“Let them eat cake!” Did she really say that? Who knows – Marie must have felt just awful when they were throwing things through the window and making all that rucous.

Obama: “Eight years of policies … have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

I came across this article a when I began blogging almost a year ago: TENDENCIES – The Vulgar Game. In the face of a deep recession, fashion houses have started to proclaim a false modesty. By Sameer Reddy | Newsweek Web Exclusive Jan 10, 2009 full article

Reddy writes: As unpleasant as it might be to accept, greed, avarice and unrestrained lust are built-in elements of the human psyche. When people have enormous amounts of disposable wealth, these darker qualities tend to surface, manifesting themselves in diamond-and-ruby encrusted cellphones (Vertu, over $300,000), and 1200-horsepower, color-shifting sportscars (Dimora Motorcar- Natalia SLS, $2,000,000).

Alfred Dimora

Natalia SLS

Well, for one thing, Reddy does write for Newsweek which qualifies him as sycophant of the aristocrats. But these jesters are allowed to slam the ruling classes because the media networks routinely deploy double speak to create a facade called ‘freedom of the press’.

The business of incorporating doublespeak began in earnest around the time of the famous WTO Seattle Summit ( more later), but here, Reddy goes on to nail the emo-double-speak for this conservatist rag:

…the richest segments of society, who played a major role in ruining things for everyone else, are simply paying lip service to a public notion of what is expected of them.

This wanking about the ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ bling-boasting upper crust is going to increase exponentially during this wave of recession, but lets recap a tad so I can make this a bit more cohesive:

The multinationals began dissolving the middle class for real back in 1988 when (in Canada) they paid to have Brian Mulroney elected and pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement into a hole where it wouldn’t really fit. And in those days, they didn’t even use lube. When Mulroney’s Conservative party began slipping dangerously in the polls pre-election, the business boys (CCCE) blithely took out $6 million in advertising including full page ads in every major Canadian newspaper to soothe the voter into liking free trade. The newspaper copy read like a Sesame Street book – Free Trade is soo good for Canada. Just relax, it won’t hurt, we promise.

(Prime Minister Brian) …Mulroney liked hearing the influential voices around him. Many of those voices belonged to members of the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI – now called CCCE), whose members are the chief executive officers of the 150 largest corporations in Canada. As Mulroney was to learn, the BCNI had been methodically mapping out a free trade strategy for him–or whoever else happened to be prime minister–for quite some time. Mulroney was being weaned as the new lapdog for Ronald Reagan under the guise of Security and Prosperity Partnership, which was nothing more than the next stage in annexing Canada to the United States Republic. Partially quoted from this article in The Multinational Monitor.

After the FTA was passed in ‘94 the sluice gates opened and companies began dissolving, merging and expatriating, closing manufacturing operations etc. etc. etc. For the first year it was a bit of a shock to people and then in the following years the working classes were subjected to the effects of closures and layoffs and successive waves of corporate restructuring— bankruptcies, mergers, takeovers, and downsizing. It was like every day in the paper huge layoffs and closures all over the country. Then publicly owned enterprises in strategic sectors such as energy and transportation were being transferred en masse to the private sector.

Then years later, the CCCE took off the gloves.

They came right out with tails blazing and held their first public meeting: The World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, 1999.

Seattle WTO

And then the summits became routine, and the dissolving middle class began protesting for real.

The corporate world rulers built a security wall around them at the Third Summit of the Americas: Quebec City, Canada April 20, 2001. This was more of a symbolic statement, a line in the sand. The intention was to make a division, a caste.

And then at APEC ‘97, the next public display of this pseudo aristocracy of CEO’s. With the gloves off – the RCMP following direct orders from the Prime Minister’s office, ignored our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and confiscated the protesters signs – using pepper spray on a non-violent crowd.

Wall

Hey, if you’re dissolving a middle class, that means eventually the upper middle class will be switching to knockoffs too. So where does that leave us now?

Coco Chanel: “I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.” Perhaps it’s time for them to reconsider why they’re in the game