Working Life

Of all the surrenders to corporate power health care has got to rank right up at the top of the list. Obamacare’s failures come down to an unwillingness to consign the insurance industry to the trash heap of history and a deal which guaranteed the drug companies billions of dollars in profits. Which makes the news about slowing health care costs even more infuriating.

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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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   A good friend of mine often contends that we would have been a lot better off if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, grouping that whole swath of states south of the Mason-Dixon line into their own little country. Perhaps. But, it also seems like actual elected leaders of the country pine for [...]

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   In the list of really annoying habits of the bi-partisan obsession with the phony debt and deficit "crisis" is the inability, or the ideological desire to willfully refuse, to do simple math. Because if you did simple math, then, you cannot be FOR cheaper government without being FOR single-payer health care. Put another way, [...]

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   I have a good friend who is always sputtering about "how terrible our educational system is because how can people think this?", whatever the preposterous "this" of the moment is. But, I see it differently. Sure, the stupid, mindless invective streaming from FOX News and much of the traditional press is central to framing [...]

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   A few days ago, I took part in a meeting organized by the AFL-CIO to launch a new publication called "Exiting From The Crisis"–a roadmap for a new global economy. The main speaker at the small meeting was Joseph Stiglitz. He outlined some great points and realities about the economic crisis with the bottom [...]

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    Yesterday, I wrote about how much money Paul Ryan pockets from the insurance industry–and how the health care part of the industry was going to make out like bandits in the Ryan budget proposal. This is worth digging into a bit more because you can learn very quickly how the Ryan budget truly boils [...]

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    I am struck every day by the incredibly bizarre world we live in, where "up" is "down" and "down" is "up". I think many people are angry and confused because what they see in their daily lives–upheaval, struggle, fear–does not match much of the rhetoric coming from the people who have their hands on [...]

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I think it is important that we point out the obscenities that we see every day in life. The danger is that too many people begin to accept, out of resignation and a feeling of helplessness, stupendously immoral standards. Today it’s this one: insurance companies profit because Americans are too poor to go to the [...]

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    I always shake my head when I read that the country no longer has industry and has evolved into a "service economy". That simple isn’t true. The main problem is that we have jobs–whether industrial or service–that don’t pay decently and are largely non-union.     Someone thinks we should do something about that: The [...]

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Over the past three days, we’ve looked at the phony deficit crisis withe excerpts from my new book, "It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis", here (from the introduction), here (a taste of the the very Stupid Statements made about the deficit and debt) and here (who is behind [...]

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   There are so many things wrong about the story in today’s New York Times on New York state’s retiree health care costs that I don’t know where to begin. Here are the first three paragraphs: The cities, counties and authorities of New York have promised more than $200 billion worth of health benefits to [...]

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 My refrain, whenever I hear about the "deficits", is very simple: we have plenty of money. We are the richest nation in human history. The problem is our priorities. And this week it boils down to this: do we want war or do we want teachers who will make our kids ready for the future? [...]

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   Three trillion dollars. Think about all the state budgets that could be helped with that money. The teachers, firemen, police officers whose jobs could be preserved. The millions of people we could put back to work during the greatest economic crisis we have faced in generations. Not to mention the lives that could be [...]

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   In the dysfunctional world of politics, games are played that no normal person would think makes sense. Right now, one of those games is being played out in astonishing fashion: Congress is being told that if it wants money for teachers, Haiti reconstruction and other good social needs, it has to vote for billions [...]

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   Some day, one would hope, journalists would stop accepting the usual erroneous assumptions. One of the biggest has to do with the unionized auto industry. Today, The Wall Street Journal has a piece that bemoans the lack of increase in workers hired at General Motors at a much lower wage, per recent concessions agreed [...]

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