Global Business News

If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone.

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http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/09/who-to-blame-for-mortgage-crisis.html

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Salon, American Casino, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, documentary, bankers, brokers, subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene, redlined, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Global Economic News, 

Today the idea of anything -- a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house -- being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

Read more: http://globalbestpractice.blogspot.com/2009/07/ikea-is-as-bad-as-wal-mart.html

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Tags: IKEA, Walmart, China, Cheap labor, low-cost producer, Outsourced manufacturing, World Bank, Columbia University, Russian forests and timber, Global Economic News, Global Development News, Salon,

Lebanon's voters gave the White House the victory it wanted -- with a lot of help from Hezbollah.

President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last Thursday may already have borne fruit. His call for political moderates in the Muslim world to fight extremism may have helped tip the weekend's parliamentary elections in Lebanon to the anti-Syrian March 14 Alliance. Obama did not explicitly call for the defeat of Hezbollah in the elections, but the Lebanese already knew where the administration's sympathies lay. His speech came three weeks after a Beirut visit by Vice President Joe Biden in which Biden warned at a news conference, "We will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the composition of the new government and the policies it advocates."

Read more: http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-wins-election-in-middle-east.html

Tags: Biden, Obama, Salon, Lebanon election, Hariri, Damascus, Global Development news, Hezbollah, Lebanese, Nasrallah, Christians, Sunnis, Samir Geagea, Lebanese election, 

The man who created flash mobs explains why crazes like Susan Boyle ruin our ability to focus on the big picture.

Bill Wasik is an Internet instigator. Though he works as an editor at Harper's, Wasik is best known as the creator of flash mobs, that early 21st-century trend in which, directed by chain e-mails, people formed mobs in public places for no other reason than to form mobs. That's hardly his only act of Internet impishness, though: Over the course of his career, Wasik has adopted numerous online personas in order to test the boundaries of our ever-expanding viral culture. He tried to derail the burgeoning career of indie rock darlings Peter Bjorn and John, started a fake version of the New York Times for conservatives, and ran a site focused exclusively on negative attacks against political candidates. In the process, he's analyzed how and why some stories became cultural phenomenons and others languish in the nursing home of online oblivion.

Read more: http://globalbestpractice.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-go-viral.html

Tags: Bill Wasik, nanostories, viral culture, salon, How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, buzzfeed, Jonah Peretti, Contagious Festival, Global Blog Network, youtube, myspace, 

Even liberals are getting antsy about debt and government spending. Stop worrying. The deficit hawks are wrong.

By Robert Reich

It's the kind of thing I expect to hear from deficit hawks and chicken littles -- from the self-described "fiscally responsible" right, from the scolds Ross Perot and Pete Peterson, from my former cabinet colleague Bob Rubin. But yesterday I was shown slides developed by the putatively liberal Center for American Progress intended to make the point. And today's front page story in the New York Times, by the eminent David Leonhardt, entitled "Sea of Red Ink: How It Spread From A Puddle," puts the issue right before our progressive noses, so to speak.

The Great Debt Scare is back.

Read more: http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-deficit-scare-returns.html

Tags: Robert Reich, Salon, Debt, Deficit, Economics, Obama, New York times, Center For American Progress, Republicans, Democrats, GDP, Wall Street, Global Economic News, Bill Clinton, Budgets, 

Dick Cheney's former company spun off KBR in 2007 -- yet paid a huge fine for the military contractor 3 months ago.

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http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/bush-is-gone-but-halliburton-keeps.html

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Military, Pentagon, Opinion, Pratap Chatterjee, Iraq War, KBR, FT, Halliburton, Will Gabrielski, George W Bush, Pentagon, Heather Browne, Dick Cheney, Salon, Global Development News Blogspot,

The prophet of hope now doesn't even bother with explanations when he reneges on his campaign pledges.

Read more: http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-trail-of-broken-promises.html

Tags:  Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joseph Lieberman, Opinion, Barack Obama, David Sirota, Salon, 

Business has never been better for the fearless pilot who takes back millionaires' expensive toys.

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http://globalbestpractice.blogspot.com/2009/06/lear-jet-repo-man.html

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baby doc duvalier, Chicago, gulfstream jets, Haiti, lear jets, lear jets repo man, repo man, sage-popovich, Salon