I would like to see men who respect women speak out against Roissy and other PUAs who use misogynistic methods. Men like Roissy who preach and teach violence against women give the entire PUA industry/community a very bad name. If you don’t want to be lumped with him and those like him, let’s hear you speak out against him. And please start using your real names and stop hiding behind anonymity and nicknames.

http://ladyraine.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/exposed-roissy-in-dc/

Why Jim Baldasci ‘Went Postal’: How Bullying Bosses and Economic Devastation Are Behind America’s Latest Workplace Shooting

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted September 28, 2009.

Baldasci’s shooting opens a window into Fresno, CA’s climate of soaring unemployment, scheming agribusiness oligarchs and Sean Hannity-inspired right-wing rage
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 … but more on that a bit later.

Here’s what happened last Tuesday: Jim Badasci, who’d worked at Fresno Equipment for 10 years, showed up Tuesday morning with a shotgun at 8:57 a.m., and the first thing he did was kill a fellow co-worker, Ralph Wallis. About two dozen fellow co-workers scattered at that point, some taking refuge at a nearby car wash, others reportedly hiding inside of a locked vault, as Badasci, wearing a hunting vest filled with ammo, proceeded to “shoot the equipment” — in this case, John Deere agricultural machinery.

Shooting utility tractors may seem strange or psychotic to anyone who hasn’t studied these workplace shootings, but if you believe Badasci was trying to kill the Company which he believed was killing him, then shooting anything on company grounds makes perfect sense.

The really surprising part of the story is how four of the employees managed to stop Badasci from killing anyone else. Though few details have come out about how they managed to convince an unarmed killer to stop shooting, a close friend of Badasci’s believes this proves that he was not a wild madman randomly killing, but rather a normal man who’d become desperate.

Rather than kill more fellow-workers, Badasci took his own life.

It was all over in a few minutes; as always, the police and SWAT teams arrived just beyond the nick of time.

So why did Badasci shoot? What drove him to it, and who was he after? Officially, we don’t know. But one local report on KSEE24 TV, which no one else picked up on, offered a rather clear explanation:

We spoke with Michael von Flue, a former coworker of Jim Badasci, who says that this was out of character for him. That Jim would go out of his way to help others and that he had a good home life. Von Flue did not want to go on camera, but tells KCEE 24 News,”This is what happens when a company mismanages their employees and fails to treat them with respect.”

In an email exchange with Von Flue, he told me that Jim Badasci had been driven to desperation by a particular supervisor and the company’s toleration of the supervisor’s mistreatment. Von Flue apologized for all the grammatical errors in his email, noting how difficult the last week has been, and how little he has slept:

Maybe there was something unknowingly wrong with Jimmy,something physically ill with his brain to of made him go to the extreme, like a brain disease that was starting to affect the thought process when he got angry by the harassment of this supervising individual that he mentioned to me that was still pushing Jimmy’s buttons.

This is particularly interesting because I’ve written about this in the past: the definition of mental illness today in today’s workplace is when you’re too sensitive to mistreatment, bullying, stress, wage cuts, firing, etc. and you want to fight back; a healthy mind should be able to take it all in stride, accept it with a harmless grumble, and “move on.” Continuing, Von Flue wrote in the email:

He loved his job, talking with people, and he was very socialble, but I loved my job there too, of eleven years and I still decided to leave, because of the continous bullshit/harassment with alcohol some times on this person breath,and the unprofessional conduct oft his individaul that was jeopardizing my safety and the security of me keeping my employment there.Jimmy told me on that day I talked to him on the phone,was that, “a few weeks before”, the owners, “Steve and Marsha were very agitated with this individual and the Service Manager, because of some customer incidents that were improperly or unprofessionally handled by this individual,but because of the service manager”, who has worked there for 20 plus years or more, being very close to them, and that they trust him, even though I know he has covered up or minipulated the true before,”he talked them into not letting that individual go”, it is sad that they didn’t follow through with what they were thinking, things might have been different I’m sure.

Von Flue’s letter echoes a reader comment I spotted in a Fresno Bee story about the shooting:

sweetthgvfwrote on September, 23 11:09 AM:To anyone and everyone out there who knows Jimmy and knows what it was like to work at Fresno Equipment Company, Jimmy may have been the one who did this horrible deed, but Fresno Equipment is ultimately responsible because of the way they treat their employees. If you don’t want to believe it don’t, but you can talk to anyone who’s quit over the last 5 years because of management my husband included, and they will tell you the real story behind all of this. My husband warned the company owners 3 years ago when he quit that if they don’t take care of the problem somebody will go postal. Too bad they didn’t listen back then….if you ask me both Jimmy and Ralph are victims. Again, our sympathies to both families….but let’s face reality here. This situation has been in the making for a long time. It’s called hostile work environment. Maybe now management will listen to their employees when there’s a problem instead of sweeping it under the rug.

