The five most memorable US political ads of 2013 – News and views for Monday 2 December

Some news and views noted along the way.
2013-12-02_father'sson
  • 5 Most Memorable Political Ads Of 2013 – “It may have been an election off-year, but that didn’t stifle the creativity of political ad-makers in 2013… Politicians often use family members in campaign spots, but this one was particularly noteworthy: Sciortino’s father is a member of the Tea Party. The two engaged in a playful back-and-forth about their political differences.”
  • Work in the Age of Anxiety – The 40-Year Slump - ”All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three decades—globalization, deunionization, financialization, Wal-Martization, robotization, the whole megillah of nefarious –izations—have now descended en masse on the American people… The middle has fallen out of the American economy—precipitously since 2008, but it’s been falling out slowly and cumulatively for the past 40 years. Far from a statistical oddity, 1974 marked an epochal turn. The age of economic security ended. The age of anxiety began.”
  • Sistema – “There are any number of paths and initiations into sistema, the liquid mass of networks, corruptions and evasions – elusive yet instantly recognisable to members – which has ordered the politics and social psychology of Russian civilisation since tsarist times.”
  • Turning Good Economic Luck into Bad – “It is often difficult to understand how countries that are dealt a pretty good economic hand can end up making a major mess of things. It is as if they were trying to commit suicide by jumping from the basement. Two of the most extreme cases (but not the only ones) are Argentina and Venezuela, countries that have benefited from high prices for their exports but have managed to miss the highway to prosperity by turning onto a dead-end street. They will eventually have to make a U-turn and backtrack over the terrain of fictitious progress.”

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