American economy and society

The United States has never needed the insights of Margaret Mead as much as in today’s world. Born in 1901, Mead saw the outbreak and ending of two world wars, and more limited conflicts in Korea and Vietnam before her death in 1978. She also witnessed the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, the Cold War and the growing influence of American culture throughout the world, as well as the civil rights movement, the growth of women’s rights, the sexual revolution and the burgeoning culture of youth in the West.

Throughout all of this century of change, she had one driving
impulse in her work and her life. This was to bring cultural understanding to the people of the United States—understanding of the people of the world, but also understanding of America’s own developing culture.

Few anthropologists today realize the pioneering role Margaret
Mead played in the investigation of contemporary cultures. Although her professional reputation within anthropology rests on her work in Oceania, more than half of her professional life was devoted to the study of contemporary Western society—primarily the society of the United States.

This essay introduces a collection of Margaret Mead's writings on contemporary society. The table of contents of the book is also included as well as other collections of Mead's writings in this series published by Berghahn Books.

note; I only upload chapter one of the research. let me know if you wanna read the rest by sending me a messgae. thank you :)


ABSTRACT

2013. This research was aimed to explain how film In Time represents capitalism in the 21st century American society and how the movie delivers superficial self-criticism toward capitalism. Film is one of pop culture products which become a vital commodity for capitalism. As film is actually part of capitalism, it is interesting to analyze when the film contains criticism to capitalism itself. This is why it is called as self-criticism.
This is a descriptive qualitative research. The main source of data of this research is film In Time directed by Andrew Niccol released in 2011. There are two kinds of data; primary and secondary data. The primary data are all elements in the film including dialogues, scenes, lighting, and other cinematographic elements. The secondary data are all selected works or research related to the topic such as reference books and journals.
This research was done under the framework of American Studies. Since American Studies is interdisciplinary, it involves various theories and disciplines. This research uses semiotics film theory to analyze the elements of film. As the topic is related to capitalism, Marxist theory is used. Socio-cultural and socio-economical context is also used to get deeper understanding and also to see the current context of the film.
In the research analysis, it is found that in some cases, there are certain elements of film which represent American’s socio-economic condition related to capitalist practices. However, film is still part of capitalism. No matter how the film tries to represent the real condition, there remain gaps in the film where the filmmaker incorporates elements which in fact continue to support and justify capitalism practices. In the film, the gaps can be found in the form of ‘romanticized’ facts.  The representation of capitalism offered by the filmmaker is actually not all honest. The film also expresses criticisms toward capitalism. There are plots, characters, and settings showing the criticisms. However, looking further the characterization, it is found that just like the representations, the criticism is not pure as it is. It is only a superficial self-criticism. In the end, film as commodity of capitalism actually will never be far from capitalist value.

Keyword: film, pop culture, capitalism, criticism, Marxist

The new designs for the US Paper Money between 1914 and 1918: Federal Reserve Notes and Federal Reserve Bank Notes during the Word War I. Contents:
BEFORE THE FED, THE FED, THE NEW NOTES, 12 BANK SEALS, THE NEW TRADITION, 2 TREASURY SEALS, DATES, FIVE-DOLLAR BILL, TEN-DOLLAR BILL, TWENTY-DOLLAR BILL, FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL, ONE HUNDRED-DOLLAR BILL, ONE-DOLLAR BILL, TWO-DOLLAR BILL, $500 BILL, $1,000 BILL, $5,000 BILL, $10,000 BILL, 4 AUTHORIZATIONS ON THE “FED” PAPER MONEY (1914-1918), FINAL WORDS.

Here, I contrast the economies between Africa & America. . .

The world is going topsey-turvey:

"The change is moving at veritable lightning speed: economies are virtually transmogrifying themselves into their antitheses simultaneously and vicariously" . . .

Article is foind on pages: 44, 46 & 48

By Angelina Lazar

From the writings of C. Wright Mills, it is obvious that he considered human nature to be dynamic and its studies to be of paramount importance in different epochs of history, as all other researches in social sciences are related to and based upon that. However, as he observed, and it is also evident, such studies have become very rare in modern times.  That is the major reason why much of the research in social sciences is abstract empiricist and mediocre, narrowly focused on surface phenomena, without discovering their essence, disconnected from theoretical foundations, and excludes macro-level problems and their analysis. Such approaches and methodologies masquerade as being “objective” and “scientific”.  However, in reality, these are the opposite of those and divert and deflect the attention from the real nature and root causes of the problems, which may be ultimately associated with the unjust and evil politico-economic system of capitalism and imperialism. The proposed solutions are also restricted within those boundaries.  The deeply rooted and inherent biases are masked with the pretensions of “objectivity” and “scientificality”.  The researchers may be engaging in such practices automatically, without even being aware of what they are doing, as that is the institutional and publications norm.  Researchers like Mills, who break through these norms, criticize them, and discover the real nature and causes of macro-level problems, are very rare in social sciences.

Right wing political groups throughout the world are celebrating Trump's victory but rather prematurely. They traditional conservatives and liberals are sufficiently delusional to believe that they are somehow far removed from Trump-style authoritarian politics when in fact they laid the groundwork for Trump to succeed. Meanwhile, some traditional conservative political leaders around the world are wondering if right wing populism flirting with Fascism is the way to political victory, never questioning if their policies drove people to the far right. Others are questioning if BREXIT and the Trump victory really mean popular discontent with globalization under the neoliberal development model. Many analysts are already decrying the rightwing course of the American electorate, as though Clinton was a New Deal Democrat rather than a Rockefeller Republican with a more pro-Wall Street and more hawkish foreign policy than Trump. Political correctness aside, the US was already a quasi-police state before Trump under both Bush and Obama. Therefore, the socio-cultural-political landscape was fertile for the new populist Republican leader, especially considering the corruption scandals that plagued Clinton. It is not at all the case as many have argued that US democracy suddenly became bankrupt because of Trump's victory, because this was the case throughout history, with some exceptions when reformism became necessary to strengthen capitalism under the pluralistic society as during the Progressive Era and New Deal. Behind the new authoritarian figure that will become America's president, and behind the Republican victory of both houses of congress, the real power is corporate America as it always has been. Wall Street, not Washington, will determine policy under Trump who promised economic nationalism vs. globalization, isolationism vs. interventionism, job-growth oriented economy vs. jobs export oriented economy. Mainstream politicians, the media, and the entire institutional establishment have always projected the image that elections are equated with democracy. The establishment wants people to believe that the electoral process affords legitimacy to the social contract. No matter how manipulated by the political class, financial elites and the media, elections put a stamp of legitimacy on what people believe constitutes popular sovereignty. As shocking as it was for many across the US and around the world, a Trump victory represents the illusion of democracy at work in a country where voter apathy is very high in comparison with most developed countries-the US ranks 27 th in the world below Mexico and Slovakia in voter participation. Besides the illusion of popular sovereignty, elections inject a sense of hope for a new start in society – the eternal spring of politics intended to maintain the status quo. An even clearer picture emerges regarding the distasteful " steak or fish " choices, as President Obama alluded during the correspondents' dinner a few weeks before the election to indicate with pride that there is no third political choice. The larger problem is the lack of differences between 'steak and fish' (Democrats and Republicans) in every policy domain, except social, cultural/ lifestyle issues. Of course, the very high percentage of 'negatives' for both presidential candidates and the absence of alternatives other than those that the political and financial establishment chose for people to give their final approval reveals that people were voting for what each side deemed the 'lesser of two evils' – the 'steak or fish' choice that the establishment places on the menu

Short paper presented at Lessons & Legacies, 2018, Wash U, St. Louis.  Explores correlations between surge of Holocaust invocation in the U.S. in the 1970s with broader societal and cultural changes of that decade.  The issue is also discussed in my On Listening to Holocaust Survivors (1998, 2010).

The decade-long boom in the US stock market and the more recent boom in the US economy have fostered widespread belief in the economic benefits of the maximization of shareholder value as a principle of corporate governance. In this paper, we provide an ...

The great challenge of our time is not a clash of civilizations, as many advocated since Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations. Nor is the world most important challenge the revival of the Cold War in the form of a renewed US-Russia confrontation or in the forms of the evils of unconventional war that the US calls “terrorism”, a generic term governments use to label any opponent terrorist. These issues are manufactured and symptomatic of capitalist countries engaged in an intense world competition for markets and raw materials. This is not very different from the world power structure during the Age of New Imperialism, 1870-1914. The great challenge of our time is social and geographic inequality that threatens not only the system of capitalism creating inequality, but the democratic political regime under which capitalism has thrived in the last one hundred years.

Food plays a central role in hospitality in virtually every culture on earth. Eating together - 'commensality'' is perhaps one of the most basic human social acts, and is imbued with a special ritual quality. In this paper I show that there are several stages that participants in commensality pass through from the outside world to the communal meal. The passage from stage to stage is effected through the use of linguistic/ behavioral routines that I call "pragmemic triggers. " The form of these triggers is different for different societies, but their structure and use is the same. To demonstrate this, I compare the passage to the meal in four widely dispersed cultures: Middle East, Japanese, German and American

Fake news, deceptive information, and conspiracy theories are part of our everyday life. It is really hard to distinguish between false and valid information. As contemporary people receive the majority of information from electronic publications, in many cases fake information can seriously harm people’s health or economic status. This article will analyze the question of how up-to-date information technology can help detect false information. Our proposition is that today we do not have a perfect solution to identify fake news. There are quite a few methods employed for the discrimination of fake and valid information, but none of them is perfect. In our opinion, the reason is not in the weaknesses of the algorithms, but in the underlying human and social aspects.

