Republican National Convention 2016, Day One

18 Mon Jul 2016

Posted by ztnh in Democracy Deferred, Political Science, Presidential Election 2016, Republican Party (USA)

Tags

Adele Stan, Anthony "Tony" Perkins (b. 1963), Carl Dix, Cheri Honkala (b. 1953), Corporate Crime Reporter, Cypress Hill, Davey D, dog-whistle politics, Donald Trump, Family Research Council, Flashpoints, Green Party, Hard Knock Radio, Kensington Welfare Rights Union, KPFA, non-profit industrial complex, Pacifica Radio Network, Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, Ralph E. Reed Jr (b. 1961), Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), Russell Mokiber, Scott Baio, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Willie Robertson

2016_Republican_National_Convention_Logo LUMPENPROLETARIAT—The Republican Party has convened once again to confirm the nomination of their candidate for the presidency of the United States. The 2016 Republican National Convention (RNC) has begun today in Cleveland, Ohio. And it’s pretty much locked in for Donald Trump, a man who has never held public office, but has gained wide notoriety and celebrity for being a real estate mogul, branding his name, and making it virtually synonymous with wealth. Trump is, perhaps, most famous for being a reality TV star.

But, for most of us, Trump is the most authoritarian, anti-intellectual, and regressive Republican candidate in memory. We know our democratic process is not very appealing for non-politicos. It’s not entertainment, at least, not intentionally. But the national conventions are very important because they determine the dominant candidates for the US presidency.

Various free speech radio (and TV) broadcasts have provided excellent coverage, unlike most of the corporate press, which has virtually birthed the first media-created candidate in Trump through sheer media saturation, even against the original schemes of the conservative establishment, who would have preferred someone like Jeb Bush.

“The Convention of the Oppressed” by Political Revolution TV (17 JUL 2016)

Hard Knock Radio looked today at alternatives to the narrow confines of the two-party system, what Ralph Nader aptly calls the two-party dictatorship, to speak with 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and professor and public intellectual, Dr. Cornel West. Dr. West has now publicly endorsed Dr. Stein. “I am with her,” said Dr. West, “the only progressive woman in the race,” Listen here. [1]

Flashpoints has provided coverage of RNC Day 1, including a conversation with Cheri Honkala, who was the 2012 Vice Presidential candidate, alongside Dr. Jill Stein. Honkala is also the co-founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and co-founder and National Coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. Also featured during this broadcast is one of our favorite public speakers on issues of socioeconomic justice, Carl Dix, a founding member, and a longtime representative, of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. This broadcast also featured a discussion with Russell Mokhiber (editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter), and more. Listen here. [2]

Pacifica Radio‘s national coverage will be featured throughout the week. Pacifica Radio broadcasters will be at the Republican National Convention (RNC) all week bringing us a sense of the proceedings there on the ground. As “Dump Trump” protests flared outside, Pacifica’s national broadcast gave us an accurate sense of the energy on the ground, inside and outside the Republican National Convention.

The theme of the 2016 RNC today was “Make America Safe Again“. [3] Just in case anyone already felt safe, the RNC did their best to make people feel unsafe. RNC organisers brought a succession of family members on stage, whose loved ones were killed by undocumented immigrants, so as to fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment already fuelled by a callous corporate media machine determined to scapegoat migrant workers, rather than to think seriously about economic policies, such as NAFTA and CAFTA, which have created waves of economic refugees who’ve had no other choice but to brave great uncertainty and hardship in the pursuit of economic survival for themselves and their families across hostile political borders. [4] This four-hour broadcast was hosted by free speech radio’s Mitch Jeserich, Askia Muhammed, and Davey D. AlterNet‘s Adele Stan joined the discussion and summarised Trump‘s campaign succintly:

“What I think you have is kind of a distillation of the resentments on which this party [the Republican Party] has been built upon for the last fifty years.”

Listen here. [5]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Pacifica Radio Network.]

PACIFICA RADIO—[18 JUL 2016] [Audio was broadcast from the early speakers at the Republican National Convention, including reality TV star Willie Robertson (of Duck Dynasty fame), actor Scott Baio (of Happy Days, etc.), and others. Various speakers did their best to recast Trump as a ‘man of the people’, rather than the cunning, perhaps, unscrupulous business elite, who has faced thousands of lawsuits and is generally viewed as bordering on criminal, even associated with organised crime.]

[Adele Stan (of AlterNet) joined the broadcast to offer some healthy analysis.] (c. 13:41)

MITCH JESERICH: “Again, we’re speaking to Adele Stan, who is the Washington, D.C. editor with AlterNet and columnist with The American Prospect. She has been covering conservative politics and the Republican Party for a number of years now. She is here in Cleveland at the RNC.

“Um, wow! What Scott Baio said there, saying that Hillary Clinton is somebody who is ‘entitled’ to the—”

ADELE STAN: “Who feels that she’s entitled.”

MITCH JESERICH: “That was pretty remarkable.”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah.”

MITCH JESERICH: “Again, the first two speakers in prime time at this Convention are Scott Baio and Willie Robertson—”

ADELE STAN: “I mean such lightweights.”

MITCH JESERICH: “—of Duck Dynasty.”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah.”

MITCH JESERICH: “What, what is happening, Adele, to the Republican Party?“

ADELE STAN: “Well, I mean the Republican Party has always been sort of a collection of, you know, different factions, that have different, sort of, resentments, that often overlap. Right?

“So, and this is code. Um, well, I don’t know what the Scott Baio code is; but I do—”

MITCH JESERICH: “[laughs]

ADELE STAN: “—know what the Robertson code is, which is anti-LGBT code to the viewership, to the audience. Right?

