when home becomes a frozen house.

Today - for the first time since the census began counting in 1880 - more than half of American adults are single. They are tied with childless couples for the distinction of being the most predominant residential type, more numerous than nuclear families with children, multigenerational families, roommate homes or group homes. Manhattan alone is home to a million people whom Klinenberg calls "singletons," living alone in one-person dwellings. Manhattan is typical of US and European cities. The people living solo are not all old widows and widowers. For the first time in recorded US history, the majority of people that the census refers to as of "prime marriageable age" – 18 to 34 years old - are unmarried and live alone. For younger Americans this does not feel like a radical change. For older Americans it is a sea change.





The implicit message of Hochschild's book is a critique of capitalist values that largely ignore the fundamental work of sustaining people's lives in favor of work that directly produces profit. The drive for profit produces endless personal services sold to wealthier over-committed people. At the same time I must point out that those services for pay are not there for the majority of Americans who cannot pay. Low income, hardworking parents and their families cannot afford the basic services that would allow their families to enjoy a decent quality of life. The drive for profit, combined with the least time off in the industrial world, robs all of the American people of time off to care for, and fully enjoy, their families. Although poor working families suffer most, all economic strata are deprived.



http://www.zcommunications.org/living-alone-the-rise-of-capitalism-and-the-decline-of-families-by-harriet-fraad

Scholars and journalists have, however, dissected US military activities over the decades, but few writers have dared to try to take on the economic institutions, the crucial other pieces of modern US Empire – the one the military and CIA dirty tricksters try to protect and defend in every post World War II administration. So readers should avail themselves of Professors Leo Panitch’s -- Political Science Professor at Toronto’s York University -- and his colleague Sam Ginden’s  excellent researching and insightful analysis, as well as their readable description and explanation of how the money part of the US empire works or doesn’t (The Making of Global Capitalism, The Political Economy of American Empire, Verso, 2012. ).

Those who have lived in ignorance of institutions like the Treasury Department, the IMF and Federal Reserve will discover in this book’s pages that these mysterious agencies play imperial roles that penetrate deeper into the world than the more publicized Pentagon and CIA.

During World War I, American finance and industry showed how US economic power, more than military strength, could relate to winning a world war.

http://www.zcommunications.org/understanding-global-capitalism-by-saul-landau