It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Iraq History
Iraq three years later: A glance back -- from the 19th century until today
Laurie King-Irani, Electronic Iraq (22 March 2006)
"Although Iraq is often described as separable into three distinct geographic and ethno-religious zones, the actual sociopolitical situation on the ground has always been more complex and heterogeneous due to extensive intermarriage, joint entrepreneurial projects, and consecutive waves of rural-to-urban migration over the last century. It is neither possible nor useful to correlate Iraq’s ethno-religious diversity with geography, class, or political ideology. Identity categories are not fixed, constant, and inevitable, but responsive to and shaped by administrative contexts of authority, resource allocation, and the codification of rights and duties. Apparently, no one told the Bush Administration about this basic anthropological tenet." An historical and anthropological overview of Iraq's history and current crises by Laurie King-Irani, an Electronic Iraq co-founder and social anthropologist.
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No Free Speech Here
He says that Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette who opposes him is a liar. The DFO are liars, and the Inuit are liars.
He lies in a press conference when he tells reporters that this isn't about the Inuit hunt. Then on Mike Duffy Live he brags that his Sea Shepard society have gotten quotas imposed on native seal hunting around the world. And of course he wants it to stop. He lies when he says they use the White Coat seal photos for propaganda PR cause they are not allowed to photograph other seals.
Paul McCartney was on the ice with both new born white coats and more mature baby seals, and for propaganda purposes he was photographed with the white coats.
Mr. Watson called the seal hunt "barbarous," saying he has witnessed seals kicked in the face and skinned alive, something Ottawa insist does not take place.
Sure that was thirty years ago when the hunt began. When Greenpeace and the Sealers were cooperating, trying to only reduce the quota's. When the Green NGO's were being reasonable. Now they want a complete ban. period. No quota's not even on Inuit hunts.
Which is why Paul Watson and Bridgette Bardot denied these folks their right to be heard.
Outside the hotel, a group of high school students from Nunavut, some wearing seal boots, demonstrated. They banged drums and waved placards with the words "seals are part of our economy." They were told they were not allowed in.
Nunavut's Education Minister, Edward Picco, who was in Ottawa for meetings, joined the students.
"Students want to show there is another side to the issue," he said, wearing his harp seal coat. The "Brigitte Bardots of this world" have no idea about sealing, he added“The only cruelty here is the cruelty being inflicted on aboriginal Canadians.”
Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette accused Bardot of being dishonest in her crusade. Bardot’s website denounces the hunt, using the image of a baby seal with its blood spreading over the snow. But Hervieux-Payette noted that, since 1987, Canada has banned the hunting of seal pups while they still have their white coats
The cone of silence on the seal hunt is business as usual for Harper. But the Liberal Senators who said he was too busy conducting business of state to respond to Bardots publicity stunt still get dissed by the right wing and the Blogging Tories.
Watson doesn't lie when he says he is opposed to all hunting of all animals. He is a vegetarian. Better a billion carrots die than a 325,000 seals.
Though it is the history of humans as agriculturalists, not humans the hunter gatherer, that has created modern civilization and its resulting industrialization and capitalism. Opps forgot about that did we Paul?
Finally lets accept the fact that little white coat seals are still cuter than a faded sobbing starlet. And the Green NGO's will contiue to milk this image for all the $$$$ they can get from the gullible public. And that's what this whole campaign against Canada's seal hunt is about.
Click here for my Seal Hunt Articles
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Good News From Iraq
Special forces free Iraq hostages
Christian Peacemaker Teams posted a statement on its Web site expressing joy in the hostages' release but also criticizing the U.S.-led operation in Iraq. "We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq," the statement said. "The occupation must end.
And Ihtisham Hibatullah, of the Muslim Association of Britain, said the group was "greatly relieved" by the news. Speaking about moves to secure their release, he said: "The hostage takers were ruthless and did not heed this call. Now we all feel that this should be the last time in Iraq that anyone should be taken and put through this kind of trauma."
See my Blog articles on Peacemakers
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Anti-War Demonstrations
In Edmonton 100 marchers braved a record breaking snow storm to march. Pictures from that march are here.
Pictures from Toronto march are here
Here are the numbers from around the world.
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Red Baiting Chomsky
Yesterday the National Pest featured a right wing attack on Noam Chomsky. It is bylined by Peter Schweizer, National Post.
No attribution is given to who Peter Schweizer is. He is a right wing policy wonk with the Hoover Institute.
Nor does the Pest bother to say that this is an exerpt from his book; Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy
Actually the Pest should be ashamed of itself, but it won't be of course, for publishing this piece of red baiting hysteria without attribution. And copywriting it like it was an original article.
Luckily for us its on one of their comment pages so please feel free to go there and let them know that Noam is ok and Peter is a dweeb.
Given the fact that Chomsky is a libertarian and a public intellectual Schweizer's attack on him is the same he uses on Michael Moore, he looks at their private lives and condemns them for, shudder, making money. In effect publishing books, giving lectures, producing DVD's, and a movie with the National Film Board of course, which is all apparently verboten for the Left, but ok for hypocrite Schweizer. You see he makes his money as a policy wonk, a red baiter of the old anti-communist school of James Burnham.
Whats ok for Peter of course is not ok for Noam. Apparently Left wing Intellectuals must wear sack clothe and ashes, in order to live up to their ideals, while champagne and caviar are fine for the right.
I think the Russians fought a revolution to over come than kind of aristocratic thinking. Indeed for two weeks during the October Revolution the vodka and booze literally flowed out of the Winter Palace until the Bolsheviks were forced to put armed guard units in charge of the wine cellar. Mind you they soon succumbed to temptation too. This is what happens when you have been denied the simple pleasures in life.
In Peters world such pleasures only are afforded to the cheerleaders of capitalism. For the critics of capitalism well they should be ashamed of themselves.
Peter began his red baiting, anti-communism waaay back. He is dyed in the wool Reaganite. One of the Neo-Cons that urged and cheered on Reagan as he challenged the Soviet Union with his Apocalpyse Now politics.
Along with Paul G. Kengor, Ph.D. Executive Director, The Center for Vision & Values Fellow, Faith and the Presidency, Peter is co-editor of Assessing the Reagan Presidency (Rowman-Littlefield, 2005). He is also author of Disney: The Mouse Betrayed, is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University) and a former consultant to NBC News. His previous works, The Next War (coauthored with Caspar Weinberger), Victory, and Friendly Spies, have been translated into nine languages. A graduate of Oxford University, his journalism appears in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
He is in effect a wannabe public intellectual, when he is nothing of the sort. He is a policy wonk journalist, and at best a policy advisor. Chomsky is a Phd. A professor, who teaches in university, and uses his academic and intellectual position within the capitalist state to criticize that state.
Like most neo-cons, Peter licks the hand that feeds him and snarls like their pet pitbull when intellectuals dare to bite that hand. It is not Chomsky who suffers from being hypocritical it's Peter.
For instance in an interview Peter is exposed for what he is an old fashioned red baiting (there are commies under the bed) conspiracy nut. Just like Uncle Joe, McCarthy not Stalin. This comes from an interview not from 1962 or even 1982 but from 2002. Seriously.
Peter Schweizer: They did. You know, there was certainly an anti-nuclear sentiment in Western Europe and in the United States and there were people, you know, lots of people that had that sincere belief, but what the KGB and the Soviet bloc intelligence did was give that movement meaning, like setting up organizations, by organizing protests. They wanted to try to make those protesters as politically relevant as possible.
So we know, for example, that one of the top people in the campaign for nuclear disarmament, which was the largest anti-nuclear group in Great Britain, was actually on the payroll of East German intelligence. We know that one of the largest peace movements in Germany was funded by East German intelligence and we know from KGB files that the KGB provided funding and helped organize protest movements in the United States. So it was a very elaborate campaign effort and very significant in importance to that movement growing and having a political voice in the United States and Western Europe.
