Both the Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith and the Wal-Mart Effect are economic studies, one of how rampant speculation in the stock market caused the destruction of the American economy, the other how exploitation as used as an economic tool by a single large company has caused cheaper goods but a less ethical society. Both authors regard the federal government as complacent and negligent in its duty to properly police the economy: "freed at last of all government regulation or retribution, the market sallied off in to the wild blue yonder" (Galbraith 42). However, Galbraith's fundamental contention is that although clearly better regulation was needed in terms of how securities were traded and to curtail the over-willingness of banks to lend, the real reason for the Crash of 1929 was not simply the state of the stock market, but the structure of the American economy as a whole, which he calls fundamentally unsound (Galbraith 177). The rich had grown so rich and the poor had grown so poor that there were simply not enough dollars to support the explosion in manufacturing.
These types of inequities are also the concern of the Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman. However, while Galbraith attempts to use a past, historical scenario to explain the present, Fishman analyzes an economic phenomenon of the here and now. He is less interested in discussing economic theory than Galbraith, and devotes more attention to specific aspects of the Wal-Mart supply chain. His style is less linear, and more anecdotal, and also more passionate, because the abuses are going in the...
Jim Crow Laws: The Segregation of the African-American in the United States of the 19th Century Perhaps one of the most discussed events of the history of the United States is undoubtedly the situation of African-American individuals during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. From the moment the first black slaves arrived to Virginia in the first part of the 17th century, racism and unjustified violence and
The optical business and the element of glass here appear once again to depict the domain of whites as superior to what a black person is expected to know and learn. In Part 3 of the essay, glass appears again in the form of a weapon in the hands of white people. The narrator is hit with an empty whisky bottle by drunk white men who at first appear helpful.
E.B. DuBois arose as a prominent voice calling for more direct civil confrontation. It is impossible to judge who was right given the context in which the two sides were working, but an analysis of how history played out reveals both the wisdom and the shortcomings of Washington's approach to equality. Given that it took half a century following Washington's death for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, especially when
One of the major components of these Jim Crow laws was disenfranchisement which was "largely the work of rural and urban white elites who sought to reassure" whites in the south that white supremacy was the law of the land. As a result, lynching and other forms of violence against blacks were endorsed, encouraged and rationalized in the minds of most southern whites (Rabinowitz, 168). A prominent spokesman against African-American
Civil Rights Jim Crow Jim Crow laws were a set of "black codes" designed to perpetuate a system of racism and near-slavery for African-Americans, predominantly in the South. The Jim Crow laws existed from the end of the Civil War until the Civil Rights movement -- nearly a century. Jim Crow laws represent a clear case of how racism becomes institutionalized. In the case of the Jim Crow laws, racism was embedded
When he became president through the assassination of President Kennedy, he not only accepted the civil rights agenda of President Kennedy but he was successful in passing pivotal legislation. Through shrewd deal making and lobbying of senators he was able to get a bill passed which prohibited segregation in places involved in interstate commerce. The following year when attempts were made to restore voting rights to blacks in the south
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