Class Politics

Pilotos de drones que llevan a cabo asesinatos selectivos. Inmigrantes indocumentados que trabajan en los mataderos industriales. Guardias que patrullan los pabellones de las prisiones más violentas y abusivas de Estados Unidos. En ‘Trabajo sucio’, Eyal Press ofrece una visión que cambia el paradigma del panorama moral de la América contemporánea a través de las historias de las personas que realizan los trabajos éticamente más problemáticos de la sociedad. Como muestra Press, cada vez estamos más protegidos y distanciados de una serie de actividades moralmente cuestionables.

The world’s largest company, WalMart Stores, has revenues higher than the gross domestic product of all but twentyfive of the world’s countries. Its employees outnumber the populations of almost one hundred nations. The world’s largest asset manager, a New York company called BlackRock, controls assets greater than the national reserves of any country on the planet.

Voici 3 textes de Jean Jaurès : "Idéalisme et matérialisme", "Discours à la jeunesse" et "République et Socialisme". Ces 3 textes forts permettent de comprendre la pensée et les idées d'un des plus grands hommes politiques français, dont les convictions et les valeurs socialistes sont fondatrices de notre vie démocratique actuelle.

These stories are about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them. Laskas spent weeks in an Ohio coal mine and on an Alaskan oil rig; in a Maine migrant labor camp, a Texas beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a California landfill, an Arizona gun shop, the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, and the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. All are part of hidden America, and you will be amazed by what Laskas tells you about them.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

The best educated and most prosperous have the most stable families, while working class families have seen the greatest increase in relationship instability. Why? The book provides the answer: greater economic inequality has profoundly changed marriage markets, the way men and women match up when they search for a life partner. It has produced a larger group of high-income men than women; written off the men at the bottom; and left a larger group of women with a smaller group of comparable men...

Warrior Ways focuses on the lore produced by modern American warriors, illuminating the ways in which members of the armed services creatively express the complex experience of military life. In short, lively essays, contributors to the volume, all of whom have close personal or professional relationships to the military, examine battlefield talismans, personal narrative (storytelling), “Jody calls” (marching and running cadences), slang, homophobia and transgressive humor, music, and photography, among other cultural expressions.

Il nous avait tous réunis, sur le golf somptueux de sa demeure privée. Et nous le suivions radieux, portant fièrement à tour de rôle le sac garni de ses clubs.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Here is armed America - a land of machine-gun gatherings in the desert, lederhosened German shooting societies, feral-hog hunts in Texas, and Hollywood gun armories. Whether they’re collecting antique weapons, practicing concealed carry, or firing an AR-15 or a Glock at their local range, many Americans love guns - which horrifies and fascinates many other Americans, and much of the rest of the world. This lively, sometimes raucous book explores from the inside the American love affair with firearms.

From the 1830s onward, a succession of well-born Britons headed west to the great American wilderness to find adventure and fulfillment. They brought their dogs, sporting guns, valets, and all the attitudes and prejudices of their class. Prairie Fever explores why the West had such a strong romantic appeal for them at a time when their inherited wealth and passion for sport had no American equivalent.

Women of Privilege traces the decline of a once-privileged Hudson River Valley family where the neighbors were Vanderbilts, Delanos, and Roosevelts. Susan Gillotti provides insight into her ancestors' heretofore secret lives, culled from private diaries, letters, and journals of the three generations of women who inhabited Grasmere - one of the great houses of the Hudson River Valley. On the surface, their lives seem ideal, but beneath that facade, there was mental illness, alcoholism, yearning for divorce, and questions of sexual identity.

Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from 10 years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.

It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! confirms what we have all suspected: Washington and Wall Street have really screwed things up for the average American. Work has been devalued. Education costs are out of sight. Effort and ambition have never been so scantily rewarded. Political guru James Carville and pollster extraordinaire Stan Greenberg argue that our political parties must admit their failures and the electorate must reclaim its voice, because taking on the wealthy and the privileged is not class warfare—it is a matter of survival.

Michelle Obama, Ugur Sahin, Frank-Walter Steinmeier: Sie erbten keine Privilegien oder Firmen in dritter Generation. Aus bescheidenen sozialen Bedingungen arbeiteten sie sich bis zum Vorbild hoch. Ihre Wege belegen: Das Leben ist nach oben offen. Allen steht frei, größer zu denken und aus Wenigem viel zu machen. In ihrem neuen Buch geht Doris Märtin den Chancen, aber auch den Mühen und Fallen des sozialen Aufstiegs nach. Realistisch und konkret zeigt sie, wie sich das Beste aus den Karten herausholen lässt, die einem das Schicksal zugeteilt hat.

Worn Out examines the underside of our historic clothing binge and the fashion industry's fall from grace. Former InStyle senior news editor and seasoned journalist Alyssa Hardy's riveting work explores the lives of the millions of garment workers—mostly women of color—who toil in the fashion industry around the world—from LA-based sweatshop employees who experience sexual abuse while stitching clothes for H&M, Fashion Nova, and Levi's to "homeworkers" in Indonesia who are unknowingly given carcinogenic materials to work with.

Metrofix: The Combative Comeback of a Company Town shows what went right and what went wrong when General Electric moved most of its businesses out of Schenectady, New York. Once known as “The City that Lights and Hauls the World” because of its electrical and railroad industries, the Electric City enjoyed decades of dizzying, enviable success. Like other river towns upstate, it was a 20th-century economic powerhouse that fueled the wealth and reputation of the Empire State.

Did you know that over 600 million people live on less than $2 a day? Nearly 10 percent of the global population struggles to survive 24 hours at a time. Eradicating extreme poverty may seem simple, but it's very complex.

For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable - and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic.