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There are several categories of strikes. In the United States, the most prevalent is the wage and working-conditions strike. Here, labor unions negotiate for better wages and an improved quality of life. Strikes related to disagreements over contract terms are less common. Occasionally workers strike to force an employer to recognize a union that will represent its employees. Closely related to the strike is the lockout, an employer imposed closing used to bring economic pressure on disenchanted workers.
The industrial and political characteristics of the United States provide fertile ground for labor strife. Favorable laws guarantee the right to strike for most non-public employees, although there are restrictions against strikes that may significantly affect the life of the nation. While firms may hire replacement workers or scab labor, this is commonly a last resort because it results in strained relations between replaced workers and the employer. Other types of labor disturbances, such as slowdowns, sitdowns and sympathy strikes, are generally illegal.
While strikes by public employees are forbidden, they have become increasingly common. A milestone in this area was the 1970 strike by US postal workers. The strike was resolved to the benefit of the workers. In the early 1980s, however, President Ronald Reagan squashed a national air-traffic controllers’ strike, permanently banning strikers from work in the traffic-control industry.
By nature, strikes by skilled workers are most effective. This is because replacements are not easily found. Thus, the primary successes of the labor movement have been realized among professional unions such as teachers’ unions. These strikes are usually settled quickly with strikers demands at least partially met. Interestingly, all of the four major professional sports have seen lockouts or strikes in the past two decades. The strikes normally oppose efforts by team owners to restrict player salary escalation by imposing caps or taxes. These strikes have had a significant impact on attendance and fan interest, but salary growth has not slowed.
The most prominent trend in industrial labor strife is the opposition to part-time and subcontracted labor. US labor laws require that most fulltime, permanent employees be covered by extensive benefit packages, including healthcare, pension and disability insurance. To control rising labor costs, many firms have sought to outsource tasks or hire temporary workers. A 1997 strike by UPS package deliverers, 1998 strikes by transit workers in Philadelphia, PA and automobile strikes across the country have brought these issues to the forefront.
Large work stoppages have declined from pre1980 levels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US averaged over 300 stoppages involving more than 1,000 employees per year from 1947–79. Since 1980, the average has declined to just fiftyeight such work stoppages per year.
The term “strike” has additional applications. Hunger strikes and student strikes have been undertaken to oppose political undertakings such as the Vietnam War or investment in South Africa under Apartheid, as well as socio-economic conditions such as the plight of the inner cities.
Industry:Culture
The Haloid company (founded 1906) acquired Chester Carlson’s patents for a xerographic process in 1947, introducing its first copier two years later. Plain-paper copying followed in 1959. The Xerox corporation (renamed 1961) not only dominated copy machines, but entered American speech as a synonym for copying (despite warnings about trademark use). By the 1980s, copiers became staples in workplaces, educational facilities, churches and even homes. As copiers have been integrated into computer technology often combined with fax machines, scanners and printers, and companies like Sharp compete for the market, Xerox has recast itself as “the document company”
Industry:Culture
Unlike many other nations, the United States has not promoted universities under direct federal control—apart from military academies—although federal funding and intervention in research, affirmative action and regulation of individual rights have shaped tertiary education in the postwar era. Instead, public education has evolved through systems organized and substantively funded by states and their citizens. These systems include major research universities such as the University of California-Berkeley, University of Michigan, UCLA, Penn State, University of Indiana, University of Illinois and others in systems whose enrollments in undergraduate, graduate, professional and related programs may surpass 100,000 students. These institutions also become interwoven with local development and identity in politics, medicine and sports.
Yet these great universities also participate in systems that incorporate formerly limited regional colleges and teacher’s colleges, divisions inherited from segregation, community colleges and extension programs. In all, state institutions have spread college and advanced education beyond the elite served by private schools, at minimal costs— tuition at public four-year colleges in 1998 averaged $3,000, about one-quarter the cost of private institutions. Nonetheless, state universities face important questions of quality, funding, politics and social meanings far beyond the campus.