“There was such a big controversy over comments, that Phil Robertson—this guy’s brother—had made about queer folk. And that made him a hero to people on the right. And he got a whole mess of speaking gigs out of that and all that. (c. 15:00)

“The thing, that struck me about what Baio said was the “free stuff” line. [6] Right?

MITCH JESERICH: “Yeah.”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “Don’t forget, Adele, that when Robertson spoke—”

ADELE STAN: “Yep.”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “—he said: I’m from Loo-siana. Let’s make that clear.”

ADELE STAN: “Loo-siana. That’s right.” (c. 15:18)

[SNIP]

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “And he also fully owned being a redneck. And, so, yes, he’s anti-LGBTQ. But he’s also a redneck and proud of it.”

ADELE STAN: “Yep. That’s right.”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “And claiming that rednecks are proud to be Trump supporters.”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “Now, that’s part of his code as well.”

ADELE STAN: “Right. You’re right.”

MITCH JESERICH: “Well, now, let me also bring into the conversation Davey D with Pacifica Station KPFA, host of Hard Knock Radio. Davey, I know you’ve been out with the protest. We’re gonna get to that in a moment. But I do wanna give you an opportunity to weigh in on what we’ve heard so far.” (c. 15:53)

[SNIP]

DAVEY D: “[SNIP] (c. 16:08) But the code about the free stuff was very interesting—”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah.”

DAVEY D: “—because that was to imply that people of color, black people in particular, are looking for handouts.”

ADELE STAN: “That’s right.”

DAVEY D: “And Trump has a whole record of, you know, scheming and getting handouts and getting tax breaks and all sorts of stuff—”

ADELE STAN: “Oh, it’s all sorts of stuff, sure.”

DAVEY D: “—including on 9/11. He went and applied and got these small business loans, that didn’t apply to him, that made a killing. So, you know, you could just Google that and see that for yourself.”

ADELE STAN: “And bankruptcies might be considered a little bit of free stuff, right?”

DAVEY D: “Right. But that won’t be applied to him because he’s a quote-unquote ‘businessman’.”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “But, definitely, there was a lotta code. And the whole thing about the redneck thing, that’s a shot across the bow in saying: Look. This is the party for you guys.”

ADELE STAN: “Of white folks.”

DAVEY D: “Of white folks. Yes.” (c. 16:54)

MITCH JESERICH: “So, Adele? Do you feel like that has changed for the Republican Party?”

ADELE STAN: “What I think has changed is that the code has become more apparent. I think this is, you know, the way the Republican Party has been trending for a very, very long time. It’s just that there was a patina of ideology over it.

“And what Trump has done is, like a Band-Aid, ripped off any patina of ideology. There’s nothing, no coherent ideology on economics or trade, regardless of what he says. What it really is is, you know, this has always been a collection of resentments by a certain segment of the white population. And, now, it’s just okay to be that, baldly and nakedly, without any kind of pretense.”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “It was a dog whistle, as they say. Now, it’s a bullhorn.”

ADELE STAN: “Oh, that’s right.” (c. 17:45)

DAVEY D: “I definitely agree with that.”

MITCH JESERICH: “Now, Davey D, you were outside all day covering the protest.”

DAVEY D: “Yeah. There was a big march against poverty. And several thousand people showed up. And highlighting that was Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, and Rage Against the Machine, who have formed a supergroup called Prophets of Rage. So, they performed—”

ADELE STAN: “Oh, wow.”

DAVEY D: “—on a flatbed truck. Among them was a number of local artists from here, Rebel Diaz out of the Bronx, a gentleman out of Baltimore, who shouted out that this was the anniversary—since we’re talking about people killed by the police—of Tyrone West. So, he talked about that passionately and connected all those dots, of course, talking about Tamir Rice; and his people were there. And it was a big showing.

“What was interesting there was a couple, that lived across the street from the park, who put out the American flag, told people to get off their lawn, called the police, took pictures, and wanted this entire event, that had thousands of people, shut down. And it was very interesting because the police did come. But, luckily, they had the permits and everything.

“But there was just this sense of—”

ADELE STAN: “Wow.”

DAVEY D: “—like: This is what’s wrong with America.”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “And they pretty much said that from their porch. This is what is wrong. And: You people need to leave!”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “And it was a very interesting situation. But today’s theme was about ending poverty. And these people were poor as heck, which was very interesting because, really, the theme of the day was to help you out, that person out. But many people did get the message.

“Cheri Honkala was one of the speakers. She, of course, was the Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate in 2012. And her remarks, I think, really crystallised what the day was about, which was: Make sure that we can speak for ourselves.”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “We don’t need a bunch of non-profits pretending. We’re here. And there were lots of people here to speak for themselves. And this is what she had to say.” (c. 19:47)

[Broadcast cuts to audio from the street protest outside of the RNC]

CHERI HONKALA: “[…] people of America. [audience cheers]

“And we—if Fannie Lou Hamer were here, would say: We are sick and tired of being sick and tired! [audience cheers]

“If you can hear the rage in my voice, it’s because we’re not only up against the Republicans, we’re up against the Democrats.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER(S): “That’s right!” [audience cheers]

CHERI HONKALA: “And, you know, it’s easy to hate a Trump. But the Democrats are passing a law around a lot of soft money. And they’re trying to create a different kind of poor people’s movements, run by the non-profit industrial complex. [7] (c. 20:46)

“But those of us, that know what it’s like to try to come together and get some milk for our kids, those of us that have been arrested over 200 times just to feed, clothe, and house people in this country, we’re gettin’ tired.

“We’re gettin’ tired about the fake people talkin’ about how we’re tryin’ to feed our babies! We are so tired of it!

“So, all of those, that are out there in the non-profit industrial complex, tryin’ to tell me that I gotta vote for the least of two evils—”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Fuck ’em!”

CHERI HONKALA: “—you don’t know how we live! [audience cheers] You are not from a front-line community!”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: “That’s right!”

CHERI HONKALA: “Our lives, today, are like a gaping wound! We can’t wait no more! We don’t have the air conditioning in our house. We’re the ones, that drive around the clock to get here, just to be here, just to go back to the City of Philadelphia to march again on opening day of the Democratic National Convention! [audience cheers]

“And everywhere I go people tell me: Cheri, you can’t say that on the stage. [audience: Yes, you can, Cheri!] Well, guess what. Fuck you! I’ll say whatever I need to on the stage! [expletives deleted from free speech radio broadcast] [audience cheers]

[end of Davey D’s audio from the street protest at the 2016 RNC, Monday, 18 JUL 2016; begin transcript of Cheri Honkala’s speech from a YouTube video]

“I, too, became an ordained minister. But the reason I went online and got ordained is because I got tired of speaking at funerals and paying somebody else to bury the people that I’m in the trenches with. And I wanted to bury people myself.

“So, when people tell me to get to the back of the line, tell me some other organisations, or some fake people can speak on my behalf, damn it, you ain’t taking my voice away!

“The most important message, that I can give to any of you, that for real, for real live below the federal poverty level, don’t you dare have anybody else speak for you! They ain’t in the boxing ring! And they better not tell you how to punch!

“I will continue to walk to the front of every single line because, damn it, my voice is important! And you can lock me up! But you can’t lock up the idea of ending poverty in America! And the people, that won’t sell us down the river are the poor people, themselves. Thank you!

“Join me on opening day of the Democratic National Convention, where we, either, are going to vote for a different woman, maybe Dr. Jill Stein or, if we don’t vote for the other woman, join me; become a soldier because we’re gonna organise the next American Spring!.”

Cheri Honkala at protest outside the 2016 Republican National Convention, Monday, 18 JUL 2016

DAVEY D: “One of the things, that I think is important is that I was in Cleveland eight years ago. This is in deep east Cleveland. And this is an impoverished place. We talk about cities being gentrified. That place is not gentrified. It is like Detroit, burned out buildings. And we talked about that, being out there. (c. 22:56)

“So, this was a thing for the community. The community was there. They were very intentional about being out there and making sure that the face of poverty really embraced—”

ADELE STAN: “Mm.”

DAVEY D: “—people who are dirt poor. And, when you go out there, you know, being from Oakland and living in New York, that’s poor. That’s poor. There’re still the abandoned buildings—”

ADELE STAN: “Wow.”

DAVEY D: “—folks, who are really just tryin’ to get by.”

ADELE STAN: “Mm.”

DAVEY D: “In a big way, it’s a Tale of Two Clevelands. [8]

MITCH JESERICH: “Davey D, coming into this convention, there was a lot of talk about what would happen on the streets, that people were gonna be armed. That you were gonna have neo-Nazis show up. That you were gonna have the New Black Panther Party show up armed. Did you see? And we’re gonna hear some sound that you have from today’s march as well. But did you see any of that?” (c. 23:44)

DAVEY D: “People were very clear. This is the other thing. Armed black people have been here. And the police responded by trying to get the law changed—”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “—for open carry suspended for a week.”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “The police unions.”

DAVEY D: “Yes, the police unions. Many people are very clear that they are not for the gun control thing. And that has been a speaking point, that doesn’t resonate. I’ve been very intentional about asking people how they feel.”

ADELE STAN: “Okay.”

DAVEY D: “They’re like: We’re not trying to get rid of our guns any time soon.”

ADELE STAN: “Mm.”

DAVEY D: “Who’s speaking for us? And these are people, that are dealing with black-on-black crime issues.”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “These are folks, that are from the community, not just in Cleveland, but also in Florida and other places. So, that myth needs to be put to rest, if we’re, you know—it’s not the reality from the people, that are getting—”

ADELE STAN: “Well, there are folks, that will tell you that they believe that gun control was really implemented as a way of disarming African-Americans—”

DAVEY D: “And folks are very clear about that—”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “—very, very clear about the attempts to put a law into place for the week—”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “—underscores that situation in a big way. And folks aren’t feeling it, aren’t having it. But, no, nobody showed up. Their security was tight. [laughs]

ASKI MUHAMMED: “Davey D, on Saturday, the New Black Panther Party had a march.”

DAVEY D: “Yeah.”

ASKI MUHAMMED: “They were gonna march and we’re gonna get out of town. And, interestingly, they did not bring weapons and said: That would send the wrong message for us to bring weapons here, even though that’s part of our mantra.”

DAVEY D: “Right. Well, I can’t speak to what they were talking about. There is a history of gun clubs throughout Texas, here, and other places, that often aren’t highlighted, often aren’t talked about.”

ADELE STAN: “I didn’t know that.”

DAVEY D: “Yeah. So, many black folks, they will tell you. You know?”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “So, that narrative has been kind of erased in the mainstream. When we talk about it, you hear about gun buy-back programmes and things of that nature. But that’s not a tradition in a lot fo places. And people need to know that. And if you don’t believe me, come out here and go to the hood and talk to folks. And they’re very clear about that.

“And I think it was part of what Cheri was saying. Too many people are speaking on their behalf.”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “And they have nothing to do with the realities of what is going on. And that was pretty stark.”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah.”

MITCH JESERICH: “Tell us about the march. And how large was it?”

DAVEY D: “The march had a couple of thousand people at the end of the show with Public Enemy and Rage, Prophets of Rage. People went and they marched to downtown. And they were also very strategic about that. Poor folks were in the front. But Tom Morello, he was at one part of the march. B Real was in another. And Chuck D—”

ADELE STAN: “Oh, that’s interesting.”

