Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby versus Prince Harry and his polo-playing American friends

By David Walsh, wsws.org

Harry on the polo grounds. The stench of decadence follows him everywhere.

Harry Windsor on the polo grounds. The stench of privilege and decadence follows him everywhere.

“Prince Harry rounded off his hugely successful week-long tour of the U.S. today very much in his comfort zone – playing polo. … He was greeted by club founder Peter Brandt [sic] and his model wife, Stephanie Seymour. Brandt, 65, – whose wife is 44 – is an American industrialist and businessman, worth an estimated $2.7 billion.” – Daily Mail, May 15, 2013

“According to the anonymous friend, [Prince] Harry was hoping to see Great Gatsby director Baz Luhrmann, a pal of his father [Prince] Charles, but any Hollywood hobnobbing is forbidden.” – New York Post, May 9, 2013

“Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan ——” After an instant’s hesitation he [Gatsby] added: “the polo player.” …

“I’d a little rather not be the polo player,” said Tom pleasantly, “I’d rather look at all these famous people in —— in oblivion.” The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The visit to America in mid-May by Prince Harry of Wales, third in line of succession to the British throne, coinciding with the release of a new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby(1925), brings into focus a number of issues.

Harry with Brant (grey coat) in Greenwich. Rubbing elbows with old aritos and aping them has been and remains the aspiration of most tycoons.

Harry with Brant (grey coat) in Greenwich. Rubbing elbows with the old nobility and aping them has been and remains the aspiration of most tycoons.

Harry is the younger son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. He is perhaps best, or at least most revealingly, known for wearing a swastika armband and a German Afrika Korps outfit to a fancy dress party in January 2005. The Sun, a British tabloid, published a photograph of the 20-year-old prince under the unflattering headline, “Harry the Nazi.” Four years later, Harry made the headlines again, after referring on a video to a Pakistani member of his British army platoon as “our little Paki friend.”

The prince’s most recent trip to the US had something of the character of an ongoing effort at damage control, after the fiasco of an August 2012 visit to Las Vegas during which Harry was photographed naked while playing a drunken game of strip billiards in a “high roller suite.”

This month’s tour was designed to present Harry as a responsible, caring and sober individual. The visit’s official purpose was to promote the rehabilitation of US and UK troops, “our wounded warriors,” as his private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, explained to the media. Harry also traveled to New Jersey, somewhat incongruously, to view the damage caused by last fall’s Hurricane Sandy, in the company of Governor Chris Christie. During his brief visit to the Jersey Shore, the prince commented sagely, “It’s fantastic American spirit, everyone getting together and making things right.”

The final stop on Harry’s trip, however, is what interests us most at the moment. On Wednesday he took part in a charity polo match in Greenwich, Connecticut, hobnobbing with multimillionaires and “celebrities,” America’s aristocracy of sorts.

Feuding Brants—Peter and Stephanie.

And in an appropriate setting. Greenwich, in affluent Fairfield County, is one of the wealthiest communities in the US. Money magazine listed Greenwich number two on its list of “top-earning towns” in 2012 (it has placed first in other years), with a median family income of $167,502 and a median home price $1,901,029. If you want to take up residence there, “a magnet for hedge funds and boutique financial service companies,” the magazine counseled, “Bring your checkbook and your Swiss bank account.”

The match was played at the exclusive Greenwich Polo Club. According to one media report, “Guests at the polo dined on grilled peppered fillet of beef, served with an arugla and spring vegetable salad and crispy warm panisse, followed by vanilla bean creme brule, mixed berry trifle, Lemon Curd tart with mixed berries and truffle brownie squares.

“Just 400 seats were available in all, however, making it literally the hottest ticket in a town, with dozens of elegantly-coiffured ladies—both young and old—trying to beg, borrow or steal an invite.” (The regular fee for attending the club’s seven seasonal polo matches is $1,000, but tickets for Harry’s match were not offered for sale at any price.)

[pullquote] “America’s multimillionaires and billionaires, and their hangers-on, envy Britain’s ‘legitimate’ royalty and dregs of a nobility, long for such rank themselves and despise the ‘common people’ with as much fervor as the aristocrats of an earlier age.” —F.S. Fitzgerald [/pullquote]

The prince’s host at the polo club was its founder, Peter Brant, who inherited a paper company and is now reputedly worth several billion dollars. He currently owns White Birch Paper, one of the largest pulp and paper companies in North America, and Brant Publications. Brant, the owner of a 53-acre estate in Greenwich, is known for his extensive art collection, worth tens of millions of dollars, and his marriage to former model Stephanie Seymour. The couple filed for divorce in 2010 and their nasty relations were fought out in public, with accusations of drug abuse and art theft filling the air. They later reconciled. Also, in 1990, Brant served 84 days in federal prison for tax evasion.

In February 2010 White Birch sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At the time it employed 1,300 workers at its Stadacona paper mill in Quebec City, Quebec. In January 2012, the company announced it was closing the mill “for good,” after workers rejected a proposal that would have slashed wages and pension benefits. “The union,” noted a CBC report, “said workers over the age of 55 would lose 45 per cent of the value of their pensions under White Birch’s final offer and younger employees would lose 65 per cent.”

The Brant kids with mother. By marrying supermodels some of the rich assure access to good genetics, but the inside remains empty of moral worth.

The Brant kids with mother. By marrying supermodels some of the rich assure access to good genes, but the exterior beauty cannot hide the squalid interior.

The New York Times, in June 2012, dubbed Brant’s sons Peter II and Harry (!) “The New Princes of the City,” in a sycophantic piece in the newspaper’s Fashion & Style section. The piece described the pair as “the well-spoken product of cross-pollination of the Übermenschen. … Despite their youth, the boys are omnipresent on the social scene and staples of Patrick McMullan party photographs. Their every move is tracked on assorted fashion blogs.”

One of these uncrowned princes, Peter, made his way into the news in November 2012 because of a text he sent to a friend, Andrew Warren, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s reelection. The conversation went like this, reported the Greenwich Time :

“Guess were [sic] poor now,” grouses Warren.

“I have a contingency plan,” Brant replies. “Kill Obama hahaha.”

Warren then wrote: “HAHA well Atleast (sic) women have rights. Oh wait I don’t care.”

Brant replied: “Hahahaahaha exactly.”

Needless to say, neither Brant nor Warren were run in for making terrorist threats.

Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby come into the story of this sordid crowd through the following connections.

First, it was intriguing to learn that the New York Post considers Baz Luhrmann, the Australian-born director, “a pal” of Harry’s father, Prince Charles, and that the young prince hoped to meet up with the filmmaker while in the US. Charles made a well-publicized appearance at the premiere of Luhrmann’s dreadful Moulin Rouge (2001).

It could be proven, and it would not take much effort, that no one enjoying the personal acquaintance of a member of the British royal family has any business tackling Fitzgerald’s novel, which expresses a thorough-going disgust for the idle rich.

One of racketeer Jay Gatsby’s efforts to reinvent himself as a man of wealth and breeding involves his brief period at Oxford and a photograph he always carries. The photo, Gatsby explains, “was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster.”

The narrator continues: “It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger–with a cricket bat in his hand.” The novel hardly has to spell out what the author thinks of the Earl of Dorcaster and his parasitic ilk.

Polo, at which both Prince Harry and Brant apparently excel, is an important social motif in Gatsby. The game is used as something of a synonym for the uselessness and worthlessness of the old moneyed classes and is closely identified with the book’s vilest figure, Tom Buchanan.

The novel’s opening chapter observes that Buchanan’s family “were enormously wealthy … but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.”

Describing Tom and his wife Daisy, the book goes on: “They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.” Wonderful phrase: “Wherever people played polo and were rich together”!

In Chapter Four, Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby’s extravagant parties and the host, in a subtle effort to humiliate Buchanan, as he is in love with the man’s wife and has been for five years, insists on introducing his rival in the manner noted at the top of this article, as “the polo player.” This is a not so subtle means of presenting Tom as a mere idler.

Catching on to the barb, Buchanan tries to reject the appellation. “‘Oh no,’ objected Tom quickly, ‘not me.’ But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby, for Tom remained ‘the polo player’ for the rest of the evening.”

Fitzgerald was fascinated by the very rich throughout his life, and it would be false to suggest that his attitude was free from ambiguities. However, when he was clear- and cold-eyed, no American author has ever written so directly, thoughtfully and unsparingly about the wealthy.

Famously, in The Rich Boy (1926), he wrote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” The narrator goes on to observe that the only way he can describe his protagonist, the rich boy of the title, “is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view.”

In 1938, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter: “That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton … I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.”

In her autobiographical College of One, Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s companion for the last several years of his life, recalls that “Scott’s library contained two large volumes of [Marx’s] Das Kapital .” Marx’s comment about “The unity of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shopkeepers, protectionists and free traders, government and opposition, priest and free thinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry, For the Salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society,” elicited from Fitzgerald: “Grand prose.”

Graham further notes that the writer “was always so vehemently on the side of the poor and oppressed. He detested people like [heiresses] Barbara Hutton, [Mary] Woolworth Donahue, and especially business tycoons. ‘I don’t know any businessman I’d want to meet in the next world—if there is a next world,’ said Scott.”

It is clear what Fitzgerald would have thought of “Harry the Nazi” and Mr. Brant “the polo player.” And it is improbable he would have had much time either for Luhrmann, a friend of the man next in line to become king of England.

As for the ever-increasing obsession of the super-rich in America with British royalty, this has unmistakable social roots, as we noted in December 2012: “The United States is ruled today by a financial-corporate aristocracy, with infinitely more in common with George III and Jefferson Davis than with [Tom] Paine, [Thomas] Jefferson, [Abraham] Lincoln, the abolitionists, [Mark] Twain and any progressive figure in US history. …

“America’s multimillionaires and billionaires, and their hangers-on, envy Britain’s ‘legitimate’ royalty and dregs of a nobility, long for such rank themselves and despise the ‘common people’ with as much fervor as the aristocrats of an earlier age.”

Hence, the intermingling in Greenwich of the human waste of the two countries.

DAVID WALSH, wsws.org’s film critic, is one of the most astute cinema and culture commentators in the US.

BOOKS: What Academic Freedom?

by David Rosen, THE BROOKLYN RAIL

Marjorie Heins
Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom and the Anti-Communist Purge
(New York University Press, 2013)

Today, we take the concept of “academic freedom” for granted. In February 2013, city officials and Zionist groups sought to prevent a talk at Brooklyn College about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

Mayor Bloomberg denounced efforts to prevent the talk in no uncertain terms: “If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea,” Bloomberg said at a press conference. In the face of the mayor’s rant, the college’s president, Karen L. Gould, held firm and the talk took place.

A half-century earlier it was a very different climate. The then-president of Brooklyn College, Harry D. Gideonse, believed he was fighting a just war against communism. He stripped professors of tenure, fired instructors and employees, and barred meetings of “un-Americans” on campus. For him, like many other elected officials and education administrators, the key question was simple: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

Marjorie Heins’s latest book, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom and the Anti-Communist Purge, sheds light on how the so-called second Red Scare played out within the educational system, particularly at New York City colleges and public schools. Heins, a civil liberties attorney and academic, heads the Free Expression Policy Project. Her book’s title comes from Justice Felix Frankfurter who, in a 1952 Supreme Court case, Wieman v. Updegraff, wrote that teachers were “the priests of our democracy” because their task is “to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens.”

Following World War I, the U.S. witnessed the first Red Scare, one marked by the Palmer Raids and the deportation of about 500 “aliens,” including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In the wake of World War II and the cold war, the demand for loyalty reached unprecedented levels. This was the era of Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Hollywood 10 trials. The Scare was especially virulent in New York.

In 1947, the Labor Management Act (better known as the Taft-Hartley) law was adopted, requiring federal employees and members of labor unions covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to sign a loyalty oath. The oath swore union members to fidelity to the U.S. government and declared that they were not members of a group on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. Failure to comply could lead to the union’s decertification and the union member’s dismissal. Neither First nor Fifth Amendment protections were afforded those accused of being communists. By 1956, 42 states and 2,000 county and city governments had adopted similar provisions. Heins details how the law was implemented with a vengeance in New York.

Loyalty oaths have a long and disquieting history in the U.S. As Heins explains, “they kept resurfacing, especially in times of political uncertainty.” Such “uncertainty” marked the second Red Scare—as well as the Civil War, World War I, and the Depression, periods during which both federal and state/local officials used oaths to buttress the call for patriotism.

In 1949, New York state legislators adopted the Feinberg Law to block “subversive propaganda” from being “disseminated among children in their tender years.” It required all local boards of education to dismiss any teacher having committed “treasonable or seditious acts or utterances” or for belonging to an organization advocating the overthrow of the government by “force, violence or any unlawful means.” Over 1,000 teachers were targeted. The Act was not found unconstitutional until 1967.

New York City reinforced state provisions with its very onerous section 903 of the City Charter. It stated that the Board of Education could fire anyone for “insubordination” or for refusing to answer questions pertaining to one’s political beliefs, thus prohibiting employees from seeking protection against self-incrimination. Many simply resigned to avoid the humiliation of a very public redbaiting campaign.

Heins’s book is a story in two parts. One part is a history of the great American fear, the legal and political anti-communist tyranny of the cold war decades; the other story is that of the human response to such fear, including the remarkable stories of educators who fought injustice, including Irving Adler, Oscar Shaftel, Vera Shlakman, George Starbuck, and Harry Keyishian.

The Warren Court (1953-1969), most remembered for its 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, also brought change with regard to loyalty oaths and educators. On June 17, 1957, a day some labeled “Red Monday,” the Court ruled against loyalty oaths in four cases. These decisions marked the turning point in the anti-communist hysteria gripping the nation. As Justice Earl Warren wrote, “To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our nation.”

Heins is a cautious analyst, knowing that the freedoms extended by the Warren Court could be pulled back by later decisions, especially given the strict conservatives who have been appointed by Republican presidents. She concludes her valuable study detailing how, over the last half-century, academic freedom continues to be challenged by local officials. Most remarkable, Heins notes, was that “post-9/11 censorship was not nearly as pervasive and deeply rooted as the anti-subversive purges of the 1950s.” Except for a few isolated incidents in which local officials assailed anti-war teach-ins, educators were not targeted in post-9/11 “anti-terrorism” loyalty campaigns.

Priests of Our Democracy, along with Clarence Taylor’s complementary study, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (Columbia, 2011), serve as a reminder that Americans can’t take First Amendment rights for granted. Both authors document how academic freedom and other forms of expression remain terrains of political conflict.

About the Author

DAVID ROSEN is author of Sex Scandal America: Politics & the Ritual of Public Shaming, writes the Media Current blog for Filmmaker, and regularly contributes to AlterNet, CounterPunch, and the Huffington Post. Check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com. He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.

5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society

AlterNet [1] / By Paul Buchheit [2]

Unregulated capitalism is out of control. Like a cancer [3], it has become “something evil or malignant that spreads destructively,” with tumors growing in several once-healthy parts of the American body.

1. Attacking the Hungry

The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them. The average Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) [4] recipient received about $1,500 for food for the entire year. At least ten Americans each made that much in under ten seconds from their investment gains in 2012 [5], about the time it took each one to fluff his pillow and roll over in bed.

