Dollars & Sense articles from July 1997

Dollars & Sense archives from July 1997

Consume, and be consumed. (consumption in Chile)(Column)
July 1, 1997... Scenes from a mall: The unmistakable scent of The Whopper wafts from the Burger King. A Radio Shack employee drums up business by putting a re-mote-control car through its paces. The song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" plays over the PA. A...

The Che marketing moment. (Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara as pop-culture icon)(Column)
July 1, 1997... Revolutionary governments rarely enjoy personnel with advanced training, technical expertise or policy-making experience in the positions normally requiring them. The Cuban revolution elevated the Argentine-born guerilla leader and physician...

Let's close the CEO salary loophole.
July 1, 1997... Executive salaries are like Charlie Chaplin's classic scene in The Great Dictator. Mussolini and Hitler are sitting in a room together, each one trying to figure out how to gain some height advantage over the other. Suddenly, the two start...

Taking aim at child slavery.
July 1, 1997... If the Persian-style carpets at your local store do not have Rugmark's signature stamp of a smiling face, chances are enslaved children made them. Rugmark is a two-year-old label founded by a coalition of German and Indian groups whose inspectors...

The Albanian house of cards. (Albanian pyramids and schemes)(Cover Story)
July 1, 1997... In early 1993 a journalist with the Albanian Economic Tribune visited Albania's Finance Ministry to collect figures on the country's macroeconomic development. Confident officials provided him with rosy statistics showing that Albania had reduced...

The new loan sharks. (includes related article on US 'poverty industry')
July 1, 1997... Bennett Roberts, 74, never had it easy. He was brought up on a modest farm in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and worked for a paving company, an orchard and a quarry. He says he was hoping for a quiet retirement in 1979 when he plunked down his...

'Miracle' in Philadelphia: can fiscal management really save the cities?
July 1, 1997... In 1991 Philadelphia was on the verge of bankruptcy. With hundreds of millions of dollars in accumulated budget deficits, Wall Street refused to buy the city's bonds. City services were deteriorating, the city suspended payments to its pension...

Why did the USSR fall? The party elite, not the masses, wanted capitalism.
July 1, 1997... Conventional wisdom tells us that the remarkable demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 was propelled by the collapse of its socialist economy, leading the citizenry to peacefully sweep aside the nation's Communist leadership and their misbegotten...

The Grameen Bank story: microlending for economic development. (includes related article on organization of people-based production)
July 1, 1997... I never intended to be a banker. I was teaching economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh and I was not happy with what I was teaching. Economics is supposed to give answers to economic ills, but the textbook answers were not helping our...

Grameen's lessons.(Grameen Bank)
July 1, 1997... During the 1960s and '70s, police often charged nonviolent protesters with "failure to quit," an offense similar to trespassing, for refusing to leave the scene of a demonstration when told to by police. The charge became a badge of honor,...

Catdang basket project: a Vietnam story.
July 1, 1997... Like most Americans, Charles Miller didn't truly understand how people in the world's poorest countries live - until he saw conditions with his own eyes. In 1991, the 49-year-old New Englander traveled to Catdang, a 2,000-person, rice-farming...

Fighting phone privatization in El Salvador.
July 1, 1997... Wilmer Erroa Argueta is National and International Relations Secretary of the Salvadoran Association of Telecommunications Workers (ASTTEL), which is fighting against the privatization of El Salvador's state-owned telephone company. El Salvador's...

Alternatives to the Peace Corps: A Directory of Third World and U.S. Volunteer Opportunities.
July 1, 1997... As a recent college graduate I am experiencing the "I am out of school - now how am I going to exist, grow, enrich myself and change the world" sort of blues. If I don't want to go abroad with the Peace Corps, what's left? Food First Books has...