DAVEY D: “—put up the rear. So, this meant that people were kind of spread out all around. It wasn’t like we were just gonna follow one person.”

ADELE STAN: “Right, right.”

DAVEY D: “So, Tom was like in the middle somewhere.”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “And the bulk of it was in the front. And they were very intentional about having the star power spread throughout.”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “A lot of people went. And they brought attention. And people form the neighborhoods joined the march. And there was a lot of conversation. It was very peaceful. But we also got to talk to a lot of people, who pointed out the military gear that the police had.”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “You know, dressed as stormtroopers. There were also police from all around the country.”

ADELE STAN: “Yes, there are.”

DAVEY D: “There are police from Massachusetts. I saw Boston police. I think there are police from New York. So, you know—”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “California Highway Patrols.”

DAVEY D: “California, yeah. So, there are thousands of police here.”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah. I asked a cop for directions. He said: I don’t know. I’m not from here.”

DAVEY D: “Yeah. I’m not from here. But they’re all wearing today’s color of black. They’re all wearing stormtrooper chic, which is very interesting.

“But here’s a clip from the end of the march after we marched a good five hours, not five hours, but five miles in the 96-degree heat. And here’s what was going on.” (c. 27:37)

[broadcast cuts to Davey D’s audio from the march]

[SNIP] (c. 41:11)

ADELE STAN: “Well, that’s the thing about Trump, right? There are people, who—and this is my theory about why I think Trump will do better in the popular vote than the polls predict—”

DAVEY D: “Yeah.”

ADELE STAN: “—is that there are people, who do not want to tell pollsters they are going to vote for Donald Trump because it’s a little bit embarrassing.” (c. 41:28)

[SNIP]

DAVEY D: “You know what? The other thing is you can’t underestimate his popularity, in terms of his TV show.”

ADELE STAN: “Right.”

DAVEY D: “People can laugh. And, you know, you can say what you want. But people identify that. And I see that. I’ve asked people. And they’re like: I love his Apprentice [TV show]. And he’s a sharp businessman. And we need that.”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm.”

DAVEY D: “And he’s an outsider. And he speaks valiantly.”

ADELE STAN: “Right?”

DAVEY D: “You know. The last time people joked like this—I mean some of us are old enough to remember—people thought Ronald Reagan was a clown.”

ADELE STAN: “Oh, that’s right.”

DAVEY D: “And people thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was a clown. Right?”

ADELE STAN: “M-hm. Right.”

DAVEY D: “And both of those guys served two terms in their respective offices. So, folks can say what they want. They can pooh-pooh the whole thing. The most popular things, that people watch are reality TV shows.”

ADELE STAN: “Isn’t that the truth? And it’s what women watch. (c. 42:15) [Adele Stan pointed out how ratings numbers showed that mostly women watched Donald Trump’s reality TV show. So, although women may not like certain things Trump says about women, they may still vote for him.] [SNIP]”

MITCH JESERICH: “So, Adele Stan, what do you think this means for the Republican Party? Is it a new party? (c. 44:15)

ADELE STAN: “[SNIP] Well, I mean I do think that it is going to be configured differently in certain ways. But, you know. So, what you’ll really just have is a more vituperative party, where certain things that people used to speak in a more thicker code are gonna be permissible. But I think that, you know—I don’t see huge, huge changes going on in the party. I think what you have is kind of a distillation of the resentments on which this party has been built upon for the last fifty years.”

MITCH JESERICH: “How about the Republican activists, that you’ve covered for a number of years? Talk to me about some of who they are; and how are they viewing Trump?” (c. 45:12)

ADELE STAN: “Well, you know, people who want to find power will ally with what they perceive as power. And Trump is seen as a strong man. So, the operatives like Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and still a political operative in the GOP, of course, he’s allied with Trump. Tony Perkins, the Chair of the Family Research Council, another big evangelical group—”

DAVEY D: “Where are the Rand Paul folks? Remember the Rand Paul Revolution a couple o’ years ago?”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah!”

DAVEY D: “What happened to them?”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah. They are divided. Some of ’em are gonna vote for Trump. Some of ’em aren’t. You know? Some of ’em are gonna vote for [Libertarian] Gary Johnson. But, you know, in terms of—Rand Paul always had a coded white identity message, that a lot of mainstream media were not picking up. They weren’t hip to it. You know?”

ASKIA MUHAMMED: “A lot of black people weren’t picking up on it because many black folks—well, not many; I mean how many are there; black folks who are Trump supporters now—have said: Oh, I started out as a Rand Paul supporter. And he did have some black support, for whatever reason.”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah! And he was against the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act. I mean that was just, to me, mind-blowing. He never backed away from that. He just, you know, basically said—well, you know, he misspoke.”

MITCH JESERICH: “But he was against the establishment.”

ADELE STAN: “Yeah!”

MITCH JESERICH: “Right. He was against the politics as usual.”

ADELE STAN: “That’s true. Well, so he says.”

DAVEY D: “That’s an attractive thing for a lot for people.”

ADELE STAN: “Mm.”

DAVEY D: “If you can get rid of the establishment, the kicking up of dust says to people that maybe there will be something better.”

ADELE STAN: “Ah.”

DAVEY D: “It’s gotta be better than this. And people will go to whoever is doing that. Trump is one of ’em.”

ADELE STAN: “Mm.” (c. 46:56)

[SNIP]

[SNIP] (c. 3:59:59)

Learn more at PACIFICA RADIO.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, and/or demand or resources, allow.]

Willie Robertson (Duck Dynasty) Speaks at 2016 Republican National Convention, Monday, 18 JUL 2016

Actor Scott Baio Speaks at 2016 Republican National Convention, Monday, 18 JUL 2016

***

[1] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Hard Knock Radio, this episode hosted by Davey D, Monday, 18 JUL 2016, 16:00 PDT, one-hour broadcast.

[2] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Flashpoints, this episode hosted by Dennis Bernstein, Monday, 18 JUL 2016, 15:00 PDT, one-hour broadcast.

[3] Cf. The old Americanism, Make America Great Again.

[4] Regarding NAFTA and its socioeconomic effects, see, for example:

“Under Nafta, Mexico Suffered, and the United States Felt Its Pain” by Laura Carlsen, The New York Times, 24 NOV 2013.
“The high price of ‘free trade’: NAFTA’s failure has cost the United States 8obs across the nation” by Robert E. Scott, Economic Policy Institute, 17 NOV 2013.

[5] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Pacifica Radio, this episode hosted by Dennis Bernstein, Monday, 18 JUL 2016, 15:00 PDT, four-hour broadcast.

[6] Actor Scott Baio made an anti-socialist comment when he said that America is not about “getting free stuff”: (c. 10:25) “But for you, first time voters, it’s important for you to know what it means to be an American. It doesn’t mean getting free stuff. [audience laughs and cheers] It means sacrificing, winning, losing, failing, succeeding, and sometimes doing the thing you don’t wanna do, including the hard work to get where you wanna be. And that’s what it means to be an American.”

This is a classic attack made against socialist, or democratic socialist, policies. The allegation is made that socialist-leaning people are lazy and entitled people expecting handouts, rather than people expecting a government for the people. In actuality, its elites like Donald Trump, who get “free stuff” in terms of big business subsidies, tax breaks, and the like. Scott Baio, unfortunately, misunderstands political economy.

[7] The non-profit industrial complex is a term, which was popularised by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence in their critique of the extremely compromised nature of the non-profit sector. INCITE! edited a collection of critical essays, entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, about which Amazon has written the following:

“A $1.3 trillion industry, the US nonprofit sector is the world’s seventh largest economy. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model? How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt politi-cal movements? Activists or -careerists? How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden exposé of the “nonprofit industrial complex” and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.”

[8] Cf. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens.

***

[22 JUL 2016]

[Last modified 19:54 PDT 28 JUL 2016]

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The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Professor Steve Fraser

26 Mon Oct 2015

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LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Although we live in a post-Occupy Wall Street world, where most people understand that the bottom 99% of the people are exploited and oppressed by the ruling class, or the 1%, we also live in a post-9/11 world, in which even John Lennon‘s “Imagine” can be effectively censored from corporate radio, not to mention Rage Against the Machine and other emancipatory music deemed worthy of censorship by our corporate thought police.

We now live in a time where bourgeois artists, such as John Mayer (b. 1977) have a hit song like “Waiting on the World to Change“, which our corporate masters are all too keen to keep on perpetual rotation.

“Waiting on the World to Change” is a far cry from John Lennon‘s “Imagine” or “Working Class Hero“, or the Civil Rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome“, or Public Enemy‘s “Fight the Power” or “Shut ‘Em Down“, or you name it, “Get Up, Stand Up“.

“Get Up, Stand Up” (1973, 1980) by Bob Marley and The Wailers

But this all seems to reflect a burgeoning apathy and surrender to the powers that be, as the last vestiges of public people of conscience, such as John Mayer and other mealy-mouthed liberals in the public eye, squander their access to mass media. As the 1960s counterculture generations, inspired within the context of revolutionary uprisings in many economically-developing nations around the world, fade into the past and COINTELPRO, followed by the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s, backlashes pummel the working classes, popular culture has somehow grown incredibly stagnant in terms of its socioeconomic and political consciousness. This reflects the general decline in civic engagement in the USA, as chronicled in Robert Putnam’s flawed, but important best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Somehow, American life has become increasingly isolated and alienated. And all of this is despite the mass protest movements, such as the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, and sundry environmental campaigns, which flare up periodically to protest, but not question nor challenge, the prevailing political order.

While we seem willing to be activists insofar as we are willing to campaign and demonstrate, our contemporary generations seem unwilling to question the prevailing wisdom of the political status quo. So, most of us accept a cartel-like two-party dictatorship oligopolised by the Republican and Democrat parties, which collude to keep out alternative political parties. And most of us, even activists, uncritically accept the capitalist mode of production. Most of us uncritically accept capitalism, lacking the imagination to imagine alternatives.

It seems much of our current generation’s political and socioeconomic apathy comes from a lack of awareness of a people’s history and the struggles of working people to provide lives of dignity for their families and communities. Professor Steve Fraser reminded us earlier today on free speech radio of our oft-forgotten people’s history of collective resistance to socioeconomic injustice, as he discusses his 2015 book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. [1] Listen (or download) here.

STEVE FRASER: “You know; a depression broke out in 1873, just when Twain published his Gilded Age book, and it continued for four long, miserable years. And it was mass unemployment all over the country, and mass evictions, and so on. And that was, particularly, the case in New York City. Demonstrators gathered in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and that demonstration was met with violence by the City Police Force. And, forever after, Tompkins Square would be remembered as one of those critical moments of class confrontation, which characterised the era.”

“You know; it’s very hard for us, living in the times we live in today, the acquiescent times, if you will, to imagine what life was like a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

Messina

***

THE NEW YORK TIMES—(16 MAR 2015) For two years running, Oxfam International has traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to make a request: Could the superrich kindly cease devouring the world’s wealth? And while they’re at it, could they quit using “their financial might to influence public policies that favor the rich at the expense of everyone else”?

In 2014, when Oxfam arrived in Davos, it came bearing the (then) shocking news that just 85 individuals controlled as much wealth as half of the world’s population combined. This January, that number went down to 80 individuals.

