#steve fraser

[wrestlingisbest]

Steve Fraser

[wrestlingisbest]

Steve Fraser, USA

[tibaert]

Kinderarbeid

Brenda Lee, Nashville (1957)   De Verenigde Staten een kinderparadijs? Kijk maar naar de bovenstaande foto. Blank en smetteloos wit overheersen. Ze komen beslist niets tekort, deze kinderen, als het om snoep of speelgoed gaat. Ja, ze leven in een paradijs, een kapitalistisch.   Vandaag 2 augustus is de verjaardag van m’n broertje, z’n zesde kon hij niet meer vieren. Het achterna hollen op straat…

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[cumbriacrack]

Apprentices wanted to make a splash in the workplace Water company United Utilities is looking to attract 29 apprentices to join its award winning scheme. Full story: http://www.cumbriacrack.com/2017/02/10/apprentices-wanted-make-splash-workplace/

[hyperbanal]

If public life can suffer a metaphysical blow, the death of the labor question was that blow. For millions of working people, it amputated the will to resist.

Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence

[hyperbanal]

As the distinguished literary critic Terry Eagleton points out, for a long time issues of gender, race, ethnicity, identity, and culture were inseparable from “state power, material inequality, the exploitation of labor, imperial plunder, mass politics, and resistance and revolutionary transformation.” Then the links got severed. We have grown accustomed to speaking about the “Southernization” of American politics. Alongside it emerged the Southernization of the American working class, its retreat into make-believe. Perversely, a form of cultural flattery invited white male workers especially to take pride in their own degradation as rednecks, in the stereotype of them as stupefied marginalia. One ingredient of this cultural curative buoyed up a deflated masculinity. A world less and less respectful of the working-class male breadwinner, one chipping away at his material wherewithal, one where women in the workplace seemed trespassers and transgressors outside their proper place, could be seen by a man as a threat to a primordial status as well an implicit indictment of his own failure to provide. It incited a kind of angry, vengeful, homophobic muscle flexing and altered the chemistry of working-class life. Together with racial fears and resentments, this was a cocktail of class consciousness mixed by political and business elites whose every motivation and policy initiative meant to subvert the class consciousness that still survived from earlier days and that stood in their way.

Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence

[hyperbanal]

Poverty can crush the will and amputate the future; everything becomes a matter of getting from one day to the next. Resignation sets in or, worse, depression. As the twentieth century drew to a close, one-quarter of the workforce—that is, 36 million people—earned less than the official poverty level for a family of four, three-quarters of them had no company health insurance, eight of nine no pension, three-fourths no paid sick days. Matters only grew tougher when governments pared away at what programs there were left to alleviate the hardship. What was to be done? And who was to do it? Mass incarceration was one “solution” pursued with a vengeance for decades. It freed up the streets and put a lid on unemployment, and while doing that exported the ominous shadow of the prison into the barrios.

Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence

[hyperbanal]

Betrayed and abandoned, cut adrift or superannuated, coerced or manipulated, speeded up, cheated, living in the shadows—this is a recipe for acquiescence. Yet conditions of life and labor as bad as or even far worse than these once were instigators to social upheaval. Alongside the massing of enemies on the outside—employers, insulated and self-protective union leaders, government policy makers, the globalized sweatshop, and the globalized megabank—something in the tissue of working-class life had proved profoundly disempowering and also accounted for the silence.

Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence