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JODHPUR, India (AP) In the summer of 1944, hundreds of royals gathered for the opening of Umaid Bhawan Palace, a magnificent sandstone edifice that dominates the skyline in Indias northwestern city of Jodhpur. It was the last of its kind.

Three years later, India was free from British colonial rule, and more than 500 princely states the semi-sovereign principalities ruled by royal clans faced an uncertain future. Most have faded into obscurity, but the family that built this palace continues to thrive in part by converting a section of it into a hotel.

How many places do you know in the world where you can actually live right where the maharaja is living next door to you? said the hotels general manager, Mehrnawaz Avari. The idea is to treat our guests like kings and queens.

The 347-room palace, considered one of the worlds fanciest residences, was used as the primary location for Viceroy House, a film by director Gurinder Chadha being released Friday in India. The movie details the last days of the British Empire in India and the bloody partition with what became Pakistan in 1947.

The iconic structure in this west Rajasthani city known for its traditional handicrafts was named after Maharaja Umaid Singh, the last king of what was known as the Marwar-Rathore Dynasty. He commissioned the project in 1929 with a spirit of grandness, said royal family associate Karni Singh Jasol. He had a larger-than-life vision.

After independence, most of Indias princely states opted to join the democratic republic, and initially maintained their titles, property and a degree of autonomy. Within decades, the royals lost almost all of it, though. India amended its constitution in 1971, giving its citizens equal rights and canceling royal privileges, including the regular payments royal families received from the state.

Stripped of their allowances and unsure how to survive as commoners, many royal families descended into chaos. Some held onto property, only to lose it amid internal bickering over rival claims.

The properties that they inherited were in a true sense white elephants, Jasol said. The royal families were high on assets, but low on liquidity. They didnt have large bank balances to turn their family properties into something grand or sustain it for the future.

The Singhs of Jodhpur not only maintained their holdings, but managed over decades to grow.

The last reigning maharajas grandson, Gaj Singh, was only 4 when his father died in a plane crash in 1952, making him sole owner of the palace and other family properties, including the ancestral Mehrangarh Fort.

When royal allowances were canceled in 1971, the young Singh patriarch acted quickly. The family opened part of its palace as a hotel in 1978, and turned the fort into a museum, investing profits into preserving Jodhpurs royal antiquities.

They today serve as the main economic levers for the city, said Jasol, who is director of the fort and museum.

The palace is open to visitors year-round, and has become a go-to destination for government leaders, other royals, and Hollywood and Bollywood stars alike. In 2007, British actress Elizabeth Hurley married Indian businessman Arun Nayar beneath the white marble canopy, or baradari, on the palace lawn; they have since divorced.

The palace is divided into a home for Gaj Singh and his family, and a heritage hotel of 64 rooms and suites run by the luxury hotel chain Taj Group since 2005. Designed by British architect Henry Vaughan Lanchester, the palace features elements of the art deco style popular in Europe and America in the 30s and 40s, combined with traditional Indian craftsmanship.

Colonnaded verandas guide ones eye up to intricately carved pillars, stylized sculptures and finally a massive central dome topped by a 30-meter (105-foot) golden cupola.

The cost of the royal experience ranges from $500 to more than $12,000 a night. For those who can afford it, the hotel pulls out all the stops.

Visitors are greeted by a smiling guard wearing one of Jodhpurs famous handlebar moustaches; he opens the door while hotel staff shower guests with rose petals. Peacocks roam the palace lawns. Further inside, pulsating Rajasthani folk tunes fill the air as colorful dancers move in choreographed circles. Guests mingle amid crystal chandeliers and silk-draped furniture.

Gold-leaf furniture and ornate mirrors are arranged around gleaming marble floors, while the walls are decorated with family portraits, as well as leopard skins and the busts of other animals hunted by former royals. The decoration was done over three years by Polish artist Stefan Norblin, who had fled from war-torn Europe in 1944. He also painted frescoes and murals in the royal suites.

The royal family has long focused on conserving the regions heritage as a way to utilize its enormous real estate holdings. It manages trusts engaged in water conservation, education and cultural revival projects, creating employment for thousands of locals.

I know at one time, royalty was a bad word, said Singhs daughter, 42-year-old Shivranjani Rajye. Now you dont have to shy away from it.

The Cambridge-educated Rajye runs most of the familys business operations, though the family heir is her brother, Shivraj Singh, who also lives with his family in the palace. He has kept a low profile since spending several months in a coma after a near-fatal accident playing polo in 2005.

Jodhpurs residents still see the family as their royals, and Gaj Singh as their maharaja. And he very much believes he is the king, said Rajye, elegantly dressed in a chiffon sari with a hint of jewelry.