Just a year ago, this kind of talk would have been dismissed out of hand, because the Reaganomics model in place for 30 years was the still best in the world, and if you weren’t on board, it was your own problem. Now that it’s all collapsed and we’re starting to understand how badly we’ve been burned all these years, revelations about how miserably workers may have been treated at the company Badasci attacked elicit a different kind of shrug — like, “Yeah, so what, everyone gets screwed over by their companies, what’s new?” Getting screwed over the way we have been these past 30 years is something new — as are the workplace massacres, pitting employee against Company, which only started after the Reagan Revolution handed all power to the shareholders, and convinced the losers in that deal — the 90 percent of Americans whose lives got worse in every measurable way since then — that in fact it was in our own best interests to turn corporations into little Profit Gulags, where the inmates could be downsized at will, and mass-layoffs in the tens and hundreds of thousands became so common in good times and in bad that it proved Stalin’s dictum about “one victim is a tragedy, a million victims is a statistic.”

What is surprising is the portrait painted of Badasci — nothing at all like the cliched “loner who kept to himself.” Here is how some people described Badasci in the aftermath — and remember, it’s not easy to publicly talk well of a murderer:

One friend said he was unable to explain why Badasci would commit such a crime. Mario Juarez of Kingsburg said he worked with Badasci at Fresno Equipment for two years and they remained friends after Juarez quit. “We’ve gone dove hunting and to concerts. We talked from time to time,” Juarez said. But Juarez is at a loss to understand the shooting. “I talked to him last week and he gave no clues that anything was wrong,” Juarez said. “I’ve never in my life seen him mad. I would have bet my life savings he would never do a thing like this.” … Marie Taylor, who lives down the block, had heard news reports about the shooting, but did not know Badasci was the suspect. She said Badasci was a mechanic and seemed to like his job. “He waved at me twice yesterday when I went by,” she said Taylor occasionally talked to Badasci and his mother, but never saw a hint of trouble in his life. “He kept up the yard,” she said. “He was good to his mother.”

That last part, about how he lived with his mother at age 46, might offer one clue as to what might have been bothering Badasci; that, and the fact that everyone I read or saw interviewed seemed so casual about that, as if living with his mother and treating her well didn’t pain him, as if they were unaware that American culture marks such people as losers and laughingstocks, disqualified from the Darwinian Tournament. If you ask me, that sounds about as miserable as a life can be: living at home with your mother outside of Fresno, in the unbearable heat and dust, at age 46, working every day in a John Deere dealership in a barren strip off highway 99, where business is bad and tempers are hot because of a three-year drought and a recession, and to top it all off, management treats him like shit. Who wouldn’t want to end that violently? Few would actually do it — only the mentally sick, of course — but many, even healthy types, would dream of it…

So even though every person interviewed who knew Badasci had such nice things to say about him, and even though Von Flue and apparently others seem eager to get the truth out about what went on at the company, officially no one knows why he shot anyone, and officially, no one seems to care.

It is as if we’ve come to accept these rampage murders as inevitable, as if there were always worker-on-worker killings in the American workplace, as if the workplace was always a dangerous place, and a stressful place, and a humiliating, degrading, insecure place where no one could be trusted, from the executives stuffing their pockets to the co-worker you wrongly suspect of being “the type who’d go postal.”

All that is brand new by any historical measure: The first of these modern workplace massacres, pitting abused employee against his own company, took place just twenty years ago this month, at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky, when an aggrieved employee arrived at work with a gym bag full of weapons, and killed 8 coworkers and wounded 12, before blowing his brains out.

Compared to that body count, Tuesday’s workplace shooting at the Fresno Equipment Company was a mere skirmish: two dead, no injuries. And we aren’t learning much in part because Fresno Equipment’s owners barred employees from talking to the media,according to a local ABC affiliate — and they’ll be inclined to listen, given Fresno’s 15% unemployment rate. Moreover, Fresno has a particularly nasty socio-economic culture: at the top, a vicious ruling class of agribusiness plutocrats and their corrupt political tools, who together lord over hordes of pissed-off crackers and endlessly-exploited Mexican laborers. In a lot of ways the region has more in common with a kleptocratic post-Soviet country, or an old Upton Sinclair novel, than what we think of as “modern America.”

