Stop Luxury Construction!

Democratic Congressional Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's National Hispanic Institute [NHI] Connection

 Most U.S. anti-war movement supporters don't think that the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government since February 2022 has either decreased the danger of World War III breaking out or brought much peace to the people living in Ukraine.

Yet one of New York City's Democratic representatives in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has apparently not attempted to do very much in Washington, D.C. to oppose the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government.

Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and Queens residents in the U.S. Congress, the Democratic Party congressional representative has, historically, been connected politically to an organization, not based in New York City, which operates under the name "National Hispanic Institute" [NHI]. As David Freedlander observed in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:

"If there was another guiding force in Ocasio-Cortez's life it was...the National Hispanic Institute [NHI]...Ocasio-Cortez participated in NHI programming before her junior year in high school when she, along with 150 or so of her peers, went to the group's Lorezo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session [LDZ]...

"At this summer institute, Ocasio-Cortez ran for every office available...Ocasio-Cortez was just one of two students from the East, and the only one from New York. She lost every election she ran for...It is easy to draw a straight line from 2018 to the teenager who went to the NHI summer program, where she learned the skills of a candidate...Ocasio-Cortez told [NHI Founder Ernesto] Nieto...`...I found that NHI helped me so much...because NHI helped me develop who I am...'

"The NHI wasn't just something that Ocasio-Cortez did a couple of summers while she was in high school. It's how she got connected to Boston University, which was actively recruiting among NHI students when Ocasio-Cortez was in high school. During college and after, she returned to work at the institute in various capacities, and when she refers to herself as `an educator' in her campaign materials, she is referring to her time leading students at NHI.

"Ocasio-Cortez wrote the afterword to [NHI Founder Ernesto] Nieto's memoir, Third Reality Revealed: Vision, Persistence, and Inventing a New Latino Identity while she was still in college...After graduation, AOC returned to NHI as a social entrepreneurship fellow and then, a couple of years after that, as a...trainer. She worked several summers in a program called the Collegiate World Series and...in 2018...lead one of the institute's seminars.

"People who were with her at NHI remember her as...ambitious...As Ocasio-Cortez bounced around in her college years, she had what was essentially a standing offer to return to NHI and work full-time..."

Democratic Congressional Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's Historic Family And Westchester Co. Background

 Most U.S. anti-war movement supporters don't think that the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government since February 2022 has either decreased the danger of World War III breaking out or brought much peace to the people living in Ukraine.

Yet one of New York City's Democratic representatives in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has apparently not attempted to do very much in Washington, D.C. to oppose the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government.

Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and some Queens tenants in the U.S. Congress, her family apparently historically owned two apartments in the Bronx and a house in Westchester County; and the Bronx-Queens congressional representative historically attended a high school in Westchester County. As David Freedlander noted in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:

"...Sergio Ocasio...got into Brooklyn Tech...He met AOC's mother, Bianca Cortez, in Puerto Rico, where the two married before settling in the Bronx. They bought an apartment in the...middle-income Parkchester complex for $36,000 and later bought another similarly priced unit nearby, where Ocasio kept an office...His business, Kirschenbaum and Ocasio Roman Architects PC...were beneficiaries of...state contracts...Clients included the Parkchester complex, where the Ocasio-Cortez family owned an apartment...

"Ocasio-Cortez...grew up not in the Bronx, but in Westchester County...Ocasio-Cortez was...explicit that the home in Yorktown Heights, a town of under 2,000 people in Westchester County, was purchased with the help of aunts, uncles, and other relatives...

"...In Westchester she was often the lone Latino in her class...Yorktown was not diverse...Another friend said there were only a handful of Asian kids in their class of three hundred, and no African American students..."

Democratic Congressional Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's Historic Boston U. Connection

Most U.S. anti-war movement supporters don't think that the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government since February 2022 has either decreased the danger of World War III breaking out or brought much peace to the people living in Ukraine.

Yet one of New York City's Democratic representatives in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has apparently not attempted to do very much in Washington, D.C. to oppose the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government.

Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and some Queens residents in the U.S. Congress, a private unversity in Boston, Massachusetts--Boston University--is the university that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez historically attended. As David Freedlander recalled in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:

"It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2011, and...she was a college senior, and the lone student on the Boston University campus invited to speak at the university's annual remembrance ceremony...Ocasio-Cortez studied economics and international relations at Boston Universiity...

"Friends say that she was animated in college by a lot of the same concerns that animated her early political career...Ocasio-Cortez would join [then Democratic U.S. Senator Ted] Kennedy's office as an intern...Ocasio-Cortez...worked for Kennedy's immigrant constituent office...

"...If you were a Boston University student at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century--even if you weren't a regular at the Thruman Center or part of the regular Coffee and Conversation group or in the slam poetry group or in Alianza Latina, the school's Latin American student organization--you more than likely knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was...

"She was part of what was known as `The BU 500', those...students who...seem to have a close relationship with the administration...She gave a Ted Talk alongside other Boston-area college students in which her bio read: `A social entrepreneur...She has consulted non-profits, worked in government, and launched a media enterprise...'...She was quoted in a National Public Radio [NPR] story about how college students were reacting to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces...AOC...said,`...This villain has been slayed...'"

 

`Fare-Free Transit'

 

A folk song from 2022 explaining why MBTA should also establish a fare-free public transit system for riders in Boston, Massachusetts in 2022.

You can ride all buses free in Kansas City

You can ride all buses free in Olympia

You can ride all buses free in Albuquerque

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Outbound trolleys were once fare-free inBoston

And for Philly elders, the subway is fare-free

It's fare-free for all riders in Estonia

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have a billion dollars to spend

For new fare collection machines

Yet they claim the T can't afford to be fare-free

While paying T managers six-figure salaries.

You can ride all buses free in Lowell

You can ride all buses free in Lawrence

You can ride all buses free in Chapel Hill

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

You can ride all transit free in Luxembourg

And for Miami elders buses are fare-free

Elders ride free in Lebanon, Pennsylvania

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have millions of dollars to spend

To pay off "The Big Dig" debt

And they have 30 million dollars to spend

For new stations by BU's campus.

All ride for free in Corvalis, Oregon

And in campus towns like Ann Arbor

And also in Boulder and Denver

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

In France, it's fare-free in Dunkirk

And some transit is fare-free in Baltimore

All elderly ride fare-free in Scotland

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have a billion dollars to spend

On new fare collection machines

Yet they claim the T can't afford to be fare-free

While paying T managers six-figure salaries.

You can ride all buses fare-free in Malta

And in Wales it's free for elderly

You can ride all buses free in Hasselt, Belgium

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Yes, you can ride all buses free in Kansas City

You can ride all buses free in Olympia

You can ride all buses free in Albuquerque

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Conclusion

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"Getting...the White House, Soros said in 2003, became the `central focus' of his life. In July 2003, he convened Democratic activists and two political strategists, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, at his summer estate in...Southampton, Long Island...The plan was about how Soros...could throw money--and a lot of it--into the political arena...

"...The second key part of the plan highlighted that...donors...could give money to...groups...Pushed by Jane Mayer in her New Yorker interview about the perceived hypocrisy of his spending large amounts of money on politics, Soros said, `...The ends justify every legal means possible.'

"Soros donated $5 million to MoveOn.org...He pledged money to America Coming Together, a group intended to mobilize voters in 17 swing states...He gave to the Center for American Progress...Altogether, Soros spent $27 million to...elect...John Kerry...The aforementioned 2004 New Yorker article on his spending was titled `The Money Man.' Jane Mayer conducted an interview with Soros over lunch at his Southampton estate...

"...Soros...supported NATO's military intervention, which did not have U.N. approval, in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s...Open Society had also been involved in Ukraine...Soros had been funding various civil society groups in Ukraine for a decade...George Soros...made money all over the world; he made...financial decisions that caused...average people to lose large amounts of money and private-equity funds he controlled used an offshore law firm Appleby...A 2017 article published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists...quoted Brooke Harrington, a Copenhagen Business School professor, as saying that the offshore industry makes `the poor pporer' and excerbates wealth inequality...

