FRED REED—Things are different, at first physically and then, as you begin to understand the place, profoundly. In any town you find a plaza, unlike any other plaza in any other town, and a church, unlike any other church. Both will be old. The local hotel will be locally owned, alive with color, idiosyncratic. Mexico was not designed at corporate. Nor was it designed by people whose interests were only money, efficiency, and the economy born of uniformity.
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JAMILA WIGNOT—The accounts and photos, along with comments by contemporary historians, also help bring out the inhuman working conditions that led to the fire. The women worked 14-hour shifts on the 8th and 9th stories of a building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in lower Manhattan (while the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Russian-born Jewish immigrants themselves, sat above them on the 10th floor) for $2 a day. Because it was a shirtwaist (women’s blouse) factory, rags and other highly flammable material littered the floor.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—As previously said, measuring all economic and societal “success” by a corporate yardstick of constant indiscriminate growth, capitalism suffers from a compulsion to expand infinitely in what is clearly a very finite and ailing world, thereby betraying in its dynamic something akin to systemic madness. Expansion at all costs is fueled by a well-developed culture of ‘short-termers”—the notion of a true capitalist statesman is an oxymoron—and a self-perpetuating, self-selecting, macho executive sociology according to which career advancement is only possible on the basis of–again–constant growth, plus aggressive competition in the boardroom jungle.
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First published on May 27 – 29, 2011 REPOSTED UPON REQUEST A “Living Exaltation”–Gone,…
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Prefatory note THIS IS A REPOST. First published on TGP on 4 April 2011.…
