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07 May 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Awake and Sing! - NYTimes.com

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while the New Deal was built from ideas developed in the Progressive Era and that the Reagan counterrevolution was the culmination of the conservative movement of the 1950s and ’60s, there is as yet “no counternarrative to replace ‘money is king.’
we are witnessing the end of “25 to 30 years worth of excess.” The “new normal” in lifestyle, wealth creation and profitability of companies, he wrote, “may be a shadow of the past.”

Op-Ed Columnist - Awake and Sing! - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...12rich.html - Preview

recession depression economy values american culture pop us usa america unemployment

It wasn’t just trillions of dollars of wealth that went poof in the bubble. Certain American values also crumbled and vanished. Making quick killings by reckless gambling in the markets — rather than by investing long-term in new products, innovations, technologies or services that might grow and benefit America and the world — became the holy grail in the upper echelons of finance.
This was not an exact replay of the preceding dot-com bubble. As a veteran of the tech gold rush recently observed to me, in Silicon Valley “the money comes later” and “the thing you make comes first, however whimsical, silly, microscopic, recondite it may be.”
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- Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.
- The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries.
- at Penn this was even true of “over half the students who graduated with engineering degrees
- “The big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy,” he said, amount to “a poverty of ambition.”
- Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead.

03 May 09

Chicago Reader | Hot Type | Sun-Times Media Group vets, laid off without severance, recount their last day at work.

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I went to the human resources department and said ‘I know I’m on the list—let’s get this done.’ It was a nice day Friday so I wanted to spend some time outside.”

16 Apr 09

10 Apr 09

Women In Transition provided by Bravenet.com

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With Advocates’ Help, Squatters Call Foreclosures Home - NYTimes.com

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Take Back the Land

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Designing Through a Depression - Allison Arieff Blog - NYTimes.com

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10 Mar 09

Even Well-off Consumers Aim to be Less Conspicuous - NYTimes.com

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“It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well being of my family. I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore.”

Will This Crisis Produce a 'Gatsby'? - WSJ.com

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Anderson had anticipated anger and radicalism among the poor and unemployed. Instead, he discovered a people stunned by the collapse of their most cherished beliefs. "Puzzled America," the title of the book he composed out of his journeys, said it all.
Never in American history had the vision of social mobility been more forcefully asserted than in the 1920s. And rarely had the image been so far out of keeping with reality. The Republican Party, which dominated national politics throughout the decade, extolled the twin virtues of economic competition and personal ambition
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- less equal and less fluid in the 1920s, as the era's prosperity increasingly benefited the wealthiest. By the end of the decade, the top 1% of the population received nearly a quarter of the national income, an historic peak that would not be approached again until this past decade. Indeed, the term "social mobility" was coined in 1925 by the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who used the phrase to identify a phenomenon in apparent decline.
- Everywhere he turned, Anderson noted, he heard the same refrain, "I failed. I failed. It's my own fault."
- That journey was echoed by a whole genre of "road" novels, written by angry young writers like Nelson Algren, who depicted an itinerant population of bottom dogs lurching from one disaster to the next. These novels answered the classic American vision of opportunity by imagining a nation of wanderers rapidly going nowhere.
- The road novels, documentary books and gangster films of the 1930s depicted the myth of social mobility as a bitter cheat.
- That opportunity would be seized on by a cohort of artists and intellectuals who took the crisis of the Depression as a chance to cast the idea of social mobility less as a framework for individual striving and more as an occasion for collective action.

09 Mar 09

Rethinking the American Dream | vanityfair.com

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American Dream in reverse
surely the viability of the American Dream isn’t in question. What needs to change is our expectation of what the dream promises
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- In recent years, the term has often been interpreted to mean “making it big” or “striking it rich.” (As the cult of Brian De Palma’s Scarface has grown, so, disturbingly, has the number of people with a literal, celebratory read on its tagline: “He loved the American Dream. With a vengeance.”) Even when the phrase isn’t being used to describe the accumulation of great wealth, it’s frequently deployed to denote extreme success of some kind or other.
- The Declaration of Independence took this concept even further, for it compelled the well-to-do upper classes to put the common man on an equal footing with them where human rights and self-governance were concerned—a nose-holding concession that Adams captured with exquisite comic passiveness in the sentence, “It had been found necessary to base the [Declaration’s] argument at last squarely on the rights of man.”
- A “better and richer life” is promised, but for most people this won’t be a rich person’s life.
- “For a century and more,” Adams wrote, “our successive ‘Wests’ had dominated the thoughts of the poor, the restless, the discontented, the ambitious, as they had those of business expansionists and statesmen.”
- Wilson said, “There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great
- The American Dream was maturing into a shared dream, a societal compact that reached its apotheosis when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933 and began implementing the New Deal. A “better and richer and fuller” life was no longer just what America promised its hardworking citizens individually; it was an ideal toward which these citizens were duty-bound to strive together. The Social Security Act of 1935 put this theory into practice.