HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------Working Class Crashes Bourgeois Party at the Waldorf:
By Heather Cottin
The arrogance of the ruling class is boundless. While 20% of New York City residents in 2002 have been forced to depend on soup kitchens and food pantries to stay alive, the leaders of the world capitalist system will be meeting and partying at the elegant Waldorf Astoria Hotel. They will be following a long tradition of the bourgeoisie
In the Gilded Age, at the late 19th Century, the Robber Barons, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Belmont, Morgan, and the others attended extravagant balls and parties at the original Waldorf located on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. At one party, according to Matthew Josephson in The Robber Barons, the men were given cigarettes wrapped in $100 bills, while the women received 14-karat gold bracelets as favors.
In the period between 1890 and 1900 there was a terrible depression, and the median amount necessary for a family to live on for one year was about $500, according to the Historical Statistics of the US. These industrialists and bankers must have sniggered as they cavalierly smoked up what amounted to 1/5 of a family's yearly survival.
One night in 1897, during the depth of a depression, one of the fabulously wealthy men of the age, Mr. Bradley Martin, had the entire lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria transformed into Hall Of Mirrors from the Palais de Versailles, reflecting the complete disregard that the monarchy had for the poor in the days just before the French Revolution. August Belmont wore a suit of armor marked with gold inlay of ten thousand dollars' value. Women wore beautiful and expensive jewels as if they were corsages (Protestantism in America: A Narrative History by Jerald C. Brauer)
The ruling classes, then as now, were aware of the poverty running rampant through the cities, the poverty that was forcing thousands of farmers off their farms. They were the cause of it. It was they who paid the workers their miserable wages. It was they who sent their thugs and Pinkerton rent-a-cops to kill workers, as Carnegie did in the 1892 Homestead Strike. It was the industrialists who paid the farmers so little they were forced to sell their farms.
A Populist Leader, Mary Lease thundered to a crowd in Kansas in 1890:
"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people
and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street."
Mary "Yellin' Lease said, "The great common people in this country are slaves and monopoly is the master ; . . . We will not pay our debts to the loan shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. . . let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware!"
The working classes and the farmers were moving fast in those days. As the economy declined, immigrants and native born people joined together against the banks, the corporations, the system the workers called, "wage slavery."
Eugene Victor Debs led the railroad workers in a strike that stopped the railroads. It took the army to break it up and Debs went to jail. There he read Marx's Das Kapital, and came out months later a socialist.
In the South, refusing to be intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan Black and White farmers joined together against the ruling class whites and organized coops. They opposed the dreaded crop lien system, which turned the African American and white farmers into debtors on their own lands.
And how did the ruling classes respond to these strikes and acts of defiance? They sent in the police and National Guards against strikers. They funded and armed and encouraged the growth of the Klan. They looked the other way when nightriders and vigilantes mowed down poor people, the majority of whom were Black, throughout the South.
The bourgeoisie showed their sympathy for the plight of the workers by throwing what they called "poverty socials". A western millionaire had the ballroom in his home decorated as a hobo camp and his ruling class guests came in rags and tatters. It cost $14,000 to serve them "hobo stew" on wooden plates. The cost of the party was equal to what it would have cost to have fed, housed, clothed and provided for 2800 families for a year.
The wives and daughters of the bourgeoisie felt virtuous and noble as they carried baskets of fruit to poor families in the crowded, fetid tenement houses. The bourgeoisie gave occasional charity balls for the poor, just as they do today. As they danced the night away in their satins and diamond tiaras, the men talking business over cigars, their concern for the poor was as cynical as it is today.
The City of New York paid the Astor family $17 million for the land and on the site of the old hotel constructed the Empire State Building. The "new" Waldorf Astoria was constructed and opened at its present location with much ceremony as a playground for the ruling classes in 1931, in the midst of the next world economic crisis, the Great Depression.
The Astor family moved to London where they bought the London Times and developed close sympathies with Adolph Hitler, according to Cigar Aficionado. In the late Thirties, according to the BBC History Magazine, a group who gathered around Waldorf and Nancy Astor's dinner-table at Cliveden, their opulent country house. Among regular guests were a number of politicians, editors and intellectuals with a shared belief in the manifest destiny of Anglo-Saxon culture.
