At one time, Delphi was just another component of the vast vertically integrated manufacturing, management, and marketing colossus that was the Big Old General Motors. But in the early 1990s, GM decided to de-integrate and created the Automotive Components Group as a separate entity. About a decade later, this entity became Delphi. By 2005, Delphi was bankrupt. The bankruptcy gobbled up four years, with Delphi only emerging recently.

It is the job of activists to never be content, even when things are generally going their way. In that light, Paula Crossfield's critique of the Obama administration's food-policy initiatives seems reasonable enough.

People who were "hoping for deep improvements in our food system can point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to food insecurity are brewing in back rooms," she writes on her blog, Civil Eats.

The great residential real estate bust has been an unmitigated disaster for most types of small businesses. Retailers have suffered as consumers adjust to the loss of housing equity. Contractors, real estate agents, interior designers, architects, and insurance agents, to name just a few, have all seen their work dry up. Entrepreneurs who financed their businesses with home-equity loans, or planned to do so, are sweating it out.

Why is there no gray area when it comes to Cash for Clunkers? Last week, Edmunds.com, a consumer car site that also provides auto-industry research and analysis, put out the results of a study indicating that Cash for Clunkers had a negligible impact on the overall 2009 car market.

Wegmans, the East Coast grocery chain that—like many grocers across the country—has been engaged in a price war with competitors, has taken a novel approach in a new ad campaign: comparing itself to itself.

That's the question on the minds of everyone who doesn't have access to the beta version of Google Wave floating around the Internet right now. As more than one person has noticed, the Wave may be an amalgam of e-mail and instant messaging and blogs and wiki pages, but you really have to use it in order to understand what it does.

When the "Smart Choices" program suspended operations in the face of warnings from the Food and Drug Administration that it would investigate the program's claims that, for example, Ritz Bits Peanut Butter Chocolatey Blast crackers were good for you and your kids, health ad