HOW WE GOT TO WHERE WE ARE NOW, ACCORDING TO ONE VIEW
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
JUNE 10, 2020
THIS IS AN INTRIGUING LOOK AT SOCIETY THAT MAY EXPLAIN WHERE WE
FIND OURSELVES TODAY, IF WE CAN EVEN RECOGNIZE WHERE THAT IS. IT’S 2 HRS AND 46
MIN LONG. HOW TO "RUN THE WORLD WITHOUT POLITICS” AND DONALD TRUMP ARE INVOLVED.
HyperNormalisation (2016 + subs) by Adam Curtis - A different
experience of reality FULL DOCUMENTARY
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Adam Curtis Documentary
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Added subtitles (french, braziianl, hebrew, english, croatian,
spanish, turkish and russian)
The cult documentary maker explores the falsity of modern life
in his own inimitable style. Though he’s spent the best part of four decades
making television, Curtis’s signature blend of hypnotic archive footage,
authoritative voiceover and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for bizarre
historical tangents is better suited to the web, a place just as resistant to
the narrative handholding of broadcast TV as he is. He argues that an army
of technocrats, complacent radicals and Faustian internet entrepreneurs
have conspired to create an unreal world; one whose familiar and often
comforting details blind us to its total inauthenticity.
Caption author (Bulgarian)
Alex Petrov
Adam Curtis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kevin Adam Curtis (born 26 May 1955) is a British documentary
filmmaker.[1] His favourite theme is "power and how it works in
society", and his works explore areas of sociology, psychology, philosophy
and political history.[2] Curtis has called himself "fundamentally a
historian",[3] and has described his work as journalism that happens to be
expounded via film. His films have won four BAFTAs. He has worked for the BBC
throughout his career.
Early life
Curtis was born in Dartford, Kent,[4] and grew up in Platt.[5]
His father was Martin Curtis (10 August 1917 – January 2002), a cinematographer
from Sevenoaks who worked with Humphrey Jennings.[2] His family had a left wing
background.[6] Curtis attended the Sevenoaks School on a county scholarship.[7]
He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in human sciences at Mansfield College,
Oxford. He started a PhD, during which he taught in politics, but he became
disillusioned with academia and decided to leave.[6]
Career
Early career
Curtis applied to the BBC and was hired to make a film for one
of its training courses, comparing designer clothes in music videos to the
design of weapons. He was subsequently given a post on That's Life!,[1] a
magazine series that juxtaposed hard-hitting investigations and light-hearted
content. He was a film director on Out of Court, a BBC Two legal series, from
1980 until 1982.[8]
Politics
Curtis is inspired by the sociologist Max Weber, who, he argues,
challenged the "crude, left-wing, vulgar Marxism that says that everything
happens because of economic forces within society".[6] Of his general
political outlook, Curtis has also remarked:
People often accuse me of being a lefty. That's complete
rubbish. If you look at The Century of the Self, what I'm arguing is something
very close to a neoconservative position because I'm saying that, with the rise
of individualism, you tend to get the corrosion of the other idea of social
bonds and communal networks, because everyone is on their own. Well, that's
what the neoconservatives argue, domestically. [...] If you ask me what my
politics are, I'm very much a creature of my time. I don't really have any. I
change my mind over different issues, but I am much more fond of a libertarian
view. I have a more libertarian tendency [...] What's astonishing in our time
is how the Left here has completely failed to come up with any alternatives,
and I think you may well see a lefty libertarianism emerging because people
will be much more sympathetic to it, or just a libertarianism, and out of that will
come ideas. And I don't mean "localism".[2]
He believes the Western world is haunted by the past, with no
vision for the future, and that it has become pessimistic and
backward-looking.[1]
Documentaries
Example of Curtis's "trademark" title screens (Modern
Times: The Way of All Flesh, 1997)
Curtis cites the USA Trilogy, a series of three novels by John
Dos Passos that he first read when he was thirteen, as the greatest influence
on his work:
You can trace back everything I do to that novel because it's
all about grand history, individual experience, their relationship. And also
collages, quotes from newsreels, cinema, newspapers. And it's about collage of
history as well. That's where I get it all from.[2]
Other creative influences are Robert Rauschenberg and Émile
Zola.[2] Curtis makes extensive use of archive footage in his documentaries. He
has acknowledged the influence of recordings made by Erik Durschmied and is
"constantly using his stuff in my films".[9]
Instead of specially composed music because it "creates a
sort of monoculture", he uses tracks from a variety of genres, decades,
and countries, as well as sound effects that he discovers on old tapes.[10]
According to a profile of Curtis by Tim Adams, published in The
Observer: "If there has been a theme in Curtis's work … it has been to
look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times,
and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts".[11]
In 2005, Curtis received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision
Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.[12] In 2006, he was
given the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution to Television
at the British Academy Television Awards.[13] In 2009, the Sheffield
International Documentary Festival gave Curtis the Inspiration Award for
inspiring viewers and other documentary filmmakers.[14] In 2015, he was awarded
the True Vision Award by the True/False Film Fest.[15]
Blog
Curtis administered a blog subtitled 'The Medium and the
Message' hosted by the BBC and updated between 2011 and 2016.[16]
THE NEW YORKER EXPOUNDS ON THE HISTORICAL EVENTS HERE.
News Desk
The Night New York Saved Itself from Bankruptcy
By Jeff Nussbaum
October 16, 2015
PHOTOGRAPH -- While New York City Mayor Abraham Beame was
described by allies and adversaries alike as kind and honorable, he also seemed
paralyzed by the intensifying challenges of his office.Photograph by Clarence
Davis/NY Daily News Archive via Getty
On October 16, 1975, New York City was deep in crisis. At 4 p.m.
the next day, four hundred and fifty-three million dollars of the city’s debts
would come due, but there were only thirty-four million dollars on hand. If New
York couldn’t pay those debts, the city would officially be bankrupt.
At the Waldorf-Astoria, in Midtown, seventeen hundred guests
were gathering for the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation benefit dinner, a
white-tie fund-raiser for the Catholic charities named in honor of Al Smith, a
former governor and the first Catholic candidate on a major-party Presidential
ticket. As day turned to night, the bad news continued to come in. Banks were
refusing to market the city’s debt, which left New York unable to borrow.
Federal help was repeatedly refused by President Gerald Ford and his advisers.
The only hope left was pension funds. And the only one that had committed to
buying the city’s bonds—the Teachers’ Retirement System—was now pulling back.
The mood was grim as New York’s financial and political élite
settled in at the hotel to hear the evening’s featured speakers, Robert Moses
and Connecticut’s first female governor, Ella Grasso, try their hands at political
comedy.
Abraham Beame, who was in his second year as the mayor of New
York, was no stranger to the city’s budget and its challenges. During two
stints as comptroller, he had seen the drop in manufacturing jobs, the wave of
middle-class families moving to the suburbs, and the massive growth of the
city’s labor force. He was aware of, and at times condoned, the gimmicks that
were used to mask widening budget gaps, such as borrowing against city pension
funds to run operating deficits for the city’s buses and subways.
Yet while Beame was described by allies and adversaries alike as
kind and honorable, he also seemed paralyzed by the intensifying challenges of
his office. Ed Koch, who was serving in Congress at the time and would go on to
succeed Beame as mayor, later said, “Abe Beame is an accountant, you know, but
it’s hard to understand that he has that title.”
A few months before, in mid-April, the city had run out of money
for the first time. Governor Hugh Carey was willing to advance state funds to allow
the city to pay its bills under the condition that the city turn over its
financial management to the state. This led to the creation of the Municipal
Assistance Corporation, which was authorized to sell bonds to meet the city’s
borrowing needs. (Its detractors referred to it as “Big mac,” because of its
authority to overrule city spending decisions.)
The mac, which was chaired by the financier Felix Rohatyn,
insisted on significant reforms, including a wage freeze, a subway fare hike,
the closing of several public hospitals, charging tuition at the previously
free City University, and tens of thousands of layoffs.
But the financial picture continued to deteriorate. Koch
remembers hearing testimony before Congress about the city’s fiscal situation
and thinking that “it was like somebody escaping from the Warsaw ghetto and
saying they’re killing people there. Nobody believed it.”
At the Al Smith dinner, diners were working their way through
what was being called a “bicentennial menu,” featuring Maryland terrapin soup
and baskets of Colonial sweets. Speeches that had been loaded with humor in
past years sounded notes of gloom.
Mayor Beame used his turn on the five-tier dais to excoriate
Washington for refusing to bail out New York: “The problems were simpler and
less complex in Smith’s day, and there even seemed to be a greater sense of
responsibility on Washington’s part.” He then left the dinner to return to the
debt negotiations.
Robert Moses, who had previously referred to the city’s leaders
as “third-rate men,” simply paid tribute to Governor Smith. Only Governor
Grasso tried to infuse some humor, joking that she must have been chosen to
speak to the dinner because she was Italian, and that the cardinal and all the
bishops “have been working for my people for many, many years.”
By ten o’clock, Rohatyn and others had learned that the
Teachers’ Retirement System wouldn’t invest in more mac bonds. The Teachers’
trustee, Reuben Mitchell, said, “We must watch that investments are properly
diversified, that all our eggs aren’t put in one basket.” Governor Carey left
the dinner and phoned state and federal leaders with a simple message: Default
was imminent.
The governor placed another call that night, summoning to his
office a developer named Richard Ravitch, who had been serving as a minister
without portfolio for the governor. When Ravitch arrived at the governor’s
office, Carey was still in white tie. He told Ravitch to find Al Shanker, the
powerful head of the teachers’ union, and convince him to buy the bonds that
would save the city. A car and driver were waiting outside.
In his memoir, Ravitch would later write that when he got to
Shanker’s apartment, Shanker “was genuinely distressed by his decision not to
buy mac bonds. He knew the risks to the city, but he believed his primary
obligation was his fiduciary responsibility to his teachers. As city employees,
they had already been put at risk by the city’s fiscal crisis. It was no small
thing to make their pension money subject to the same risk.” They talked until
five o’clock that morning, but reached no consensus.
At the same time, Mayor Beame, convinced that there would be no
stay of financial execution, had assembled a small team in the basement of
Gracie Mansion. Ira Millstein, then a young lawyer at Weil, Gotshal, &
Manges, prepared the legal filing.
Sid Frigand, the mayor’s press secretary, recalled the point at
which the conversation turned not from if the city would go under but how. “We
needed to figure out which services were essential, and which weren’t,” he
said. “It was an interesting exercise because when you think of what is
essential and what is not essential that there are functions of public service
that we don’t know about that are very essential. Bridge tenders who raise and
lower bridges were essential. Teachers weren’t life-or-death. Hospital services
and keeping the highways open were essential.”
As the mayor’s team was making the list, Sid remembers looking
over and seeing Howard Rubenstein writing on a pad of paper. Rubenstein was a
sort of unpaid booster for New York City who was making his living doing
public-relations work for many of the city’s real estate developers and unions.
This magazine would later describe him as “ubiquitous, trusted, a kind of
gentle fixer for those who run New York.”
Rubenstein and Beame were friends. At one point in the late
sixties and early seventies, Rubenstein had lived across the street from Beame,
in Belle Harbor, Queens. One of Rubenstein’s more vivid memories is seeing
Beame on the beach, tucking a series of folded papers into his bathing suit.
Rubenstein asked what they were, and Beame showed him that each was covered
with tiny handwriting: he was writing a platform for his mayoral run. Here’s my
program,” Beame said. Rubenstein’s response: “What happens if you go in the
water?”
In 1974, on the power of that platform, Beame became mayor. And
now, less than two years later, Beame was about to announce the bankruptcy of
America’s richest and largest city.
As October 16th became October 17th, the mayor’s team was in
constant contact with the mayor’s Contingency Planning Committee as they sought
to determine how, exactly, a bankruptcy would play out. Police, fire,
sanitation—those were essential. Hospital and emergency care were, too. But
what would the mayor say? Rubenstein was working on the mayor’s statement. Even
in the moment of crisis, there was some score settling. Beame had no love for
the comptroller and wanted him implicated in the bankruptcy. The first words of
the statement read, “I have been advised by the Comptroller that the City of
New York has insufficient cash on hand to meet debt obligations due today.…”
Rubenstein handed Beame the statement after many hours of work.
The mayor looked at it, said nothing, and nodded. Rubenstein had it typed up.
At 12:25 a.m., Beame attempted to call President Ford to advise him that
default was imminent. Ford was asleep.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
The Streets of New York City Under Quarantine
On the morning of October 17th, New Yorkers woke to a series of
grim headlines. (“Balk by UFT pushing city to default,” in the Staten Island
Advance; “Teachers Reject 150-Million Loan City Needs Today,” in the New York
Times.)
The city ordered the sanitation department to stop issuing
payroll checks, and one bank said it would not cash city payroll checks unless
they were drawn on an account held by the bank itself.
New York City’s bonds, issued by the mac, plunged to between
twenty dollars and forty dollars per thousand-dollar face value, and city
note-holders began to line up at the Municipal Building in an attempt to redeem
whatever they could. That morning, Rohatyn told the press that everything
hinged on the teachers’ union: “The future of the city is in their hands.”
It was more than just the future of one city. New York’s bonds
were held by banks throughout the United States and around the world. By some
estimates, New York’s default would bring down at least a hundred banks, and
expose others to liability for selling suspect or fraudulent products.
Economists warned that New York’s default would hurt the dollar
abroad. The Dow dropped ten points at the opening bell, the price of gold began
to rise, and, as reported by the United Press International wire service, “trading
of bonds of other cities and states slowed to a near standstill, and even the
prices of most credit-worthy bonds fell.” One newspaper in North Carolina ran a
cartoon of a bum lying on trash, under the Brooklyn Bridge, with the caption,
“We’re going down, America, and we’re taking you with us.”