Once the Soviet Union fell well what was a Cold Warrior like Peter to do? No more reds under the bed, so the espionage and terror network had be......
COUNTERING INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE IN THE POST-COLD-WAR ERA
(Senate - June 24, 1992)
The Growth of Economic Espionage: America Is Target Number One
Peter Schweizer
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1996
Yep cyberwarfare, became his next ballywick. When that declined as the world of cyberspace became more and more public and the Zapatista's used it for creating a very real public world of protest, not darkened corners of ex-KGB spy networks, well Peter was out of work again as a policy wonk.
So what does he do? Write a paen of glorious praise to his hero Ronald Reagan; the former communist turned anti-communist, former Hollywood union leaders, turned union buster.
Peter Schweizer: I just think Reagan was a wonderful leader. He demonstrated the power of courage and I think he was right and it applies to the war on terrorism today; you know, evil is powerless if the good are unafraid. I think that's a philosophy that we can carry to the war on terrorism. I think that's a philosophy that we can carry forward in any battles we are facing in our lives.
Well do ya think this guy has a bias? And since Chomsky spent so many years attacking the maniac regime of Reagans Secret Wars do ya think he has an axe to grind? Well do ya?
Once again we find ourselves confronting the fact that the old communist left including the Trotskyist mileu in the United States confronted with the dominance of America after the war and the faliure of Bolshevism and consequently its defeat at the hands of Stalin, they retreat to the right.
Peter is of the neo-con school that arose from the defeated Trotskists like Max Schactman, and James Burnham. Indeed so is Fukuyama, David Horowitz, and those who see themselves as heirs of the NYC Trotskyist Intellectuals that turned to the right in the 1960's.
But Emma Goldman had already predicted the decline of the Russian Revolution into a Bonapartist regime in the 1920's. The Anarchists saw the Russian Revolution as only one attempt at revolution one that was doomed to failure because of its authoritarian Lenninst orgranization. Kropotkin did, and died fighting for Anarchist minority rights against Bolshevik poltical control.
Emma lectured around the world, exiled from the US, denouncing the Bolsheviks for failing the peoples revolution. She and the Anarchist left embraced the Spanish Civil War as the next peoples revolution, in a series that would confront capitalism in order to bring forth the new world.
That struggle continues today and we see it in the Post Reagan world, the Zapatista revolts, the anti-globalization movement, the left surge in Latin America. This is a very different dialectic than the one that occured in the eighties as America dominated geo-politics.
America has fought two wars in Iraq, the first a pyrichic victory, where before they could really defeat Saddam they left. Then the Balkan failure, unless breaking up the Balkans is what you want to do, which some of us suspect. The failure of democracy to arise in Russia and Eastern Europe while mafia capitalism runs rampant only to give way once again to old Tsarist politics of Putin. I looked into his eyes and saw his soul says King George the II. And he saw the soul of neo-conservative politics. Real Politick, Power Poltics, the politics of Empire.
Chomsky was the left intellectual who was outspoken for all that time, sometimes a lone voice as the neo-cons gained ascendency in the public and media during the Reagan, Bush era. A lone voice. One who must now be ridiculed and attacked by red baiting syncophants like Peter Schweizer, in order to write their revisionist history of American Empire.
Like old battles on the left where the Anarchists are attacked by the Communists and Trots, the right also hates the Anarchists. We fought against both the authoritarians, left and right. Reagan and Lenin, Bush II and Stalin. We did not betray our revolutionary traditions, we continue them today. As does Chomsky.
Unlike Burnham whom of course neo-cons like Peter Schwiezer and David Horowitz owe their existance to. Not Regan, not Hayek, not even Rothbard, but to Burnham, the old Trot who betrayed the left to suck up to the right. It is the old left, of Stalin and Trotsky, whose Bolshevism was that Revolution was Immanent, that their revolutionary movement was the Eschaton, its existence was predetermined, milliarian, and thus always about to happen. Thus Reganism, Bushism and the neo-con ideology of America Truimphant ironically has its foundation in Bolshevism. And Bolshevism and Anarchism are old enemies.
