Working Life

First things first: I am not at all shocked or surprised by the stupidity flowing from the White House. If you are, you have not been paying attention for the past 5-6 years, or you’ve engaged in willful denial. But, the moronic, and immoral, proposals on Social Security do give us a wonderful moment of clarity about politics and the press.

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Banks and elites will wring their hands. How can those Italians just stick a thumb in our eyes, they’ll say. Well, because real people don’t like austerity — especially when it’s imposed by the very people who made a mess of the economy.

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I don’t know whether anything will make the austerity mongers around the world — from Wall Street, to the halls of the political leadership — stop for a moment and think, “what the hell are we doing?” Long unemployment lines don’t make them pause. So, if people freeze to death or shiver through cold weather because they can’t pay heating bills, will that matter? Welcome to the reality in Greece.

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The obsession over balancing budgets and reducing debt is a foolish global exercise at a time when people need governments to spend more money to create jobs and demand. And one of the great wizards behind the curtain of the foolishness is the International Monetary Fund.

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Austerity is wildly successful — if you understand that the only logical outcome of austerity is higher unemployment. Take a bow, austerity. You did it.

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Austerity has to be fought. And at least the Greeks have the gumption, along with a measure of desperation, to pack the streets.

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All you need to know about what the elite are doing to the people is to understand what people in Spain are doing to feed themselves.

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Austerity is a bad thing. As I’ve pointed out before, when an economy is suffering from lower demand, the last thing you want to do is squeeze the pocketbooks of the very people who you want to have out there spending money. But, here’s another thing: it makes you sick. Literally.

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You don’t have to look further than the utterly pathetic game of repeated “stay-out-of-jail” cards handed the global banker elite to understand why people are pissed—whether in the U.S., Greece or pick a country. Time after time, the guys who cratered the economy, and robbed people of their jobs and wealth, are given a pass [...]

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     So, it’s not all bad news in the world. Some sanity prevails when real-life economics, not blather about the glories of the "free market", triumphs and one can hope for a bit of truthiness to spread.    First, the good news: President François Hollande’s Socialists and their allies won an absolute majority in runoff [...]

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   Here is what austerity and the spread of the "American disease" does for people: Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people [...]

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    Really. When I read The New York Times editorials about the economy, or the truly shallow reporting from most of the paper’s reporters, often I think: the people at The New York Times actually are dolts. They don’t understand economics–at all. But, more often, it’s worth considering–they actually believe what they write, even if [...]

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   A few months ago, I spent 5-6 hours interviewing Paul Krugman for Playboy magazine. It’s now on-line here. He speaks candidly–surprise–about the economic misdeeds of Wall Street, the foolishness of the current austerity obsession and focus on the non-existent debt crisis, and a whole range of topics including his view that the Obama Administration [...]

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   I’ve written a lot about the complete immoral insanity of the obsession over the phony debt and deficit "crisis"and the rush to impose austerity on the people when we really need much more public spending to employ the masses of people who are falling, falling, falling further behind. Well, truth is austerity is not [...]

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   Willie Sutton, the infamous bank robber, could not have said it better than Hassan Heikal. And Heikal is no bank robber—he’s the chief executive of EFG Hermes, which describes itself as the premier investment bank in the Middle East. But, like Sutton, he kows where the money is—and that’s where he wants to go [...]

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    You may join me in the celebration of failure–a celebration I have been urging we look forward to for a very long time. Do not listen to the hand-wringing and whining about the implosion of the Catfood Commission II. This is a great thing. It is fabulous.    BUT…    Let us also pause, [...]

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