Below the agribusiness oligarchs in Fresno County is a huge class of people struggling to keep its head above water, and losing. An estimated 41% of the people in Fresno County are either uninsured or underinsured, among the worst in the country. Housing prices collapsed out here, and coupled with the three-year drought, unemployment in some Central Valley farming towns reaches as high as 40-50%.

The struggle with poverty can mean dozens of circles of Hell, levels that you wouldn’t imagine possible, like this one described in a recent Fresno Bee feature:

Ask Stanley about the cost of being poor and she whips out a plastic bag with dozens of dead cockroaches inside. They were gathered from one apartment along Lowe Avenue. “Every night when you turn on the light, roaches scatter,” Stanley said.

The roaches, attracted to mold and moisture behind the walls, wiggle their way into the ears of young children, prompting costly midnight visits to the emergency room, she said. Families sleep with the lights on, not because they fear the bogeyman, but because they fear pests. The bag of roaches came from an apartment where FIRM was conducting an assessment as part of a program to identify substandard housing and organize help. The task is difficult, because families often won’t ask for help, or shun it. Many are afraid of being evicted, having rents raised or being ratted out to immigration authorities, advocates say.

And this being Fresno County, you can’t forget that familiar demographic which gravitates to hot dry places like this: the Fox/Hannity crowd, seething with petty white-male malice, always mobilized to fuck up anything good, and side with whomever’s going to cause the most damage — out of sheer spite.

It’s been wonderful talking with you about all of these important human potential and interpersonal skills!

Warmly,
Denise

It is so much easier and such a joy when one can do this with others who are also invested in learning, self-growth, and doing one’s best. It is quite a challenge when dealing with people who do not care about such things. It is also sad for me when I let others know about EI, NVC, or sound conflict resolution methods and they just refuse them. It is very odd to me. I understand there is a fear or discomfort, but I do not understand embracing ignorance and rejecting learning, knowledge, and help.

Denise

I see now that my mother’s “request” that I attend a bridal shower was really a DEMAND and that she seems to have been completely unconscious that this was a demand. My outrage was in response to her and the rest of my family actually believing they had any right to make demands upon me, a 39-year old woman (at that time) whom they knew had many career, health, and legal obligations that were simply not flexible.

My extreme hurt was in response to the very stark realization that four people who were supposed to love me more than anyone in the world (father, mother, and two sisters) actually believed and insisted that their need for my presence at a bridal shower absolutely negated my many needs for my own physical well-being (medical appointments in my schedule), choice, security (career obligations), understanding, celebration (the right to keep my plans to celebrate my 40th birthday), and support (from them for my very challenging schedule and that I was simply unable to attend). I also needed empathy, mutuality, and shared reality from them and did not get it or any of my needs above met by them. It was extrarodinarily painful and felt like an abandonment and betrayal. I had done so much FOR each of them over the prelievious ten years and I could not understand why they actually believed that all of their needs were more important and more valuable than mine and why they were unable to acknowledge that I had any needs at all.

I am able (and was also able then) to look at their feelings and needs with empathy: I can see that their needs were ease, order, celebration, community, and acceptance.

I was not able to meet their needs and they were not able to meet mine. I still believe that if they had been open to a mediated discussion with a skilled family therapist that the entire conflict and ensuing years of pain could have been resolved and avoided entirely. However, they refused to do this. My mother agreed to attend one session with a psychologist with me. The psychologist made it clear that the family did in fact gang up and scapegoat me. The psychologist also pointed out that the shower date was never discussed with me and nobody asked me whether or not I was available. My mother refused to acknowledge that she was even angry with me. She insisted that she was not angry, yet our relationship had completely changed. I was no longer invited to holiday celebrations, there were no more phone calls every other day, and there were no more birthday or christmas gifts.

NVC has enormous potential to simply teach people how to understand and be aware that we always have feelings and needs. Always. The only way we don’t is if we’re dead.

I do hope that my family will someday learn NVC for themselves and for the sake of my young nieces and nephews, for whom my hope is that they grow up as healthily as possible with genuine awareness of their feelings and needs and the ability to communicate those in emotionally intelligent ways so they contribute to their own lives and the lives of others with as much compassion, self-awareness, and positivity as possible.

Thanks for responding!
Denise