Dropping this news in Davos is a great publicity stunt, but as a political strategy, it’s somewhat baffling. Why would the victors of a class war choose to surrender simply because the news is out that they have well and truly won? Oxfam’s answer is that the rich must battle inequality or they will find themselves in a stagnant economy with no one to buy their products. (Davos thought bubble: “Isn’t that what cheap credit is for?”)

Still, even if some of the elite hand-wringing about inequality is genuine, are reports really the most powerful weapons out there to fight for a more just distribution of wealth? Where are the sit-down strikes? The mass boycotts? The calls for expropriation? Where, in short, are the angry masses?

Oxfam’s Davos guilt trip doesn’t appear in Steve Fraser’s “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power,” but these are the questions at the heart of this fascinating if at times meandering book. Fraser, a labor historian, argues that deepening economic hardship for the many, combined with “insatiable lust for excess” for the few, qualifies our era as a second Gilded Age. But while contemporary wealth stratification shares much with the age of the robber barons, the popular response does not.

As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age — which he defines loosely as the years between the end of the Civil War and the market crash of 1929 — American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics. Rather, a “broad and multifaceted resistance” fought for and won substantially higher wages, better workplace conditions, progressive taxation and, ultimately, the modern welfare state (even as they dreamed of much more).

To solve the mystery of why sustained resistance to wealth inequality has gone missing in the United States, Fraser devotes the first half of the book to documenting the cut and thrust of the first Gilded Age: the mass strikes that shut down cities and enjoyed the support of much of the population; the Eight Hour Leagues that dramatically cut the length of the workday, fighting for the universal right to leisure and time “for what we will”; the vision of a “ ‘cooperative commonwealth’ in place of the Hobbesian nightmare that Progress had become.”

He reminds readers that although “class war” is considered un-American today, bracing populist rhetoric was once the lingua franca of the nation. American presidents bashed “moneycrats” and “economic royalists,” and immigrant garment workers demanded not just “bread and roses” but threatened “bread or blood.” Among many such arresting anecdotes is one featuring the railway tycoon George Pullman. When he died in 1897, Fraser writes, “his family was so afraid that his corpse would be desecrated by enraged workers, they had it buried at night . . . in a pit eight feet deep, encased in floors and walls of steel-reinforced concrete in a lead-lined casket covered in layers of asphalt and steel rails.”

Learn more at THE NEW YORK TIMES.

***

“War” by Bob Marley and The Wailers

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Letters and Politics.]

LETTERS AND POLITICS—[26 OCT 2015] “Good day; and welcome to Letters and Politics. I’m Mitch Jeserich. During a 15-year period between 1870 and 1920, there were thousands of violent skirmishes between workers and the state, the state meaning whether it be the military, the national guard, state troopers, or the police, and there have been throughout the United States. This period encompasses what is known as the Gilded Age and the rise of industrial capitalism.

“Many say, today, that we are living in a second Gilded Age with the rise of financial capitalism and the automation of the workforce, displacing many workers today, just like what happened during the first Gilded Age. But in the first Gilded Age, there were 40 people’s armies formed, just between 1893 and 1894, that set out to march on Washington, D.C. All but one of them were put down violently before arriving.

“Today, we’re gonna compare and contrast the first Gilded Age and the so-called Second Gilded Age. My guest is Steve Fraser. Steve Fraser is a labour historian and an award-winning writer. He’s the author of the book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. He joins us via Skype from New York City. Steve Fraser, it is my good pleasure to welcome you to this programme.” (c. 7:34)

STEVE FRASER: “Thanks. It is my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.”

MITCH JESERICH: “As we begin, let’s talk about the term Gilded Age itself and what it means. It was first coined, wasn’t it, by Mark Twain in a book called The Gilded Age?”

STEVE FRASER: “That’s correct. It’s Mark Twain’s first best-seller, published in 1873. And that’s where we get that rubric from. It’s still, today, a hilariously funny book, which makes fun of what, today, we would call the crony capitalism of that era. That is to say the kind of incestuous relationship between big business (back then, which meant railroads and mining companies and banks) and the government. And the roster of corrupt politicians ranged all the way from the Vice President through the Senate, all through that Congress, into the Cabinets of the Presidents, who ran things in those days.

“And Twain meant it to mean, both, crony capitalism and the kind of obsession with wealth, with what clerics of that age might have called Mana worship and the way it corrupted democracy and undermined the egalitarian ethos that America was supposed to be dedicated to. So, that’s where we get that term from. [SNIP] (c. 27:35)

“[SNIP] There are a lot of similarities, people who say, Look, you know, this is the same old; it’s déjà vu all over again, have a point. That is to say there is the same gross maldistribution of income and wealth. There’s the same kind of obnoxious, extravagant flaunting of great wealth. There’s the same kind of socially Darwinian callousness today. If you don’t make it big, you’re a loser. Then, you are a kind of casualty of the survival of the fittest. There is the same kind of crony capitalism or corruption in politics. There’s the same undermining of all democratic institutions, that are supposed to protect the people against the powerful and the wealthy.

“These things are all similar. There’s no question about that. But there are these striking differences. One, of course, is what we’ve been talking about, the extent of resistance, which is far, far less in our own age. A second is this lack of a kind of alternative vision or set of visions of what might replace a system, which has shown itself in the last 30 or 40 years to be kind of heading back to the future. That is to say we now have an economy, which more and more is characterised by sweat shop labour. 30 to 40 million people work a full time day and make less than poverty-level wages. That’s a scandal.

“The sweat shop back around the year 1900 was considered an aberration, a kind of obnoxious departure from capitalism. Now, it’s, increasingly, in the age of neoliberal, flexible capitalism considered the norm.