Under capitalism, fortunes accrue to a few while 47 million [6] Americans, or one out of seven, need food assistance [7]. Almost half of the hungry are children [8]. For every food bank we had in 1980 [9], we now have 200.

Yet just 20 people made more from their investment income in one year [5] than the entire 2011 food assistance budget [10]. That’s $73 billion, taxed at the capital gains rate. Meanwhile, President Obama couldn’t get the $1 billion per year he needed to improve childhood nutrition [9]in schools.

Most recently, the House proposed a farm bill [11] that would cut another $2 billion a year from the food stamps account.

2. Suffocating the Students

The corporate style of capitalism allows young college graduates, the bright hope of the future, to work in minimum wage positions while carrying an average of $26,000 [12] in student loans, which accumulated because tuition rose ten times faster [13] than the cost of living, and which now come with interest rates [14] many times higher than the banks pay.

The great majority of pre-recession jobs have been replaced, if they’ve come back at all, aslow-wage [15] jobs in food service and retail. The number of college grads working for minimum wage has doubled [16] in five years. They may be the ‘fortunate’ ones. In 2011, about 360,000 [17]Americans holding advanced degrees were on food stamps or some other form of public assistance. Many of them are homeless [18].

Jobless and frustrated young Americans trusted the system, and it failed them. Yet free enterprise entrepreneurs hustle [19] them for even more college, in order to extract federal loan money, which goes right to the schools to pay administrative salaries.

Defenders of capitalism say hard work will ensure success. At a recent jobs hearing [20] in Washington, only one Congressman bothered to show up.

3. Weakening the Children

The disease has been spreading since the 1960s, when life expectancy [21] began to decrease along with increasing health care costs. Capitalism has betrayed our children. A UNICEF study [22] places the U.S. 22nd out of 24 OECD countries in “children’s health and well-being.”

Child poverty, perhaps the main cause of their health problems, is up 50% [23] since 1973, with the rate for minorities three times that for white children.

Our global poverty ranking is shameful. Despite having the second-highest average income for children among the 30 OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 27th out of 30 for child poverty [24](percentage of children living in households that are below 50% of the median income).

4. Depleting the Taxpayers

The body of our society has been drained of its vital juices by tax avoidance. Loopholes and exemptions cost the public about a trillion dollars [25] a year, and underreported [26] income costs another $450 billion. The total is much more than the cost of our stable but always threatened Social Security program.

Since the recession, Fortune 500 corporations have cut [27] their tax payments in half, even though their profits have doubled in less than ten years.

Finally, it is estimated [28] that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed, with up to40% [29] owned by Americans. U.S. PIRG [30] estimates that the average taxpayer in 2012 paid an extra $1,026 in taxes to make up for tax havens by corporations and wealthy individuals. The average small business paid $3,067.

5 .Paralyzing the Voters

Corporations and Congress are a carcinogenic mix. Voters are rendered useless, like withering organs, as all the attention is given to the greedy mass of nutrient-taking super-rich individuals and companies.

A vast majority of Americans want background checks [31] on guns, an emphasis [32] on clean energy [33], job stimulus [34] programs, taxes on the rich [35], and an uncut Social Security [36] program. Yet Congress only hears the ka-ching of campaign contributions. Of the 435 House elections [37] in 2004, 95% of them were won by the candidates who outspent their opponents.

Healing

There’s much more to the sickness, like the workplace explosions and fires triggered by cost-cutting measures, banks preying [38] on working people, the environmental [39] destruction caused by oil companies [40] and herbicide [41] manufacturers, attempts [42] to profit [43] from global warming, the middle class collapse caused by corporations transferring jobs overseas and then calling themselves multi-nationals to avoid allegiance to the country that supported their growth. Et cetera, et cetera.

This all allows a small number of people to make most of the money. These are the people who demand ‘freedom’ at the first hint of regulation.

The post-WW2 American body began to deteriorate around the time of Milton Friedman, author of one of the all-time economic inaccuracies: “The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people.” For forty years the sickness caused by his teaching has spread, at first without pronounced symptoms, but now in an out-of-control process that threatens to incapacitate the better part of America. A revolutionary medicine may be the only hope for recovery. A revolution, that is, of co-ops and small farms and local currencies and solar panels on the rooftops.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-ways-raw-unregulated-capitalism-acting-cancer-american-society

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/paul-buchheit
[3] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cancer
[4] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1269
[5] http://www.usagainstgreed.org/Fortune400_2011-12.xls
[6] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3239
[7] http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/884525/err141.pdf
[8] http://www.fns.usda.gov/Ora/menu/Published/SNAP/FILES/Participation/2011Characteristics.pdf
[9] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/09
[10] http://www.obpa.usda.gov/budsum/FY13budsum.pdf
[11] http://www.capitalpress.com/content/jh-farm-bill-details-042913
[12] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/09/26/a-record-one-in-five-households-now-owe-student-loan-debt/
[13] http://www.deltacostproject.org/pdfs/Delta_Not_Your_Moms_Crisis.pdf
[14] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-15/how-obama-wants-to-change-student-loan-interest-rates
[15] http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Job_Creation/LowWageRecovery2012.pdf?nocdn=1
[16] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/03/30/number-of-the-week-college-grads-in-minimum-wage-jobs/
[17] http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/
[18] http://www.alternet.org/college-students-are-going-homeless-and-hungry-and-corporate-america-trying-exploit-them?paging=off
[19] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177064219731.htm
[20] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/lawmaker-unemployment-hearing_n_3148362.html
[21] http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/oecdhealthdata2012-frequentlyrequesteddata.htm
[22] http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc9_eng.pdf
[23] http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/soac-2012-handbook.pdf
[24] http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/4/43570328.pdf
[25] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/412404-Tax-Expenditure-Trends.pdf
[26] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/irs-estimate-17-percent-taxes-204637410.html
[27] http://www.payupnow.org/CorpTaxByYear.xls
[28] http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf
[29] http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Inequality_120722_You_dont_know_the_half_of_it.pdf
[30] http://www.uspirg.org/news/usp/offshore-tax-havens-cost-average-taxpayer-1026-year-small-businesses-3067
[31] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/04/03/90-percent-of-americans-want-expanded-background-checks-on-guns-why-isnt-this-a-political-slam-dunk/
[32] http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-country-one-worlds-largest-economies-ditching-fossil-fuels?paging=off
[33] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161519/americans-emphasis-solar-wind-natural-gas.aspx
[34] http://www.gallup.com/poll/158834/economy-entitlements-iran-americans-top-priorities.aspx
[35] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/taxing-the-rich-poll_n_2203400.html
[36] http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/battleground-poll-hike-taxes-on-the-rich-84824.html
[37] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2004/11/2004-election-outcome-money-wi.html
[38] http://www.alternet.org/economy/rich-have-gained-56-trillion-recovery-while-rest-us-have-lost-669-billion?paging=off
[39] http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full
[40] http://itsoureconomy.us/2013/02/oil-sands-mining-uses-up-almost-as-much-energy-as-it-produces/
[41] http://www.biosafety-info.net/article.php?aid=267
[42] http://www.alternet.org/environment/cynical-companies-are-already-scheming-how-getting-rich-global-warming?paging=off
[43] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming
[44] http://www.alternet.org/tags/capitalism
[45] http://www.alternet.org/tags/us-0
[46] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

The Radical Center and Armed Revolution

A Challenge for the Left

by ROB URIE

The liberals —especially bourgeois feminists—are already salivating at the prospect of a Hillary presidency. That’s the kind of “center” that constitutes the worst obstacle to making progress on the left.

Following release of the results of a recent Fairleigh Dickinson University poll showing 29% of registered voters in the U.S. believe armed revolution to ‘protect liberties’ may be necessary the self-appointed political ‘center’ went into full conniption in defense of the established order. Visions of shotgun wielding Tea Partiers were trotted out, racists no doubt, storming the Capitol to roll back the radical progress President Barack Obama and a blameless Congress have made to save ‘our fledgling democracy’ from the predations of empire, the corrupting influence of money in politics, the growing and conspicuous divide between haves and have-nots, the murderous militarism of the war industry and the oppressive machinations of a militarized police. Accurate descriptions of official policies to which the citizenry might legitimately object were prominent in their absence.

Framed as reaction to the ascendance of America’s first black President and the ‘liberal agenda’ he studiously paid lip service to while factually acting in the service of his rich campaign contributors and the corporations they own, missing was where this ‘movement’ fits into recent American history. On the political right the ‘Militia’ movement of armed defenders of American ‘liberties’ arose in the mid-1990s. The economic context was a prior decade of de-industrialization of the heartland attributable to Federal Reserve efforts to ‘tame’ inflation (high interest rates raised the value of the U.S. dollar making industrial exports uncompetitive), military cuts following the end of the Cold War that disproportionately affected the rural middle class and the savage, largely gratuitous mass layoffs by corporate America that were the fashion between 1990 – 1995. While poorly understood and often even more poorly articulated at the time, the ‘New World Order’ against which the Militias were preparing to fight was a rough proxy for the factually ascendant plutocracy now patron and sole beneficiary of official Washington policy.

[pullquote] In a masterful propaganda stroke, the decades-long corporate project of eviscerating the real left in the United States has produced a rump political spectrum in which status quo liberals have been impudently paraded as “left,” thereby damning in the minds of most Americans what the actual left truly represents, and creating a gigantic political opportunity for the ultra Right. Mind you, there was never anything accidental about the switcheroo.—The Editors [/pullquote]

Unmentioned out of apparent residual embarrassment are left wing revolutionaries, a/k/a ‘terrorists,’ long known to enthusiastically object to economic predation, historical and current police violence against their persons, colleagues, families and communities, wanton militarism in the interests of imperial capital and the class predations of reigning plutocracies—all the policies good liberals support when a credentialed guy in a $3,000 suit explains in liberal-speak the policies of the radical right are ‘liberal.’ To the ongoing humiliation of said professional left, South American Marxists / Leninists and homegrown anarcho-collectivists impede, or at least have in the not so distant past, their corporate fund raising and networking efforts at the annual con-fabs held at five-star hotels in exotic locales where they no doubt enthusiastically discuss the locale and menu of the next year’s con-fab. As anyone receiving a paycheck from the responsible left could tell you, ‘working within the system’ is the only way to ‘get a seat at the table.’