He never gave up his title he doesnt have it officially, but he knew who he was, and he knew he commanded respect of the people.

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Watch a 360 video of the Umaid Bhawan Palace: https://youtu.be/LfpCWXcX-v0

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Follow Vineeta Deepak at http://www.twitter.com/VineetaDeepak.

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7 decades into Indian democracy, a royal palace thrives - The Seattle Times

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Neglecting the evils of communism? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in The New York Times recently? The newspaper has hosted a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of 20-century communism the optimism, the idealism, the moral authority. and more »

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Neglecting the evils of communism? - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

During the Cold War, few American institutions were more resolutely anti-communist than the labor movement. On the surface, this might seem counterintuitive. The Soviet Union, after all, claimed to be a workers paradise, a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Reality, of course, was different. Just because communist leaders professed to represent the interests of workers didnt mean they actually did. In communist societies, workers lacked the basic freedoms that their brothers and sisters in democratic societies enjoyed: namely, the right to assemble peaceably, free speech, and strike. Communist leaders insisted their economic system obviated the need for unions, though they gestured in the direction of the Western civil society model by creating labor fronts, regime-sanctioned bodies that served as tools of the one-party state. Any attempt at forming unions independent of the regime were ruthlessly suppressed.

For this reason, most leaders of the American labor movement understood communism to be a uniquely dangerous enemy of free trade unionism, writes Arch Puddington in his sterling biography of Lane Kirkland, the legendary president of the AFL-CIO and one of the Cold Wars unsung heroes. Workers are exploited under any form of dictatorship. But under communism, they are in a way doubly exploited, in that the exploitation is cynically implemented in the name of the working class. There is no such thing as a Communist trade union official, Kirkland said. They are all just rulers of labor.

To be sure, American labor was not uniformly anti-communist. At the outset of the Cold War, disputes between anti-communist and communist-leaning unions caused major ruptures within the movement. But the main labor confederationthe AFL-CIOnever backed down from its position that communism was an enemy of working people worldwide. In the late 1940s, the AFL published a map of gulags across the Soviet Union. When the exiled Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to the United States in the mid-1970s, his first public speech was delivered at an AFL-CIO dinner. And the AFLs most heroic international achievement was its early and unwavering support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, to which it secretly smuggled printing presses.

A fierce critic of dtente with the Soviet Union, Kirkland assailed American captains of industrythose supposed lovers of the free marketfor their willingness to cut deals with communist regimes. In a 1981 speech protesting the imposition of martial law in Poland, Kirkland even assailed the Reagan administration for being soft on communism, criticizing it for allowing a steady flow of credits to those who keep Lech Walesa in prison, Andrei Sakharov in exile, thousands in psychiatric clinics, countless more in labor camps, and whole peoples enslaved. The Polish communist regime of General Jaruzelski, he said, was a fascist junta.

Today, it is hard not to conclude that Kirkland would be anything other than ashamed at how his successors in the American labor movement have abandoned his legacy. Earlier this summer, labor leaders across the country, including those at the AFL, feted a Cuban government union representative visiting the United States. In late June, Vctor Lemagne Snchez, secretary-general of Cubas Hotel and Tourism Union and executive committee member of the Cuban Workers Federation (CTC), began a two-week tour of 11 American citiesthe first time in 17 years that a Cuban union leader acquired a visa to visit the U.S.

Like Soviet-era labor fronts, the CTC is the only organization permitted to represent workers before the Cuban government and is thus an appendage of a regime that routinely harasses and imprisons independent trade unionists (PDF). In addition to being a leader of a fake union, Snchez also sits in a fake parliament, the Cuban National Assembly of Peoples Power, in which all 612 deputies are members of the Communist Party. In Sacramento, according to the communist Workers World newspaper, he was warmly welcomed as the first Cuban elected official received onto the floors of the California Senate and Assemblya mockery of those democratic chambers.

Snchez was hosted by the Communications Workers of America in Berkeley, and paid visits to the San Francisco Labor Council, the San Jose/South Bay Central Labor Council, and the University of California/Berkeley Labor Center. On July 10 in Washington, Snchez met with AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, Cathy Feingold, (director of the confederations International Department), and representatives from the AFL-CIOs LGBTQ unit PRIDE at Work, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. The AFL-CIO did not respond to requests for comment.

