This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach. Scott, a 24 year old dean's list college grad, is smart but unemployed. According to the New York Times, in five months, only one job has given him an offer: $40k as an insurance claims adjuster. Scott said no, because Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder. Now, the easy way to go here would be to call Scott an idiot for giving up a $40k/yr job in the midst of a recession.
However, a) the recession ended last year; b) 1487 NYT commenters did the heavy lifting. No, I'm going this way: "The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said. A long time ago, before psychiatry and rum, I seriously considered a job in intelligence. This is a guy whose entire job search is conducted online in the mornings. Huh? Is this Russia? Rethinking the American Dream. No one grasped this better than Norman Rockwell, who, stirred to action by Roosevelt’s speech, set to work on his famous “Four Freedoms” paintings: the one with the rough-hewn workman speaking his piece at a town meeting (Freedom of Speech); the one with the old lady praying in the pew (Freedom of Worship); the one with the Thanksgiving dinner (Freedom from Want); and the one with the young parents looking in on their sleeping children (Freedom from Fear).
These paintings, first reproduced in The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, proved enormously popular, so much so that the original works were commandeered for a national tour that raised $133 million in U.S. war bonds, while the Office of War Information printed up four million poster copies for distribution. Whatever your opinion of Rockwell (and I’m a fan), the resonance of the “Four Freedoms” paintings with wartime Americans offers tremendous insight into how U.S. citizens viewed their idealized selves.
William J. Bruce Meyer on the Middle Class, Poverty, and Inequality. Does America need an industrial policy. Editor's Note: Be sure to catch GPS every Sunday at 10a.m. and 1p.m. EST. If you miss it, you can buy episodes on iTunes. By Fareed Zakaria, CNN President Obama spoke forcefully in his State of the Union about the importance of reviving manufacturing in America. If you talk with economists they will tell you it's a very complex problem, involving tax, trade regulatory policy, exchange rates, and educational skills. It is all those things. But when you move from high-level policy to specific cases, you will often find one element that is rarely talked about: a foreign government’s role in boosting its domestic manufacturers with specific loans, subsidies, streamlined regulations and benefits.
In a front page story last week, the New York Times detailed how Apple's iPhone ended up being made outside America. How could they afford such an extravagant gesture? "Why can't we do that here in the U.S.? " "Innovation doesn't just happen in laboratories by researchers," he told me. Www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/incomemobilitystudy03-08revise.pdf. Sequence 13 (Page 7): Bogen, F. W. The German in America, or, Advice and instruction for German emigrants in the United States of America :also, a reader for beginners in the English and German languages. Boston : B.H. Greene ; New York : Koch ; Philadelp. OCCUPY WALL STREET. I get it – people are angry. Very, very angry. I’m angry too.
And Wall Street sure makes a great scapegoat, hence the Occupy Wall Street protest. Wall Street is a symbol of the “greed and corruption” that took over America and caused this whole mess. But let’s take a minute to examine the facts and see if we can’t find some better scapegoats: In 1997 Andrew Cuomo, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton, allowed Fannie Mae to reduce the standards by which they would secure loans. This helped create the entire subprime category.
But how about this: You’re to blame too. And finally, people are saying the problem in the euro zone is a “repeat” of Lehman. In 1981-2 a huge portion of South America defaulted. So, I’m confused, whose fault is it? What about Germany? There are millions of private businesses out there that aren’t hiring because banks aren’t lending. Deep breath. Meanwhile, please stop being so angry. Who Runs the World ? – Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control. Business Published on August 28th, 2011 | by Michael Ricciardi In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs).
Their results have revealed a core of 737 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs. Strongly Connected Component (SCC); layout of the SCC (1318 nodes and 12,191 links). Node size scales logarithmically with operation revenue, node color with network control (from yellow to red). Link color scales with weight. [Note to the reader: see the very end of this article for a ranking of the top 50 'control holders'] But now we have the results of a global network analysis (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) that, for the first time, lays bare the “architecture” of the global ownership network.
Two generalized characteristics were identified: and End Notes: Open Letter to that 53% Guy. In the picture, you’re holding up a sheet of paper that says: I am a former Marine. I work two jobs. I don’t have health insurance. I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college. I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years. But I don’t blame Wall Street. I wanted to respond to you as a liberal. First, let me say that I think it’s great that you have such a strong work ethic and I agree with you that you have much to be proud of. I have a nephew in the Marine Corps, so I have some idea of how tough that can be. So, if you think being a liberal means that I don’t value hard work or a strong work ethic, you’re wrong. I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something. Do you really want the bar set this high?
Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? And what happens if you get sick? Do you plan to get married, have kids? Look, you’re a tough kid. CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About... The "Occupy Wall Street" protests are gaining momentum, having spread from a small park in New York to marches to other cities across the country. So far, the protests seem fueled by a collective sense that things in our economy are not fair or right. But the protesters have not done a good job of focusing their complaints—and thus have been skewered as malcontents who don't know what they stand for or want. (An early list of "grievances" included some legitimate beefs, but was otherwise just a vague attack on "corporations.
" Given that these are the same corporations that employ more than 100 million Americans and make the products we all use every day, this broadside did not resonate with most Americans). So, what are the protesters so upset about, really? Do they have legitimate gripes? To answer the latter question first, yes, they have very legitimate gripes.
Tea Party vs. OWS: The psychology and ideology of responsibility | The Moral Sciences Club. One of the most robust findings in political psychology is that liberals tend to explain both poverty and wealth in terms of luck and the influence of social forces while conservatives tend to explain poverty and wealth in terms of effort and individual initiative. Here's a useful summary of the sort of thing I have in mind: Harmon (2010a) built on these works by testing their conclusions against six U.S. public opinion polls. Secondary analysis found consistent and strong relationships. Conservatives and Republicans overwhelmingly attributed poverty to the personal failings of the poor themselves (lazy, drunk, etc.) while Democrats and liberals consistently offered social explanations like poor schools and lousy jobs for poverty.
What about libertarians? But, having lived most of my adult life among them, experience tells me that when it comes to the explanation of poverty and wealth libertarians are close cousins to conservatives. Which really hacks off Welch: Welch's kicker: The Broken Contract. Iraq was one of those wars where people actually put on pounds. A few years ago, I was eating lunch with another reporter at an American-style greasy spoon in Baghdad's Green Zone.
At a nearby table, a couple of American contractors were finishing off their burgers and fries. They were wearing the contractor's uniform: khakis, polo shirts, baseball caps, and Department of Defense identity badges in plastic pouches hanging from nylon lanyards around their necks. The man who had served their food might have been the only Iraqi they spoke with all day. The Green Zone was set up to make you feel that Iraq was a hallucination and you were actually in Normal, Illinois. This narcotizing effect seeped into the consciousness of every American who hunkered down and worked and partied behind its blast walls -- the soldier and the civilian, the diplomat and the journalist, the important and the obscure. The Iraq war was a kind of stress test applied to the American body politic. Register.