The basis of the current charge these would-be revolutionaries are from the radical right is that over twice as many registered Republicans (44%) as Democrats (18%) claim to be ready to take up arms (27% of Independents join them). Having apparently declined to ask the economic status of the respondents, economic class was pre-determined to be irrelevant to both the poll questions and liberal discussion of them. Beyond this, it seems a reasonable assumption a racist, reactionary right composes some proportion of those ready to take up arms, just as it is represented in the police forces of major U.S. cities, in the military, in senior management positions in large corporations, is regularly welcomed at White House functions and serves on the Boards of Directors of prominent cultural institutions. While the apparent liberal fear is of heavily armed trailer park rednecks swilling beer while trying to reclaim the Ku Klux Klan from the FBI and local police forces, the facts of the existing political economy suggest the revolution of the radical right was won some decades past. So what exactly is it bourgeois commentators are defending?

The ‘centrist’ tale told is of a once dominant culture displaced by history that is now desperate to reclaim its right– the ‘Leave it to Beaver’ world of white privilege being ‘stolen’ by Spanish speaking immigrants, Affirmative Action receiving ‘minorities,’ and feckless academics promoting the interests of ‘others’ over their own heritage and culture. The tale not being told is of a political economy re-dedicated some decades back to capitalist accumulation at any cost that has resulted in wildly skewed income distribution, stagnant incomes for most of the population, regular and large scale unemployment, widespread and increasing economic insecurity, predation by large corporations now exempted from laws and accountability, the diminishment of public institutions and a national state wholly dedicated to serving the tiny elite who now control the country. The liberal tale needn’t be wrong to be irrelevant— while the ‘feelings’ of racist right-wing reactionaries may be strong; there is little possibility they would have actual effect without the wholesale economic dispossession now under way.

One aspect missing in the debate over gun control– the back-story of the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, is gun control advocates only look at the civilian side of the issue. Coincident in recent decades with increasing concentration of political-economic power has been the militarization of the police; the massive build out of incarceration and prisons as capitalist enterprises, the erosion of legal protections from illegitimate state and commercial power, the growth of intrusive surveillance technologies and a shift to formal race and class-based strategies of police repression. On the one hand gun control advocates argue the fear of growing state power is lunatic paranoia while on the other there is no apparent interest on their part in disarming the increasingly militarized state against who the claims of outsized power are being made. This contradiction, combined with the articulated fear of an ideological right accompanied by implicit acceptance of the institutional right, points to the class basis for liberal fears. While ideological right-wing reactionaries are the perceived threat to bourgeois liberals, the facts of daily existence posed by institutional racism, the ‘legal status’ machinations used to exploit the manufactured immigrant underclass, and the rapidly and visibly growing class divide supported by state policies and enforced with state power, affect the lives of more people far more dramatically.

Put another way, it is the reaction of the growing underclass bourgeois liberals fear, not the diminishing material conditions faced by it. But the diminishing conditions are not fact of nature, but of policy. In but one example, Mr. Obama’s assorted efforts to solve the ‘foreclosure crisis’ his administration inherited were unwaveringly designed to screw ordinary citizens, both black and white, for the benefit of outlaw banks. Even so, residual anger over the bank bailouts would have diminished if wages and employment had recovered from depression levels. But wages for most Americans remain well below where they were six years ago and unemployment and underemployment remain at historically high levels. Were this not coincident with the full restoration of the fortunes of the reigning plutocracy at the expense of the broad citizenry these facts could be attributed to ignorance of basic economics on the part of establishment Washington. But this is not the case. The fortunes of the people ‘who matter’ were effectively restored—the economic mechanics for doing so are understood. It is entirely reasonable to conclude Mr. Obama and liberal Democrats (and Republicans) are tools of a predator class not just indifferent to the well being of most Americans, but one that actively benefits at their expense.

Congressional Republicans may more publicly promote economic and political predation under the guise of libertarian ‘freedom,’ but it is Democrats since President Bill Clinton (Jimmy Carter actually) who have more effectively promoted them. And therein lies at least part of the reason for current political angst. Beginning in 2006 when the Democrat majority was returned to Congress to the election of ‘liberal’ Democrat Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008, the American electorate offered a rebuke of the murderous overreach and increasing plutocratic control of the George W. Bush era. And with it, the opportunity arose, in theory at least, to repudiate those excesses and chart a different course for the nation. Congressional Democrats immediately abdicated leadership under the conspicuous lie they needed a super majority to govern and Barack Obama set about codifying the most far reaching abuses of governmental power established by the Bush administration while demonstrating unwavering fealty to the reigning plutocracy. By describing his own policies as ‘moderate Republican’ Mr. Obama made it clear the electoral choice is between degrees of Republican—in contemporary terms the establishment Party of the radical right. When the possibility of affecting political change through the ballot box is removed, no other choice remains but to use other means to do so.

