super-rich feel dissed by Obama

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This Colbert Report video touches on the growing antipathy of the super-rich towards President Obama, despite the fact they have enjoyed incredible prosperity over the span of his term. Colbert particularly takes off on a recent article that appeared in The New Yorker about hedge-fund investor anger about Obama's insufficient rhetorical respect for such "wealth creators." 

what to do with your wealth? get help at "Mansion"

In this age of growing income disparities and economic hardship, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has chosen to further glamorize the rich and their wealth by starting a section called Mansion. According to the launch press release, the new section will appear weekly in the paper copy and daily at WSJ.com. “The mantra for real estate has always been location, location, location – the location for the most intelligent, original, trustworthy and insightful journalism on prestige property is now The Wall Street Journal,” said Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire, so we have created Mansion to be the home of both aspiration and real estate realization.” For more information on the addition, see introductory video. 

Unfortunately, it does not appear that Mansion will likely offer the kind of coverage about the lifestyles of the rich that readers came to appreciate in Robert Frank's recently discontinued WSJ blog, The Wealth Report. However, Frank's work is now available at CNBC's Inside Wealth.

tall poppy syndrome

Amy Stein and Stacy Mehrfar have just published a collection of photos which explores tall poppy syndrome in Australia. As Amy states in a recent interview with Benjamin Starr, “Stacy was visiting NYC from Sydney and... in the course of discussing life in Australia she mentioned the term. I immediately said that would be a great book. The term was so strange and arresting to me. When we realized that it represented a viewpoint and practice so far from ideas of American individualism and exceptionalism we knew that we potentially had an interesting project.” For rest of brief interview and selected images go to http://www.visualnews.com/2012/09/29/tall-poppy-syndrome-on-a-cultural-phenomenon/.

Given current election campaign dynamics, perhaps the ideological proponents of great wealth would do well to address critics in relation to this particularly "unAmerican" concept.

dissecting "the 47 percent"

Candidate Mitt Romney continues to wield a very blunt scalpel in his dissection of the U.S. class structure. A video clip from a May 2012 speech to prospective contributors has ignited the most recent campaign firestorm. In it, he states that "47 percent" of Americans "view themselves as victims," and he's not interested in reaching out to them. The clip, initially published in a Mother Jones article by David Corn, will no doubt receive big press over the duration of the campaign. Romney goes on to claim the "47 percent" are government dependents, who pay no federal income taxes. Juliet Lapidos in a New York Times article examines the 46.4 percent of Americans who paid no federal income taxes during 2011. This population, quoting Lapidos, has the following characteristics:

• They are more likely to live in Republican states. The states with the highest percentage of non-filers, with the exception of Florida and New Mexico, are solidly red. Ezra Klein calculates that Mr. Romney will receive “96 electoral votes from the ‘taker’ states” while Mr. Obama will receive 5. (29 are tossups.)
• More than one-fifth are elderly. David Frum says they’re “people who pay no income taxes because their income takes the form of Social Security.”
• Most of them pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than Mr. Romney. Here’s Ezra Klein again: “Among the American who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes—which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid.”
• Some of them are simply too poor to pay federal taxes. In 2011, 18.1 percent of households paid neither income tax nor payroll taxes. Within that group, more than half are elderly; over one-third are nonelderly with annual income under $20,000.
• Some of them are wealthy, and manage to slip into Mr. Romney’s dependent-victim category due to exemptions and deductions. As ABC noted in June, “20,752 households that reported earning more than $200,000 in 2009 paid no federal income taxes. About 1,500 of those tax-free Americans were millionaires.”

A series of graphics providing greater detail about those Americans who paid no federal income taxes during 2011 is available at NPR.   

Update: see Jamelle Bouie's July 2014 Slate article for a history on the use of the "47 percent" meme among conservative politicians and pundits.

income, unemployment, and foreclosure: interactive map of U.S. states and counties

NPR has published a handy interactive map of the U.S., providing recent data relevant to household income, unemployment, and housing foreclosures. Data, color-coded per county, allow for easy visual comparisons between states and regions. Users may drill down to obtain precise county level figures.

why prole day? how about bourgeoisie day?

Why is there a holiday set aside to celebrate labor? This brief video from the History Channel provides an overview of its origins within the context of class division and strife. On the other hand, Gerald Skoning in an article today for that bastion of capitalism, The Wall Street Journal, asks "Why Not Corporation Day?": "Corporation Day would be a joyous celebration of capitalism, a three-day national holiday honoring the great industrialist pioneers, business barons and tycoons of our nation. We would pay grateful respects to the Mellons, Carnegies, Gettys, Fords, Rockefellers and, yes, the Kochs, for their contributions to our country's prosperity." 

Happy Labor Day!

Today's Labor Day edition of The Washington Post includes a brief animated video depicting the status of labor relative to the pro-deregulation position that is being articulated by Romney-Ryan. In your opinion, does this cartoon provide further support for claims by conservative critics, as suggested in this video, that mainstream media evinces a decided "liberal bias"? 

single and unequal

This post was written by Paul Dean and originally appeared in The Sociological Cinema. 

In this video, The New York Times notes that "as a single mother of three, Jessica Schairer falls in the middle of a sharp debate about how economic inequality is increasingly linked to changes in family structure" (see accompanying article and infographic). Through Jessica's story as a working class mother, it illustrates how family structure can exacerbate already existing class inequalities. Jessica explains her stress trying to raise her children as a single parent, including the difficulties of getting home and needing to meet the needs of children and her inability to pay for all the activities her children would like to do. This is contrasted with her married supervisor at work, who is able to rely on a partner when going home from work. The narrator notes that like Jessica's supervisor, college-educated people are more likely to marry and that their combined resources help provide an additional advantage in raising their income, which provides additional advantages conferred to their children. The narrator also notes that "many children of single parents flourish, but studies have shown that on average, children raised by single parents are more likely to fall into poverty, do poorly in school, or become teenage parents." The accompanying article provides many additional statistics. For example, it notes that "estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality." Viewers can be encouraged to consider how class and family structure intersect to shape intergenerational economic inequality, and how low-income workers face more job-related difficulties in meeting family needs as compared to salaried professional workers.

Image by Stephen Crowley/New York Times

do men really earn more than women?

This entry was written by Lester Andrist and originally posted at The Sociological Cinema.


A few months ago, sociologist Phillip Cohen blogged about a feminist viral statistic meme, which claims that women own less than 1% of all the world's wealth. It turns out, a credible source for this figure can't be traced and is unlikely to exist. As Cohen's post reminds us, the very statistics that shape how we understand the world are sometimes little more than elaborately disguised rumors. So what about other influential statistics? What about that viral statistic which states that women earn about 77 cents for every dollar men earn? When people have denied gender inequality exists and when they have implied it is unnecessary to enact policies aimed at eradicating it, the 77-cent statistic has often come to the rescue and thwarted derailment, so whether the statistic is accurate is an important question. In the above clip, Republican Party strategist Alex Castellanos asserts the 77-cent statistic is untrue. Could it be just another viral statistic meme without a source? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that 77 cents is an average, and the number varies based on profession, age, and race. The 77-cent statistic can easily be traced to a respectable source--the Census Bureau (the U.S. Bureau of Labor calculates the number differently and arrives at about 81 cents on the male dollar). The point is society needs an accurate description of the world, lest our dominant understanding of the world become solely derived from eloquently stated assertions by elites with narrow interests. In part, this clip makes a good case for the potential importance of sociology, and in particular, a sociology that checks its sources. It is also important to have a sociology that is capable of setting the record straight, if only to rebuke those talking heads who seek to confuse the public with baseless assertions. In this clip, Alex Castellanos' baseless assertion begins at about the 7:35 mark.

Marx rolls over in grave

A Reuters release notes that bank cards with a likeness of Karl Marx have proven to be popular among those living in the former East Germany. A subsequent NPR story has generated some interesting twitter hashtags for suggested logos (e.g., Revolution of the Proletariat: Priceless. #marxcard).

current issue of Context

The Spring, 2012 issue of Contexts includes several articles that should be of interest to students of stratification. Much of the content of the journal is accessible only through purchase or subscription, but two pieces are both relevant and available at no cost. Understanding "occupy" is a collection of different takes on the meaning and significance of the OWS movement written by several sociologists, including Ruth Milkman and William Julius Wilson. Also informative is Sharmila Rudrappa's India's reproductive assembly line. Women who served as surrogates largely appear to be positive about surrogacy, particularly when compared to alternative employment in garment factories. A piece discussing the "world changing" effect of Michael Harrington's The Other America is available for purchase.