"...Soros...wants to be one of the people dictating the future of politics...Soros, through Open Society, does support NGOs...Soros was never elected...The NGOs he supports...are not accountable to the general public. Soros does have far more power than the average person, and his...work isn't bound by borders, and he did make his money as a speculator. All of that is true..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 10

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"A billionaire with so much money, accountable to no one, unelected by any people to any government...It is Soros, with all his money and all his power, who is picking people--like Licht, like Finci, like Trbic'--who are then...empowered...They were given power to advance their personal agendas...

"...It seemed wrong to me that one man from abroad could have such a large role in determining who in a society was able to have a voice and a platform and tremendous sums of money with which to execute an agenda...George Soros was not from Bosnia, or the former Yugoslavia, and yet had had power and influence in the society...And who is George Soros to decide that this is the issue on which...aid and attention should be spent? Why was George Soros essentially an actor in a civil war across the world? Who appointed him...?

"...The Charter 77 Foundation, which funded...Czeck and Slovak dissidents...was launched in Stockholm in the late 1970s. Soros, working with Czechs and Slovaks in exile, was, by his own admission, their main source of support..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 9

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"Soros has justified speculation...The value of the baht plunged 32 percent against the dollar, and millions of Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made $750 million...The Thai financial crisis sspread, becoming the Asia financial crisis, and Soros was blamed...At the 1997 World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF] meetings, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahather Mohamad called Soros a `criminal'...and claimed that he...caused the crash of the Malaysian ringgit...Soros...shorted the British pound...He and his employees helped trigger the Asian financial crisis..

.

"`The industry in which he made his money is an industry whose norms and rules have generally served to disenfranchise regular people over the last thirty, forty years,' said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a look at the way in which the very wealthy use philanthropy to protect the status quo and paper over problems they themselves have created, in a September 2019 phone interview...

"Soros...was still participating in a system that actively disenfranchises people...Soros...worked in finance in such a way that it broke countries' currencies..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 8

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"By the 1990s, there were enough foundations established that Soros's work evolved into a network. The staff in New York was growing...and Soros ended up opening an office space on Seventh Avenue...By 1994, when [Journalist Michael] Lewis traveled with Soros through Eastern Europe, Soros was dining with multiple presidents in one day and told his interlocutor, `Just write that the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.'...

"Soros said...`As a hedge fund manager I...tried to maximize my profits'...In October [1991],..The Daily Mail ran a photo of Soros with the headline, `I Made A Billion Crashing the Pound.'...Soros said that [Soros's] Quantum and its offshoots had bet...ten billion dollars against sterling, and that...speculation had gotten roughly two billion dollars in profits.

"Invisible investors like Soros, owing no allegiance as citizens, could place bets big enough to change economic outcomes for entire nations,' Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator, wrote for The Telegraph in 2012...A country was thrown into economic chaos...And this happened at least in part because Soros saw an opportunity to make a lot of money...Soros...wanted his empire to be grand and global..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 7

 In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"...Geza Jeszenskzky, who was minister of foreign affairs for Jozsef Antall...prime minister of Hungary, told me over email that Soros offered to settle Hungary's national debt in echange for stake in Hungary's state-owned companies. Jeszenskzky remembers the meeting as being in the fall of 1989 `at what was then called Hotel Novotel near the Southern Railway Terminal'...

"In addition to giving out scholarships, one of the Hungarian Soros Foundation's first projects was to offer photocopiers to institutions...Soros provided...many photocopiers...It was subversive--Soros was, in effect, funding underground...information...It was their first real, successful foray into philanthropy as subversion...Gabor Horn...in the late 1980s and early 1990s, received support from Soros as a representative of an independent labor union...

"The Soros Foundation was not the only institution to support...opposition movements, as Timothy Garton Ash...a professor of European studies at Oxford, told...over the phone from the United Kingdom...He got to know Soros `fairly quickly' because he was traveling around...Eastern Europe in the 1980s writing for the New York Review of Books. He described Soros as a `very important supporter of...opposition movements'...There were others involved, like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was not just Soros.