The Cuban Workers Federation is not a genuine union but an instrument for controlling workers. At his speech in Berkeley, Snchez claimed that membership in his union is voluntary and conscious. This is a lie. Membership in the CTC is compulsory for anyone wishing to work in government-run factories, stores, and resorts, which, in a country where the regime either controls or has a stake in nearly every aspect of the economy, comprises a huge percentage of the labor force. The Cuban hotel workers whom Snchez ostensibly represents are not paid by the foreign conglomerates that partly own these establishments; rather, the businesses pay the Cuban regime in hard currency, and the regime, acting as middleman, pays its subjects in worthless Cuban pesos.

Ultimately, 95 percent of the wages earned in joint enterprises are garnished by the state. Any American trade unionist should understand how these practices violate both the letter and spirit of democratic, pluralistic labor relations, and the Cuban regime has been repeatedly criticized by the International Labor Organization and human rights organizations for its abuse of basic worker rights (PDF). Labor relations in Cuba can hardly be said to resemble the collective bargaining processes employed by unions in democratic societies. Its more like indentured servitude.

One of the greatest insights offered by the international labor movement has been the notion of solidarity: the idea that a steelworker in Gary, Indiana, has common interests with a dockworker in Gdask, who in turn has a stake in the fate of a hotel maid in Guantnamo. Reminding American labor leaders of this legacy are independent Cuban trade unionists, two of whom wrote an open letter to the AFL-CIO protesting the organizations welcoming a Cuban regime apparatchik (PDF). Such a visit, until this moment irrelevant and confined to communism-leaning, pro-Cuban regime groups, and with no relevance in the trade union and political life of the United States, was institutionalized and enhanced by the meeting held at the AFL-CIO in Washington, stated Joel Brito and Ivn Hernndez Carrillo, director and general secretary, respectively, of the International Group for Social Corporate Responsibility in Cuba, an organization advocating for the protection of labor rights and socially conscious behavior by international companies operating in Cuba. The CTC, they explain, is an instrument of an oppressive State that systematically violates the most basic and fundamental human and labor rights of the Cuban people.

These criticisms could have been lifted from a 2009 AFL resolution condemning multinational enterprises that profit from the exploitation of Cuban workers and from the Cuban governments chronic violations of international worker rights, the Cuban governments continued imprisonment, arrest, torture and other acts of unconscionable harassment against independent trade unionists, human rights advocates and democracy activists, and call for authentic and democratic Cuban trade unionism.

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Not long ago, the AFL would have lobbied strongly against a visit from a figure like Snchez. During the Cold War, it repeatedly pressured the State Department to deny visas to communist officials posing as authentic trade unionists. In the 1980s, the New York State AFL president described a delegation of Nicaraguan Sandinista trade union leaders as an enemy within floating around the United States under the guise of representing workers. That description fits Snchez, who is, in the words of Brito and Hernndez Carrillo, not a union leader but an oppressor co-protagonist of the worst indisputable violations of the fundamental rights of Cuban wage earners.

What caused the change in labors Cuba policy? Part of the shift surely owes to the Obama administrations Havana opening, which, by offering unconditional concessions to the Castro regime, emboldened the dictatorship. But larger forces are at play, namely, the gradual triumph of progressive anti-anti-communism over an earlier generations Cold War liberalism. Emblematic of this tendency is an article in The Nation by left-wing journalist Tim Shorrock appraising the AFLs Cold War record as one stained by a belligerent anti-communism that today looks like a dangerous anachronism. But whats truly anachronistic in the 21stcentury is a one-party state devoted to the worker-crushing principles of Marxist-Leninism, not the opposition to it.

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What Is American Labor Thinking in Honoring a 'Union' Figure From Cuba? - Daily Beast

When a thousand socialists from across the United States gathered in Chicago over the weekend for the biennial convention of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA national director Maria Svart declared: What we're seeing today is historic: the largest gathering of democratic socialists in an era.

Since the 2016 election, Svart is delighted to report, tens of thousands of democratic socialists have come together to build a future for this country in which everyone has the right to a decent job, a good home, a free college education for their children, and health care for their family. For years, we've been sold hope and promised change by Wall Street politicians now we're taking matters into our own hands.

DSA got a big boost from the surge of interest in democratic socialism that extended from the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who upended decades of right-wing histrionics and media neglect bordering on malpractice when he declared: "Do they think Im afraid of the word? Im not afraid of the word. When I ran for the Senate the first time, I ran again st the wealthiest guy in the state of Vermont. He spent a lot on advertising very ugly stuff. He kept attacking me as a liberal. He didnt use the word socialist at all, because everybody in the state knows that I am that."

Far from being harmed by his embrace of the S word, Sanders benefited from the fact that he was not another apologist for a capitalist experiment that had produced market instability, cruel austerity and scorching income inequality. Young people, in particular, were excited about alternatives.