The earliest state schools emerged in the South—University of Georgia (1789), University of North Carolina (1789) and Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (1923). Northern states, instead, debated public control over finance and curriculum in the private institutions that became the Ivy League, leading to a court battle confirming the private charter of Dartmouth College. State foundations were helped by federal allocations of land as endowment through the 1862 Morrill Act that funded agricultural and mechanical universities. Some states founded separate schools (Texas A&M), while others expanded state universities. Over time, states also founded and took over regional institutions serving specific areas—Eastern Michigan versus Western Michigan—or specific functions like teacher training (normal schools) and rural outreach. Consolidated state systems, in turn, grew in the postwar period with junior and community colleges that extended public education, albeit in a highly stratified manner.
There remains great variety between systems and within them. California has highly elaborated relationships among colleges and universities, while SUNY has sought to unify and improve New York colleges into universities since 1948 while increasingly funding another public-complex system in CUNY (City University of New York). Some systems focus on a single university (New Hampshire, Vermont), while others have multiple universities and feeder schools (Kentucky, Texas, Florida, etc.). In the South, the role of historically African American colleges within desegregated state systems has often proved problematic.
State systems, as they extend education to more citizens, often face fights over resources within the state to be allocated to each unit and within programs or cities that may compete for recognition. The mass culture of such institutions also has entailed constant challenges of sports versus academics, and demands for mass (practical) and vocational education versus research. While desegregation has made these systems of diversity, they have faced 1990s challenges over the use of race and class to foster admissions that reflect state populations. Student behavior, including excessive alcohol, problems of sex and relationships and social unrest, has also arisen as student organizations have competed with other university ideals—whether fraternities and sororities or the radical political associations in the 1960s who took over campus offices.
Here political traditions clearly differentiate a leftist Berkeley from more social campuses, and the problems of college towns dominate myriad students and academic employers.
Fights over programs also go beyond the campus. While most state universities have been buffered from direct political influence by independent Boards of Trustees, these may be targeted by governors in terms of influential appointments. Moreover, political issues of diversity, salary and productivity, and ideology can spill over into the state legislature and funding process.
Costs are also an issue. The early commitment of public tertiary education often involved free tuition for qualifying students (within the state). This has given way to fees substantially lower and sometimes more flexible than private schools, but not necessarily negligible. Out-of-state tuition, in fact, may equal that of private schools, although research universities may offer generous stipends to foreign students as well as a crosssection of American scholars. Still, containment of costs in salaries, construction and other areas is as real for these systems as for most private universities.
Nonetheless, state universities still embody the triumph of American democratic education as a limited right. They are also constant scenarios for media depictions of coming-of-age events—a somewhat more adult extension of high-school dramas of romance, sports and mayhem.
Industry:Culture
The last half-century has witnessed a massive relocation of African Americans away from farms, plantations, towns and cities in the South towards a more national and urbanized existence associated with factories, assembly-lines, service jobs, professional work and unemployment all within the context of burgeoning globalization. This structural shift has shaped the cultural experiences of African American people.
Mass migration, together with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and affirmative action policies, has wrought a unique degree of social differentiation among black Americans. One consequence has been the expansion of an African American middle class, with an estimated one-sixth of black families earning over $50,000 annually by the early 1990s. The influence of this new class is evident through the prominent placement of individuals like President Clinton’s former advisor Vernon Jordan, former Joint-Chief-of-Staff Colin Powell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It is also clear from the emergence of groups like the congressional Black Caucus and university academics whose political and intellectual influences are unprecedented. With this black middle class have come passionate arguments among black intellectuals about the manner in which to respond to the increasing social bifurcation of African American life. Struggles against slavery and second-class citizenship have historically united black people. Over the last generation, however, civic incorporation together with middle-classness has riven this traditional solidarity.
Meanwhile, poorer African Americans have been buffeted by global capitalism and by economic deprivation in inner cities. According to the 1991 federal census, over 30 percent of black families live below the poverty line. It has been estimated that more than 10 million African Americans are confined to fourteen cities with segregated black populations of at least 200,000, which denotes residential apartheid. For instance, there are fourteen job applicants for every available job in the fast-food industry in central Harlem because of the increasing globalization of the US economy. Perhaps the most striking feature of this postwar globalization is the degree to which the conditions of poor blacks resemble those of the poor world rather than those of the richest nation in history.
Economist Amartya Sen points out that African Americans are richer than Chinese citizens and South Indian peasants, but have lower life expectancies than these people.
The infant mortality rate in Washington, DC is 15 per 1000 babies born (1996) compared with 11 in Barbados, 10 in Jamaica and 7 in Cuba (1997). Rather than famine, poverty in the US causes poor diets, with higher rates of obesity and heart attacks.