Burnham’s relations with his colleagues on the non-communist Left suffered as a result of his Cold War trilogy. Where once there was widespread acclaim for The Managerial Revolution, now his colleagues on the Left disdained him as a warmonger who advocated atomic war. For many liberals (and some conservatives) Burnham’s geopolitical vision was too sweeping and apocalyptic. To many, a policy of “liberation” was simply too dangerous in the nuclear age. The non-communist Left sought, at most, to contain the Soviet Union while searching for areas of accommodation. Burnham did not think that accommodation with communism was a long-term possibility. For Burnham, the Cold War was a systemic conflict that would only end when one or the other system changed or was defeated.
His final and lasting break with the non-communist Left, however, resulted not from his proposed strategy of “liberation,” but from his views toward domestic communism and what came to be known as “McCarthyism.” Burnham, unlike many intellectuals of the time, believed the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other ex-communists who identified and described the activities of a Soviet espionage apparatus that operated in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. He supported the congressional investigations of domestic communism and even testified before investigating committees. He also called for outlawing the Communist Party of the United States.
During the 1980s, as Peter Schweizer, Jay Winik, Andrew Busch, and others have described, the Reagan Administration formulated and implemented an offensive geopolitical strategy designed to undermine Soviet power.37 While there is no evidence that Reagan or his advisers consciously sought to apply Burnham’s precise strategy of “liberation,” Reagan’s strategy consisted of policies that in a fundamental sense were remarkably similar to Burnham’s proposals. Reagan launched a vigorous ideological and propaganda offensive against the Soviets, calling Soviet leaders liars and cheats, predicting the Soviets’ near-term demise, and daring its leader to tear down the Berlin Wall. Reagan provided aid and encouragement to Poland’s Solidarity movement and the Afghan rebels, two resistance movements within the Soviet Empire. Reagan built up U.S. military forces, deployed intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe, and announced the plan to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), thus putting additional pressure on the already strained Soviet economy, thus serving to convince the Soviets that they could not win an arms race with the United States.
The so-called “Reagan Doctrine” placed the Soviets on the geopolitical defensive throughout the world. Less than a year after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall came down, the enslaved nations of Eastern Europe revolted, and the Soviet Empire was on its way to dissolution. Burnham, it turns out, was right all along. Containment was not enough to win the Cold War. It took an offensive geopolitical strategy to undermine Soviet power. And, as Burnham had argued, Eastern Europe was the key to victory.
Burnham had little confidence that such a strategy as his would ever be implemented by the United States. His pessimism in this regard was most profoundly expressed in his 1964 book, Suicide of the West. Burnham argued that since reaching the apex of its power in 1914, Western civilization had been contracting, most obviously in a geographical sense. Burnham described the contraction in terms of “effective political control over acreage.” Because the West continued to possess more than sufficient relative economic, political, and military power to maintain its ascendancy, the only explanation for the contraction was an internal lack of will to use that power. Hence, the West was in the process of committing “suicide.” In the book he was highly critical of modern liberalism, but the author did not claim, as some have stated, that liberalism caused or was responsible for the West’s contraction. “The cause or causes,” he wrote, “have something to do…with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury; and…with getting tired, worn out as all things temporal do.” Liberalism, instead, was “the ideology of Western suicide.” It “motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it.” He expressed his belief that the collapse of the West was probable, although not inevitable. He acknowledged the possibility of a “decisive change” resulting in a reversal of the West’s contraction.
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Better Balanced Budget
Ordinary Albertans will get only minor relief from the budget. Exemption levels for personal, spousal and dependent deductions will be increased by $100, expected to save taxpayers affected by the change an average of $35 a year.Businesses will save a total of $300 million from a reduction in the corporate income tax rate to 10 per cent from 11.5 per cent.
The New Democrats tabled their own budget to reporters yesterday, one that pledged $1.5 billion from adjusted oil and gas royalties for a new green fund to help Albertans use energy more efficiently.
It also called for the establishment of a new pharmaceutical savings agency the party claims would save the province $75 million in its first year.
The NDP said they would reduce health-care wait times in the public system, scrap health-care premiums, reduce the education portion of municipal property taxes and establish kindergarten and junior kindergarten in Alberta schools.
They said they would also implement the auditor general's recommendations to improve the quality of long-term care in the province.
Mason said his party would kill the new ministry of restructuring and government efficiency, saving taxpayers $30 million annually.
"It's almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is itself a prime example of waste."
The NDP would also cut back the province's $14 million public affairs bureau, phase out private school funding, scrap the royalty tax credit, eliminate a $45 million horse racing subsidy and put the brakes on cuts to corporate taxes, Mason said.
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Which Is It?
And just to be "fair and balanced" are they including incidents of attacks on Arabs who are also semites or just Jews?
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Goof Off Day
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Bombardier Mobilizes Workers Power
Bombardier employees told commuters on the Montreal metro system Monday that they want the government to choose them for a lucrative home-grown project.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest isn't ruling out the possibility that his government will award a major transport contract to Bombardier Inc. without a public tender.
Charest said Monday he is “receptive” to public demands that the Liberal government award the $1.2-billion contact to replace Montreal subway cars directly to Bombardier Transportation.
More than 3,000 residents of La Pocatiere, where the cars would be built, attended a rally on the weekend to pressure the province to do so.
Bombardier could not exist without government subsidies. It's competition is French state capitalist Alstom's and German State Capitalist Siemens. Alston actually has a plant operating in Quebec.
Being a state captialist business makes Bombardier the company of choice for the PRC. Bombardier wins $51.3M contract for rail link to Beijing Airport
And Seimens move to bid for building subway cars for the TTC could be seen as revenge;Bombardier wins $361 mln light-rail deal in Germany
But it does nothing for its share price, which continues to be boosted by Canadian taxpayers. Why don't we just own Bombardier outright, instead of continuing with the family business farce. That way the workers who are being used as pawns by the Bombardier family, could run the business themselves. And certainly the history of workers control in Quebec shows they can do it more profitably.
Bombardier "sell"
Monday, March 13, 2006 11:46:26 AM ET
Canaccord Adams
NEW YORK, March 13 (newratings.com) - Analysts at Canaccord Adams reiterate their "sell" rating on Bombardier Inc (BBD.B.TOR).
In a research note published this morning, the analysts mention that there are uncertainties surrounding the orders from US Airways on the company's backlogs and the timing of new orders, if any. These uncertainties, coupled with the lead time required with suppliers and Bombardier's current production rate, suggest that the company may have to cut the production of its larger jets in the near term, the analysts say. Canaccord Adams expresses its concern regarding the impact of the continuing appreciation of the Canadian dollar on the company’s margins in the near future.
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Plutocrats Rule
Why not call it what it is; Plutocracy and the rich are Plutocrats.
Mr. Kapur has explained that among countries that function as “plutonomies” — a category that encompasses the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada — economic growth is powered by the increasingly wealthy, who dominate both income and consumption. In Japan and most of Europe, the rich have not been getting much richer and the economy is more egalitarian. A boom in assets, rising profits, favourable treatment by market-friendly governments, and improved productivity have allowed the wealthy to prosper. Mr. Kapur believes that corporate profits are set to climb, as “low inflation, high productivity, globalization, and low labour power” send profit margins even higher.
Prof. Neil Brooks says Canada at Risk of Becoming a Plutocracy
Forget Democracy welcome to the return of the Plutocracy one hundred years after it was spawned in America. This is what George Bush and Tony Blair mean by bringing Democracy to the world. They really mean rule of the wealthy; Plutocracy.
