For the first time since 20 December 2020, musician, actor, and writerFrederick Ingram has posted to his niche blog, Corporate History International (with the great, if somewhat cumbersome, URL of https://corporatehistory.international). It’s a short piece about the KitKat Bar, that delicious, wafery little delight with the memorable jingle:
View original post 259 more words
Japanese are famous for stretching the flavour palette after the crispy form factor was perfected in America. Worth remembering though that KitKats originated in merry olde England (I think): https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/08/foreign-international-candy-snacks-japan/671291/
Good summary of Trump’s appeal but fails to me the case that the majority of American voters will buy it. As a corporate history researcher, I documented Wall Street shipping jobs, factories, and capital to low-wage countries for 30 years.
Of course China was the chief beneficiary of all that, with Bill Gates crowing about lifting one billion of its citizens out of poverty, never mind the Hillbilly Elegy / opioid epidemic blowback. But the tide has turned, at least in the more elevated corners of The Swamp; consider “Honey Badger” AG Bill Barr calling out the Chinese Communist Party for all manner of aggressions.
“It’s the economy, stupid” was the George Stephanopolous sloganeering that guided Bill Clinton into the White House; today I would say it’s the wage gap. It’s striking to see even right-wing governments freely signing checks, but that’s how apparent it is; it’s the common denominator of 2020, from the death of opioid zombie George Floyd to the astounding coronavirus work and travel restrictions that hit the poorest the hardest, while bolstering the case for universal health care. The last time we tried Reaganomics, all the money went to China and a few elites; that is not a scenario favorable to conservative social values or populism in general.
A major lesson of the 2016 election was that the neoliberal consensus of the prior thirty years was not the panacea its advocates claimed. Trump’s candidacy was premised on the notion that the national government should work for the interests of the nation’s people, not on behalf of globalist concerns and aloof cosmopolitan elites. Government could be reformed to strengthen the nation, rather than operating as the piggy bank for and protector of internationalists.
It’s interesting to reflect how entrenched the assumptions of neoliberalism were prior to 2015-2016. When Trump began his historic campaign, virtually no one on the Right was talking about tariffs, other than Pat Buchanan (and a long essay on the necessity of a trade war with China that Oren Cass wrote for National Review in 2014). The outsourcing of jobs overseas was assumed to be a short-term sacrifice that would result in more efficiency
View original post 839 more words
JCPenney is permanently closing 154 stores across 20 states this summer, including eight in California, as part of its bankruptcy plan. The company, one of the most high-profile retailers to file f…
Summer Break is approaching, which means unstructured time, our most precious resource. I plan on using that time to work on some long-delayed eBooks—including one on Christmas carols—and to teach my History of Conservative Thought course. I’m also hoping to rebuild my music lesson empire after The Virus sacked the imperial capital. There will also be lot of family time built in.
In addition to all of those wholesome and productive activities, there is also the siren song of video games. Video games can become a major time sink (I’m learning that with Stellaris), but they’re a good way to unwind, and require a bit more focus and decision-making than passively consuming television.
One of the major video games meta-series of my youth were the various Sim games from Maxis—SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, etc. (I had a particular fondness for the scope and…
View original post 534 more words
Corporate History International 