Perverse representations in the dominant culture can be found in fast-food advertisements and on cigarette billboards directly targeting poorer minorities, while healthier black bodies adorn magazine covers, radiate from television screens, and saturate the sporting arena.
Professional sports has served as one escape hatch from poverty and the ghetto, especially since Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson began the integration of modern sports in the late 1940s. It is unclear how many African Americans earned their living through sports during the era of the Negro Leagues from the 1920s to 1940s, but it is likely that there are far more blacks earning a living from professional sports today. In 1997, blacks accounted for 80 percent of 361 NBA players, 67 percent of 1,815 NFL players and 17 percent of 1,100 major league baseball players. Over the last two years, golfer Tiger Woods and tennis sisters Serena and Venus Williams have courted enormous prestige and earning power; while heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson earned $60 million in six years and basketball guard Michael Jordan earned $16 million alone in commercial endorsements in 1992. Indeed, “Air” Jordan assumed an unprecedented global commodification through slick sports shoes advertising. In the process, company stockholders made a fortune, while the global spotlight revealed the company’s naked exploitation of factory workers in poor Asian nations.
Less remarked upon is the degree to which these poorly paid jobs are part of a process of globalization with devastating consequences for urban black life. The former exploitative commodity chain of slaves, sugar, cotton and popular consumption has been replaced by overseas cheap labor and shoddily manufactured goods advertised by African American sports stars, with youngsters fighting and killing other youngsters for sports shoes. Indeed, contemporary sport functions as terrible schooling for black youth.
According to a 1995 New York Times survey of the top twenty college football teams, three-quarters of these teams had graduation rates for scholarship players below 60 percent. A 1997 survey revealed that 66 percent of black youth aged thirteen through eighteen believed they would make a living through professional sports. It is true that sports can pave the way out of poverty for some; a late 1980s study revealed that fivesixths of blacks in Major League baseball born since 1940 had working-class backgrounds. Most black youth, however, never make it into professional sports, and those few who do are often ill-prepared for life after their careers in professional sports.
Most disturbing of all, the dominant culture continues to feed parasitically off black sporting prowess, oblivious to the social costs involved. The question modern sport raises for African American popular culture is: who pays the high price for “He Got Game”? Much like sports, popular music serves an ambivalent role in African American culture. A rich and varied tradition of spirituals, work songs, blues, gospel music and jazz suggests that music “be the food” of African American life. Changing jazz styles— bebop (1940s), hard bop and cool jazz (1950s), modern jazz (1960s), jazz funk, and fusion (1970s) and the new jazz swing (1990s)—make it hard to generalize about jazz, yet it is clear that jazz is part of a movement culture which reflects a disembedded modern people. While relatively unappreciated by most Americans—public television and radio stations continue to define classical music as only a European genre—jazz is the US’ classic music and is arguably the most serious musical contribution of the US to world culture.
In more recent decades, an assortment of other popular black musical genres have emerged, including: 1950s R&B, characterized by the group ballad and doo-wop style; 1960s soul, symbolizing a black aesthetic of pride, purpose and people-hood; and 1970s funk, disco and crossover. Currently, hip-hop, emerging from the fusion of rhythmic poetry and poverty-stricken city life has taken alternate directions with nationalist rappers like Public Enemy and Sister Souljah to blaxsploiters like Geto Boys and Snoop Doggy Dogg.
It is important to emphasize that many of these genres emerged from structural transformations in African American life. It is also significant to note the consistent globalization of African American popular music from jazz through hip-hop, with the latter currently being the fastest growing musical form in Europe. It should be added, however, that this European musical appreciation has exotic and imperialist undercurrents, while its exploitative features are particularly prominent. The wealth of black music contrasts with the relative poverty of blacks working in the music industry.
Furthermore, real existing urban poverty, despair and discontent inform musical genres like rap and hip-hop, which then become consumer products and in turn reduce a complex African American class structure to one negative racial stereotype of underclassness.
Meanwhile, the dominant culture feeds off these images, especially through record-buying, hipster jean-wearing, bored white suburban youth, while black youth on elite college campuses consume this music as a means to gain their “props” with the “real folk” outside academe’s privileged and safe walls.
