Dreams Incorporated
Living the delayed life with Amway.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill
There was a time when major corporations didn’t encourage us to “break the rules,” business consultants didn’t promote revolutions, and prominent neo-con historians didn’t celebrate radical labor leaders. But the times, they are a-changin’. To wit:
Joe Hill was an ...
The Gaudy and Damned
If every society makes myths to explain the great and unknowable forces of the world, the age of advanced consumer capitalism has wrought its own peculiar mythology: the brand. What originated as a means of selling standardized products across a mass market—essentially ...
A Question of Size
Everybody loves small business. Politicians use plucky little enterprises as the cover for schemes to cut taxes and ease regulations for their Fortune 500 constituencies. Pundits assure us that small business is a fount of jobs and innovation, a hotbed of entrepreneurship led ...
Babbitt Rex
The Cartesians of this world must find it difficult to listen to WYPA, the Chicago AM radio station that fills its broadcast schedule with a torrent of three- and four-minute talks on aspects of success, leadership, and entrepreneurial virtue. Not only does the object of desire ...
Remainder Table: The Invisible Novelist
Sitting to the right of my keyboard as I write are a book and a magazine. The book, purchased for ten cents at the (Salinas, California) John Steinbeck (public) Library’s discard shelf, is a dog-eared copy of the very first of the fifty or so books about Thomas Pynchon, ...
Why Johnny Can’t Organize
On the dust jacket of his book, America Needs A Raise, recently elected AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney compares his first months in office to FDR’s celebrated 100 days. Certainly, like Roosevelt, he’s been driving the Republicans crazy. In the fall ’96 campaign, the ...
Disorganized Labor
Studies of African American poverty from the Moynihan Report to the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson have asserted that “when work disappears” from Black urban communities, so does the chastity of teenage girls, the work ethic of young men, and any hope of reversing ...
Ursus Wallstreetus
Last January, I got a call from Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a Wall Street newsletter on the credit markets. Jim was a bit nervous that the dockers’ strike in Liverpool had attracted sympathy strikes, demonstrations, and other actions around the ...
The More Things Change . . .
Ten years ago, advocates of a revitalized labor movement heard our concerns echoed in the subtitle of Tom Geoghegan’s book, Which Side Are You On?: How to Be For Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back. Unions that had been at the center of the labor movement were shrinking in size ...
Confronting the Capitalist International
When she was 17 years old, Ana Alvarado fled the civil war in El Salvador for Los Angeles. Before long she was working as a maid at the luxurious New Otani Hotel, part of a Japanese chain owned by the Kajima Corporation, a transnational conglomerate whose main interests are in ...
Unions Can’t Buy Elections, But Let’s Pretend They Can
It was late October 1996, and Congressman Frank Cremeans was in trouble. Polls showed the Republican freshman running neck-and-neck in Ohio’s Sixth Congressional District with the man he narrowly unseated in 1994, Democrat Ted Strickland. Republican Majority Leader Dick ...