On 3/23/07, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2040914,00.html
>
> Conrad Black is on trial in a nation that loathes its elites
>
> The jury selection process shows how regular Americans now regard the
> wealthiest few not as heroes but as thieves
>
> Naomi Klein
> Friday March 23, 2007
> The Guardian
>
> During the jury selection process at the Conrad Black fraud trial in
> Chicago, the judge polled potential jurors on their impressions of
> Black's Canadian homeland. "Socialist country," one replied. According
> to press accounts, Black, once the third-most-powerful press baron in
> the world, turned to his wife, Barbara Amiel, and they shared a smile.
> At last, a juror after their own hearts - the couple had been
> redbaiting Canadians for years.
>
> The Black trial is an odd beast: a Canadian who gave up his
> citizenship in order to accept a peerage in Britain is on trial in the
> US for allegedly pocketing tens of millions that belonged to the
> shareholders of Chicago-based Hollinger International. Every twist is
> front-page international news, but most Americans have no idea who
> Black is. In his opening remarks, Black's lawyer, Edward Genson,
> assured the jury: "In his native Canada and England, he's a household
> name."
>
> It makes sense that Lord Black is a nobody in Chicago. He never needed
> to bother with politics in the US - as far as he was concerned, the
> country was close to perfect. It was the rest of the English-speaking
> world that required his bombastic ideological lectures. Delivering
> those was his life's mission.
>
> Black is the world's leading advocate of the "Anglosphere", a movement
> calling for the creation of a bloc of English-speaking countries.
> Adherents claim that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New
> Zealand must join together against the Muslim world and anyone else
> who poses a threat. For Black, the US is not just the obvious leader
> of the Anglosphere but the economic and military model that all Anglo
> countries should emulate, as opposed to the soft European Union.
>
> Although the consolidation of the Anglosphere as a political bloc
> receives far less scrutiny than US military interventions, it has been
> a crucial plank of Washington's imperial projects. The movement
> recently gained some notoriety when it emerged that on February 28 the
> White House had hosted a "literary luncheon" for George Bush and Dick
> Cheney's new favourite writer, ultra-right British historian Andrew
> Roberts, author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since
> 1900, an Anglosphere manifesto. But it is Black who has been the
> linchpin of Anglosphere campaigns for two decades, using his British
> and Canadian newspapers to reach out and collectively hug his beloved
> US. In Britain, this took the form of using the Daily Telegraph as a
> beachhead against "Euro-integrationism" and insisting that Britain's
> future lies not with the EU but with Washington. This vision reached
> its zenith, of course, with the Bush-Blair team-up in Iraq.
>
> In Canada, where Black controlled roughly half the daily newspapers,
> the push to Americanise was even more strident. When he founded the
> daily National Post in 1998, it was with the explicit goal of weaning
> Canadians from our social safety net (a "hammock") and forming a new
> party of the "united right" to unseat the governing Liberals.
>
> So if Black was going to get a sympathetic jury anywhere, it should
> have been in the US, where regular people worship the wealthy because
> they are convinced they could be the next to strike it rich (unlike
> those envious, over-taxed and over-regulated Europeans and Canadians).
> Perhaps in 2000, at the height of the stock-market bubble, Black would
> have faced a jury made up of such supportive folks, ones who would
> have looked at his uncanny ability to divert Hollinger profits into
> his own accounts and said: "More power to you."
>
> But in 2007, Black came face to face with the casualties of the boom's
> collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively
> globalised. As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors
> in order to whittle the group down to 12, plus eight alternates, she
> found men and women who had "lost every dime" in the WorldCom
> collapse, whose pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had
> been fired thanks to outsourcing, and who'd had their finances ravaged
> by identity theft.
>
> Asked what they thought of executives who earn tens of millions of
> dollars, jurors answered almost uniformly in the negative. "Who could
> possibly do that much work or be that much capable?" one asked. A
> mechanic's apprentice pointed out that no matter how much he works,
> "I'm barely getting by as it is, living at home". No one said: "More
> power to you."
>
> Many appeared to regard North America's ultra-rich the way Russians
> see their oligarchs - even if the way they amassed their fortunes was
> legal, it shouldn't have been. "I just don't think anyone should get
> that amount of money from any company, example Enron and WorldCom,"
> one juror wrote. Others said: "I feel that there is corruption
> everywhere"; anyone paid as much as Black "probably stole it"; "I am
> sure this goes on all the time and I hope they get caught". John Tien,
> a 40-year-old accountant at Boeing, launched into such an elaborate
> lecture about the accounting scams endemic in corporate America that
> Black's lawyers asked the judge to question him in private, to prevent
> his views from influencing the other potential jurors.
>
> Regardless of what else happens in the Black saga, the jury-selection
> process has already provided an extraordinary window into the way
> regular Americans, randomly selected, view their elites - not as
> heroes but as thieves. As far as Black is concerned, this is all
> terribly unfair - he is being "thrown to the mobs" because of rage at
> the system and, unlike American billionaires, he doesn't "dress in
> corduroy trousers" or donate his fortune to Aids charities. Black's
> lawyers even argued (unsuccessfully) that their client could not get a
> fair trial because the average Chicagoan "does not reside in more than
> one residence, employ servants or a chauffeur, enjoy lavish furniture,
> or host expensive parties".
>
> There is no doubt that what is going on in that courtroom looks less
> like a fraud trial than class war, one at the heart of the
> Anglosphere. Even if Black wins, it will be harder to sell the world
> an ideological model that is so deeply reviled at home.
>
> --
> Colin Brace
> Amsterdam
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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