Surging share of Americans consider themselves lower class

Chris Roquemore once thought of himself as working class. But it's hard to keep thinking that, he said, when you're not working.

The 28-year-old father said he sparred with his supervisors at a retail chain about taking time off after his mother died — and ended up unemployed. Since then, Roquemore has worked odd jobs and started studying nursing at Long Beach City College, trying to get "a career, not a job." All those changes, in turn, changed the way he thought of himself.

Roquemore is among the small but surging share of Americans who identify themselves as "lower class." Last year, a record 8.4% of Americans put themselves in that category — more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey, a project of the independent research organization Norc at the University of Chicago.

The rising numbers surprised some researchers and activists even in light of the bruising economy. Read more >>

Study: One-Third Of Recent Marriages Occurred Between Online Courtships

A new study offered by researchers at the University of Chicago and reviewed by a team at Harvard University shows that a third of recent marriages happen between couples who met online. For the study, researchers examined a sampling of marriages of over 19,000 people that occurred between 2005 and 2012.

Of the couples that participated, the research teams found that 35 percent of those marriages occurred between couples who found one another through the Internet. The type of sites that connected the future spouses varied, U.S. News & World Report learned. Approximately half of those who met online did so through dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony.

Out of the other half, 20 percent reportedly met through social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, while 15 percent met through communication-based online mediums such as email and chat rooms. Read more >>

The Shock Doctrine - Full Movie

A documentary adaptation Naomi Klein's 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine. An investigation of disaster capitalism, based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism -- the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock -- did not begin with September 11, 2001.

The films traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.

New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, shock and awe warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Broke Americans Can't Even Afford to File Bankruptcy

This year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are expected to be too broke to file for bankruptcy.
The average cost to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, the most common form of consumer bankruptcy, is more than $1,500, according to recent research submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

As a result, anywhere between 200,000 and one million consumers are estimated to be unable to afford that steep cost this year. The research, conducted by a group of professors from Columbia University, the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis, examined how bankruptcy filings spiked after people received their tax rebates in previous years. They estimate that another 200,000 consumers, who would otherwise not have enough money to file, will use their tax refunds to pay for bankruptcy this year.

"For lots of people, bankruptcy has been taken off the table as an option because of the severe fees involved," said Jialan Wang, co-author of the report. Among those fees is a charge of about $300 just for filing the paperwork with the federal court, while the rest typically goes to bankruptcy lawyers, said Wang. More...