Tag Archives: Inequality

Last week I discussed the connection between the Occupy Wall Street protests and the long-term transfer of national income into the finance sector. Well the problem is worse than Wall Street’s power over the national economy and polity.

There really are two faces to financialization. The most familiar face is the dominance of the finance sector over the rest of us: the giant profits and bonuses at the big banks and investment houses and the instability generated by too big to fail but rapaciously imprudent financial services firms. The other face is the financialization of the rest of the economy. Greta Krippner figured this out first. Greta discovered that since the 1980s firms in the non-finance sector have increasingly invested, not in the production of goods and services, but in financial instruments. The productive economy, Main Street in some formulations, has increasingly abandoned production in favor of financial shenanigans. Finance related income, including interest, foreign exchange profits, and stock market investments have risen from about 1/8^th of corporate profits to around 30%. In the manufacturing sector the move from production to financial strategies has been even more dramatic, rising to a ratio of finance revenue/profit as high as .60 after 2000.

The Labor of Protest: A Comment on Walker and the Occupy Movement

By Steven Vallas

October 31, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

Social Media and the Labor Market

By osharone

October 26, 2011

Commentary

1 Comment

These are tough times to be an unemployed job seeker. During in-depth interviews job seekers frequently tell me that applying for jobs “feels like you’re applying to a black hole.” Understandably so: Job seekers may submit hundreds of applications electronically without receiving a single acknowledgement. They often suspect that nobody even looks at their resumes.

In these dark times, job seekers who turn to support organizations or advice books often learn of a new “solution,” a technology that (in the words of one employment counselor) “has revolutionized job searching.” The technology is social media, and specifically social networking sites (SNS), such as LinkedIn. Support organizations across the U.S., including state-run “One Stop” centers, are now offering trainings to job seekers on how to use SNS platforms like LinkedIn. The mantra I hear at these trainings is that “if you are not on LinkedIn you are invisible.” The message resonates with job seekers.

Occupy Wall Street, Inequality, and Organizational Democracy

By walkeret

October 25, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

1 Comment

by Edward Walker, University of California-Los Angeles

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations have caused, to say the least, quite a stir in the weeks since the first events in the New York financial district on September 17. Organized with explicit reference to the Arab Spring uprisings, activists responded to a February call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters for a “Tahrir square moment” targeted against Wall Street financial firms, which they called “the greatest corruptor of our democracy.” Although the first events included only a small number of activists and looked like to many like a bust, fortuitous events facilitated broader mobilization: mass arrests of over 700 demonstrators who thought they were following the officially sanctioned march route over the Brooklyn Bridge, a YouTube video of an officer pepper-spraying a seemingly defenseless group of activists, and the early support of the Airline Pilots Association (followed by significant additional union support in the following weeks). The campaign’s reach has become astoundingly broad; as of October 15, the movement claims to have a presence in over 100 U.S. cities and over 1,500 global cities. Even if these figures can be discounted to some extent as self-serving overestimates, the ability of the campaign to capture public attention has been remarkable. For instance, Nate Silver notes that the movement received a cumulative 3,000 print stories over the first three weeks of its existence, and my own October 16 search of NewsLibrary shows that an additional 4,500 stories have been published in the week since Silver’s October 7 accounting. Media coverage of the movement seems to be following an accelerating production function, to use Oliver and colleagues’ (1985) terms. By this metric, OWS is on pace to receive more cumulative early coverage than the first Tax Day Tea Party events in April 2009, despite OWS’s minimal initial coverage and associated questions about the its legitimacy early on. Further, the movement is gaining major traction in public opinion, as 54% now hold a favorable view of these demonstrations (this compares to the 27% favorable view held about the Tea Party movement). Read More