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March 30, 2008
Influencing the World: One Click at a Time
I often get buried in paid direct marketing work and unpaid national peace organization structural committees and find it difficult to keep up with the daily new cycles and cyber chatter. I find it ironic that as a woman who has become buried in offline responsibilities, I'm being asked to be a web 2.0 expert for my league.
According to the NYT, most people my age and younger are chatting on Facebook, MySpace, and their blogs about presidential YouTube clips. There's a free PDF about online political advocacy at e-politics. The Feminist Peace Network reminds me that there are lots of people who see that peace cannot be created without gender justice.
I'm not sure how to break through the clutter, have my voice heard, and influence public opinion. I do know I want to spend more time keeping up with Daniel Drezner (who lives the life I sometimes wish I had) and less time on conference calls.
Posted by cj at 9:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2008
There Are No Jobs
The lead article in today's NYT Business Section is graph after graph of depressing news on the US labor market. US corporations have been making more money over the last ten years by squeezing more productivity out of a leaner and leaner workforce. We had a "jobless recovery" from the last recession, and now companies are plunging workers into even deeper spirals of unemployment because some screwed up economists convinced them that credit checks have an actual correlation to a person's character.
So now, if you lose your home in the mortgage meltdown, and maybe the bank repo's your car because you lost your job, it'll be even harder for you to find work to pull yourself out of the economic hell that is the US "middle class."
Intellectuals wonder why Americans focus so much on celebrity gossip and have such a poor grasp on foreign affairs. Perhaps they can't be bothered with politics because they're struggling to make ends meet and they focus on the lives of the rich and famous because that fantasy is the closest most Americans will ever come to the American dream.
"Is a Lean Economy Turning Mean?" by Peter Goodman
Posted by cj at 2:58 PM | Comments (0)