And what did the new progressivism of the 1880s do? It put my people on reservations, killed them by the thousands, and destroyed our nations, governments and schools. It banned our religions until 1978 and it started programs that sterilized our people without their consent upward of 40% in 1978 when it was stopped. It also separated out the Arts and consigned the middle and lower classes to vaudeville when in reality they were more sophisticated as a group than Americas upper class. The Robber Barons organized time and organized society through professional councils that controlled everything from colors in fashions to the ingénues in Hollywood who would succeed and who would be sent to the trash heap.
The poor of the 1880s knew the arts of the day and if cheated they would threaten people with vegetables and violence. Today we have trinkets and trash entertainment instead of great aesthetic elevation. A thoroughly automated theater in the movies with no real live theatrical tradition where political questions foment, are answered and raise activism. Instead we get junk TV and cold Indie movies with the docu-dramas separated out so people cannot confront real issues through quality fiction and drama. We have Reality TV and Reality movies that arent real but cheap to make and mind numbing. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of D and N Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2011 4:01 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Reign of the one percenters Written before the Occupy Wall Street movement began, Ketcham has since retracted his statement about current youth being unable to shake a fist at the brokers. Yet this article does an admirable job of describing the inequities and cultural demise that led up to the OWS movement, while using New York City's cultural state as clear example of the nation's own sad priorities. More than a deserving nod to Henry George, and also to Stephane Hessel for his little book, Cry Out, and with, I think, few suppositions with which to take issue, most should find this an interesting read. An accurate account of impoverishment of the arts in N.Y. City would be difficult to describe by anyone. Though perhaps a bit harsh and nostalgic for more dynamic times, Ketcham seems to come close as he accuses commodities marketing as art's primary expression through graphics' varicose vein of creativity. He observes live art as having mostly moved elsewhere, citing little time to be creative while holding down three jobs to pay the rent. (The tally of homeless in New York sounds way high, though I'm not sure how he arrived at that figure, and I disagree with Ketcham that eggs should be hurled at the bankers/brokers--I think that citizens arrests should be made of the better-known psychopaths) Natalia Below you'll find only part of the entire piece from: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6470 The Reign of the One Percenters Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City by Christopher Ketcham Published in the November/December 2011 <http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/6469/> issue of Orion magazine (snip) On a smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my birthplace and home, once beloved to me, is really about. Because Im convinced that the beating heart of the city today is not its art galleries, its boutiques, its restaurants or bars, its theaters, its museums, nor its miserable remnants in manufacturing, nor its creative typesits writers, dancers, artists, sculptors, thinkers, musicians, or, god forbid, its journalists. Here, I tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, is what New York is about. Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen. (snip) According to the FPI, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the operations of the sector known as financial services, whose preoccupation is something they call financial innovation. The One Percenters draw the top salaries at commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, insurance companies, stock brokerages. They are the suit people at Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan and AIG and Deutsche Bank. To get a sense for how their fortunes have blossomed, consider the fact that the largest twenty financial institutions in the U.S., almost all of them headquartered in New York, now control upward of 70 percent of the countrys financial assets, roughly double what they controlled in the 1990s. And what do the suit people do to earn such heaping returns? At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society neededprojects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. Lord Adair Turner, a financial watchdog and former banker in the city of Londonthe other world capital of financerecently denounced his class as practitioners and beneficiaries of a socially useless activity. Paul Woolley, who runs a think tank in London called the Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, observed that the presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable was a kind of metaphysics. It wasnt backed by any empirical evidence, Woolley told John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgagesthese were shown to have little or no long-term value, according to Cassidy. The purpose was to merely shift money