It might be argued that African Americans have progressed from being a talented tenth in the 1890s to a talented third in the 1990s. Apart from fostering a false set of values for unsuccessful blacks, this argument ignores the precarious position of the black middle class who increasingly find themselves under attack for enjoying “discriminatory” entitlement. It also ignores the broader context of a dominant national and global culture which has historically been quite comfortable with the exploitation of people of African descent.
Industry:Culture
The most notorious union in the United States, the Teamsters have been at the center of controversies regarding the power of organized labor. In the years after the Second World War, the Teamsters became the nation’s largest labor organization. At the same time, the union’s leaders attracted attention because of their associations with organized crime.
This notoriety helped justify new efforts to halt union-organizing campaigns.
Founded in 1899 as a national union for men working on horse-drawn wagons, the organization began to evolve dramatically in the 1930s. Ambitious new leaders, such as Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, pioneered new organizing techniques that harnessed the strategic power of the interstate truckers. Eager for new members these leaders ignored traditional craft and jurisdictional distinctions to organize a wide range of workers. The union grew to be the nation’s largest and its membership became increasingly diverse.
Actively organizing among the unskilled workforce of the country especially in the South, the Teamsters became an interracial organization. By the early 1960s, it included some 200,000 African American members, about 20 percent of all the blacks belonging to organized labor. Women workers joined in large numbers as well, especially as the union began aggressively to organize warehouse and cannery operations. Seeking to attract and hold such members, the Teamsters’ leadership promised them equal wages and fair treatment. At the local level, however, where white male members adhered to the dominant prejudices of the day, discrimination frequently occurred.
Known for its aggressive and ambitious organizing, the union also became famous for its alleged links with organized crime. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters from 1957 to 1971, openly proclaimed his friendship with a number of wellknown gangsters, although he insisted that those associations did not influence his leadership. Most people assumed that Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 followed a dispute with the Mafia that led to his abduction and murder. In Hoffa’s wake, the next four successors to the union’s presidency all reputedly had connections with organized crime. In one case, Jackie Presser (president 1983–8) served as an undercover FBI informant, while at the same time campaigning to gain the assistance of the Mafia in achieving the union’s presidency.
Beginning in the 1950s, critics of organized labor focused attention on the Teamsters in order to raise questions about the power of organized labor. The combination of the union’s aggressive organizing activities and the allegations of organized-crime influence made it an inviting target. A sensational investigation conducted by the Senate’s McClellan Committee (1957–9) linked together the power of the Teamsters, the misconduct of some of its officers and the dangers of organized crime to justify new legal restrictions on all union activity. The resulting legislation, the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959), was known as the “law to get Jimmy Hoffa.” In fact, Hoffa’s notoriety offered organized labor’s opponents the chance to create a law that further hampered union organizing efforts across the board.
Industry:Culture
The living room, like the earlier parlor, often presents a home’s formal visage to visitors.
Behind the kitchen or down the stairs, however, another space in the postwar American home has fostered informal domesticity, conveyed as well in names like “rumpus” or “recreation” room. In this family room, worn furniture, recreational equipment and the debris of children and pets have defined informality Collective events from television and popcorn to teenage dances to adult parties with bars and pool tables have identified this space with flexibility memorabilia and comfort, private yet central values for the family and home.
Industry:Culture
The increasing automobility of Americans after the Second World War not only changed American geography and culture, but also benefited a set of key corporations that stood for American industrial power, and, later, its problems in global competition: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” From its infancy in the early twentieth century, the automobile industry was characteristically entrepreneurial. Breakthroughs, such as the Five Dollar Day, which helped create a mass market, the assembly-line and parts standardization are attributed to the industry’s early years (1900–20). As it matured, consolidation put control into the hands of a few powerful automakers based in Detroit: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler became the “Big Three.” Along with foreign competitors, these have constituted an oligopoly, which uses its market dominance to price vehicles for maximum profit.
In the 1960s, the US auto industry felt the threat of foreign imports. By this time, the US industry had become complacent, producing large, gasguzzling hunks of steel targeted at the average American family. Furthermore, a strategy of planned obsolescence, wherein the Big Three produced technologically inferior cars in order to promote annual model changes, resulted in a perception that foreign cars were superior.
Niches developed for outsiders in the sports car, trucks and, most significantly the fuelefficient segments of the market.
