Economic Fragments 01/29/09

Comedy Central Edition
1) Colbert on the turbulent chicken-wing market
2) Stewart on the stimulus and CEO spendthrifts

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Economic Fragment or Figment?

Bonus points to anyone who can find me the source of this quote I read, which I know I read in the last two days, but cannot find. According to google, some person who reviewed a book on Amazon saw it too, so I’m not making it up. Please help.
Basically, the article was talking about [...]

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Economic Fragments 01/09/09

The Culture of Scarcity:
When good times go south, Americans typically either have turned for relief to defiant gallows humor or, conversely, sought comfort in idealized visions of a purer, resilient, close-knit Heartland, far from the scoundrels on Wall Street and their political enablers in Washington.
So now that unhappy days are here again, some commentators are [...]

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Economic Fragments 1/04

“It’s the System, Stupid!”: More Wolff
It would be reasonable to identify, investigate, and publicly discuss every possible cause of such instability.  The goals would be to offset, moderate, or eliminate its effects or, better yet, the instability itself.  But a taboo blocks consideration of one such cause, namely capitalism’s class structure.  For the last half-century, [...]

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Economic Fragments 12/27

Nation’s Wealthy Cruelly Deprived of True Meaning of Christmas (The Onion)

I certainly hope poor people don’t take what they don’t have for granted…
War On Terror Nears $1 Trillion Mark
Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s four times more than America spent fighting World War I, and more than 10 times the cost of 1991’s Persian Gulf [...]

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Economic Fragments 12/24

Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein
When she arrived back at university in 1996, she discovered that everything had changed. During her previous stint as an undergraduate, she had spent all her time protesting the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the curriculum and the media; campus politics in 1989 had mostly meant identity politics. But students in [...]

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Economic Fragments 12/16

From The Onion…
$700 Billion Bailout Celebrated With Lavish $800 Billion Executive Party
Amid the bleak backdrop of imminent economic collapse, worried observers got some good news last October when executives from the nation’s top 10 failing companies celebrated the historic $700 billion government bailout with an ultra- extravagant $800 billion party aimed at restoring confidence and [...]

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Economic Fragments 12/14

Cereal and Pop Culture

The cereal business had one major drawback—there was little substantive difference between brands. To stand out from the crowd, manufacturers realized that they had to focus more on the outside of the box than on what was inside. Some tried decorating their products with adjectives, creating names like University Brand Daintily Crisped [...]

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