DSA has invited them into the fold, and thousands joined. The groups membership has tripled over the past year to 25,000. It now has 177 local groups in 49 states and the District of Columbia. And DSA members are running for and winning local offices across the country.

This is a striking development.

But it has happened before.

Socialists once governed great American cities, helped to define the politics of states across the country, and played a critical role on the national stage. The Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas had many bases of strength (and exists to this day, along with DSA, Socialist Alternative and a burgeoning array of socialist organizations).

From 1910 to 1960, the strongest of these bases was in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee was not just a hotbed of socialism. What was then one of the largest and most prosperous of American cities was run by Socialists. The first member of the Socialist Party to govern a major American city, Emil Seidel, took charge of Milwaukee in 1910 (with the poet Carl Sandburg as his aide), two years before he would run for the vice presidency on a Socialist ticket headed by Debs. The Debs-Seidel ticket pulled close to 1 million votes nationally 6 percent of the total cast in an election year that saw Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Bull Moose Progressive Teddy Roosevelt and even Republican William Howard Taft borrow ideas from the Socialists. By the end of 1912, the Socialist Party had elected mayors, city councilors, school board members and other officials in 169 cities from Butte, Montana, to New York City. In several states, the Socialists were so successful that they were no longer seen as a third or minor party.

Wisconsin was one of those states. Republicans held the majority of state legislative seats during the 1910s and 1920s, while Socialists usually formed the major opposition caucus; Democrats were an afterthought. When those legislatures ushered in many of the reforms that would define Wisconsin as Americas laboratory of democracy, progressive Republicans associated with Robert M. La Follette worked with the Milwaukee Socialists to advance the agenda.

The Milwaukee Socialists did not just influence Madison. They influenced Washington. The first Socialist elected to the U.S. Congress, Milwaukeean Victor Berger, took his seat in 1911 and held it, on and off, until 1929. Far from being marginalized, Berger worked closely with the insurgent Republican caucus that included La Follette, New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia and the great progressive leaders of the era.

When La Follette mounted an independent progressive campaign for the presidency in 1924, the Socialist Party endorsed his candidacy and Debs hailed the campaigns calls for supporting public ownership of utilities, strengthening labor unions, protecting the rights of women and minorities, defending civil liberties, and preventing wars and war profiteering.

La Follette carried Wisconsin, finished second in 11 Western states and won more than 5 million votes nationwide (17 percent of the total). When some comrades questioned endorsing a lifelong Republican, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Daniel Hoan, said of La Follette: He says the supreme issue is whether the wealth of the nation shall remain in the hands of the privileged few Is not that the thing we have been ding-donging for 40 years?

The Socialist Party faded as a national force after Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal stole many of its ideas and much of its thunder. But democratic socialism never disappeared from the American landscape.

Seventy years after Emil Seidel took charge of Milwaukee with a declaration that socialists are prepared to govern, Bernie Sanders took charge of Burlington, Vermont, as a proud democratic socialist.

Sanders went on to serve as an independent socialist member of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, caucusing with Democrats but positioning himself to their left on issues ranging from health care reform to trade to economic democracy.

His presidential candidacy confirmed the appeal of such a politics in a 21st century that has been characterized by rampant inequality and the corrupt excesses of crony capitalism.

DSA's growth confirms that the appeal of democratic socialism extends beyond any one campaign.

In the early 1900s, Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party rose in a grass-roots movement against the forces of nationalism, oligarchy, and authoritarianism, recalled DSAs Svart. One hundred years later, todays democratic socialists stand in that same tradition, at a time no less perilous.

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John Nichols: Socialism never went away, but now it's really back - Madison.com

Question: If a man had no incentive to work, but lived off his male friends fathers Capitalist business, what idea of government would he propose?

Karl Marx of the late 1800s had an idea of a parasitic form of government, and others like him were caught up by the idea. The results are communism, socialism and now progressivism.

When I was in Ecuador recently on vacation, I was most impressed by the people and the culture, and two thoughts came to my mind: We could not live without farmers, and people helping people works better than government helping people.

People helping people costs the government nothing and creates a neighborly, industrious society, which is biblical. Government helping people loses too much to bureaucracy, leaving little left, and creates an isolated, lazy society, which is socialism.

No socialistic government has ever been prosperous, and such governments always eventually collapse from within. America was once prosperous, but we are now on the brink of collapse.

Will the insurrectionists support our new administration, which is trying to make improvements, or will they continue to behave as hypocrites and crybabies? Will our leaders began to serve, rather than be served?

And will our judges began to support our Provident-ordained Constitution, or will they continue to play God?

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Letter, 8/8: Socialism always fails - Lincoln Journal Star