President Ford began hearing from leaders around the world about
the dangers of a New York default. His press secretary, Ron Nessen, said that
Ford would continue to monitor the situation throughout the day, but wouldn’t
change his mind about granting assistance to the city. In Nessen’s words, “This
is not a natural disaster or an act of God. It is a self-inflicted act by the
people who have been running New York City.”
Al Shanker, just a few hours removed from his meeting with Dick
Ravitch, now went to Gracie Mansion to meet with Mayor Beame and former Mayor
Robert Wagner. That meeting, too, yielded no consensus.
In the late morning, with the city’s 4 p.m. deadline looming,
Shanker asked Governor Carey for another meeting. But since Carey’s office was
swarmed with reporters, Shanker asked if they could meet somewhere private.
Ravitch’s apartment, at Park Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street, was between Gracie
Mansion and the governor’s office.
Ravitch still remembers how unprepared he was to host such a
high-level meeting. There was so little food at his apartment that Harry Van
Arsdale, the head of the New York Central Labor Council, began eating matzo he
had found in the cabinet.
The teachers’ union was in a bind. Shanker later called it
blackmail. If the city went bankrupt, a judge could order thousands of teacher
dismissals, undo the raises the teachers had recently negotiated, and override
any pension laws, stripping retirees of their pension checks.
Three hours into the meeting, Shanker left to meet with the
Teachers’ Retirement System. Ravitch remembers that the only evidence of the
momentous decision that had just taken place in his apartment was a trail of
matzo crumbs.
At 2:07 p.m., the teachers’ union announced that it would
reverse course and would make up the city’s hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar
shortfall with their pension funds. “No one else was coming forward to save the
city,” Shanker said.
The mayor’s statement, prepared by Rubenstein, was never read.
Published for the first time here, it speaks in a workmanlike way to how grim a
bankruptcy could have been. Only at the end is there a rhetorical flourish,
referring to New York’s “great and continuing promise.”
[GO TO THE WEBSITE FOR THIS PDF TITLED “STATEMENT BY MAYOR ABRAHAM
D BREAME, OCTOBER 17, 1975,” 3 PAGES]
The immediate crisis averted, New York’s leaders continued to
petition for federal help. Twelve days later, President Ford stepped to the
podium at the National Press Club and delivered a stinging rebuke.
“What I cannot understand—and what nobody should condone—is the
blatant attempt in some quarters to frighten the American people and their
representatives in Congress into panicky support of patently bad policy. The
people of this country will not be stampeded; they will not panic when a few
desperate New York City officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage
payments out of them.”
Later in the speech, he added, “I can tell you, and tell you
now, that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal
bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”’
Ford’s speech may actually have been harsher than many of his
advisers intended. According to David Gergen, who, at the time, was an
assistant to Treasury Secretary William Simon, Ford was certainly offended by
the city’s profligate spending, but was generally a moderate Republican who
liked New York. (He had chosen a New Yorker, Nelson Rockefeller, as his
Vice-President.)
Early versions of the speech, while strongly worded, contained
no veto threat at all. The papers of Robert Hartmann, a speechwriter for Ford,
show that, in drafts up until two days before the delivery of the speech, Ford
is content to simply say, “I am fundamentally opposed to this [bailout]
solution.” In another earlier draft, Ford almost comforts and welcomes the prospect
of a default, promising that if that happened, “the federal government will
work with the court to assure that police, fire, and other essential services
for the protection of life and property are maintained.”
The harshness of the speech that Ford ultimately delivered led
to a headline that ran in the following morning’s New York Daily News and will
forever be associated with Ford, although he never said it. “Ford to City: Drop
Dead.”
Ironically, Ford’s tough words, and the even tougher headline they
engendered, may have served to save New York and sink Ford. For New York,
Ford’s statement convinced the key players that no federal help would be
forthcoming. It galvanized the city to make tough choices and significant
changes. Rubenstein, Koch, and others would later say that by refusing to save
the city, Ford did the city a service. (For better or worse, it may also have
enshrined brinkmanship as a bankruptcy negotiating tactic.)
And although Ford would later approve federal support for New
York, New Yorkers remembered the headline. The following year, Jimmy Carter
received the third-highest vote share a Democratic presidential candidate ever
received in New York City, narrowly won New York State, and with it, the
forty-one electoral votes that give him the Presidency—revealing the impact
from one speech that wasn’t given, and one that was.
Jeff Nussbaum, a partner at the speechwriting firm West Wing
Writers, is working on a book about undelivered speeches.
More:
Gerald Ford
New York City
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