On a number of specific policy issues the feared non-establishment right may be inarticulate but may still have a point. By putting forward a conspicuously inadequate economic stimulus program when he entered office Mr. Obama ‘proved’ to a citizenry more concerned with just getting by than with the arcana of macroeconomic debates that Keynesian remedies don’t work. (Mr. Obama was loudly and repeatedly warned of this outcome at the time). Mr. Obama’s health care program forces financially strapped citizens to buy expensive private health insurance from for-profit companies with little redress for legitimate claims denied and with unchanged probability of economic ruin from exorbitant health care costs. To the Tea Party point, when associated with the increased militarization of the police, mass incarceration and diminished civil rights, this joining of state and corporate interests satisfies Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the ‘corporate state.’ And in contrast to educated, connected, bourgeois liberals, those on the receiving end of illegitimate searches, arrests and incarceration, illegitimate foreclosures, predatory student loans from scam private educators and various and sundry state and commercial predations, have no other choice but to act collectively outside of ‘official’ channels if recourse is to be had. In other words, the question of whether the existing order is worth maintaining depends very much on where one exists within it.

The remaining charge is the existing political order represents the democratically chosen will of the citizenry and efforts to change it outside of (highly controlled) elections are necessarily to force the wishes of an aggressive minority onto the broader citizenry. But the consistent distance between poll results of Americans asked what policies they favor and official government policies belies this claim. From bank bailouts to environmental policies to government works programs to raising taxes on the wealthy to increased funding for education and social insurance, Americans are consistently far to the left of official Washington policy. And the direction of this distance is important—the conceit that calls for radical change are from a loutish right contradicts the reality the greatest distance between actual and desired policy is from the left.

The tactic of official Washington is to misrepresent policies as being in the broader interest while making largely empty gestures on social issues like gay rights. And even this formulation ignores the highly developed technologies for manufacturing consent by ‘private’ media acting for private interests under the guise of faux ‘adversarial’ politics by the one Party state. Far from repudiating George W. Bush’s extra-legal grab of executive power, Democrat Barack Obama has achieved the most radical extensions of it in American history. And as liberals railed at Mr. Bush’s kowtowing to his wealthy constituents, it is this same constituency that is the sole beneficiary of Mr. Obama’s time in office. These are specifically, visibly and unequivocally the policies of the radical right integrated into Western political institutions by ‘both’ political parties over the last forty years. And from those who bothered to ask, this is not the will of the people that is being represented. So again, what is it that liberals are defending?

It is a virtual certainty professional liberals and progressives were sitting behind their office desks only last year when the NYPD (New York Police Department) and Oakland police were beating the crap out of Occupy, firing projectiles into faces at point blank range and parking their motorcycles on the legs of NLG (National Lawyers Guild) observers for daring to protest the ‘liberal’ state / plutocrat nexus. This was in marked contrast to Federal and local police respect for the ‘rights’ of Tea Partiers to carry loaded weapons at rallies for their political ‘opposition.’ FBI and local police infiltration of Occupy, including illegal ‘pre-emptive’ kidnappings and all manner of dirty tricks, was immediate, intense and had the desired effect of creating paranoia and mistrust. And those efforts tie historically to the COINTELPRO facilitated murders of black leaders and radical disruption of the legal and constitutionally ‘protected’ rights of (real) leftist and anti-war organizations trying to affect substantive political change in the 1960s and early 1970s. But the grassroots Tea Partiers aren’t responsible for the different treatment they received– the institutions of the radical right in Federal and state government working in the interests of their ruling class patrons are.

By framing the Fairleigh Dickinson poll results in Democrat / Republican and left / right terms bourgeois liberals left unstated, purposely or not, the joined class interests that are at a minimum a relevant aspect of widespread political disaffection. Ironically, Wall Street is well ahead of the professional left in understanding this—any regular reader of the financial press would find many titans of finance incredulous at how narrow, and potentially politically destabilizing, the class interest represented by official Washington, and in particular by corporate Democrats, has become. And straightforwardly, domestic victims of Washington’s plutocrat-friendly policies of recent decades, the unemployed, underemployed, fraudulently indebted, illegitimately foreclosed upon, impoverished and fraudulently arrested and incarcerated, weren’t victimized based on major political Party affiliation– they were victimized based on class. Put another way, middle and lower class Tea Partiers may have more interests in common with inner city socialists, communists, anarcho-collectivists and undocumented immigrants than they have with wealthy Republican patrons of the Tea Party. That this possibility hasn’t already been offered to them is a challenge for the left. And likewise, through unwavering support for corporate Democrats, even if from near-total ignorance of their actual policies, liberals and the bourgeois left promote the interests of the very rich against all who aren’t, including in most cases their own.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York

Death toll in Bangladesh factory collapse reaches 950

By Sarath Kumara and Wimal Perera , wsws.org
UPDATE: Rescuers now put the figure at 1127 victims.

The Rana Plaza tragedy: totally avoidable in a compassionate and well governed world. The site of the garment factory building collapse is in Savar, Bangladesh.

The death toll of the Savar building collapse reached 950 by Thursday evening, refuting earlier claims of the Bangladesh government and business organisations, which put the number of deaths at a lower figure.

Press reports indicated 121 decomposed bodies were retrieved from the wreck of the Savar building by noon on the 16th day after the disaster. It is feared that the death toll will increase further as the debris continues to be cleared.

