Tapsearch Com EditorThe Broken Convenant - Falling from Grace
April 12th 2008 23:23
Katherine Newman wrote Falling from Grace (1999). It apparently not only portrayed what happened to American workers prior to that time but now appears to be a hand book for the future. It is time to review it with the current presidential candidates debating about the bitter America workers. This economic disease is not new and it is continuing to infect a growing number in our economic storms for the past many years.
Newman told how many were losing everything and she believed their tragedy was a result of a broken convenant with a new generation not knowing how to prepare their children for the future. The future is now here and we see a deep voids of our times without knowing what to do about it. We have a government providing a universal handout in the form of an economic stimulus package because they have used up most of all other options.
The juggling act is over.
Her book is described as ethnographicies which depicts the divisions being made between classes due to globalization and free trade. Ethnographies compel us to rethink commonly held positions and force us to see who we really are holding a mirror to our times. People have changed. Rugged individualism from the right and the left has altered us in many ways. The changes came as an undertow after the first waves of globalization and free trade touched us.
Falling from Grace probes the experiences of formerly secure middle class Americans who awoke one day to find the unthinkable had occurred: events had suddenly propelled them into an economic skid. Newman found that the malaise of blue- and lower white collar work was not only the middle class groups hit. We are constantly bombarded with the idea that production work is an arbitary process and the USA needs to upgrade its skills instead of hanging on to manufacturing jobs. All of sudden the term trade included the moving of factories and production based on the competitive value of labor. Newman draws her data from a different stance. She tells about
1. The " delayered" executives of large corporations.
2. The executives' families.
3. The air traffic controllers dismissed by Reagan in the wake of the PATCO strike.
4. Former operatives in Singer's flagship plant in Elizabeth New Jersey, which was first
downsized and then closed in the early 1980s and finally
5. Divorced women who had previously shared their husbands' well-heeled lifestyles.
What emerges in her study of participants is a sensitive emic portrait of the devastation wrought by downward mobility in people's lives. She found the upper levels unable to cope with the radical changes in their lives. We believe that the firing of the air traffic controllers set the stage to for the largest assault on private sector production workers in U.S. history and after the assault was over, a union like the AFL-CIO membership is made up of 46 percent of government workers who now seem hid from the scene while the private sector production workers who now represent only 15 percent of the membership are still blamed for the U.S. not being competitive on the world scene.
However , the worst scenario is the new generation who think they must win against all odds no matter what and the weak may be sacrificed at the altar of greed.
A story about a young man who jumped off a bridge back in the mid 1990s was described as Bobby J. dead of a year without a job.
Businessmen say
"Man is naturally bad;
you can do nothing with human nature."
If it is true, as businessmen say, ........ then you need fewer priests and more policemen.
..... to foster a society based on creed instead of greed, ....... on gentle persausion instead of rugged individualism, is to create a new society within the shell of the old..... ( taken from Peter Maurin from Catholic Workers )
Today the U.S. prison population keeps breaking records with no end in sight as we send our children to fight dirty wars in a new colonialism because our interests and greed are spread across the globe. Our political leaders wear masks of cunning deception outside the will of the people with no end in sight. Workers really have no voice in the process as we now receive our economic rations in the economic stimulus package. Why should anyone be bitter?
View again the Cross of 9/11 Tangle of Terror - who can untangle this terror bred by globalism and free trade.
See also Bitter Workers in the 1990s too By Ray Tapajna
Newman told how many were losing everything and she believed their tragedy was a result of a broken convenant with a new generation not knowing how to prepare their children for the future. The future is now here and we see a deep voids of our times without knowing what to do about it. We have a government providing a universal handout in the form of an economic stimulus package because they have used up most of all other options.
The juggling act is over.
Her book is described as ethnographicies which depicts the divisions being made between classes due to globalization and free trade. Ethnographies compel us to rethink commonly held positions and force us to see who we really are holding a mirror to our times. People have changed. Rugged individualism from the right and the left has altered us in many ways. The changes came as an undertow after the first waves of globalization and free trade touched us.
Falling from Grace probes the experiences of formerly secure middle class Americans who awoke one day to find the unthinkable had occurred: events had suddenly propelled them into an economic skid. Newman found that the malaise of blue- and lower white collar work was not only the middle class groups hit. We are constantly bombarded with the idea that production work is an arbitary process and the USA needs to upgrade its skills instead of hanging on to manufacturing jobs. All of sudden the term trade included the moving of factories and production based on the competitive value of labor. Newman draws her data from a different stance. She tells about
1. The " delayered" executives of large corporations.
2. The executives' families.
3. The air traffic controllers dismissed by Reagan in the wake of the PATCO strike.
4. Former operatives in Singer's flagship plant in Elizabeth New Jersey, which was first
downsized and then closed in the early 1980s and finally
5. Divorced women who had previously shared their husbands' well-heeled lifestyles.
What emerges in her study of participants is a sensitive emic portrait of the devastation wrought by downward mobility in people's lives. She found the upper levels unable to cope with the radical changes in their lives. We believe that the firing of the air traffic controllers set the stage to for the largest assault on private sector production workers in U.S. history and after the assault was over, a union like the AFL-CIO membership is made up of 46 percent of government workers who now seem hid from the scene while the private sector production workers who now represent only 15 percent of the membership are still blamed for the U.S. not being competitive on the world scene.
However , the worst scenario is the new generation who think they must win against all odds no matter what and the weak may be sacrificed at the altar of greed.
A story about a young man who jumped off a bridge back in the mid 1990s was described as Bobby J. dead of a year without a job.
Businessmen say
"Man is naturally bad;
you can do nothing with human nature."
If it is true, as businessmen say, ........ then you need fewer priests and more policemen.
..... to foster a society based on creed instead of greed, ....... on gentle persausion instead of rugged individualism, is to create a new society within the shell of the old..... ( taken from Peter Maurin from Catholic Workers )
Today the U.S. prison population keeps breaking records with no end in sight as we send our children to fight dirty wars in a new colonialism because our interests and greed are spread across the globe. Our political leaders wear masks of cunning deception outside the will of the people with no end in sight. Workers really have no voice in the process as we now receive our economic rations in the economic stimulus package. Why should anyone be bitter?
View again the Cross of 9/11 Tangle of Terror - who can untangle this terror bred by globalism and free trade.
Who can untangle the terror Global Free Traders have bred
See also Bitter Workers in the 1990s too By Ray Tapajna
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