Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
An original and cutting commentary on the bad side of the good life.
Why do those who are extremely well off spend their money in socially and environmentally damaging ways? How do crooks, con artists, and counterfeiters function in the hypercharged markets catering to the whims and fancies of the very rich? And why do so many of the less fortunate insist on slavishly emulating the über rich, spending way beyond what their limited means allow?
A critique of the lifestyles of today’s ultra rich bolstered by old-fashioned muckraking, Crass Struggle provides a sharp, original, and often humorous commentary on “the bad side of the good life, the underbelly of the potbelly.” Taking the reader inside today’s luxury trades, R.T. Naylor visits gold mines spewing arsenic and diamond fields spreading human misery, knocks on the doors of purveyors of luxury seafood as the oceans empty, samples wares of merchants offering top-vintage wines (or at least top-vintage labels), calls on companies running trophy-hunting expeditions and dealers in exotic pets high on endangered lists, and much more. What stands out is that so many high-priced items glitter on the outside, but have more than a spot of rot at the core.
Through a series of outrageous but all too true stories, Crass Struggle reveals the appalling consequences of consumerism run amok and its links to repetitive financial swindles and the alarming degradation of the biophysical environment.
Crass Struggle launched April, 2011.
Click here for the book’s order page
Click the links below, or scroll down, to view additional information |
R.T. Naylor is professor of economics at McGill University. His books include Satanic Purses, Wages of Crime, Patriots and Profiteers, and Hot Money and the Politics of Debt.
Download the high resolution book cover image
“Just ask Leo Hindery Jr, billionaire sports broadcasting tycoon and racing-car enthusiast, who modestly remarked during the upswing: ‘I think there are people including myself … who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.'”
“Meanwhile the high-end gemstones so often set in that gold have no competitor for the human misery associated with their production, the commercial duplicity accompanying their trafficking, the political mayhem that the scramble for them leaves behind, or the vulgar glitz in their marketing. This reached its perky pinnacle (or two) in Victoria’s Secret bras, especially the 2008 Black Diamond Fantasy Miracle (“Cleavage like this could only be a Miracle”) with about 3,500 black diamonds, 117 1-carat round diamonds, and 34 rubies. For today’s sleazure class, it seems, nothing exceeds like excess.”
“But well after a market crash that supposedly wiped out 40 percent of world “wealth,” the principality of Monaco (35,000 people, 350,000 bank accounts) decided to launch its Concept URI (ultra-rich individual) program. Facing the threat of being blacklisted by the G–20 group of rich countries as a “predatory tax haven,” Monaco planned a charm counter offensive for a select group whose political clout matched their personal wealth. Each URI would receive a “key to Monaco” card that opened twenty-four-hour private shopping in local Prada, Christian Dior, Yves St Laurent, and Cartier outlets with the guarantee that “ordinary” clients would be cleared out in advance. Each URI would be feted, too, with a helicopter tour of the environs capped by a reception in a “private home” to study the local way of life, no doubt with the same enthusiasm as an anthropology student doing doctoral field research among exotic cultures. A visit to the Royal Palace (big chief’s hut?) got tossed in for good measure.”
“Of course, those space-capades took place before Hollywood roundly criticized human excess in the $500 million blockbuster Avatar. That film’s devastating depiction of corporate greed and bloody-mindedness in scrambling for mineral wealth is predicted to set off a rush to convert not just cinema technology but even home computers and cellphones to 3d mode. That will accelerate the already existing race to extract rare metals from deep in the Earth, further fouling surrounding areas with mountains of toxic tailings while pushing electronic equipment rendered obsolete onto heaps of e-waste poisoning ecosystems in places too poor or ignorant to refuse the honour of receiving the effluent world’s dangerous trash. But no one can say that Hollywood didn’t warn them, in 3d no less.”
Goring the Tusk Trade: Mammoth Task, Toothless Law?
The prospect of ending up as the main course at dinner is also a threat to periodically hang over the head, and choicer parts, of the most charismatic of megabeasts – as if the elephant needed more things to prey on a mind that, at least among elder matriarchs, is already exceptional for its long-term memory. A single, mature male of three tons can yield 1,300–1,400 pounds of edible meat. Even the vascular organ weighs in at nearly 50 pounds. That much heart would put to shame a whole army of politicians, sporting cheese-cake smiles and shedding crocodile tears, whose only reason for electoral success is the general public’s own startling lack of recall capacity, short term or long.
Ivory-tower ideologues naturally claim that the best way to save the elephant is to consume more of it – after all, the example of chickens shows convincingly that, if there is human demand, there will always be more than enough supply. Although elephant tartar is still not prominently featured at exotic meat counters in the West, enough of an international black market exists today that the meat can fetch more than the tusk, traditionally the main target of poachers. While no one has yet suggested elephant bile to cure sleeping sickness, a result better effected if one of the great beasts inadvertently steps on the head of a snoring tourist curled up beside a campfire, in parts of the Orient elephant joins a long list of meats from other endangered species as an aphrodisiac. And, of course, elephant bits and pieces have been, and are still, in demand for other purposes. Women seeking the ultimate fashion statement might have purses and footwear fashioned from its hide, while men might choose to pass around celebratory Cuban cigars out of humidors made from a baby elephant’s foot.
For review copy requests or questions:
Jacqueline Davis
Publicist
McGill-Queen’s University Press
1010 Sherbrooke, Suite 1720
Montreal, QC H3A 2R7
Tel: (514) 398-2555
Fax: (514) 398-4333
jacqueline.davis@mcgill.ca
No comments yet.