DOCUMENTARY CINEMA Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

DOCUMENTARY CINEMA - Essay Example This essay will delve into various aspects of the film Dark Days by way of relating them to the broader social, cultural and political contexts. Firstly, homelessness in the United States can be traced back a long way. The direct and circumstancial evidence for this is available in literary and performing arts of the last one and half centuries. Prominent among the artists who dealt with this subject are Walt Whitman, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, John Dos Passos, Bill Mauldin, Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. In the early twentieth century slang, homeless people were casually referred to as hoboes, which is a term of denigration. These so-called hoboes had a reputation for being barbaric, wild, lazy and unscrupulous. The first detailed representation of these people living on the fringes of society started appearing after the end of the Civil War. We further learn that â€Å"following the Civil War, a legion of men traveled the country with no visible means of support. Some earned the sobriquet "hobo," which they embraced it as a nickname for a migrant laborer, that is, a "hoe boy." Whatever the origin, sociologists of the 1920s used the phrase "hobohemia" to describe a subaltern lifestyle embraced by white working-class males. When congregating in places such as Chicagos "main stem," they forged a swaggering counterculture that defied domesticity. They embraced the labor radicalism of the Wobblies, even while they were parodied by vaudeville and motion picture comics.† (Lookingbill, 2005, p.314) During these early days, homelessness in the United States was largely an issue of social class and was caused by the huge disparities in wealth distribution between the top ten percent of the population and the rest. But in the last century, the issue has grown to encompass factors of racial discrimination, drug abuse and homosexuality. Of the half a

Production And Perfect Competition - Megamergers and Oligopoly Coursework

Production And Perfect Competition - Megamergers and Oligopoly - Coursework Example The common market structure is either perfect or imperfect competition. Agricultural products are traded in a perfectly competitive market structure. For example, milk producers supply processed and non-processed milk products to the market for the consumers. The milk market is characterized by large of number of sellers and buyers who are involved in this exchange. In addition, the market is unregulated by the government hence a free-market with no government intervention. Owing to the large numbers of milk traders, the effect of a single seller/buyer may go unnoticed as each trader’s contribution is insignificant (Siegfried, & United States, 2010). Both the seller and buyer are price-takers in the market as the exchange price for milk products is determined by the market forces of demand and supply; therefore, each trader has limited influence on effective market prices (OaShaughnessy, 2005). The milk products traded in the market are homogeneous and undifferentiated. However, the sellers and manufacturers attempt to create a difference in the products through branding and packaging. Being a perfect competitive market, there are no barriers to exit or entry into this market. The buyers and sellers would leave or enter the market at will. Under this market, the milk products are similar in shape, size, quantity, and quality, hence, infinite cross elasticity of demand for milk products (OaShaughnessy, 2005). The buyers are therefore indifferent to all the milk brands and products in the market. Being a perfectly competitive market, milk market is characterized by perfect information symmetry. All the participants in the market have perfect information on all the prevailing market conditions, thus, no seller could benefit by charging abnormal prices for milk. Finally, the single unit price of the milk market is not affected by