Archive for the ‘Credit debt’ Category

Hee hee. Spitzer.

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

It's Wednesday now and, on Monday, PBS' Frontline re-ran the truly excellent profile of the credit card industry. Granted, the interview with then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a lot funnier now, but the episode was a truly horrifying and in-depth look at a really shady industry that bankrupts a ...

Voudoun Economics

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Normally, I resent when someone makes some headlines for coming up with a snappy, headline-friendly term for something completely random - Gen Y, frienvy and, to be honest, anticonsumerism spring to mind. It's sort of lazy journalism. But who can resist Zombie Debt? Yeah, I had to go with Thriller. It's sort of ...

Oh no, I’m only an 87.9

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

How confident are you as a consumer? It's 87.9. That's it. That's the answer, at least according to the Conference Board, the group that compiles the Consumer Confidence Index cited in articles like this Associated Press article to tell us, the consumers, how confident we feel. So we're at an 87.9. That's down ...

The rest of the world

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

America is big and bad in terms of the junk we buy and the amount we go into debt to get that junk. But what's going on in the rest of the world? Showing the colonies that they can still beat us at something, British personal credit card debt is even higher ...

Finally, the interview

Friday, January 18th, 2008

I called him. He called me. I forgot to call him. He forgot to call me. It just never worked out. But now, after all this silliness, I finally have my interview with Brandon McCormick, director of Consumerism! The Musical, the first anticonsumer satire I've seen in years that hasn't made ...

HA!

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

In what has become my new favorite example of corporate culture, the domain name http://www.anticonsumerism.com/ has been registered by one of those companies that registers likely domain names in bulk and then sells it off at inflated prices to anyone interested. HA! In the mean time, as my planned interview fell through, here ...

Hot topics

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Anticonsumerism is really as broad a topic as business is, but there are several topics I plan to focus on in particular in this blog. 1. Anticonsumer efforts themselves Did you know that Slow Down Week starts Monday? It's an effort by the folks at anticonsumer magazine Adbusters to get people to ...