Joe Bageant

Dismayed by dismissal of 9/11 movement

Dear Mr. Bageant,

Thanks for the article on the global elite ("Somewhere a Banker Smiles"). I just wanted to add the obvious -- that the global media corps will never, ever report on their incestuous relationships. G.E. is the largest media company and the largest defense contractor in the U.S. Murdoch's global neocon army seems to have a direct line to every major candidate and politician. These conglomerates control most of what people see as news and how they view events. Massive power.

Leadership becoming more conspiratorial

Joe,

Regarding your essay Somewhere a Banker Smiles: The latest thing to hit the stock market are these "dark pools of liquidity", high powered investment groups who are seeking to buy some regional exchanges where they can trade stocks away from the noisy floor of the public exchanges. Well, they have always had their block trades. A block trade crosses on the exchange, but is negotiately privately. A company insider, let's say, calls his broker, who calls another to negotiate a sale of his XYZ stock, because XYZ maybe only trades 10K a day, and if he dumps the whole thing on the market by the time it all gets cleaned up they will have dropped the price considerably.

300-pound kids are not going very far

Hi Joe,

I am writing this in response to Edmund's interesting letter on today's young people ("A coarsening of modern American culture"). I imagine Edmund is about my age and yours (I'm 56). Remember we tend to romanticize the past in our case the 50's and 60's. As to be dressing like slobs and acting like louts, teenagers have always done this. Remember gangs in the 50's  and hippies in the 60's. I enjoyed my anti-social period.

A coarsening of modern American culture

Joe,

I'm sort of a newcomer to your writings, but from what I've read so far, I think you're right on about so many things! I've noticed that one theme running through much of what you write is the condition of the working man in modern America, a subject which I have thought about a great deal.

I come from a solidly working class background, both my mother and father being children of immigrant parents. Neither finished high school because they had to go out and help support the family during the Great Depression. After World War II my father settled into a modest-paying job in a shop doing custom metal work; my mother was a housewife in a two-family house we shared with my uncle and aunt. We had one very used car. Typical working-class 1950s setting. They both scrimped and saved to put me through college. I became and engineer and now live in a nice middle class suburb. While not living the full-blown American Dream, I am not exactly hurting, either.

A Christmas Day Offering

Here are links to two previous posts that are worth reading again this Christmas. The first is a beautiful letter from a woman in England who fondly remembers Christmas when she was a young orphan and the people who became her family in the home where she was placed. The second is an essay by Joe Bageant based on his childhood memories.

Childhood in an English children's home

Prince of a Different Peace

Merry Christmas,

Ken Smith, webmaster for JoeBageant.com

Americans must sugar coat the truth

Heya Joe:

In response to the Vietnamese fan ("Reader says humor dilutes seriousness"), I say: Don't apologise for clowning, mate! If you can address the serious topics of these terrible times with a slit of a grin, it shows you still have some lightness in your soul. Like the bluesmen say, "Gotta laugh to keep from crying ..."

Bucko in Australia

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True my friend!

But despite the cultural differences, the Vietnamese kid had a point. We mix fact and humorous fiction because we cannot take the truth on the chin. In daily life, when I am not depressed as hell, I like to think I am a pretty upbeat, and often funny guy (especially when drunk, I think, though opinion seems to vary on that one.)

A German asks why change is so difficult

Hi Joe,

Please accept my gratitude. Your essays are like a key that frees me from a prison of social censure and guides my perception to a higher level. There is one question I’ve been asking myself for a long time: Why is it that those who are extremely perceptive and eloquent in seeing and expressing huge flaws in the existing social fabric, seem to be unwilling or unable to build or reveal a specific cognitive structure that would eliminate such flaws?

Reader says humor dilutes seriousness

Dear Joe,

I've just discovered your web site and absolutely love it. It is nice to know that there are someone who thinks deeply about things, realized what is happening to himself, and understands that everyone is responsible and accountable for his own actions. I just wish that people can be reached without one resorting to humor, entertaining headlines and exaggerations -- thus diluting the seriousness of one's messages.

Kissing asses and telling the right lies

Dear Joe,

I've just read "The masses have become lazy, fat and stupid" and I must say that Kelly's letter is most depressing for the fact that he/she -- like many "self-made" people -- seems to remember "fearing every moment that I wouldn't make tuition" and other terrors on the way up only as things she heroically overcame rather than as points in her life when some small change beyond her control might have brought the entire dream crashing down.

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

Joe,

I just read your article Somewhere a Banker Smiles and all I could think of was the old 1976 movie, Network -- especially, Ned Beatty's CEO-character's prescient rant to the rebellious newsman Howard Beale:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?!

You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance!