The "Second Gilded Age!" .......an incredible read: Tom Gram...

[KoKo]

Tomgram: {b]Steve Fraser, The Two Gilded Ages


Think of it as gilding the pain. Last year, hedge fund manager John Paulson of Paulson & Co. hauled in a nifty $3.7 billion. (Yes, you read that right.) Mainly, he did so, according to the Wall Street Journal, "by shorting, or betting against, subprime mortgage securities and collateralized debt obligations." And he wasn't alone. Hedge fund money-maker Philip Falcone of Harbinger Capital Partners raked in a comparatively measly $1.7 billion in 2007, also by shorting subprime mortgages. These are fortunes beyond imagining, made in no time at all by betting on the pure misery of others. Think of them as Las Vegas with a mean streak a mile wide.

In a week in which Citibank released news of quarterly losses of $5.1 billion and sweeping job cuts, food riots dotted the planet, oil hit $117 a barrel, and regular gas prices averaged $3.47 a gallon at the pump (with another 30 cents likely to be tacked on in the next month), Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine released its list of the 50 top hedge fund managers. In 2007, they "made" a cumulative $29 billion. (Even to slip in among the top 25, you had to take in at least $360 million.) To put this in perspective, Paulson alone made $1.6 billion dollars more than it is going to cost J.P. Morgan Chase to pick up the tanking Bear Stearns; in one hour, he made 30 times what the median American family earned all last year. And here's a little tidbit to go with that: Income inequality in 2007 was, according to the Associated Press, "at the highest level since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began."

And still, a New York Times piece on the gains of Paulson and crew described the hedge fund managers with genuine awe as "those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe." Master of the Universe (a label originally attached to an over-muscled action figure of the 1980s by the name of He-Man) -- such descriptions have been with us since the beginning of our new Gilded Age and no one knows this better than Steve Fraser. His book on our financial "masters of the universe" from the eighteenth century to the present, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, has just been published. As he writes, "Beginning with the merger and acquisition mania of the mid-1980s, the media were overrun with depictions of Wall Street 'gunslingers,' 'white knights' and 'black knights,' 'killer bees,' 'hired guns,'… and 'barbarians at the gates,' warrior appellations borrowed helter-skelter from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and America's mythologized West." The language brought to bear always had that requisite edge of awe, part of an ethos that added up to a cult of the Titan. Fraser, whose book is simply superb (and, in this age of information onslaught, mercifully short), offers a brief history of key images of Wall Street movers and shakers -- the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist -- taking you on a concise tour of America's love/hate relationship with Wall Street from the founding of the republic to late last night.

Now, as the gilding on our present age begins to peel and flake, Fraser turns back to the last Gilded Age at the end of the nineteenth century, to ask a few questions germane to our moment, especially why, today, unlike in the late nineteenth century, the protests over the Paulsons of our world aren't rising to the heavens. Tom

The Great Silence
Our Gilded Age and Theirs
By Steve Fraser

Google "second Gilded Age" and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: it's a matter of déjà vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened "gilded" in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad's chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant's vice president, to loot the federal treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policy-making. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.

MUCH MORE AT .........

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174922/steve_fraser_the

[Peace Patriot]

1. I read somewhere that, on the eve of the Great Depression, the glitterati of New York

society held a "Beggars' Ball" at the Waldorf-Astoria, where all the rich people dressed up like hoboes ("street people" or "homeless" today) and ate their caviar and drank their champagne, and danced beneath the chandeliers, in costumes as the poor, while their fellow Americans died of hunger and exposure outside in the snowy streets.

I have not been able to re-locate the story, but it has stayed with me. I read it somewhere around the time that Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" came out, and Bush's remark to the fatcats at a Republican dinner seemed hauntingly familiar. “I’m glad to be here with the haves and have mores. They call you the elite--but I call you my base."

The haves and the have mores, in their tuxes and jewels--while they tortured human beings to the point of madness or death, slaughtered tens of thousands of men, women and children, and maimed, and sickened, and displaced millions more, out of greed for their oil.

"Gilded" is not the word for it. The Obscene Age. The Evil Age. The Devil's Age.

Hugo Chavez was right.

--------------------------

I just saw the DVD "Tocar & Luchar" ("To Play and to Fight"), one of the most moving documentaries I've ever seen, about the poorest children of Venezuela, children of the barrios, 300,000 of whom are now enrolled in a visionary classical music program--initially a private effort, now funded by the Chavez government--whose main orchestra, performed and conducted by children, has been proclaimed as one of the finest classical music orchestras in the world. You listen to its amazing sound--a perfection and energy not to be matched--and your mind keeps boggling over the fact that these are not just children, making this music, but some of the poorest children on earth. And they are on a mission to spread the beauty, discipline, uplift and cooperative spirit of orchestral music to all of South America and to the world. They have played in the finest concert halls in Europe, the U.S. and South America, to rave reviews. Placido Domingo is shown in the film with tears in his eyes as he listens to them. One of their members has been appointed lead conductor for the L.A. Philharmonic. They have formed hundreds of small orchestras and choirs all over Venezuela, and have pioneered classical music performance by blind, deaf and other disabled children. They speak of themselves as a family. They are obviously delighted to go to school. They love what they are doing, and they are loved. And it is amazing. Street children. Hopeless children. Children who can barely afford shoes. Giving the greatest classical music performances of our age.

So we must ALSO call it the Age of Music and the Age of Hope. To play is Heaven. To fight for the right to play, and for the musical program and its schools, is necessary and satisfying. To Play and to Fight. That is their motto. And they play as if their lives depended on it, with passion and skill that the composers of classical music would weep to behold. It is how the music was meant to be. It is music for everybody, not just for an elite. And everybody--the communal human race--deserves the best.

Great good and great evil seem to come in pairs. The Bushites would no doubt think nothing of nuking this country, if they could get away with it--to steal their oil. Meanwhile, this miracle of human creativity and love is growing like a tidal wave, in the heart of this targeted country, to sweep away our differences, and lift us all into a better world.

---

Here's a short clip of the DVD at YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmPIz9W-WQU

You can purchase the DVD here
http://www.amazon.com/Tocar-y-Luchar-Play-Fight/dp/B000UHAGNO

[1776Forever]

2. I found your post intriguing and found this picture of the Waldorf-Astoria in its hayday......

I tried to find more about the "Beggars Ball" but didn't come up with anything. Just to think about those people who did that made me think of the Bilderberg's. I don't know how much influence they really have on the world economy but it does make one wonder if this wasn't planned somehow. We will see down the road if the election is held or not later this year. I think the worst is yet to come.

[KoKo]

3. Years ago we did a tour of NewPort, RI...where the Mansions of Rich and Famous from

that time are open for visitors. The gold plated bathroom fixtures...gradiose paintings and stone "imported from Europe" reminded me of ads I saw during Bush II's years after 9/11 for real estate in Florida and California. Those houses in RI are open for tourists now ..to see how they lived in the "Gilded Age." I wonder what all those Mega-Mansion owners in CA and FLA are going to do with the hundreds and hundreds of their homes built on the backs of American Workers. There are so MANY MORE OF THEM, now...than even during the Gilded Age. As America grows older the number of the Uber Wealthy seems to grow in proportion.

Thanks for that picture. We don't build things like that anymore. The beauty of the architecture. We build CHEAP with GOO GAH's of Wide Screen Tee Vee's and some Brazilian Rainforest floors and call it LUXURY. It's LUXURY without Architectural Class.

[Prophet 451]

4. I've heard the same story

In the version I heard, it was inspired by the Danse Macarbe