It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democr

BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis - WE'RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT - AREN'T WE?
At every moment there are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans floating around the world on "Funships" - superliners like the Costa Concordia that crashed and capsized off the coast of Italy.
These ships are extraordinary creations, millions of ordinary people pay not very much to spend weeks in an offworld pleasure bubble, surrounded by vast replicas of pictures and architecture from the glories of past civilizations.
I want to tell the story of the rise of the modern cruise ship industry from its beginning in the 1960s - how it promised to make a world of aristocratic luxury available to everyone in the west, but also the hidden story of how that promise was achieved.
In many cruise ships there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs.
Many of the ships' workers can only get a living wage on the whim of the thousands of passengers above them - on the tips they choose to give them. And in the strange fun-world of the superliners the waiters, the cabin staff, the cooks and everyone else who serves, live in a state of continual vulnerability - unprotected by most of the employment laws that apply on land. Meanwhile discount hotels in chicago many of the companies that own the vast ships pay practically no tax at all.
The biggest company in the cruising world is the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami (the Costa Concordia is owned by one of their subsidiaries). Carnival has its roots in a small company set up in the 1960s which had a utopian vision that cruise liners could transform the world. One of its founders believed that the giant ships were machines that could help bring about a new era of world peace.
The liners would, he was convinced, unite the rich westerners and the poor from the "third world' by bringing tourists to new and remote destinations. This would foster a new enlightened understanding of each other that would bring about equality and justice throughout the world.
It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democratisation of luxury. How one half of the world all began to live as though they were aristocrats, discount hotels in chicago while the other half became their servants. And how this allowed the real elite aristocrats of our time - who had become wealthier than any group ever before in history - to disappear, and become invisible.
The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck - served by men in white jackets.
But with the growing democratisation of Britain after the second world war, more and more ordinary people wanted to experience this, and what was called "the Cruising Revolution" discount hotels in chicago started. In the 1960s the "one class cruise" was invented - passengers discount hotels in chicago were promised that the experience would still be "ultra deluxe", but anyone discount hotels in chicago could go, there were no class divisions.
In 1966 Alan Whicker made a wonderful documentary about one of these cruises. It was on a liner called The Andes, and it is a very funny picture of Britain's postwar class structure in miniature when they are all thrown together in a boat. Everyone claims to be getting along together discount hotels in chicago - but they all bitch about each other and everyone hates the Nouveaux Riche.
There is also a woman who in one sharp line points to the problem discount hotels in chicago that would bedevil the democratisation of luxury. "I came because I expected millionaires" she says - "but all I found was a load of Huggets". The Huggets were a fictional working class family from a famous radio sitcom.
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In the mid sixties the American cruise industry suffered a terrible disaster. An old converted troop ship called the Yarmouth Castle was on a cruise to the Bahamas when it caught fire and 91 people discount hotels in chicago died. It was a terrible scandal, the sprinklers didn't work and the public address system failed. And the captain, it was alleged, jumped into one of the first of the lifeboats with four other passengers and sped off into the night. He later claimed that he was going to get help.
Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.
Kloster and Arison are today seen as the founders of the modern cruise industry. Their first boat, the Sunward, started taking middle-class Americans on week-long cruises to Jamaica from Miami - and it was an immediate success. They also became close friends.
Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west - and the "third world" which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly discount hotels in chicago unequal distribution of global power.
Kloster hated the idea that his liners were just going to take white middle class Americans on cheap holidays in other peoples' hell and misery. He supported the left-wing politicians in Jamaica who said "Tourism is Whorism".
Kloster held brainstorming sessions in the company to come up with new ideas that would provoke the American tourists to engage with the lives of those they were pointing their cameras at. One brilliant suggestion was that women workers in a Jamaican coffee factory should be given instamatic cameras so they could take picture of the passengers as they toured past them. The aim was to make the tourists feel what it was like to be watched and snapped as if they were animals in a zoo.
In a wonderful and perceptive history of the cruise industry called Devils on the Deep Blue Sea , Kristoffer Garin has described another scheme that Kloster dreamt up. It was called "New Experiences", and involved having a "Jamaican Family in Residence" on each cruise.
" The passengers will be invited to meet the Jamaicans informally, to dine together, drink, dance and play together, to ask questions and pump them for all kinds of information discount hotels in chicago in friendly conversations with no holds barred, including political and racial problems ."
And then - when the ship arrived discount hotels in chicago in Jamaica - there was going to be the "meet the people experiment" where passengers would go and spend a day with middle-class Jamaican discount hotels in chicago families who were like the passengers - doctors would meet doctors, teachers would meet teachers - people Kloster believed would be "articulate enough to communicate".
The only problem was that they couldn't find enough Jamaican middle class families, and many of those who were deemed suitable discount hotels in chicago thought it was incredibly patronising. Plus Kloster found that behind his back in the Miami offices the experiment discount hotels in chicago was called the "Take a Nigger to Lunch Program"
Kloster was helped in his vision by his vice-president of public relations, called Herb Hiller who was a bit of an early countercultural management theorist. In 1970 Hiller wrote the greatest company mission statement of all time:
Kloster claimed that Arison had been taking the advance payments he was supposed to be holding from the bookings and doing all sorts of odd and dodgy things with the money. Plus a lot of it was missing. Kloster accused Arison of cheating him, Arison discount hotels in chicago denied it and there was an enormous row - and Arison left the company taking with him all the future bookings. So Kloster broke into Arison's new offices late at night and stole them back.
Riklis was one of the earliest of the takeover kings of the 1970s and 80s who used junk bonds to build a giant financial empire. He is also famous for lavishly wining and dining the judges of the Golden discount hotels in chicago Globes awards in 1981 - which some believe led to the unlikely triumph of his actress wife, Pia Zadora, for her film Butterfly.
discount hotels in chicago To make Carnival Cruises grow, Arison went downmarket discount hotels in chicago - offering the cruise experience to people who would never have considered it before. Then he had a massive stroke of good luck in 1977 when ABC TV began the Love Boat series. The series was an instantaneous hit and it transformed the image of the cruise liner. It not only portrayed it as a sexual discount hotels in chicago paradise, discount hotels in chicago but crucially a paradise that was open to all. It was the opposite of the exclusive and unattainable world portrayed in Dallas and Dynasty.
But to make the cruise affordable Carnival had to cut costs - and Arison did this through tough management. Just how tough was shown on Easter Sunday 1981 when 300 crewmen on two of Carnival's "fun ships" in Miami decided to strike. They weren't unionised, it was a spontaneous outburst against the harsh world they were forced to live and work in, and the low wages.
Ted Arison's son Micky was now second in command. Garin's history describes what Micky then did. He waited four days, and then invited discount hotels in chicago the strikers' leaders to come ashore to talk. But it was a trick.
At the same time Micky sent a fake news helicopter to fly down the side of the boats. The strikers rushed to the deck to wave banners at the helicopter - while at the same time a force of private discount hotels in chicago security men wearing helmets and holding clubs rushed onto the ship. They cornered discount hotels in chicago the terrified strikers, pulled them off the liner and gave them to the immigration authorities waiting on the deck - who promptly deported them back to Honduras.
"Phoenix would carry a staggering 5200 passengers and an additional 1800 crew - a number that rivalled the entire fleet capacity of any of NCL's competitors. Brochures spoke breathlessly of a ship designed for