HoopDance

If, according to Bob White of the Allentown Morning Call, “[Hell] is full of overpaid, outsourcing, golden-parachuting, employee-abusing, worms…”; then Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, This land is our their land: reports from a divided nation, documents what a “heck-of-a-job” this “market is deity” crowd has done on the country and everyone in it since 9/11.

Her scorn hot as a griddle, Ehrenreich frys the corporatocracy, health care, and academia (AKA Fleece U) in the fat of their own bloat. Her wit is wicked, her research eye-opening, her courage unstoppable, and her conclusions scathing: “the flip side of misery is gluttony”–-starring super rich who can never get enough to “appreciate …what it feels like to have enough.” Think Dickens. Robber Barons. Enron. McCann’s seven (or was it 8?) houses. Disgraced bosses caging $100 mil+ from bankrupt companies. Think $50 for a hospital gown (better damn well be from Talbots). Think the latest local salary abuse story in your local newspaper.

In 2-3 page essays and prose concise as an exit sign in a dark theater, Ehrenreich’s snapshots capture the line-up of golems–banks, credit card issuers, academia, the health care industry. She names names like Wal Mart, Wendys, Circuit City, The Gap, Jet-Blue. Laid bare is a portrait of out-of-control and above-the-law mayhem– fee slamming, workplace bullying, double-billing per cycle, passenger abuse, young cheerleaders used to sell pharmaceuticals to doctors, child slavery in the name  of jeans, usurious stealth mortgages designed to defraud, health insurance shakedowns on the sick, box-store security interrogators, worker detainment without representation, forced confessions, and finally the looting of the poor and middle class of their jobs and houses. The poorer you are the more you pay, for everything. All to feed an insatiable Über-Rich so clownlike, ruthless, and decadent, that they are well on the way to killing America’s Golden Goose.

“…Our economy—with its dizzying bubbles, wild lending sprees, reckless downsizings, and planet-wide hypersensitivity—has gotten too far disconnected from ordinary human needs.”

Punching in for work shouldn’t mean being stripped of dignity, being chewed up, punched out verbally and emotionally, enduring shaved paychecks, age-related layoffs, corporate security  interrogations, forced confessions, harassment or intimidation; yet, for too many trapped inside this great American “greed storm,” that is what the workplace has become. Ehrenreich traces the cascading shame and terror back on Main Street back to business’ massive “failure of morality.”  Not only can we do better. We must. Start by reading This land is our their land: reports from a divided nation.  It’s time for some adult supervision. The shame should be placed where it belongs.

Reviewed by Val Morehouse  © May 2009