[A-List] Naomi Klein on Conrad Black

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Conrad Black is on trial in a nation that loathes its elites

The jury selection process shows how regular Americans now regard the
wealthiest few not as heroes but as thieves

Naomi Klein
Friday March 23, 2007
The Guardian

During the jury selection process at the Conrad Black fraud trial in
Chicago, the judge polled potential jurors on their impressions of
Black's Canadian homeland. "Socialist country," one replied. According
to press accounts, Black, once the third-most-powerful press baron in
the world, turned to his wife, Barbara Amiel, and they shared a smile.
At last, a juror after their own hearts - the couple had been redbaiting
Canadians for years.

The Black trial is an odd beast: a Canadian who gave up his citizenship
in order to accept a peerage in Britain is on trial in the US for
allegedly pocketing tens of millions that belonged to the shareholders
of Chicago-based Hollinger International. Every twist is front-page
international news, but most Americans have no idea who Black is. In his
opening remarks, Black's lawyer, Edward Genson, assured the jury: "In
his native Canada and England, he's a household name."

It makes sense that Lord Black is a nobody in Chicago. He never needed
to bother with politics in the US - as far as he was concerned, the
country was close to perfect. It was the rest of the English-speaking
world that required his bombastic ideological lectures. Delivering those
was his life's mission.

Black is the world's leading advocate of the "Anglosphere", a movement
calling for the creation of a bloc of English-speaking countries.
Adherents claim that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
must join together against the Muslim world and anyone else who poses a
threat. For Black, the US is not just the obvious leader of the
Anglosphere but the economic and military model that all Anglo countries
should emulate, as opposed to the soft European Union.

Although the consolidation of the Anglosphere as a political bloc
receives far less scrutiny than US military interventions, it has been a
crucial plank of Washington's imperial projects. The movement recently
gained some notoriety when it emerged that on February 28 the White
House had hosted a "literary luncheon" for George Bush and Dick Cheney's
new favourite writer, ultra-right British historian Andrew Roberts,
author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, an
Anglosphere manifesto. But it is Black who has been the linchpin of
Anglosphere campaigns for two decades, using his British and Canadian
newspapers to reach out and collectively hug his beloved US. In Britain,
this took the form of using the Daily Telegraph as a beachhead against
"Euro-integrationism" and insisting that Britain's future lies not with
the EU but with Washington. This vision reached its zenith, of course,
with the Bush-Blair team-up in Iraq.

In Canada, where Black controlled roughly half the daily newspapers, the
push to Americanise was even more strident. When he founded the daily
National Post in 1998, it was with the explicit goal of weaning
Canadians from our social safety net (a "hammock") and forming a new
party of the "united right" to unseat the governing Liberals.

So if Black was going to get a sympathetic jury anywhere, it should have
been in the US, where regular people worship the wealthy because they
are convinced they could be the next to strike it rich (unlike those
envious, over-taxed and over-regulated Europeans and Canadians). Perhaps
in 2000, at the height of the stock-market bubble, Black would have
faced a jury made up of such supportive folks, ones who would have
looked at his uncanny ability to divert Hollinger profits into his own
accounts and said: "More power to you."

But in 2007, Black came face to face with the casualties of the boom's
collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively
globalised. As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors in
order to whittle the group down to 12, plus eight alternates, she found
men and women who had "lost every dime" in the WorldCom collapse, whose
pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had been fired thanks
to outsourcing, and who'd had their finances ravaged by identity theft.

Asked what they thought of executives who earn tens of millions of
dollars, jurors answered almost uniformly in the negative. "Who could
possibly do that much work or be that much capable?" one asked. A
mechanic's apprentice pointed out that no matter how much he works, "I'm
barely getting by as it is, living at home". No one said: "More power to
you."

Many appeared to regard North America's ultra-rich the way Russians see
their oligarchs - even if the way they amassed their fortunes was legal,
it shouldn't have been. "I just don't think anyone should get that
amount of money from any company, example Enron and WorldCom," one juror
wrote. Others said: "I feel that there is corruption everywhere"; anyone
paid as much as Black "probably stole it"; "I am sure this goes on all
the time and I hope they get caught". John Tien, a 40-year-old
accountant at Boeing, launched into such an elaborate lecture about the
accounting scams endemic in corporate America that Black's lawyers asked
the judge to question him in private, to prevent his views from
influencing the other potential jurors.

Regardless of what else happens in the Black saga, the jury-selection
process has already provided an extraordinary window into the way
regular Americans, randomly selected, view their elites - not as heroes
but as thieves. As far as Black is concerned, this is all terribly
unfair - he is being "thrown to the mobs" because of rage at the system
and, unlike American billionaires, he doesn't "dress in corduroy
trousers" or donate his fortune to Aids charities. Black's lawyers even
argued (unsuccessfully) that their client could not get a fair trial
because the average Chicagoan "does not reside in more than one
residence, employ servants or a chauffeur, enjoy lavish furniture, or
host expensive parties".

There is no doubt that what is going on in that courtroom looks less
like a fraud trial than class war, one at the heart of the Anglosphere.
Even if Black wins, it will be harder to sell the world an ideological
model that is so deeply reviled at home.


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