“Also, in our Second Gilded Age, we are experiencing a developed country—that is to say, the United States—undergoing a process of underdevelopment. That is to say, the general standard of living has, either, stagnated or declined for millions of people over the last 30 to 40 years, despite the gaiety that is common in the precincts of the 1%.

“During the first Gilded Age, brutalised and exploited as it was, there was, instead, a general and slow gradual uptick in the standard of living for most people. [SNIP]” (c. 29:58)

“[SNIP] But what we have today is the de-fanging of all those protections, the stripping away of all the welfare state provisions. The National Labor Relations Act has become a joke. Nobody obeys it. No corporation obeys it anymore. The chances of getting a free and fair election at a work site are minimal. The law is used by corporate America to delay interminably the resolution of grievances or demands, to engage in collective bargaining until workers who have no choice give up, go elsewhere, work elsewhere.

“There are millions of low wage workers in this country today—and there are numerous reports that document this—that are working at wage levels, for hours, and without health and safety benefits, that are proscribed by law. But business in America, today, uniformly—or, if not uniformly, widely—ignores that law ‘cos there’s no enforcement mechanism in place. All of the social welfare provisions, that you’re referring to, was the culmination of that resistance to that first Gilded Age.” (c. 31:06)”

MITCH JESERICH: “Not just the New Deal?”

STEVE FRASER: “Yeah, created during the New Deal have been slowly and more rapidly whittled away.”

MITCH JESERICH: “But you’re saying, though, that these protections, that really sort of came in the 1930s, this is part of—what?—a 60-year effort? A 50-year effort—”

STEVE FRASER: “Yes.”

MITCH JESERICH: “—all the way back to the 1870s?”

STEVE FRASER: “Yeah, some of it, like, for instance, anti-sweat shop legislation begins to emerge around the turn of the century, long before the Great Depression and the New Deal. And safety legislation begins to emerge. States begin to pass minimum wage and maximum hour laws. All of that is, in my view, a function of this upwelling of resistance, which had characterised the country and alarmed so many people for decades by that point.

“Moreover, when you get to the ’30s and you face what, I guess, arguably, is the second most traumatic moment in American history, the Great Depression, you don’t have only a President who’s open to the possibility of significant reform, you have a population, which is ready to demand in a variety of ways, so that there are mass strikes all around the country. There’s a San Francisco General Strike. There’s a Minneapolis General Strike. There’s a textiles strike, which puts 450,000 textile workers on the picket lines. There are sit down strikes in the auto industry, in the rubber industry, in department stores, in the meat-packing industry. You have farm or labour parties emerging all through the midwest and even in New York state. You have mass unemployment demonstrations, some of them met with violence, as in the case of the Ford Motor Company in 1932.

“You have movements to stop, forcibly stop, evictions, both, from farms and from people’s apartments and homes. You have people actually seizing idled utility plants and coal mines, that is transgressing the holy of all holies, private property, and starting them up themselves, so that they could survive. So, there’s a general atmosphere of anti-capitalism, which fuels the political, which informs the political atmosphere of that moment and makes the New Deal reforms possible. The New Deal is not a function of a kind-hearted Hudson River patroon, which is what Roosevelt was, feeling—”

“—feeling the pinch.”

MITCH JESERICH: “And it’s not just a reaction to, which I think a lot of people think it is, to the 1929 crash.”

STEVE FRASER: “No. It’s not. And it draws on this long reservoir of anti-capitalism. (c. 34:00) [SNIP]”

[SNIP] (c. 59:59)

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, and/or demand or resources, allow.]

[From KPFA website] Steve Fraser is a labor historian and author of several books including Wall Street and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His latest book is The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.

About the book:

A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?

The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser’s account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today’s delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear.

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

***

THE NATION—[2 APR 2015] This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

What We Can Learn From the Workers, Activists, and Even Politicians Who Tore Down the First Gilded Age: Americans were furious at the inequality of their country 200 years ago. Could they get as angry today?

by Steve Fraser

The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company).

Part 1: The Great Upheaval

What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement for the eight-hour day, elicited what one historian has called “a strange enthusiasm.” The normal trade union strike is a finite event joining two parties contesting over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The mass strike in 1886 or before that in 1877—all the many localized mass strikes that erupted in towns and small industrial cities after the Civil War and into the new century—was open-ended and ecumenical in reach.

So, for example, in Baltimore when the skilled and better-paid railroad brakemen on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad first struck in 1877 so, too, did less well off “box-makers, sawyers, and can-makers, engaged in the shops and factories of that city, [who] abandoned their places and swarmed into the streets.” This in turn “stimulated the railroad men to commit bolder acts.” When the governor of West Virginia sent out the Berkeley Light Guard and Infantry to confront the strikers at Martinsburg at the request of the railroad’s vice president, the militia retreated and “the citizens of the town, the disbanded militia, and the rural population of the surrounding country fraternized,” encouraging the strikers.

The centrifugal dynamic of the mass strike was characteristic of this extraordinary phenomenon. By the third day in Martinsburg the strikers had been “reinforced during the night at all points by accessions of working men engaged in other avocations than railroading,” which, by the way, made it virtually impossible for federal troops by then on the scene to recruit scabs to run the trains.

By the fourth day, “mechanics, artisans, and laborers in every department of human industry began to show symptoms of restlessness and discontent.” Seeping deeper and deeper into the subsoil of proletarian life, down below the “respectable” working class of miners and mechanics and canal boat-men, frightened observers reported a “mighty current of passion and hate” sweeping up a “vast swarm of vicious idlers, vagrants, and tramps.” And so it went.