At first, European automakers like Volkswagen, Mercedes and Fiat made inroads in the US. By the 1970s, Japan’s auto industry, protected domestically by governmental tariffs, brought its fuelefficient, inexpensively produced car to the US market. Foreign imports, which averaged 22.2 miles per gallon versus just 13.2 for domestics, became an attractive alternative during US oil shortages in 1973 and 1979. Although US automakers responded with compact, efficient cars of their own (Ford Pinto, AMC Gemlin), Japanese automakers Honda, Toyota and Nissan gained significant market share in the US. As these foreign companies built assembly plants in North America and as the Big Three have acquired interests abroad in their own manufacturers and acquisitions like Ford’s control of Aston Martin and Volvo, or the Chrysler—Daimler Benz merger, the limits of nation and globalism have become murkier.
In 1997, the Big Three accounted for 60.9 percent of US sales compared with 31.0 percent for Japanese automakers. Waning fears of energy shortages have led to a demand for “family trucks”—minivans and sports utility vehicles. American automakers have especially capitalized on the rising popularity of the new big car, producing 82 percent of trucks and sports utility vehicles.
The Big Three represent what many think of as big business—faceless corporations that stop at nothing to make a profit. Union strife, most recently at General Motors, has illustrated the classic battle between owners and workers. Roger and Me (1989) depicted the socio-economic devastation inflicted by plant closings in Flint, Michigan, a scene which has been repeated throughout the country. Auto workers are faced with the threat of lay-offs, downsizing and bankruptcy due to the mature nature of their industry.
Seven million Americans directly owe their livelihood to the automobile industry. By offering individual privacy and comfort, the automobile is both a status symbol and a necessity in modern American society. Its production and distribution as well are statements about American power and challenges in this century.
Industry:Culture
The portable consumer video cameras that came out in the late 1970s extended the range of the portable 16mm camera that had allowed cinema vérité to flourish. Unlike film cameras, video cameras first used analog, and then digital, technologies to capture sound and image, dramatically lowering the price of footage and potentially democratizing production as well as distribution of moving images. On the other hand, the movingimage industries also incorporated new video delivery systems to reach an even larger audience, through video cassette recorders, cable and satellite.
The availability of cheap video technology in the 1970s allowed average lay people to produce moving images. Many more families have home videos now, even though their content differs little from previous 8mm home movies, except for accessibility. While most associated video in America with the VHS cassette, other formats have been used by professionals or independents. Hence, there was euphoria when the U-Matic was introduced with good quality BetaSP tape. More “prosumer” models followed, including 8mm, high-8 and super VHS; all are analog videotapes.
The digital age arrived in the mid-1990s, further improving the quality of the image and sound of the taped event. The camera became cheaper, smaller, even more portable.
With digital technology nonlinear editing becomes more accessible as well.
On the industrial side, digital technology has helped made Titanic a success, as well as creating other works from Toy Story to the Matrix. More and more films are now edited first in video rather than film.
With the development of the Internet, video technology has found a new channel for distribution and exhibition. It can be both broadcast, reaching whoever hits the site, or narrowcast, where only the target audience will be reached. Technology is developing quickly so that the quality of cyber-video constantly improves both in resolution and the time needed to transmit images.
We cannot fully understand the implication of these new technologies for the production and transmission of moving images and sound without placing them in the basic cultural and economic landscape of the US. When new, better quality cheaper, more accessible technologies arrive, different people in society will find diverse uses for them, be it portable video or digital nonlinear editing systems. Lay people shoot home videos, activists make community/advocacy works, artists create avant-garde works and George Lucas makes Hollywood blockbusters. In the US, while all these possibilities coexist, the commercial broadcasting and entertainment systems inevitably devise ways to make the most profitable use of the medium.
Hence, home video stays at home, while consumer camera sales go up. Activists can use video to create community and have their messages heard, but are confined to limited constituents. Artists will find small grants and museums open to their new pursuits.
Hollywood will have the best machine to produce the most expensive images, mesmerizing the audience with the mystique of technologies. The Internet sites that get the most hits mean bigger companies and the richest Internet companies will have the largest capacities for the transmission of video data in cyberspace. The marketplace is not only an economic phenomenon, but also a cultural one. Technologies are intertwined with the market, channeling money, talent and other resources, and benefiting the owners of the means of such production and distribution.