around without designing, building, or selling a single tangible thing. The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the value of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit. Behold, then, the One Percenter in his Wall Street tower. He creates value by tapping on keyboards and punching in algorithms. He makes money playing with money, manipulating abstractions. He manufactures and chases after financial bubbles and then pricks them. He speculates on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, the price of gas that keeps the real economy moving, the price of food that keeps the labor pool alive, always hedging his bets so that he comes out ahead whether society wins or loses. A study from the New Economics Foundation in England found that for every pound made in financial services in the city of London, roughly seven pounds of social wealth is lostmeaning the wealth of those in society who do productive work. Finance as practiced on Wall Street, says Paul Woolley, is like a cancer. There is only maximization of short-term profit in these financial servicesthey are services only in the sense of the vampire at a vein. There is no vision for allocating capital for the building of infrastructure that will serve society in the future; no vision, say, for a post-carbon civilization; no vision for surviving the shocks of coming resource scarcity. The finance nihilist doesnt look to a viable future; he is interested only in the immediate return. Rotten Vegetables The optimist will say that the wealth disparities in New York have been far worse in the past, and the optimist would be correct. When in 1869, for example, a young journalist named Henry George arrived in New York, already the most opulent city in America, he found that amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts. The inequalities got worse. There came the Panics of 1873 and 1884, which resulted from the speculation and stock fraud of the citys financial and business elite. Epicentered in lower Manhattan, the panicswed call them crashes todayproduced nationwide shock waves of mass unemployment, homelessness, hunger, years of depression and dislocation, and, at times, the specter of all-out chaos. President Grover Cleveland, aghast at the scope of the division between the few very rich and the many poor, concluded that the wealth and luxury of our cities, primarily enjoyed by the industrial monopolists and the financier and Wall Street class, was largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people. The exactions in New York, as with every city where unregulated industrial capital ran amok, were most felt in the profitable horrors of wage slavery: the fourteen-hour workdays, the miserable pay, the children forced into labor, the dangerous conditions on factory floors, the rents extracted by landlords for the opportunity to live in windowless, rat-infested, soul-destroying tenements. In answer, across New York City throughout the 1880s there were strikes, marches, boycotts, gigantic torch-lit demonstrations. New Yorks Central Labor Union (CLU), a branch of the Knights of Labor, whose national membership approached 700,000, welcomed all the producing classes, skilled and unskilled: the bricklayers, the jewelers, the printers, the industrialized brewers and machinists, the salesclerks, bakers, cloak makers, cigar makers, piano makers, musicians, tailors, waiters, Morse operators, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, whites and blacks, men and women. The only people they refused to welcome in their ranks, wrote historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, were bankers, brokers, speculators, gamblers, and liquor dealerswhat the Knights and other radicals of the time called the fleecing classes, the parasites, the leeches. The CLU and the Knights organized the first Labor Day parade in the United States, on September 5, 1882, marching twenty thousand strong from City Hall to Union Square, unfurling banners that said: LABOR BUILT THIS REPUBLIC AND LABOR SHALL RULE IT. And: NO MONEY MONOPOLY. And: PAY NO RENT. The seamstresses along the route waved handkerchiefs from windows and blew kisses at the marchers. When the ladies at their sills saw cops and thugs hired by the fleecing classes, they rained down rocks, eggs, rotten vegetables. By 1886, the labor coalition was looking for a radical candidate for mayor, and they found one in Henry George, who by then had become a famous writer, known on four continents. Seven years earlier, he had published a book of economics called Progress and Poverty that during the last decades of the nineteenth century would outsell every book but the Bible. His chief contribution was to acquaint the lay American with the problem of economic rent in society. This was defined as revenue with no corresponding labor or productivity; economic rent was unearned income. Those who benefited from this income were known as rentiers, and the most egregious rentier in Georges day was the landlord, who, sitting on land as it rose in value, got rich on the backs of his tenants without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community. Political liberty required also economic liberty, said George, and economic liberty required doing away with the privileges of the rentier. We are not called upon to guarantee