Big Scary Money

The wealthy are not only powerful, they can frighten otherwise sensible people into a state of blubbering impotence. Take Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the 12th richest ($20 billion) person in America. How does he get away with his autocratic program of police brutality on Occupiers, stopping and frisking minorities, spying on Muslims both inside and outside city limits, and until recently, making food stamp applicants get fingerprinted as though they were common criminals?

 Not only does he run New York City as his own private fiefdom, he owns a vast media empire -- and he is constantly threatening to expand it. Journalists are afraid to cross him, lest he own them one day -- say, at The New York Times. David Sirota of Salon lays it all out, and suggests we just stop sucking up to the sanctimonious prick.




Money Honey


Easier said than done. Bloomberg  also wields his influence inside the Beltway and inside the White House, where after a long lunch with the president earlier this year, he was reportedly offered the presidency of the World Bank. He turned down the job, because he already owns the World. And his World View happens to revolve around the cult of centrism -- an elite world in which the little people must sacrifice a lot and the plutocrats pay only a little, and where the meltdown of '08 was caused not by Wall Street psychopaths, but by the government making it too easy for greedy people to buy homes they couldn't afford. President Obama gratefully sucks up to this sanctimonious little prick and the rest of the oligarchy by fully embracing Grand Bargainism and pretending that the Deficit is the original sin. He and Bloomberg are on the exact same austerian page in calling for trillions of dollars in cuts to government programs, and raising the retirement and Medicare eligibility ages.

Ordinary people do not care about the deficit, and outright reject the austerity meme. A recent Ipsos poll reveals the majority of Americans (including Democrats, Republicans and independents) want more, not less, government spending in such areas as food safety, veterans' affairs, and medical device and drug safety. The same poll also revealed that most people were not only unaware that federal employees have been subject to a wage freeze for the past two years, but that the president has just extended it indefinitely. The majority believe that the rich should be taxed to pay for government agencies that serve and protect everyone. We're all a bunch of raving socialists.

Meanwhile, the middle class is shrinking. A new report by Pew grimly lays out the facts -- America is in a Lost Decade. I don't think we needed another poll to tell us that. 

And Mayor Bloomberg gets invited to the White House and liberal think tanks even as he gets away with criminalizing hungry people. He would sooner spend millions of dollars investigating them than feeding them.

Money rules. The class war is real. It's them against us, and as Uncle Warren Buffett famously said, they're winning.

Occupy "The Scream"

The huge turnouts for Occupy May Day seem to have stunned the corporate media, which had assumed the movement was dead because they had stopped paying attention to it. Now, they are trying to marginalize OWS even further by calling the day's events a one-off piece of national street theater. Nothing to see here, move along, let's get back to the Rombama Death Match and the Osama Assassination retrospective.

Well, not so fast! Occupy is alive and well and living in the rarefied world of obscenely overpriced art and the obscenely wealthy oligarchs who have nothing else to do with their money than invest it in priceless masterworks, only to hide them away from public view. Today is "Shut Down Sotheby's" Day in New York City to protest against the auction of one of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" paintings. (he painted more than one version.) From the OWS website:




Tonight, at an exclusive 7pm auction, Sotheby's is expected to sell Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream" for $80 million dollars*. Outside, Occupy and labor allies will protest the Upper East Side art auction house in solidarity with 43 locked-out art handlers who have been replaced by Sotheby's with low wage temporary workers with no benefits.
Catering exclusively to the mega-rich (by providing a service that makes them richer and more exclusive,) Sotheby's is perhaps the most quintessentially 1% institution there is. Founded before the industrial era, it was the first company ever listed on the NY Stock Exchange, and today (despite the current "recession") is more profitable than at any other time in its 260-year history. Meanwhile, the Sotheby's workers who make those profits possible are given the shaft. Enough is enough. The 99% will not stand silent as union-busting companies like Sotheby's wage class war against us.
Making it even more interesting is the fact that Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg's girlfriend, former NY Banking Commissioner Diana Taylor, is on the board of Sotheby's. She has actually threatened to quit should Sotheby's CEO accede to the demands of the shut-out Teamsters. "MiDi" has got to be a match made in heaven, given Bloomberg's own disdain for the working class and poor. With a net worth of almost $20 billion, he is adamantly against raising the minimum wage, and insists that food stamp applicants in his fair city get fingerprinted lest they steal crumbs from the maws of the plutocrats. And when it comes to the unemployed and underemployed Occupiers, he is Marie Antoinette in smirky billionaire drag: instead of eating cake, says Hizzoner, they should just go out and become entrepreneurs.

