Media Bits and Bytes - What You Don’t Know edition

Portside
Google says the FBI is secretly spying on some of its customers; Journalists in the service of Pete Peterson; "Actipedia" Crowdsourcing platform goes public; Digital Elite flirts with Socialism (and Nixon) at TED; Commotion wireless: free and open way to network; Moving from an age of Internet scarcity to abundance; Apps are creating new jobs, but also adding to unemployment; Meet the new mobile workers; Quantum Computing moves forward...

Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs

Nelson D. Schwartz The New York Times
With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

labor

Growth of Income Inequality Blocks Recovery

JACK RAMUS Talking Union, a DSA labor blog
Growing income inequality—approaching now obscene levels—is not simply a ‘moral outrage’. It not only represents a gross violation of historically held American values or reasonable equality for all. It is a condition that has served, and continues to serve, as a major cause of the lack of sustained economic recovery in the US now for five years—as well as a major factor in explaining why the US continues today to drift toward another ‘double dip’ recession.

Five Reasons the Keystone Pipeline is Bad for the Economy

Brendan Smith Labor Network for Sustainability
The American labor movement is once again facing a most controversial issue - the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While labor leaders weigh the pros and cons of building KXL, they should keep in mind that the pipeline is as much a threat to our economy as it is to our planet. After a year of extreme weather - at an extreme cost to the economy - this age old jobs vs. environment debate is emerging as a false choice.

labor

The Robot Will See You Now

Jonathan Cohn The Atlantic
"In Brazil and India, machines are already starting to do primary care, because there’s no labor to do it,” says Robert Kocher, an internist, “They may be better than doctors. . ." The rising costs of health care, an aging population in the United States and other nations, are spurring investments into the development of sophisticated machines that will be able to perform tasks now done by highly skilled workers. What may be the impact on the healthcare workforce?

A Bit of Optimism in the Alps, A Lot of Pain in the Everyday World

Carl Bloice Black Commentator
While some of the world's economic and political elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, a United Nations agency reported that there has been an increase in unemployment planet-wide of 28 million since the onset of the current economic crisis five years ago. One million jobs were lost in western capitalist economies last year alone and three million in the rest of the world.

Job Numbers Add To The Case Against Right-Wing Austerity

Isaiah J. Poole Campaign for America's Future
The fact that the economy created 157,000 jobs in January, and that there were significant upward revisions in previous months’ jobs reports, is no signal that we’re coming out of our nation’s jobs crisis.

Government is Hurting the Economy - by Spending too Little

Ezra Klein The Washington Post
In light of the report that the economy contracted in the last quarter of 2012 due partly to cutbacks, Ezra Klein notes that one man's big government socialism is another man's premature and destructive fiscal retrenchment.

As Union Membership Declines, So Do Wages - Despite Job Growth

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of union members fell by 400,000 last year, to 14.3 million, even though the nation's overall employment rose by 2.4 million - the unionization rate to its lowest level in close to a century. among full-time workers, union members had median weekly earnings of $943 last year (about $49,000 annually), compared with $742 (about $38,600 annually), for comparable nonunion workers.
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