Society

That the American and global economies are being transformed by the forces of globalization, demographics, and over-indebtedness is self-evident. What is less self-evident is the impact this transformation will have on the future of work, earned income, and financial security.

The key question an increasingly vulnerable workforce is asking is: What skills will be in demand once this transition occurs?

On Friday, October 7th, a beautiful blue-sky and warm-ish October day, I went to Zuccotti Park in NYC with Livio Sanchez (film editor) and Debby Brand (camera operator) to see firsthand what Occupy Wall Street was all about and record what we could.

What we found were people united by a sense that our national narrative is off course and that resentment over the patent unfairness of our current system is building. Perhaps the most common expression we found was that people, to varying degrees, thought that there was something systemically wrong.

Because of this widespread view of ‘everything being wrong,’ there was, naturally, no single message or thing around which everyone had gathered. Instead, the view was simply that the system being discussed — political, capitalist, economic, or monetary — was broken.

When you hold such a view, there’s really no ‘ask’ that makes sense. If the political system is irretrievably in the clutches of special interests, then voting new members into that system is perceived to be a waste of effort.

The short video below (less than four minutes) captures well what we observed:

The title of this blog is not mine, it belongs to Paul Ferrell of CBS Marketwatch who used it in a piece penned and posted yesterday to one of the largest financial websites in the business.

I am reposting a portion of it here because I find it interesting as an indicator of social mood.  Let’s face it, a growing swath of people are not comforted by the V-shaped return of the stock market but instead see a continuation of the policies and power structures that got us into this mess in the first place.

More and more people are simply fed up with the financial and economic looting that has already taken place and downright angry to see that it is continuing unabated. 

To the list of looted items tossed onto an already well-lit bonfire we can now add "the future" and "time" because the various stimulus programs and bailouts have done nothing to get us onto a sustainable path of repair. 

But seeing such things openly in print in the mainstream media reveals a profound shift in attitudes.