China issues report to criticize US for its democracy of money As former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said, "The United States is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy. The people don't rule in the United States. Wealth rules, the corporations rule."
Plutocrats ruled America at the end of the 19th Century, the robber barons, and expanded their power with the rise of the Trusts at the begining of the 20th Century. Today the global business giants that dominate the world market and its politics remind us that those who advocated for workers back over 100 years ago were not that far off the mark. And their rallying call against plutocracy is as relevant today as it was then.
Organized Labor and Social Justice Movements
Eugene Debs' revolutionary unionsimby Charles Sullivan
Labor unions have always been under assault by the company bosses and their cohorts in government. This connection reveals that the government does not serve the people; it serves business interests, the elite. It is thus evidence not of democracy, but of Plutocracy.
Jack London: The Iron Heel'I'll show you something that isn't a dream, then,' Ernest answered.
'And that something I shall call the Oligarchy. You call it the
Plutocracy. We both mean the same thing, the large capitalists or
the trusts. Let us see where the power lies today. And in order to
do so, let us apportion society into its class divisions.
'There are three big classes in society. First comes the Plutocracy,
which is composed of wealthy bankers, railway magnates, corporation
directors, and trust magnates. Second, is the middle class, your
class, gentlemen, which is composed of farmers, merchants, small
manufacturers, and professional men. And third and last comes my
class, the proletariat, which is composed of the wage-workers.*Triumphant Plutocracy ; the story of American public life from 1840-1910 Richard Franklin Pettigrew
It has been well said by the famous English writer and philanthropist, Mr. Stead, that the modern business world has adopted a new Golden Rule as follows :
“ Dollars and dimes, dollars and dimes ;
To be without money is the worst of crimes.
To keep all you get, and get all you can,
Is the first and the last and the whole duty of man.”That this Golden Rule has been adopted by the so-called business men of the United States is evidenced by what has been accomplished in the distribution of the wealth produced by the great toiling masses of this country.
Recently it was announced that John D. Rockefeller had finally succeeded in accumulating one billion dollars, thus making him the richest man that ever lived.
The American people know how he succeeded in accumulating this vast sum. He produced none of it—he secured all of it by exploiting the American people who had produced it.
The most thrifty of the American people do well if they succeed in saving $300 a year above all their expenses, and they must be busy every day in the year in order to do that. To accumulate one billion dollars at the rate of $300 a year—a dollar a day for three hundred working days—a man would have to live and labor 3,333,333 years. He would have to be older than Methuselah—he would have to start when the world was hot no matter where he ended up.
But if he was cunning, unscrupulous and religious and followed Rockefeller’s method of robbing his fellow-men, he could get the billion-dollar prize in fifty years.
One billion dollars is equivalent to the earnings of one hundred thousand men for twenty years, provided they earned $500 apiece each year, and during all that time leaving nothing out for sickness, death or accident. The fact that Rockefeller could appropriate the earnings of his fellow-men and the fact that he did do it is what has caused the social and economic protest against the existing system and the cry for justice.
This great and powerful force—the accumulated wealth of the United States—has taken over all the functions of Government, Congress, the issue of money, and banking and the army and navy in order to have a band of mercenaries to do their bidding and protect their stolen property.
Immediately after the announcement that Rockefeller was worth a billion dollars, Armour & Swift announced a dividend upon their capital stock of thirty-three and one-third per cent and each of these concerns increased their capital stock from twenty millions to one hundred millions.
It is safe to say that neither of these concerns had any capital stock for which they had paid a dollar. Their capital stock represented what they had stolen from the people of this country. Their working capital is represented by bonds. The eighty millions of stock which they have since added is also nothing but water and is issued so as to make the annual dividends appear smaller. The exploited people will object less to paying six or seven per cent on a hundred millions than to paying thirty-three and one-third per cent on twenty millions. It looks better in print.