Industry:Culture
The United States has a long history of organizing religious sects, new religions and cults. The inherent individualism and right to self-determination that is fundamental to its culture makes it inevitable that many expressions of religion have emerged, many of them with cult-like characteristics. The term “cult” developed a negative stereotype as numerous cults arose in the 1970s. Current scholars prefer the term “new religion” or “alternative religion” to the term “cult.” A recent publication cited over 1,000 cults, sects and new religions in the United States. The number continues to grow as mainstream Protestant denominations (Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists) lose their appeal, while immigrants from non-Christian, non-Protestant traditions continue to flourish in the country (Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists), New Age movements continue to proliferate and an increasing number of individuals are alienated from religion altogether.
Major “new religions” or movements considered cults include the New Age movement, the Unification Church, the Way the Hare Krishna movement, the WICA movement and other goddess religions, and the Church of Scientology. Other communities in the latter part of the twentieth century that enjoyed cult-like status but no longer exist, owing to mass suicides or conflicts with lawenforcement officials, included Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, MOVE, the Branch Davidians, and Heaven’s Gate.
Mormons and Christian Scientists, now generally considered “new religions,” have also been considered cults, revealing the latter term’s instability and its dependence on perspective.
Characteristics that distinguish alternative religions from mainstream religions have been variously identified—from any religion that departs from traditional interpretation to socially dangerous groups led by cynical leaders who exploit their members. Another list of categories for distinguishing new religions or cults from mainstream include: leadership (often lay or charismatic), organization (usually less bureaucratic), size (usually small), membership (usually requires conversion to a community that excludes the unworthy), worship (often fervent or spontaneous), dedication to duty (makes more demands on time and controls members’ lives) and social status (often marginalized, uneducated or powerless) (Miller 1995:3–4).
The New Age movement is considered the outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture.
Baby boomers, former hippies and others suddenly seeking spiritual guidance may be drawn to New Age ideals as brought by David Spangler, a student of Alice Bailey, to America from the Findhorn Community in Scotland (described in My Dinner with Andre, 1981). These ideals are: 1. The possibility of personal transformation; 2. The coming of broad cultural/environmental transformation; 3. The transformation of occult arts and processes; and 4. The self as divine.
The Unification Church began in Korea in the 1950s with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, but it came to the United States in 1971 when Moon went coast to coast speaking, defending Nixon, and proselytizing on college campuses. His followers believe that Moon has revealed a “new truth,” as recorded in the 1973 Divine Principle, that he and Mrs Moon are the “true parents of humankind,” that he is the messiah whose task is to establish the true family and that he has ushered in a “completed Testament Age.” The true family begins with a “blessing,” often found in mass weddings of thousands of couples at one time.
A former evangelical and Reformed Church of America minister, Victor Paul Wierville founded the Way in 1942. His teachings reject the Trinity and deny the divinity of Jesus. The Way grew explosively during the 1970s as part of the national Jesus People revival. Teachings are spread through Power for Abundant Living classes. This group has been the subject of numerous de-programming actions, as well as federal investigations for their training in deadly weapons.
The Hare Krishna movement—or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness—set American roots in the 1960s, when A.C. Bhaktivendanta Swami Prabhupada entered New York City’s counterculture. It has aroused great hostility particularly through aggressive solicitation at airports and public places.
The Church of Scientology is a distinctive American “new religion” founded by L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86). From his 1950 publication of Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health, his followers have asserted that humans can live without unwanted sensations and fears, that humans are essentially good and that thetans (humans as immortal spiritual beings) have lived many lifetimes before. This group has been the subject of numerous cult controversies, e.g. over tax evasion and health practices, and has a sizeable following among actors in Hollywood, including Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Hilary Swank and John Travolta, who brought Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth to the screen (2000), where it failed to become a summer blockbuster.
Industry:Culture
Wall Street is the modern American “Street of Dreams,” built on the remains of a seventeenthcentury fort wall. It is the financial capital of the United States, spanning a seven-block stretch of downtown Manhattan, New York City, NY. The district surrounding Wall Street is home to numerous investment banks (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan), securities firms (Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch) and insurance companies (Metlife). Additionally the New York Stock Exchange and other major exchanges are located here. Wall Street embodies highs and lows of American life, economic prosperity and tickertape parades or Depression, recession and corporate greed (in the movie Wall Street, 1987).
Industry:Culture