Previous official estimates held that as there were fewer than 3,200 workers in the building at the time of the collapse on April 24, with 2,437 rescued, the death toll would be less than 763. This underscores that the figures published by the authorities after the disaster were unreliable.

The collapsed eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar near Dhaka had housed five garment factories. The factory owners ordered workers into the building, despite their objections due to serious, visible cracks noted in the building on April 23. Thousands of workers were injured in the disaster, many critically, and hundreds will suffer permanent disability.

REALITY BEHIND THE GLITZ

Heidi Klum and her fellow judges on the wildly successful reality show, Project Runway. Any comments on this catastrophe? Better still, are they going to do anything about it?

Heidi Klum and fellow judges on her wildly successful high fashion reality show, Project Runway. Any comments on this catastrophe? Better still, are they going to do anything about it? Can such people ever do anything about this kind of systemic evil in which they’re among the few lucky ones who profit obscenely from the poverty of others?

As body parts are retrieved from the collapsed multi-story building, mass anger with the political establishment has deepened. The fact that no survivors have been found since heavy cranes began clearing debris have heightened relatives’ concerns that these operations will end the chances of rescuing remaining survivors.

Hundreds of surviving workers and their relatives staged a protest on Tuesday near Savar bus terminal and blocked the Dhaka-Aricha highway for two hours, demanding wages and other benefits.

Workers from the Rana Plaza building are charging that, after the collapse of their plant, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) is now also violating compensation agreements. The BGMEA is only ready to give a pittance to the survivors: one month’s salary.

The Daily Star cited a worker who said, “We heard they [BGMEA] were going to pay only one month’s salary. But we want four months’ pay and other perks, as per the rules.”

Another worker, Shipu Begum, explained: “We lost many colleagues, while most of the injured will not be able to bear their treatment expenditure with a month’s salary.”

In another devastating example of the deadly conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories, a factory fire at Tung Hai Sweater killed eight on Wednesday night—including Managing Director Mahbubur Rahman, Deputy Inspector General of Police Z.M. Monzur Morshed, and Sohel Mostafa Swapan, a regional leader of the Jubo League, the ruling Awami League’s youth movement.

[pullquote] We wonder what passes through the minds of people deeply involved in the surreally pampered glitzy world of high fashion as they learn about these grotesque corporate crimes.[/pullquote]

It is not clear what these officials were doing at the factory, though Reuters wrote that their presence highlighted the “entanglement” between higher officials and big business in Bangladesh.

Because the factory was closed at 11 p.m. when the blaze took place, workers were not on the premises. Reuters reported that this company is a large one, running two factories employing 7,000 workers.

Workers at the Rana Plaza building who survived after being trapped in the rubble have been traumatized, with some rescued only after spending four days under the debris. Describing her experience, Laboni, rescued after 36 hours, said: “A pillar had fallen on my left arm. Blood was coming out of my head, eyes and nose.” One of her friends, Dipa Patra, died after a big piece of concrete fell on her chest.

Laboni, 22, who lost her left hand, still screams, “Get me out of the building. It terrifies me,” when someone tries to wake her. She told the Daily Star: “My life is ruined … I don’t want to see the life of any other man or woman ruined like mine.”

“Whenever we need to wake her up … she springs out of her bed, scared and stupefied,” said her father.

There is no rehabilitation program for the partially disabled, however. What the government and business organizations are interested in is to re-start the garment factories, which account for 80 percent of the country’s exports.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Italian retailer Benetton’s CEO Biagio Chiarolanza admitted on Wednesday that his firm had had shirts made for it at the Rana Plaza building, something Benetton initially denied. In a devastating indictment of the conditions his firm and other major international clothing retailers impose on garment workers, Chiarolanza admitted: “The wages in Bangladesh are an act of cruelty. Women cannot support their families on $40 a month.”

He cynically added, “I can assure everyone that Benetton has always paid special attention to the workers condition, and the environment in which they operate. I believe our long-standing commitment to social issues speaks for itself.”

With several Western retailers threatening to withdraw their operations from the country to prevent the exposure of their connections with sweatshops, the Bangladeshi government is desperate. On Wednesday it temporarily shut down 18 garment factories—16 in Dhaka and two in Chittagong.

Textiles and Jute Minister Abdul Latif Siddiqui tried to portray the action as part of cleaning up of operations “deemed to be dangerous.” However, with more than 5,400 factories in this sector in Bangladesh, in which unsafe and unhealthy conditions are common, this measure is for show.

In Dhaka, the 16 factories ordered to close were part of a group of 32 that Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments (DIFE) ordered shut because of faults that pose dangers to the workers. But DIFE officials could not confirm what happened with the remaining factories, the Daily Star reported on Thursday.

Business groups protested even these cosmetic gestures. The BGMEA and the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) expressed concern over the shutdown in a meeting with the prime minister on Wednesday. Former FBCCI president A.K. Azad said: “Firstly, we went to the PM’s residence, and being instructed, we met Textiles and Jute Minister Abdul Latif Siddiqui at his residence and expressed our concern.”

The authors work for the world socialist web site, an information resource of the Social Equality Party.