Now the Waldorf Astoria is host to new generation of Robber Barons, with a global view of manifest destiny. Today's bourgeoisie created the World Trade Organization to assure their global dominance of capital over labor. But they are not like the bourgeoisie of the late 19th century who were only concerned with owning the means of production in the United States. They are more rapacious even than the Astors with their Nazi tendencies.
These modern day capitalists are meeting now to plan for further global plunder. They have completed the conquest of the world the Robber Barons of the late 19th century only dreamed of. But, like the capitalists of the late 19th Century and later in the 1930s, they are worried. And for good reason.
In 1890 there was no place left in the United States to invest. It was, as historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1890, the "end of the frontier." The capitalists were afraid. Capitalism was stagnant. The depression was growing. The masses were angry.
In 1898, Senator Albert Beveridge urged the nation toward imperialism. That would solve the economic crisis, he said. "We are raising more than we can consume, . . . we are making more than we can use, there is more capital than there is investment." Supporting the war in Cuba and the Philippines, Beveridge said, "we must find new markets for our capital, new work for our labor, . . . think of . . . Hawaii and Puerto Rico . . . Think of the thousands of Americans who will invade mine and field and forest in the Philippines . . ."
And invade they did, they attacked Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Mark Twain criticized the war the United States waged on the Filipinos. It was a war that resulted in the murder of 1/3 of the people of the islands. This brutal war was modeled on the wars the United States had just waged against the Native People. It was openly racist, reflecting Washington and Wall Street's utter disregard for people in Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Twain excoriated imperialism in two short sentences in 1900. "I bring you the stately matron named Christendom -- returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines; with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking glass"
Capitalists, militarists and their intellectual lapdogs joined together to urge this nation on a path which, as Columbia professor Charles Conant, wrote in 1898, "marked out for them as children of the great Anglo-Saxon race . . .demanding new markets and new opportunities for American enterprise."
Conant called this "A result of natural law and race development." He meant imperialism, but he cautioned against the United States following in the paths of England and Germany and the "older countries," as he called them.
Conant said, "Capital is no longer needed in excess of supply. It is becoming congested."
He cautioned, "The multiplication of unprofitable enterprises has flooded the market. . . and resulted. . . in a glut of goods which has destroyed profits, bankrupted great corporations, and ruined investors."
This was before the United States embarked on its imperialist adventures that turned the entire world into a market for its goods and an outlet for investment. Though the United States took few actual colonies, in the 104 years since Conant's article the United States has come to dominate the world economy. The bourgeoisie have expanded their grasp to every part of the globe.
And still, Conant's words ring as true now as they did then. "Capital is no longer needed in excess of supply." The system has no where to go. As the bourgeois financiers, corporate moguls and paid policy wonks skulk around the Waldorf Astoria, they know that the economic crises of the late 19th Century have multiplied exponentially. The size of the US economy in 1898 was miniscule compared to now. The number of workers, firms, products, and nations involved in the global capitalist system connected to the U.S. economy has grown astronomically since then.
They say the bigger they are the harder they fall.
The system is foundering, and the World Economic Forum has no idea how to save it. They may feel secure in the Waldorf Astoria. Protected by the police from the angry protesters outside, they may believe that the horrors of poverty, unemployment, hunger, disease, and the myriad ravages of capitalism will be forever accepted by the working classes of the world.
They may think that their armies can help them maintain control now of a world capitalist system that the neo-imperialists of the late 19th Century only imagined. They may believe they can wage endless war and the workers here will accept it.
But if they look outside of the Waldorf Astoria, they will see that their world is crumbling. From Allentown to Zimbabwe working people are wise to the machinations of these World Economic Felons who have stolen the resources and land and immiserated the lives of the people in every corner of the world.
A truly international working class now confronts the bourgeoisie that created this criminal system.
The days of reckoning have begun.
.
--------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST
==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
