramatic illustration of the astonishing hypocrisy of U.S. policies. The Obama Administration understood the scale of human suffering it would unleash in Syria by arming, funding, training and providing political support for the opposition—opposition that it moved from a non-violent protest movement to a violent insurgency, as part of its larger geo-strategic plan for the region.

That is why commitment to regime change, rather than to a peace based on Syrian realities and the needs of the Syrian people, is the price of admission to this week’s conference in Montreux, Switzerland. It is a conference that it would be more accurate to call a ‘war conference’ rather than a ‘peace conference’ due to U.S. Secretary of State Kerry’s insistence on keeping the scope of the conference confined to the terms of the Geneva I communique, which calls for a political transition in Syria.

The Syrian National Coalition is a mirage. Its “Free Syrian Army” has no standing and the most effective fighters are the al-Qaeda linked jihadists armed by the U.S. and the Saudi government. They are now the real power brokers on the ground.

For these fighters, Geneva II is an irrelevant sideshow that has no bearing on them and they have rejected the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition. So who does the Syrian National Coalition represent, when the bulk of the fighters have shifted to al-Qaeda and the other more than 1,000 Islamist rebel groups that between them have 100,000 fighters, all united in their commitment to a post-Assad state in which Sharia, or Islamic Law, will be established throughout Syria?

Yet on January 16, Kerry restated the U.S. position on Geneva 2 “It is about establishing a process essential to the formation of a transition government body — governing body — with full executive powers established by mutual consent,” he told reporters.

The consent of whom? Who assumes power and will a new government represent the aspirations for democracy, civil liberties, workers’ rights, respect for religious and community difference that the “revolution” promised or is Syrian’s future already written from the Libyan experience?

There are now voices inside and outside the Administration saying that the U.S. should abandon the Syrian National Coalition and work instead with the Salafi-Wahhabi fundamentalists who have joined together under the umbrella of the Islamic Front (IF) and are being presented as the “moderate” alternative to the radicalism of al-Qaeda. However, the Syrian people, who have a history of secularism and respect for different religions, have not signed on to a post-Assad society and government ruled by a group that has publically stated its opposition to democracy and intention to establish an Islamic state under Sharia law.

But who cares what the Syrian people want? It does not seem to matter to the U.S. that supporting Salafi-Wahhabi fundamentalism is the antithesis of the justification it gave for supporting the “revolution” against al-Assad. It does not matter because in the end the interests of the Syrian people are of little concern to these policymakers who prioritize U.S. imperialist interests above every other consideration.

In the long annuals of crimes by U.S. and Western imperialism, the slow, protracted destruction of the Syrian state, including the tens of thousands of lives sacrificed, is starting to emerge as one of its most significant crimes, if not in numbers then in terms of scale. It can be listed with crimes like the Christmas season carpet bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 and the millions murdered in Iraq during the period of sanctions and full-blown military attack.

In this era in which war is peace and wars are fought for “humanitarian purposes,” it is hard for many to get to the truth. But one thing is certain—the humanitarian disaster in Syria that was supposed to be the justification for intervention by the U.S. and its allies will continue unabated for the foreseeable future.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and writer. He is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for  the Black Agenda Report. Baraka’s latest publications include contributions to two recently published books “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and “Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral.”