You can see video here of locked-out Sotheby's workers asking Diana Taylor to stand up for them and their families. Her response has all the passion of a bored, pre-guillotine Louis XVI in drag.

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Odd Couples, Then and Now 

And it's not just the Teamsters giving Diana Taylor some righteous indignation. Investors are planning to demand that she and others resign from the Board at the annual shareholder meeting on May 8, for "gross mismanagement" in wasting money to punish middle class workers, and also for the mishandling of James Murdoch's embarrassing position on the Sotheby's board. The auction company has had its share of scandals over the years, and if there's one thing fabulously wealthy oligarchs don't want now, it's even more bad press and class resentment. This is one thin-skinned crowd. They have not had an equal opportunity to develop life's little calluses.

Even the Ivy League has had it with Taylor and her cadre of plutocrats. Dartmouth students have teamed up with the Teamsters, and are demanding their own college board of trustees cut all ties with the auction house, given its blatant class warfare against working families:




Despite grossing over $700 million in 2010, Sotheby's hired the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis to attack its workers. More than seven months ago, Sotheby's locked the art handlers out of their jobs, depriving them of their paychecks. On Jan. 1, the art handlers and their families were stripped of their health care coverage. Sotheby's continues to demand that all union positions be phased out and replaced with low wage non-union temporary positions with no benefits.
"Taylor's open hostility to the bargaining process, and refusal to end this awful lockout is an affront to my College's values," said Janet Kim, a Dartmouth junior who participated in Saturday's action. "Dartmouth has always been committed to being a socially responsible institution, but Taylor's actions totally fly in the face of that."
Sotheby's reckless behavior has harmed its shareholders. In a recent filing with financial regulators, the auction house disclosed that it had spent $2.4 million in "extra expenses" associated with the first three months of the lockout. (The entire cost of the art handler's contract is $3.2 million.) The lockout has also caused several organizations, including a group affiliated with Oberlin College, to cancel events originally scheduled to be held at Sotheby's.

"Diana Taylor's refusal to publicly use her influence to try to end this lockout not only speaks volumes about how she feels about America's working families, but it should raise serious questions about her stewardship as a board member," said Jason Ide, President of Teamsters Local 814, the union that represents the workers.
I guess it is also no coincidence that Diana Taylor lounges on the board of Brookfield Properties, the quasi-owners of Zuccotti Park, original camp of the Occupy movement. This is another one of those neo-liberal public private partnerships in which taxpayers foot the bills of the ruling class.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that Sotheby's will profit mightily from the sale of "The Scream", an iconic painting that captured the angst and despair and outrage of people buffeted by a cruel authoritarian system over which they have no control.

Munch and other painters in the Expressionist movement wanted to express a new internal, psychological form of reality. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson says the image touches on something primitive within all of us, because we were all once young and helpless like the hairless creature in the picture, wordless and afraid. She says Munch managed to convey something all human beings have felt at some time: "I am overwhelmed. I am helpless. There is nothing I can do and when I try to convey it, in some way, whether I am screaming or expressing some of what nature is screaming at me, other people ignore it."

Why would some master of the universe even want to own this painting, given that it symbolizes the pain of the downtrodden?  Hmm.... Sadism. Control. Evokes fond memories of crashing an entire economy and the hopes and dreams of  an entire generation. Or, alternately: wealthy new owner identifies with the painting because it symbolizes the fact that he is only a multimillionaire and not yet a member of the Forbes 400. It is so unfair that the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 160 million combined. It's enough to make one Scream.

Update: The Scream has sold for a record-breaking $120 million, the highest ever price paid for a work of art at auction. The bid was done privately, by telephone. No word on the identity of the new owner, who may be in the Forbes 400, after all.