How do Armour and Swift make their money ? They are the great packers. They are in collusion. They fix the prices they pay the farmer for his hogs and cattle, and they fix the prices they will charge the consumer for their product. They are simply robbing the producer and the consumer, and their robbery is represented in their great wealth, which they did not produce but which they took from the people under the guise of law.
A Forgotten Fighter against Plutocracy
The best of these standard-bearers of the anti-monopolist crusade were known beyond the borders of this country. Even in the midst of the reconstruction of the Soviet Union, Lenin, for example, found time to follow their work. In October 1922, Oscar Cesare, the American artist, went to sketch Lenin in his Kremlin office. Cesare told Walter Duranty the next day that, he had murmured something about political opinion in America. “Yes,” Lenin replied, “I’ve just been reading this,” and he held up a red-bound copy of Pettigrew’s Plutocrat Democracy (sic). “It’s a very fine book,” he said— and his eyes sparkled as he looked down at it. “I got the impression,” Cesare commented, “that Lenin didn’t admire the American political system as much as he admired the book.”
Who was Pettigrew? What sort of man was this Republican senator that he could call forth Lenin’s admiration? Lenin was not in the habit of praising bourgeois politicians or their works.
You will not find the answer to these questions in the best-known liberal histories of Pettigrew’s period— in the Beards’ Rise of American Civilization; in Kendrick and Hacker’s History of the United States Since 1865; or in John Chamberlain’s Farewell to Reform. As though designed to emphasize his obscurity, Pettigrew’s name remains misspelled and the title of his book misquoted in Duranty’s Moscow dispatches published in book form twelve years after Cesare’s interview with Lenin. It is only when we turn to Pettigrew’s book that we begin to see why he has been obliterated from official historical memory. His book is a scathing indictment of monopoly rule beside which the writings of the muckrakers and speeches of the reformers seem pale and harmless.
As we delve deeper into the events of Pettigrew’s career, we understand still more clearly why he has been cast into obscurity. Richard Franklin Pettigrew was the first United States senator from South Dakota. He was not only a picturesque personality but an influential figure in national politics at the turn of the century.
Pettigrew’s elimination from the political arena coincided with the defeat of the middle-class radicalism he represented. He was crushed by the political steamroller of the plutocracy as an obstacle to its concentration of power. In the process his reputation was so blackened and his deeds so distorted that he has never been accorded his rightful place as one of the staunchest opponents of monopoly domination in American public life.
Against Democracy, Plutocracy, and Imperialism
Sumner was too astute to believe that there was any danger that
democracy could degenerate into mass rule. The mass was unorganized,
unintelligent, and without leisure or a taste for study. How could
they possibly rule? The fate of modern democracy is to fall into subjection
to plutocracy. The term plutocracy is integral to Sumner's
thought.
By it, he did not mean the rule of wealth, for he thought that
wealth should have more political power than the mass. Rather, he
meant a type of government in which effective control rested with
men of wealth who sought to use political means to increase their
wealth. Sumner believed that there is no form of government better
suited to their control than democracy.
The methods and machinery of democratic, republican self government
caucuses, primaries, committees, and conventions
lend themselves perhaps more easily than other
political methods and machinery to the uses of selfish cliques
which seek political influence for interested purposes.
William Morris - Art Under Plutocracy Completing the American Revolution Norman D. Livergood
Forgotten Victims of America's Plutocracy | BaltimoreChronicle.com
Plutocracy and Politics
Demise of the Middleclass as we once knew it! The Internal Revenue Service figures and the results of corporate deregulation in the decade of the 1980s. Ironically, this has resulted in a 2,184% increase in the salaaries of the overclass, the largest increase of the richest incomes in recorded history. However, the middleclass has had only a 44% increase in the same period of time. If a family earning $13,000 a year at poverty level, had the same increase in their income as the rich, they would have had an unbelievable $283,920 annual income! Poverty would no longer exist! This is the beginning of the end of our middleclass culture. Is a class war inevitable???
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