politics for the 99%

Published on Spiegel Online International, by Christoph Scheuermann, Oct 15, 2015:

They drink heavily, shatter champagne flutes and smash furniture — before moving on to positions of leadership. The elite Bullingdon Club is an exclusive haven for Britain’s rich and powerful. But members don’t like to talk about it.  

To understand England’s elite, it helps to go back in time, to the summer of 1987. A pack of bow-tied young men dressed in midnight blue tails with brass buttons and cream-colored silk lapels are stumbling through the streets of Oxford after one of their dinners, tipsy on champagne and in a boisterous mood. None of them is older than 24. One of them hits upon the idea of visiting a fellow student — and a short time later, a flowerpot flies through a restaurant window and a police car arrives. It is a night that the entire country will still be talking about decades later … //

… Unchanged for Centuries:

The Bullingdon and other dinner clubs are seeds of power in the United Kingdom, and not just because membership provides influence. Members also gain access to a group of like-minded individuals who will later assume leading roles — allies for life, just as it has always been.

If there is a stable core of British society that has remained unchanged for centuries, it is the upper class. Unlike the elites on the European continent, the leadership clique in Britain was largely spared from revolutions and uprisings. For generations, the children of the country’s powerful families have attended boarding schools like Eton, Winchester and Harrow, followed by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It is a form of patronage that Britons simply refer to as tradition … //

… Daddy’s Castle:

The Bullingdon represents money and myth, decadence and madness — it is a haven of the upper class. No Labour politician neglects an opportunity to badmouth the Old Boys network and to show who the Tories really are. And the stories are also fodder for the tabloid press.

The club was founded around 1780 and was first mentioned in a written document in 1795, as a cricket club. Membership is by invitation only … //

… Rewarded for Getting Drunk: … //
… Fifty Bottles: … //
… Sometimes We Hired Strippers: … //
… Stairway to Paradise: … //

… Sometimes there are people who fail and fall. For example, Darius Guppy, in the same class as Boris Johnson, was sent to prison for fraud. Ambition and delusions of grandeur are close cousins, especially at the Bullingdon Club. But the Facebook profiles of the latest graduating class, the photos from parties and vacations, depict a cheerful, weightless upper class, and there is no sign of fear and concerns about the future in their faces. Only of determination and power.

They occasionally get together at The Bridge, a club in Oxford. The entrance is up a flight of stairs, and only those with a golden wristband are allowed into the club. The lion’s throne, surrounded by a cord, is at the back.

“Why is our table occupied?” asks Ali, the student with the rich uncle. There is a tense conversation, and then someone says: “We’re the Bullingdon, man.” The table empties within a few minutes.

(full text).

Links:

Migrant crisis: EU backs Turkey action plan, on BBCnews, Oct 16, 2015: EU states have backed an action plan with Turkey, which it is hoped will ease the flow of migrants to Europe. Nearly 600,000 migrants have reached the EU by sea so far this year, many of them travelling from Turkey …;
(see also: on en.wikipedia: European migrant crisis, or European refugee crisis[6][7][8][9] arose through the rising number of refugees and migrants[10] coming to the European Union, across the Mediterranean Sea or through Southeast Europe, and applying for asylum. They come from areas such as the Middle East (Syria, Iraq), Africa (Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Gambia), South Asia and Central Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh),[11][12] and the Western Balkans (Kosovo, Albania).[13] According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of October 2015, 75% of the over half a million Mediterranean Sea arrivals since the beginning of the year are refugees coming from Syria (55%), Afghanistan (14%) and Eritrea (6%). Most of the migrants are adult men (69%).[14] The phrase “European migrant crisis” became widely used in April 2015,[15] when five boats carrying almost two thousand migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200 people …);

Global Capitalism: Monthly Update October 2015, 89.34 min, uploaded by RichardDWolf, Oct 15, 2015 … Global Capitalist Downturn Yet Again …
(see also: Democracy at Work; Left Forum.org; Dr. Richard D. Wolff on YouTube-search /this month);

Die Stimmen des digitalen Untergrunds, auf The Huffington Post.de/Blog, von Dr. Markus Linden, 13. Okt 2015;

Extra 3, der Irrsinn der Woche vom 07. Okt 2015 – NDR, 29.54 min, von extra 3 am 8. Oct 2015 hochgeladen … mit Christian Ehring;

DER FEHLENDE PART: Das Duo des Zorns – und was macht Dich wütend? auf RTdeutsch, 16. Sept 2015;

ALL WARS ARE BANKERS WARS – The Movie, 45.21 min, uploaded by UFOTV® The Disclosure Movie Network, April 28, 2015;

Youtube Safety Mode Censorship: Latest Battleground in the War on Consciousness, on The Conscious Reporter, by David Gardner, Aug 23, 2014: YouTube was once a bastion of free speech, an open venue where alternative information could circulate and wake up millions worldwide. Now it’s increasingly a place where truth is suppressed, as YouTube’s 6 billion+ hours of content is ‘soft censored’ on the sly by its mysterious ‘safety mode’. Keep reading if you prefer watching liberating information to mindless entertainment;

Graham Hancock, the War on Consciousness – Banned TED Talk, 18.44 min, uploaded by Imagine Hypnotics, Sept 30, 2013 … Re-uploaded as TED decided to censor Graham and remove this video from the TEDx YouTube channel … more on Collective Evolution CE; /Cultural references; /See also; /External Links;
(see also War on Consciousnesson).