Dispatch from the Trenches

Monday, May 03, 2004

This is the initial prototype of a new blog dedicated to working-class issues, From the Trenches.

From The Moloch Broadside
by Allen Ginsberg
Engraving by Lynd Ward
1956

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Read the rest

by Mick

Those of us at the bottom of the income scale are involved in a war. It is not a war of bullets, mortar shells, bombs and tanks, but it is a war just the same, and people are dying. We didn't start this war. It is not a war with us but a war on us. We didn't ask for it, we don't want it, and if we could we'd sue for peace. It is not a war we can win in any final way, ever.

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Essays & Commentary

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler

"[A] powerful new book....Clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read and read now." Ron Suskind, The New York Times Book Review

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

"Ehrenreich's scorn withers, her humor stings, and her radical light shines on." The Boston Globe

Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, and Consequences by William J Baumol, Alan S Blinder, & Edward N Wolff

"Balanced, fact-filled, sensible ... showing exactly how the threat and practice of downsizing have been used as a weapon against labor." The American Prospect, Jan '04

Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas by Lou Dobbs

"...an enlightening treatment of a huge new American problem by a brilliant, highly informed, market-loving Republican, addicted to economic truth." Mario Cuomo

Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- And Cheat Everybody Else by David Cay Johnston

"As Johnston knows, the real scandal of our federal tax system isn't so much what the rich didn't pay. It's what the rest of us now have to." James K. Galbraith, The New York Times Book Review

The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose

"This groundbreaking study finds that the intelligence, integrated skills and achievements of blue collar and service workers have been consistently undermined and marginalized by cultural stereotyping." Publisher's Weekly
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle

"[T]he best parts of the book are its slices of life: DeParle accompanies the women on trips to the dentist, on visits to loved ones in jail, to job-training workshops and on travels to Mississippi." Publisher's Weekly

Dispatch from the Trenches

Monday, May 03, 2004

Moloch

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