inequality speech banned by TED

Jim Tankersley in a recent NationalJournal article reported that TED has refused to air a speech given about income inequality, claiming it to be too controversial. Delivered on March 1, 2012 by venture capitalist, Nick Hanauer, the speech argued that the middle class is the true engine of job creation and economic growth, not rich people, and therefore, the rich should not be given special tax breaks by government. While TED has not released the talk on its home website nor its YouTube channel, the video is available elsewhere on YouTube.

what if the Honduras Air Force detained U.S. citizen children?

This story was written by Dottie Laster and originally posted at Anti Trafficking News by Dottie Laster 

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) there is a need for emergency shelters due to an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States. One of the solutions that ORR is using is to detain children at Lackland Air Force Base. According to ORR they have just over 200 children housed at the Air Force base (see the New York Times story). According to the story, border apprehensions overall have declined; there were 340,252 nationwide last fiscal year, down from 1.2 million in 2005. The small increase of children to cause such extreme measures as housing on an Air Force base seems suspicious.

These children are all in the United States without adults to accompany them. They have been detained by Immigration or Customs and Border Patrol, some as young as 8. Many have been victims of sexual abuse, human trafficking and other crimes. According to the Flores vs Reno Settlement "all minors are to be held in the least restrictive environment, be provided at least 6 hours of education daily, and access to legal services and mental health care. Any minor who is a victim of a violent felony, abused abandoned or neglected or a victim of human trafficking may qualify for immigration relief." According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act trafficking victims are not to be detained or deported.

According to one of the detained children, after the press tour was over the 2 hours of education they were receiving was taken away, the teachers replaced by guards, the board games taken away, the outdoor time evaporated and the children were denied even arts and craft supplies. All this changed after the the single tour of outside observers left. Many non- profit legal service providers have volunteered free legal services to these children only to be rebuffed and denied access.

When remembering the Stanford Prison Experiment, by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, one recalls how college students treated their “captives” in the short time they had power and control over them. It was a lesson for psychologists and sociologists to understand how people behave in the absence of oversight and in the position of detaining others. It could be assumed that groups of people detaining others are susceptible to the actions portrayed in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

When the inequity of immigrant children, being held with no outside representation and advocates, are wards of large bureaucracies who benefit financially from their incarceration then I wonder why anyone would think it is ok to allow these children to be denied legal and psychological services. Why is a detaining organization able to operate unlicensed and in a location where no one can check on the children?

Also, how can 200 immigrants be allowed on an Air Force base? Just to visit a family member who is in the Air Force is a long process which involves many levels if identification. What decision maker combined the U.S. Air Force with detained immigrant children? Does not this suggest an image of the least-in-voice crushed by the most powerful organization in the world? If US citizen-abandoned children were held on a Honduran Air Force base behind guards with no access to legal services, education, or mental health services, would we cry foul? Would we demand their rights be protected? Should we treat all children as carefully as we treat our own? 


Related articles
Lackland AFB a temporary shelter for immigrant children (mySanAntonio.com)
UK Border Agency 'detaining children in degrading conditions' at Heathrow (guardian.co.uk)
DEA admits to role in deadly Honduras helicopter shooting (cbsnews.com)
US DEA Agents Kill Up to Six Civilians in Honduras (news.antiwar.com)
Reverberations from drug raid felt in US, Honduras (kansascity.com)
Hondurans attack Government buildings, demand U.S. leave (redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com)

May Day

May 1 is commonly celebrated as a workers' day around the world. In many nations, in fact, it is an official holiday. Compare the findings in this video with the common disregard given workers in our society (see a video interview on the origins of May Day with historian, David Green).

recent multimedia on modern slavery

In addition to KONY 2012, other multimedia pieces on abduction and modern slavery have recently come online. In the top video, photographer Lisa Kristine gives a TED-talk on modern-day slavery around the world and the abolitionist efforts of Free The Slaves. The bottom clip is from CNNs Slavery's Last Stronghold, examining conditions in Mauritania where a sizable minority of the population remains enslaved.