all men equal conditions but we are called upon to give to all men an equal chance, said George. If we do not, our republicanism is a snare and a delusion, our chatter about the rights of man the veriest buncombe. George also proclaimed, It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life. In declaring his candidacy, George decried the principle of competition upon which society is now based. He announced to an ecstatic public that his intention was to raise hell! He saw only corruption in government as it was then comprised, and suggested that a revolutionary uprising might be necessary to turn out the praetorians who were doing the corporations bidding in government office. But George was defeated in the 1886 campaign, and new and more advanced rentiers, typified by J. P. Morgan, with his offices at 23 Wall Street, rose to dominate the American political economy. By the turn of the twentieth century, Morgan had directed a massive consolidation of banking and, through the leverage of credit and debt, industry. This superconsolidation, which came to be known as monopoly finance capitalism, extended the influence of New York bankers nationwide to the point that, as Woodrow Wilson observed in 1911, all our activities are in the hands of a few men who chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. (snip) Sterility And what of the city as engine of culture? The art critic Robert Hughes pronounced New York a fading star as early as 1990just ten years into our new Gilded Agewhen the sheer inequality of New York became overpowering, he wrote. Could a city with such extremes of Sardanapalian wealth and Calcutta-like misery foster a sane culture? Hughes declared it could not. Between 1980 and 1990, the One Percenters in New York roughly doubled their take of income, from 12 percent to 20 percent, and this conspicuous concentration of money inflated the art market, which was soon run almost entirely by finance manipulators, fashion victims and rich ignoramuses. The impulses of art appreciation and collecting, lamented Hughes, were now nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display. At the same time, rents skyrocketed, driven by speculative real estate development. By the 1980s, wrote Hughes, the supply of affordable workspace for artists in Manhattan finally ran out. In a somber observation, Hughes noted, It was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its gravitational field keeps drawing more talent in, as in the combustion of a star, to sustain the reaction. The process is now dying. Thirty years on, with rents at historic highs, this has been a long death march, swallowing in its pall not only the artist, but the writer, the poet, the musician, the unaffiliated intellectual. The creative types sense that they are no longer wanted in New York, that money is what is wanted, and creative pursuits that fail to produce big money are not to be bothered with. But it is rent, more than anything else, that seals their fate. High rent lays low the creator, as there is no longer time to create. Working three jobs sixty hours a week at steadily declining wages, as a sizable number of Americans know, is a recipe for spiritual suicide. For the creative individual the challenge is existential: finding a psychological space where moneythe need for it, the lack of itwont be heard howling hysterically day and night. Crains New York Business, not known as a friend of the arts, reports the endgame of the trend identified by Hughes, namely that the young painter and sculptor are now sidestepping New York altogether, heading instead to cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and overseas to Berlinwherever the rents are low and the air doesnt stink of cash. The Times reports that freelance musicians in New York are killed off in a marketplace that no longer has need for them. The once-great Philharmonics, mainstay of a New York tradition, are crippled from lack of listeners, lack of funding; Broadway replaces the live musician in the well with the artifice of sounds sampled out of computers. New York loses its standing as a creative center, reports Crains. It becomes sterile. It is an institutionalized sort of Disney Land where art is presented but not made. Henceforth it will no longer be known as a birthplace for new cultural ideas and trends. In Brooklyn, I bump into a newspaper editor I once worked with who tells me he is abandoning the city. He talks of Costa Rica, the dark side of the moon, even Los Angeles. Anywhere but New York. Its just too depressing to watch whats happened, he tells me. The place is creatively bankrupt. He had freelanced at the paltry rates that freelancers are expected to survive onthe wages dropping always lower, the marketplace for journalism devalued by content mills and information aggregators staffed by content serfs producing blog entries. Then he attempted to start a small newspaper in Brooklyn. The investors werent interested. They want digital projects that promise an all-or-nothing billion dollars, he tells me. I just dont get that buzzy creative vibe from New York anymore. I see mercenarianism. Cynical ambition. Monied dullness. People trying to get rich and cash out. Its always a CEO and CTO and CFO launching a new web property. Not writers and editors getting together because they have common visions. This is old news. Technologic advances in the digital world order now mandate that the journalist vies in the editorial room with technocrats advising on the method for tweaking headlines and articles to the rhythm of Google. The model is from advertising: find what people want to hear, then echo it in the news so that they will be attracted to hear more of it. If you want to know whats really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money, writes author Jaron Lanier. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising. No surprise then that the most lucrative creative jobs in New York for the aggregating of content are not in journalism but in corporate media, advertising, and marketingthe machines of manipulation and deceit. Affluenza Everyone was broke and no one cared, said a friend of mine recently, describing Brooklyn in the 1970s. The people he knew back then, before New York degenerated into a city run by and for the rich, lived it up. They were freer and they were happier, because they werent so uptight about the money thing. I think what my friend was saying was this: it was easier not to care about appearing to have money, easier on mind and spirit not to have to worry about the appurtenances of affluence. His observation happens to be supported by a good deal of scholarship in the social sciences. Among developed nations, the evidence shows that healthier and happier societiessocieties that are more sane, less uptight, whose members for the most part are enjoying lifeare usually those with more equal distribution of wealth and income. The opposite correlation holds true: regardless of total wealth as measured by GDP, unequal societies appear to be less healthy and less happysuffering, for instance, lower life expectancy, lower educational achievement, higher rates of obesity, more infant mortality and more mental illness and more substance abuse. Richard Wilkinson, an emeritus professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham in England, offers a sweeping hypothesis to explain the causality in the correlations. Economic inequality, he and coauthor Kate Pickett write in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, seems to heighten peoples social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. . . . If inequalities are bigger, so that some people seem to count for almost everything and others for practically nothing, where each one of us is placed becomes more important. The result is increased status competition and increased status anxiety, whose effect on well-being is not to be underestimated. Scientists measuring stress-induced hormones in human beings have found that subjects were most stressed when faced with a task that included the opportunity for others to judge their performancea social-evaluative threat to self-esteem and status, where the fear is that others might judge you negatively. A stressed person typically has higher cortisol, a steroid hormone that prepares body and mind to fend off danger and manage in an emergency. But if cortisol is high much of the time, it can act as a slow poison: the immune system is weakened, blood pressure rises, learning is impaired, bone strength is reduced, and, in some instances, the appetite is grossly stimulated. Wilkinson argues that, in a more unequal society, people become more stressed and insecure, vying in the hierarchy of statusmore prone to feeling inadequate, defective, incompetent, foolish. And more sick both in body and mind. The literature of the psychosocial effects of status competition and anxiety, to which Wilkinsons work is only the latest addition, points to a broad-stroke portrait of the neurotic personality type that appears to be common in consumer capitalist societies marked by inequality. I see it all around me in New York, most acutely among young professionals. The type, in extremis, is that of the narcissist: Stressed, to be sure, because he seeks approval from others higher up in the hierarchy, though distrustful of others because he is competing with them for status, and resentful too because of his dependence on approval. He views society as unfair; he sees the great wealth paraded before him as an affront, proof of his failure, his inability, his lack. The spectacle of unfairness teaches him, among other lessons, the ways of the master-servant relationship, the rituals of dominance, a kind of feudal remnant: The captain kicks the cabin boy and the cabin boy kicks the cat. Mostly he is envious, and enraged that he is envious. This envy is endorsed and exploited, made purposeful by what appear to be the measures of civilization itself, in the mass conditioning methods of corporatist media: the marketeers and the advertisers chide and tease him; the messengers of high fashion arbitrate the meaning of his appearance. He is threatened at every remove in the status scrum. His psychological compensation, a derangement of sense and spirit, is affluenza: the seeking of money and possessions as markers of ascent up the competitive ladder; the worship of celebrities as heroes of affluence; the haunted desire for fame and recognition; the embrace of materialistic excess that, alas, has no future except in the assured destruction of Planet Earth and of every means of a sane survival.
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