Smaller cities and towns like Martinsburg were often more likely than the biggest urban centers to experience this sweeping sense of social solidarity. (What today we might call a massing of the 99%.) During the 1877 Great Uprising, the social transmission of the mass strike moved first along the great trunk lines of the struck railroads, but quickly flowed into the small villages and towns along dozens of tributary lines and into local factories, workshops, and coal mines as squads of strikers moved from settlement to settlement mobilizing the populace.

In these locales, face-to-face relations still prevailed. It was by no means taken for granted that antagonism between labor and capital was fated to be the way of the world. Aversion to the new industrial order and a “democratic feeling” brought workers, storekeepers, lawyers, and businessmen of all sorts together, appalled by the behavior of large industrialists who often enough didn’t live in those communities and so were the more easily seen as alien beings.

It was not uncommon for local officials, like the mayor of Cumberland, Maryland, to take the side of the mass strikers. The federal postmaster in Indianapolis wired Washington, “Our mayor is too weak, and our Governor will do nothing. He is believed to sympathize with the strikers.” In Fort Wayne, like many other towns its size, the police and militia simply could not be counted on to put down the insurrectionists. In this world, corporate property was not accorded the same sanctified status still deferred to when it came to personal property. Sometimes company assets were burned to the ground or disabled; at other times they were seized, but not damaged.

Metropolises also witnessed their own less frequent social earthquakes. Anonymous relations were more common there, the gulf separating social classes was much wider, and the largest employers could count on the new managerial and professional middle classes for support and a political establishment they could more often rely on.

Still, the big city hardly constituted a DMZ. During the mass strike of 1877 in Pittsburgh, when 16 citizens were killed, the city erupted and “the whole population seemed to have joined the rioters.”

“Strange to say,” noted one journalist, elements of the population who had a “reputation for being respectable people—tradesmen, householders, well-to-do mechanics and such—openly mingled with the [turbulent mob] and encouraged them to commit further deeds of violence.” Here, too, as in smaller locales, enraged as they clearly were, mass strikers still drew a distinction between railroad property and the private property of individuals, which they scrupulously avoided attacking. Often enough the momentum of the mass strike was enough to win concessions on wages, hours, or on other conditions of work—although they might be provisional, not inscribed in contracts, and subject to being violated or ignored when law and order was restored.

Learn more at THE NATION.

***

MOYERS & COMPANY—[19 DEC 2014] “Why Have Americans Stopped Resisting Economic Privilege? by Steve Fraser

The following excerpt is from the introduction to Steve Fraser’s new book, The Age of Acquiescence.

Marx once described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. Several decades have come and gone during which we’ve learned not to mention Marx in polite company. Our vocabulary went through a kind of linguistic cleansing, exiling suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor” or even something as apparently innocuous as “working class.”

In times past, however, such language and the ideas they conjured up struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as accurate depictions of reality. They used them regularly along with words and phrases like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced. Never before, however, has the Vatican of capitalism captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that recently ran the country for a long generation and ended up running it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville (no Marxist he), confessed as much during the Clinton years, when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Occupy Wall Street, even bereft of strategy, program, and specific demands as many lamented when it was a newborn, nonetheless opened up space again for our political imagination by confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament. It rediscovered something that, beneath thickets of political verbiage about tax this and cut that, about end‑of‑the world deficits and missionary-minded “job creators,” had been hiding in plain sight: namely, what our ancestors once called “the street of torments.” It achieved a giant leap backward, so to speak, summoning up a history of opposition that had mysteriously withered away.

True turning points in American political history are rare. This might seem counterintuitive once we recognize that for so long society was in a constant uproar. Arguably the country was formed and re‑formed in serial acts of violent expropriation. Like the market it has been (and remains) infinitely fungible, living in the perpetually changing present, panting after the future, the next big thing. The demographics of American society are and have always been in permanent upheaval, its racial and ethnic complexion mutating from one generation to the next. Its economic hierarchies exist in a fluid state of dissolution and recrystallization. Social classes go in and out of existence.

Nonetheless, in the face of this allsided liquefaction, American politics have tended to flow within very narrow banks from one generation to the next. The capacious, sometimes stultifying embrace of the two-party system has absorbed most of the heat generated by this or that hot-button issue, leaving the fundamentals intact. Only under the most trying circumstances has the political system ruptured or come close. Then the prevailing balance of power and wealth between classes and regions has been called into question; then the political geography and demography of the nation have been reconfigured, sometimes for decades to come; only then have axiomatic beliefs about wealth and work, democracy and elitism, equality and individualism, government and the free market been reformulated or at least opened to serious debate, however briefly.

A double mystery then is the subject of this book. Speaking generally, one might ask why people submit for so long to various forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination. And then, equally mysterious, why they ever stop giving in. Why acquiesce? Why resist? Looking backward, the indignities and injustices, the hypocrisies and lies, the corruption and cruelty may seem insupportable. Yet they are tolerated. Looking backward, the dangers to life, limb, and livelihood entailed in rebelling may seem too dire to contemplate. Yet in the teeth of all that, rebellion happens. The world is full of recent and long-ago examples of both.

Learn more at MOYERS & COMPANY.

***

[1] Steve Fraser is a historian, writer, and editor. His research and writing have pursued two main lines of inquiry: labor history and the history of American capitalism. In his first book, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (1991), he examines the relationship between the New Deal and the rise of the modern labor movement. His later works, including Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace (2008) and Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (2005), explore the ways American society and culture reacted to the presence of powerful economic elites. His newest book is The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015). He has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. He has also worked as an editor for Cambridge University Press, Basic Books, and Houghton Mifflin.

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[29 OCT 2015 20:30 PST]

[Last modified 09:01 PDT 12 MAY 2016]

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The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Professor Steve Fraser

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