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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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
January 13, 2013
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
January 13, 2013
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
January 13, 2013
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
January 13, 2013
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 . . .
January 13, 2013
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
January 13, 2013
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 ...

What the Frick
January 12, 2013
You couldn’t help noticing the three prep school kids lounging outside the entrance to the Frick Museum at Fifth Avenue and 71st Street. It was a white-knuckle cold day, not yet spring, and they were wearing nothing but tweed jackets, khakis, and long mufflers. I was on my way ...