"But Soros was indeed there supporting these opposition groups, including that group...Fidesz...Fidesz transformed from a youth organization to a political party..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 6 `

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"Philanthropy...is effectively a legal form of tax evasion, and Soros is one of many wealthy people who have set up charitable trusts or philanthropic organizations...toward these ends. Those with enough money can use it...to hold on to their money for themselves and their heirs...Soros...by his own admission...first set up a charitable...trust to keep money in the family and hand less of it over to the state for redistribution...

"...In 1980, he turned to...awarding scholarships to dissidents in Eastern Europe...He also began directly financially supporting dissident movement like Solidarity in Poland.., Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia (a group led by intellectuals), and Andrei Sakharov's...movement in Soviet Russia. The idea that Soros has...funded groups that worked against the ruling government or parties is not...untrue...

"...The Soros Foundation in Hungary, once established, continued to operate on a somewhat slective and secretive basis...From its earliest days, there was--by design--comething secretive about how George Soros gave the money away..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 5

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"...Soros...set up his own hedge fund in 1973. His fund was called the Soros Fund. He brought along Jim Rogers...They opened an office on Columbus Circle, not far from Soros's home at the time at 25 Central Park West. In 1978, the fund changed its name to Quantum Fund...(...around the time that Rogers left the fund.).

"By 1981, the fund had...assets worth $381 million. Soros had a personal fortune of $100 million...Soros said that his financial strategy was informed by his philosphy...When he believed there was opportunity ahead, he went in for the kill. In 1973, for example, the Arab-Israeli War had shifted tectonic plates in the defense industry...Soros...bought defense stocks and made money...

"...Soros met Susan Weber, twenty-five years his junior...in 1978, the same year he left Witschak, the two married in 1983...the same year of his first divorce...

"In 1979, Soros established The Open Society Fund as a charitable lead trust. His motives were not entirely altruistic. `A charitable lead trust is a very interesting tax gimmick.'.., he explained in the early 2000s...'...The principal that remains can be left [to one's heirs] without estate or gift tax. So this was the way I set up the trust for my children.'..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 4

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"After graduating from LSE, Soros...wrote to all the merchant banks in London...At Singer & Friedlander...one of the managing directors was Hungarian.

"He got a job there in 1953 and worked in arbitrage and the stock exchange...George followed his brother and moved to America to work at a small brokerage firm on Wall Street owned by the father of one of his co-workers at Singer & Friedlander...George Soros moved to New York City to work in international arbitage...He lived...in a two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive...

"Soros stayed at the brokerage firm, F.M. Mayer, for three years, but then, in 1959, moved to Wertheim & Co., an investment firm...In 1960, he married...Annaliese Witschak...with whom he moved to an apartment on Sheridan Square and built a house in Southampton...Another firm, Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder came calling. Soros began there in 1963...

"...In 1966, at Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder, he set-up a model account with $100,000 of the firm's money...In 1969, he used $4 million to set up a hedge fund...named Double Eagle Fund...The Double Eagle Fund was successful...Soros was recommending stocks to clients that he was also potentially buying for his own account and so could have been accused of recommending stocks to make his own stocks perform better..." 

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 3

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"It is...an understatement to say that George Soros is influential in politics. In 2004, he threw his financial weight behind then-Senator John Kerry in the hope of defeating the incumbent president...Soros is still, to this day, a political backer...In July 2019, he created a PAC for the 2020 election called Democracy PAC and promptly put $5.1 million into it..

"Gyorgy Schwartz...was born in 1930 in Budapest...It was not until 1936 that Gyorgy Schwartz became a Soros...George Soros's father, Tivadar Soros (born Tivadar Schwartz), was a lawyer...Tivadar would not have his family use an obviously Jewish name. In 1936, Schwartz became Soros...

"Tivadar Soros...was of a certain socioeconomic class and had the means to save himself...His...plan was to obtain documents from Christians...He did for..his younger son, who hid out as Sandor Kiss...

"George Soros as Sandor Kiss hid out with...a Ministry of  Agriculture employee. Tivadar Soros paid the man to take...George in and pretend he was his godson..

"...In 1998, Steve Kroft, interviewing George Soros on 60 Minutes, noted that Tivadar Soros had `bribed a government official to swear that you were his godson,' adding `as hundreds of thousands of Jews were being shipped off to the Nazi death camps...George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.'..For some people...Lajos Ozme...for example--Tivadar Soros charged quite a lot to obtain false documents...

"...George Soros found life in socialist Hungary constricting...By 1947, Soros...decided to go to England...He got on the train without his permit..." 

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 2

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"...Soros was never elected...The NGOs he supports...are not accountable to the general public. Soros does have far more power than the average person, and his...work isn't bound by borders, and he did make his money as a speculator. All of that is true...

"This is...the problem with billionaire philanthropists: at the end of the day, they're still the ones with the money, and the power to decide what to do with it..

.

"...`My defense is that I operate within the rules,' Soros said in 1995. `...I have absolutely no moral qualms in being branded a speculator...I am the classic limousine liberal...' He also noted that he...didn't start giving his money away...until he had made millions...

"One could argue...that it's easy to criticize a system that allows people to amass great sums of money through speculation after one has done exactly that...After one has used it to become rich, live in luxury, and exert great influence..." 

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's "The Influence Of Soros" 2020 Book: Pt. 1

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"...In 2015...Jacobin ran an article titled `Counting on Billionaires,' which argued that `Philanthrocapitalists like George Soros want us to believe they can remedy the economic misery that they themselves create.'...

"...George Soros has wielded and continues to have tremendous influence...It may be an understatement to say that George Soros is influential in finance...He became one of the fathers of the modern-day hedge fund, establishing his own fund, Quantum (advised through the firm retaining his name, Soros Fund Management). He is perhaps the most famous currency speculator in history, credited with...`breaking the Bank of England'...

"Soros...survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary...by pretending to be a Christian...

"It is...an understatement to say that Soros is influential in philanthropy. In the late 1970s...he began a foundation called `Open Society.'..."

Talkin' Columbia University Revolt

While The Oceans Heat Up

Merchants of Death

Why Artists Protested At Museum of Modern Art In 1969

 

In their 1969 manifesto, Jon Henricks and Jean Toche of a late 1960s Movement art action group explained why they decided to historically protest inside Midtown Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] on Oct. 31, 1969:

"We demand that the Museum of Modern Art decentralize its power structure to a point of communalization. Art, to have any relevance at all today, must be taken out of the hands of an elite and returned to the people. The art establishment as it is used today is a classical form of repression. Not only does it repress the artist, but it is used:

"1.) to manipulate the artists themselves, their work, and what they say for the benefit of an elite working together with the military/business complex.

"2.) to force people to accept more easily--or distract them from--the repression by the military/business complex by giving it a better image.

"3.) as propaganda for capitalism and imperialism all over the world. It is no longer a time for artists to sit as puppets or `chosen representatives' at the feet of an art elite, but rather it is the time for a true communalization where anyone, regardless of condition or race, can become involved in the actual policy-making and control of the museum...

"...Today the museum serves not so much as an enligtening educational experience, as it does a diversion from the realities of war and social crisis. It can only be meaningful if the pleasures of art are denied instead of reveled in. We believe that art itself is a moral commitment to the development of the human race and a negation of the repressive social reality. This does not mean that art should cease to exist or to be produced--especially in serious times of crisis when art can become a strong witness and form of protest--only the sanctification of art should cease during these times."

And on November 18, 1969, the same Movement art action group stated the following in a second manifesto:

"We as artists feel that there is no moral justification whatsoever for the Museum of Modern Art to exist at all if it must rely...on the continued acceptance of dirty money. By accepting soiled donations from these wealthy people, the museum is destroying the integrity of art. These people have been in actual control of the museum's policies since its founding. With this power they have been able to manipulate artists' ideas; sterilize art of any social protest and indictment of the oppressive forces in society; and therefore render art totally irrelevant to the existing social crisis."

Excerpt From Howard Fast's 1946 Essay On Literary Classism

In a May 7, 1946 New Masses article, titled "Toward People's Standards in Art," the then-20th-century proletarian writer Howard Fast indicated why most of the U.S. literature created by U.S. upper-middle-class writers, published by the subsidiaries of global corporate media conglomerates or praised by U.S. upper middle-class academic literary critics doesn't generally accurately portray the reality of U.S. working-class lives or promote the liberation of U.S. working-class people from institutional classism in the 21st-century:

"What shall we say of the standards of the literary esthetes who rule the highest level of our `modern culture?' I think the best one can say is that in most cases they have no standards at all. Their approach to art has taken on all the aspects of a retreat from life, and avoiding life as carefully as they do, they have a moral fear of putting standards into operation.

"They are at a point now where they are entranced by sound. They worship style. Like children, they cavort at cunning phraseology, and their idea of a high intellectual achievement...is the creation of a second-rate pun. They have adopted a canting and formalized literary phraseology, and they are endowing it with a sacredness very like the ritual of a church. They delight in the resultant confusion because confusion does not place upon them the responsibility of sifting facts for the truth. They are enraged if, perchance, progressive critics should point out that Swinburne wrote revolutionary odes; they value only that part of Swinburne which is sound without meaning, and they value Shelley that way, and Keats too.

"One cannot deny that these critical czars have vast material means at their disposal. Each week they coin hundreds of thousands of words of so-called criticism, and with that criticism they establish their own hierarchy of the great, both in practitioners of art and in works of art.

"But are their great the people's heroes? ...I think not...We have accepted too uncritically too many bourgeois idols...

"We today, in the midst of the struggle, must not forget that the bulk of modern writing is not created by the working class or by friends of the working class. We very often have reason to remember that much of it is created by enemies of the people, enemies of progress, enemies of all that we believe in, and by and large those enemies control the critical standards of today.

"Are their standards our standards? Can they ever wholly be our standards? Today, our standards and their standards occasionally will coincide--on a Walt Whitman, for example. But what was the attitude of those people toward Walt Whitman in his day, during his life? They attacked him and slandered him, and even today you cannot read critical journals without finding regular attacks on Whitman, supercilious and snide commentaries on Whitman, and scholarly investigations of the `dubious worth' of Whitman.

"Did these makers of standards approve of Uncle Tom's Cabin?...Did they not malign Dreiser and say that he was a buffoon presuming to art? Did they not condemn Jack London to the hall of mediocrity? Did they not fairly successfully expunge Frank Norris from our literary memory? Did they not deride Upton Sinclair, the early Sinclair whose socialist novels were so magnificent?...

"What is their attitude toward the social writer of today? What will be their attitude toward the social novelists of tomorrow?

"We cannot depend on them, on their concept of artistic truth or worth...,Before art can be wholly a weapon for us we must understand art, both the art of the people and the art which the enemies of the people create and use in one fashion or another to keep the people in subjugation. And, so long as we confuse these two, the people's art and the art created by the enemies of the people, so long as we bow to the decadents, to the mystics, to the cheap literary frauds, art will not be the weapon we want it to be, and the great people's art...will not come into being...

"The art we embrace comes from the people and, at the same time, it is a gift to the people. The people are not grateful for gifts from fascists and other enemies of mankind. Such gifts are not art by our standards... Only death or the seeds of death are sown by such gifts. Even as the people must some day destroy the last seeds of fascism, so must they reject `art' which leads away from life and toward stagnation.

"And when they do so, a new art will emerge, a people's art, judged by people's standards."

The Tallest Tree Paul Robeson Part 2

The Tallest Tree Paul Robeson Part 1

City of Masks

NPIC: Will the revolution be funded?

Columbia's Role in Gentrifying Harlem (Columbia Tuition Strike Teach-In)

Dear Diary