Category: Economics
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The Battle of the Basket
Sometimes magazines surpass your expectations. I click on a lot of links that my friends post about social issues on Facebook, but I can’t say a lot of them lead to Esquire magazine. Yet the other day, I followed a link posted by a former teaching colleague of mine to an excellent article Esquire ran by…
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Corporate Welfare.9: Markets and Chains
Today I’m posting a link to an article from the blog CivilEats.com by Adrien Schless-Meier called “Why Grocery Store Workers Are Making Less While Big Chains Make More.” It’s a topic on my mind because one of the songs on the record I’m working on is about the economics of supermarkets. The song is called “King Piggly…
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Sunday Paper with the BPF: Ahhh, Mindfulness
Well, I don’t really read a Sunday newspaper anymore. Either they’ve been driven out of business by the internet or intellectually eviscerated by corporate centralized ownership. But I’ve been kicking back and checking out some posts on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) website after renewing my membership today. Among them was a piece with a…
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Corporate Welfare.8: Twitter Takes
There’s a new story out today from Julia Wong of In These Times about how Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco “have become a symbol of gentrification and displacement for housing activists and community organizations in the city. ” I asked a friend of mine who had moved from the Bay Area to New York fairly recently…
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Corporate Welfare.6: Pulling a Fast One
UC Berkeley’s Labor Center has published a new study on the role public subsidies play in the business model of fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s. Like the other corporations in this series of posts, it turns out that these firms surreptitiously pocket billions in public subsidies while preaching the doctrine of…
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Corporate Welfare.5: Pigskin welfare
Some corporations, like GE and Bank of America, have to resort to creative accounting to make it look like they lost money to avoid paying federal taxes. The National Football League is not one of them. A recent Change.org petition reads as follows: “Despite the fact that it is a $9Billion/Year industry, the National Football…
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Corporate Welfare.4: Avoid Amazon
Salon.com published a piece today with the provocative title, “Amazon is worse than Walmart.” Their argument centers on the notion that Amazon’s business strategy for years has been to accept near-perennial losses on a quarterly and yearly basis in exchange for achieving a near monopoly size “market share.” Walmart, by contrast, actually makes a profit.…
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Corporate Welfare.3: Welfare Wings
Today the Real News Network, who I encourage you to support during their current drive to win a matching gift, is reporting that “the Michigan strategic fund has decided to issue $450 million in bonds for a new stadium for the Detroit Red Wings, 44% of which will be financed publicly,” while the city is…
johnhdavis / inundation records 