This paper sets out an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This framework, while rigorous and broadly applicable and an advance on the frameworks currently employed, primarily seeks to incorporate an a priori element. Until now the frameworks utilized in examining critical junctures were entirely postdictive. Adding a predictive element to the concept will constitute a significant advance. The new framework, and its predictive element, termed the “differentiating factor,” is tested here in examining macro-economic crises and subsequent changes in macro-economic policy, in America and Sweden.

The idea of symbolic consumption is based on the assumption that consumption is more than just functional problem solving: products and brands have significant meanings; therefore, they can be utilized as symbols in the cultural ecosystem. However, grasping the meaning of a specific brand can be confusing because it would presume knowledge about the brand as a symbol shared by the customers. We review the contradicting findings in the literature about the symbolic meaning of brands, and we initiate a new reference point in order to dissolve the above mentioned conflict. According to our understanding, the symbolic meaning of a brand shall be examined in the context of specific brand communities and not in general. We suggest that limiting the scope of research to brands with brand communities resolves several limitations of symbolic consumption studies focusing on general issues. Our theoretical model distinguishes the different types of brand communities based on their main cohesiv...

This course, which I am teaching at the University of New Hampshire, explores the problem of the wealth gap in the ancient and the modern world. It first introduces students to the causes of wealth inequality, and then provides a  historical overview of the social and political consequences of wealth inequality from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present day. Students will also become familiar with the various solutions that intellectuals and philosophers proposed to address the wealth gap in the ancient world (Plato, Aristotle), the Enlightenment (Rousseau), the Nineteenth Century (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, etc.), and contemporary America (Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, etc.).

Abstract: The paper presents the first stage of a pilot project, which aims to introduce mobile learning (m-learning) in mechanical engineering education. Educational concepts and technological considerations are discussed first, together with basic assumptions and fundamental ...

Two types of recent contributions to the discussion of a ‘crisis’ in law recall issues in Weimar labour law. Wolfgang Teubner and others propound a ‘reflexive law’ patterned on the multiple constitutions of collective labour law; and American ‘critical legal studies’ dismiss legal reasoning and press for frankly ‘altruistic’ policy-making in the courts. The Weimar controversy over the extent to which ‘works-community’ supercedes the legal attributes of the employment relationship as specified by the older law of contract shows, first, that the characteristic collectivism and institutionalism of the socialist labour movement's legal strategy was premissed on a complementary political conception of the organization of labour, and, second, that Socialist lawyers defended a legal discourse which was critical of prevailing doctrine but grounded in its systematizations, as essential to their struggle against the amorphous, nominally altruistic reading of the employment relationships which the German courts and then the Nationla Socialist regime imposed upon labour. Their recognition of the problems posed by deficient or excessive politicization of law makes them again important, notwithstanding their political defeats, and their survivors' disillusionment.

У нинішніх умовах нестабільної економіки, яка постраждала через пандемію COVID-19, конкурентні переваги і стратегії їх досягнення являють собою практичний інтерес для туристичних підприємств і виступають невід'ємним елементом формування загальної виробничої стратегії в цілому. У статті проаналізовано концепції як вітчизняних дослідників проблеми конкурентоспроможності підприємств, так і зарубіжних вчених. Перераховано фактори, які мають вплив на формування конкурентних переваг підприємства. Розглянуто зміни у конкурентній ситуації в туристичній галузі, викликані сучасним станом внаслідок пандемії COVID-19. Особливу увагу приділено напрямкам досягнення конкурентних переваг, або діловим стратегіям, які можуть застосовуватися туристичними підприємствами. За результатами дослідження, автори приходять до висновку, що чітке формулювання, визначення, реалізація конкурентних переваг і вибір конкурентної стратегії, а також всебічний аналіз факторів, що впливають на конкурентні переваги, ...

On March 1, 2013, President Obama and congressional leaders failed to come to an agreement that would avert automatic across-the-board government spending cuts as required by the 2011 Budget Control Act.  The Act requires the government to cut at least 1.2 trillion dollars in spending from fiscal year 2013, through fiscal year 2021.  The budgets cuts also known as the sequester/sequestration requires eighty five billion dollars of spending cuts for fiscal year 2013, with the Department of Defense taking the brunt of the cuts, cutting forty six billion dollars – more than half of all government spending cuts and an additional fifty to fifty five billion dollars per year until 2021.  Furthermore, these cuts are arbitrary, which is having a negative affect on the U.S. Armed Forces’ military readiness, which in turn is negatively affecting individual Americans, certain communities and groups, and nations allied to the United States.  This paper will explore, in three parts, how the sequestration is negatively affecting military readiness, determine the stakeholders involved, and explain how a combination of revenue creation, eliminating un-needed programs and contracts, and overhauling the military benefit system will reduce or eliminate the sequestration’s negative effects on military readiness.