David Gillette, creator of IllustratedEssays, has a new one out about the disappointing Copenhagen climate change talks. If you missed last month’s Gillette/Robert Reich essay on EconomyStory called “Why the Recovery is Happening Without Us,” here it is again:

As described in our last post, the retailer H&M is suffering a public relations nightmare stemming from a New York grad student’s noticing on the street hundreds of unsold garments that it destroyed. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs are all ablaze in condemning H&M for not donating the clothes to charity. The H&M Facebook page [...]

You may have heard about the big to-do going on over H&M (as well as Wal-Mart) dumping unsold clothes instead of donating them to charity. A few days ago a City University of New York grad student noticed hundreds of the stores’ discarded garments and called the New York Times, which wrote up a story.

What happened next has become a familiar story in the annals of bad corporate p.r. H&M took too long to respond, and the Web went wild. A day later, H&M issued a statement. Wallet Pop…

Just saw this item. Saddled with debt, the legendary New York restaurant Tavern on the Green, located in Central Park, had its last seating on New Year’s Eve. The web site is still functioning, however, as are the memories of people who ate there, snapped photos available on Flickr or shot video available on YouTube. [...]

Take a look at this chart of the S&P 500, and note the big dip starting in 2000 and repeating in 2008. If you happen to be an investor who went on that roller coaster ride both times, you can probably be forgiven for being too dizzy at this point to delve into the obfuscatory world of 10-Qs, 10-Ks, and other byzantine company filings mandated by the SEC in the interest of transparency.

Unfortunately, however, maybe that’s the only way these days to get the real scoop on a company’s financial health. Investor outsourcing of crucial due diligence to the media, stock analysts, and even the ratings agencies led to massive losses in the accounting scandals in early last decade and in the financial collapse later on.

So when it comes to your money, how can you trust anyone but yourself these days?

“While there aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules for mining SEC filings for interesting nuggets, it’s a pretty safe bet that if the words “company yacht” are mentioned in the filing, it’s worth at least a quick skim.” The web site footnoted.org received a lot of favorable press last year, including this report [...]

When I was a kid, 2010 sounded like a year beyond science fiction, a time when anything might be possible. But now that that impossibly futuristic date has finally made its way to the front of the line, all I can think of is my disappointment in the lack of flying cars.

One thing that never occurred to me in those decades leading up to the latter part of the Big Zeros is that America would experience an economic crisis so profound as to spawn a blog like this. If you had told me, say, 25 years ago that one day I’d be blogging about a near-depression, I would have said “No way!” (I wasn’t so articulate back then.) I also might have said, “What’s a blog?”

But here we are…

One item to catch up on, if you missed it the first time. Christmas week, EconomyStory wrote about Laredo Reads, a campaign to bring a new bookstore to the Texas border city that is losing its only bookstore, a B. Dalton, this year. Book sales, like sales of many things, were down in 2009, and the growing acceptance of e-books only added to retailers’ woes.

This ad for Volkswagen in France is called “Save The Traders,” a parody of musical charity events involving lots of pop stars. Gawker noted more recession-themed ads back in February.

From the Empty buildings for economic reasons photo pool: Click on an image to see it full size. More photos here.

Just how did mortgage-backed investments that were rated AAA by the ratings agencies Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch, wind up as “toxic assets” that precipitated a financial crisis that nearly brought down the world economic system last year and fed straight into this vicious recession? After all, investors depend on the agencies to assess [...]