How Bullying Bosses and Economic Devastation Are Behind America's Latest Workplace Shooting

[no_hypocrisy]

There was another workplace rampage killing last week, just outside of Fresno, California, leaving two company employees dead and the other employees grateful to be alive.

Fresno, like so much of unofficial America, is still in a state of shock these days, after suffering from a non-stop barrage of tragic events and trends, of subprime devastation and a three-year drought, and political corruption and machinations that seem to be accelerating with every month. So unlike workplace shootings in the past, this one was quickly pushed off the front pages and almost forgotten, just a couple of days after it happened.

But like so many workplace shootings, scratch the surface of Fresno today, to get a sense of context, and you'll be shocked by how corrupt, desperate and bizarre the situation has become: pull the camera back from the scene of the crime, and suddenly you get Sean Hannity making regular appearances on behalf of agribusiness oligarchs, and beleaguered Mexican farmworkers gang-pressed into marching 50 miles in the Central Valley heat calling for the repeal of the Endangered Species Act . . .


http://www.alternet.org/workplace/142925/why_jim_baldasci_%27went_postal%27%3A_how_bullying_bosses_and_economic_devastation_are_behind_america%27s_latest_workplace_shooting_

[Omaha Steve]

1. Great post

K&R!

[Hannah Bell]

2. k/r and another rec on the topic: Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion:

From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond
by Mark Ames

http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-82-4

About the book:

Going Postal examines the phenomenon of rage murder that took America by storm in the early 1980's and has since grown yearly in body counts and symbolic value. By looking at massacres in schools and offices as post-industrial rebellions, Mark Ames is able to juxtapose the historical place of rage in America with the social climate after Reaganomics began to affect worker's paychecks. But why high schools? Why post offices? Mark Ames examines the most fascinating and unexpected cases, crafting a convincing argument for workplace massacres as modern day slave rebellions. Like slave rebellions, rage massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Going Postal seeks to contextualize this violence in a world where working isn't--and doesn't pay--what it used to. Part social critique and part true crime page-turner, Going Postal answers the questions asked by commentators on the nightly news and films such as Bowling for Columbine.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the author:

Mark Ames is the founding editor of "The eXile," a Moscow-based English-language newspaper and web magazine, co-author of the book The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia with Matt Taibbi, and author of V Rossiu s Lubovyu, a collection of translated columns published in Russia. He is a regular contributor to The New York Press and has been published in the Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Metro Silicon Valley and several Russian newspapers including Kommersant and Limonka. He has lived in Russia for most of the last ten years.

[Stand and Fight]

6. Much, much, much better article! Thanks! n/t

[fasttense]

3. Wow, talk about a frame work for violence.

And I did not realize that going postal, or going on a shooting spree at your place of work, started at the same time Ronnie Raygun gave us voodoo and trickle down economics.

[dmallind]

4. Much as I would like to blame Reagan, it didn't.

The deadliest school attack in our history was in 1927 for example.

[Stand and Fight]

5. What a long rambling piece of crap.

It started off well enough -- was really quite good touching on the horror in Fresno -- but then he starts talking about Dennis Miller, Paul Rodriguez... Unrecommending.