Fear & Loathing in Tinseltown-on-Potomac

"I've got two words for you, Harvey. Predator drones. You'll never see it coming."

That's what I imagine Barack Obama schmoozing to Harvey Weinstein as the two alpha males bonded one night over bundles of Hollywood campaign cash at a $34,000-a-plate dinner.  Burnishing each other's brands with money and influence was all well and good. But just imagine the dividends from an actual blending of the two powerhouse firms via a subsidized internship at Weinstein's company for Obama's elder daughter. Just imagine a lucrative niche for Weinstein at Obama's planned $500 million post-presidential shrine and luxury entertainment complex.

They were ruling members of the same extended clan anyway. And despite the "open secret" of Weinstein's decades-long history of sexual predation of women, he probably wasn't about to touch a young woman who arrived for work every day with her own armed Secret Service detail. It would have been akin to incest, and as far as we know, Harvey isn't into that.

Harvey most likely remembered the Kill List president's grotesque remarks to the Jonas Brothers at one of those annual Washington press dinners where media stars and political stars and Hollywood stars become more indistinguishable from one another than usual.

  Yours truly called Weinstein out as a predator on this blog more than two years ago. At around the same time that Wikileaks was dumping a stash of Sony emails to and from Hollywood insiders and Obama insiders, the New York tabloids (but not the New York Times) were salaciously splashing Weinstein's groping of an Italian model all over their front pages.

Those leaked emails revealed just how closely intertwined the Democratic Party and Hollywood truly are.

One of the sleazier reveals was how, in exchange for the millions of dollars the movie mogul gave to the party and to the Obama war chest, First Friend Valerie Jarrett arranged with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates for Weinstein to receive a Harvard medal named after civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois. At the same time, the 2014 emails show, Jarrett also finagled a spot for herself on Gates's fawning PBS series which explores the genetic roots of Hollywood stars. The only problem they encountered in the deal-making was getting somebody important in Hollywood to fly all the way out to Boston to personally bestow the fake award upon Harvey Weinstein.

Sony CEO Michael Lynton refused outright, voicing disgust that Weinstein was actually being honored for anything even remotely resembling human rights. Gates, the master of ceremonies for the event, allowed that he, too, had his "issues" with Weinstein.

Where Harvey was concerned, there was a battle royal between fear and loathing even among the most loyal Democrats. As far as the awards show was concerned, loathing won that particular round, because Jarrett and Gates couldn't get one single A-Lister to stoop so low as to actually call Harvey Weinstein a civil rights icon in exchange for future wads of his cash to the Democrats. They ended up using a mere Harvard student to pay Weinstein off with the medal.

Besides that contrived award, and Michelle Obama selling access to herself for $34,000 to Hollywood high rollers, the Sony emails revealed that Obama's relentless championship of the now-moribund Transpacific Partnership was fueled largely by Hollywood moguls anxious to keep their profits high through strict intellectual property rules to be applicable all over the world. The pact would have given them the right to sue foreign countries where their movies and TV shows and hit songs were being pirated. These suits would be prosecuted in secret courts, and any judgments would be as secret and as final as Weinstein's alleged confidentiality agreements with his victims. Had the TPP passed, it would have been the citizens of largely poor countries, like Indonesia and Vietnam, who would have been paying extortion to the likes of Harvey Weinstein - even if they themselves had never illegally downloaded a copy of one of his films.

As a matter of fact, emails in the Sony cache revealed that Hollywood insiders were so upset about previous Wikileaks documents revealing their own roles in secretly crafting the TPP that they flocked to the Oval Office to plot further public relations strategy with Obama himself.

And then Obama went on national TV to tell the public that an alleged North Korea revenge hack on Sony had been a virtual assault on US national security itself.  Obama's "intelligence community" absolutely did collude with Hollywood in order to "assassinate" Kim Jung Un in a spy spoof, and thus make audiences more amenable to an eventual regime change. And they say that Donald Trump is a reckless provocateur for calling the North Korea dictator "Rocket Man"? I wouldn't be surprised if Trump got his own inspiration for wackily whacking the foreign dictator from watching The Interview.

It took the Obamas five days, with a newly-fired Weinstein safely esconced in a luxury sex addiction therapy resort, to respond to the Hollywood scandal. They carefully crafted their words, saying they were disgusted by the reports about Weinstein. They didn't go so far as to claim disgust at the man himself. They didn't go so far as to return all his campaign donations, or pledge them to charity, as other Democratic politicians have done. They left it at a typically smarmy and meaningless "And we all need to build a culture -- including by empowering our girls and teaching our boys decency and respect -- so we can make such behavior less prevalent in the future."

Maybe they can raise more funds from Hollywood to build a virtue-signaling decency and empowerment wing at their new Chicago inspiration-industrial complex.

Tellingly, it was only the Hillary half of the Clinton duo which tweeted out some belated boilerplate shock and awe, also glaringly minus any cash donation to charity.(Update: on second thought, Hillary says, she will after all give the money to charity, because as she so humbly reminds us, she already gives away 10 percent of her annual income anyway.)

The Sensuous Art of the Political Ma$$age

As Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote concurrently with the release of the Sony emails, there is not only a co-equal partnership between Hollywood and the Democratic Party, Hollywood is an integral part of the military-industrial complex itself. Hollywood makes the surveillance state look sexy, and it makes war crimes seem glamorous. It can even try to make the CIA killing a North Korean dictator look zany and fun.

 Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of RAND Corporation, an organisation specialising in research and development for the United States military and intelligence sector. The Sony Archives show the flow of contacts and information between these two major US industries, whether it is RAND wanting to invite George Clooney and Kevin Spacey to events, or Lynton offering contact to Valerie Jarrett (a close advisor to Obama) or RAND desiring a partnership with IMAX for digital archiving. With this close tie to the military-industrial complex it is no surprise that Sony reached out to RAND for advice regarding its North Korea film The Interview. RAND provided an analyst specialised in North Korea and suggested Sony reach out to the State Department and the NSA regarding North Korea's complaints about the upcoming film. The Sony documents also show Sony being in possession of a brochure for an NSA-evaluated online cloud security set-up called INTEGRITY.

As regards the New York Times and other establishment media suddenly all ganging up on their pal Weinstein after so many decades of giving him a free pass, who knows what their agenda really is? It could simply be the realization that maximum sleaze attracts maximum eyeballs, and they desperatey need maximum clicks to stay in business.  Or maybe Weinstein overstepped his bounds and groped not only the top actresses now fighting their way for a top spot in the accusation publicity sweepstakes, but someone so important that she shall not be named. I don't know, and I don't care. Because this would not be a scandal if it were a $40,000 McDonald's franchise owner groping his whole crew of $9-an-hour wage slaves between hamburger flips and milkshake runs. These scandals happen every hour and every day to the working class women the Obamas wouldn't empower if their new luxe lives depended on it.

I haven't been clicking on all of the sleaze myself, although I couldn't resist Times pundit Ross Douthat's hysterical piece last week about Weinstein and "liberalism's" creation of a whole stinky sty of man-pigs. Apparently, Republican pigs are not as disgusting as Democratic pigs, because Republicans grope women conservatively and Democrats grope them liberally. Everything must boil down to tribal affinity and tribal loyalty. Avoid nuance and depth as if your very careers depended on it.

My published comment:

Predatory behavior has more to do with power than it does with ideology. Creeps can be alt-right, libertarian, liberal, progressive, white, black, brown, or in one case, orange.

The one common denominator in the decades-long, consequence-free careers of serial predators is extreme wealth. It helps if the offender is also a media star or mogul, like Trump and Weinstein. Lack of clout is probably the main reason that Anthony Weiner, their brother in predation, is going to jail, and they're not. Perhaps if he'd been elected mayor of NYC, things would have turned out very differently for him. He would have been owed, big-time.

Weinstein did end up in the tabloids in 2015 when an Italian model accused him of groping her. Naturally, the media cast her as a bimbo with an accent. Provocative pics of her modeling sexy underwear duly accompanied all the articles, which were filed under "gossip" and "entertainment."

The NYPD pretended to care by setting up a "sting" phone call, in which a previously warned Weinstein readily admitted the groping. No charges were filed, because he came clean about the whole "misunderstanding." And then he gave Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr.'s campaign a nice $10,000 donation to show how nice he really is.

This is the same DA who, it was just revealed, dropped pending fraud charges against Ivanka and Don Jr.

It's a small world after all - especially when money begetting power begetting more money begetting more power is the oily engine that makes it spin.

Norma Rae Revisited

One of the last Hollywood films to unabashedly showcase working class activism was released in 1979, on the very eve of the Reagan era neoliberalism that, in the coming decades, would effectively destroy the American labor movement.

Norma Rae, which won Sally Field her first Oscar for her portrayal of the title character, is based on real-life labor organizer Crystal Lee Sutton and the ultimately successful struggle of workers to unionize a J.P. Stevens textile plant in 1974. Despite many details, as well as dialogue lifted almost verbatim from a New York Times article about Sutton, (then known as Crystal Lee Jordan) the film bears the usual "this is a work of fiction and any connection to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental" disclaimer in the closing credits. As a result, Sutton herself never saw a dime from the film, which became a major box office hit. In that regard, too, it very much presaged the brutal backlash against working people that was to come.

Still, the movie stands out for its realism, from the pro-labor dialogue, to the cross-racial worker solidarity portrayed, right down to the depressing, paint-peeling company-owned abodes of the mill workers, who at the time represented nearly one third of the population of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. (Since the movie was shot in Alabama, no actual factory workers were needed as extras, of course.) Another irony is that the producer, 20th Century Fox, only forked out money for the film because it was drowning in record profits from the first edition of the Star Wars franchise, the escapist fantasy for the ages.

