since this is LBO talk...http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#070315
<OPEN QUOTE> DOUG: I'm speaking with Ian Bone, veteran British Anarchist and author of the book "Bash the Rich" [...] You said you want to personalize the struggle. A lot of people talk about, "It's the system," and "the people are just pawns of the larger system," but you don't think that's a good way to do politics.
BONE: No. [???] You need to personalize it and I think that was [his band and newsletter] Class War's great breakthrough and that's why we got patronized by the rest of the left when we talked of jostling the rich in the streets.
There's a thing that happens over here called the Henley Regatta [http://www.hrr.co.uk/] where there's loads of posh people in boaters and frocks and old school ties, yachting and rowing at Henley and it's a real gathering of the rich social calendar. And we mobilized about 500 people to go there one year--'cause most people haven't seen what the rich people look like en masse: I mean they are truly loathsome and horrible. And when you see them with their sort of chinless-wonder types and their OKR's (?)...I mean I think there is a whole generation that had never seen the rich *really;* I mean they had never seen how ghastly they are together. And people came away from that absolutely fuming. They said , "I can't believe there's people like that in this day and age."
Yeah I think it... to get rid of the system and overthrow the corporations is all very well. But I think to bring it home you also need--and also to vent your own anger, you know, you can't just rant against faceless bureaucracies all the time--and it fit in very well with my background: I do really hate 'em. So it was a political movement constructed on that." <CLOSE QUOTE>
I'd also note that according to the Wiki on Bone, Greg Hall is making a movie version of "Bash the Rich." There is a blog following the progress and there is a short clip of it which begins with a few scenes from the Regatta he talks about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bone http://bashtherichfilm.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/the-bristolian/
I'm nowhere near as hardcore as this guy, but I think he represents the kind of honorable disgust of the rich to which Dennis refers.
As for the Penny piece, I think it's completely true and, while I see Bill's point about sympathizing with people where they are, there's not much reflection on her part about where she fits into the system or how it might be different for her to make all her own money as a Park Ave divorcee than her Colombian housemaid.
More than that, I think US culture, as bourgeois as it is, is so saturated with the whining of rich people--all these hideous teen soap operas and reality TV shows peopled by privileged white/minimally diverse characters worrying about their banal problems--that to pile this on is beyond ridicule. How many stories will the Daily Beast feature about workers (much less stories written by the workers themselves) who won't be heading to the Chrysler plants for the next month? my guess is zero.
s