Another hint of the neoliberal swing from labor politics to the identity-driven politics to come was the film's marketing as a feminist story rather than a class story. Labor historian Jefferson Cowie writes that although class solidarity and worker solidarity were, in fact, the underlying themes of Norma Rae, "one of the most important aspects of the film is the subtle way that both individualism and feminism subtly trump workerism in the film. Rather than creating a solid foundation for the merging of gender and class, as (director Martin) Ritt had hoped for, this film was backed and marketed as a woman's picture. Like all Hollywood productions, the film focused on the rising consciousness of the lead heroine at the expense of the rest of the workers' efforts. Crystal Lee found this so problematic that she came close to suing Martin Ritt and launching a competing narrative of the events in collaboration with the Academy-award winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. The narration of political uplift also became the center of the marketing strategy."

The promotional poster, in fact, features a perky Sally Field, arms outstretched like a cheerleader, looking carefree and happy in skintight designer jeans, which were soon to be branded in department stores as "Norma Rae Work n Class Jeans!" 

The only trouble is that this triumphal image never happened in the actual movie, let alone in real life. Crystal Lee herself no longer worked at the minimum wage (then about $3 an hour) job at the textile mill she had helped to organize. This is the original advertising poster, which Fox distribution and marketing executives nixed as being too dangerously close to real working class angst:

In the movie trailer, the excited voice-over gushes: "Norma Rae is a survivor and for the first time in her life she has the chance to become something more - a winner!" 

This tripe not only presaged the neoliberal era, it presaged neoliberalism's ultimate excrescence - the win-at-any-cost persona and propaganda of our current pseudo-populist president, Donald J. Trump. Not for nothing were the anti-union mill owners of the South also among the most generous right-wing funders of the Republican Party. From Henry P. Liefermann's gut-wrenching Times article, which inspired the film:

 The industry, from floor sweeper to chairman of the board, reaches everywhere in the South. Senators such as Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, Herman Talmadge, governors such as John West, Terry Sanford and Jimmy Carter started their campaigns with the mill vote. Roger Milliken of Deering‐Milliken mills, the world's third largest, was one of Richard Nixon's finance chairmen in 1968 (as well as one of the John Birch Society's directors in 1962). It was the souls of the mill hands Billy Graham began with—he has gone on to Presidents and the world, they to such as the Great Speckled Bird Baptist Church in Greenville, S. C.

Mill hands are the bedrock of the Deep South's economy, religion, politics, industry. They are also the lowest paid industrial workers in the South and the nation. Their average income is $6,000 a year before any deductions; their average work day includes 20 minutes for lunch and two 10‐minute rest breaks; their average work week is six days, including a scheduled day of overtime; their average hourly wage of $2.79 is 35 cents less than the Southern average and $1.22 an hour below the national average for industrial workers, and their wholly non‐average life is plagued by alcohol, sex, violence and an image of themselves as deserving no better than what they get.

These mill workers got sick manufacturing high-end bedding for the rich and fulfilling contracts for damask tablecloths for the entire chain of luxury Hilton hotels.  And, Liefferman wrote, mill workers were even encouraged to bring their children to work in order to learn the trade.

Now, of course, much of this manufacturing work for what Forbes aptly calls Carl Icahn's "Undercover Empire" is increasingly offshored to workers, paid even less than Crystal and her pre-union co-workers were, to get sick as they manufacture Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren and Disney and Izod sheets and towels and clothing.
 
Crystal Lee Sutton would die of a brain tumor in 2009 at age 68, having escaped the brown lung disease which prematurely claimed the lives of so many of her former co-workers and generations of members of her own extended family.

The Roanoke Rapids, NC mill where she'd worked and agitated had shut its doors six years previously, in 2003, eventually becoming subsumed in the WestPoint-Stevens conglomerate, which itself was taken over in bankruptcy by corporate raider (and Trump adviser) Carl Icahn, who continues to live long and prosper despite his felony record. As recounted in The Encylopedia of Forlorn Places, the building where Sutton and her co-workers fought for and gained their rights has fallen into disrepair, while many other factories of its kind were quickly demolished for fear of too many people remembering history.


The penultimate scene in the film version, in which the newly-fired and defiant Norma Rae jumps up on a table happened just that way in real life. For the first time in generations, the whole plant went quiet.

Crystal Lee returned to her work table to pick up her purse. Suddenly she pulled out a sheet of cardboard, and with her black marker lettered on it, “UNION.” She climbed on her table and slowly began to turn, holding the sign high so the side hemmers, terry hemmers, terry cutters and packers could see what she had written.

That's what she was doing when Drewery Beale came to get her, found her on the table, angry, afraid, close to tears, holding her “UNION” sign. Later that night Chief Beale would take Crystal Lee to jail, book her on disorderly‐conduct charges, and the union organizers would came to bail her out. Weeks later the charges would be dropped, her firing taken before the N.L.R.B. by the union, and she would be on unemployment, the family living only on Cookie Jordan's salary.

That mill might be falling down today, but Crystal Lee's memory lives on, especially at Allemance Community College, where a museum has been established in her memory. 

Crystal, Thinking

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Norma Rae is currently available on the Filmstruck streaming platform, which is also showcasing several other rarely aired labor films this month, including Salt of the Earth, about striking New Mexico mine workers, and Barbara Koppleman's iconic Harlan County USA.