Working Life

   There are days when I would just rather be a sports reporter. Today is one of those days. Sports news repeats itself–but every day there is a new twist. Scores may be the same–but how a baseball game ended up 3-2 will always have a different make-up.     Not politics, though–or at least the […]

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  This is a post simply suggesting we ponder what it means to live in a conflicted, grey world. Yeah, I hate that. It would be nice if everything was clear cut. But, it isn’t. Especially for people who are trying to survive in a corrupt economic system.   On the one hand, I am […]

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   This is a bit late and dumb: The Senate Banking Committee has started gathering information for what could become a hearing on the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, a committee aide said Monday.    I mean, c’mon. As I wrote yesterday, S&P is a tiny cog in the corrupt economic system. You want to […]

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    I am perplexed by the storm of criticism leveled at Standard & Poor’s. Don’t get me wrong–that S&P, or any of the ratings agencies, is even taken seriously is a monumental farce, given their role in the financial crisis.   But, we’re missing the point:   It is a mistake to solely blame the […]

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   Many of us have been troubled that bankers and financiers have gotten off and paid no price for the financial crisis that obliterated millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth–and, indeed, the CEOs and Wall Street folks are reaping huge pay packages again. The slaps on the wrist for Goldman Sachs and […]

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   To return to my theme of "numbers are a bitch"…here is one to chew on: $1.3 trillion. It’s a gap–a BIG gap…and in that number is part of the story of the crisis we’re in.   At this point, after checking in with my colleague and friend Dean Baker, the Gross Domestic Product is […]

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    Sometimes numbers are a bitch. Because they expose ugly truths that we either choose to ignore or don’t understand. We better get this one straight in the next few months or the bi-partisan cuts just shoved down the throats of the American people will pale in comparison to what will come post 2012.    […]

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   We can wait until the next inevitable capitulation–anyone want to take bets on the Bush tax cut expiration deal?–or we can keep debating about what has already, predictably, happened. We can complain about the Tea Party, FOX News etc–but I confess to being bored by that discussion simply because, get over it, they are […]

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    We are wasting our breathe.  The president, and, respectfully, a significant number of Democrats, long ago signaled that they were going to choose a horrendous path for the country by embracingthe phony debt and deficit "crisis". We are here, on a day of complete capitulation, because of a very long march–years in the making–of […]

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   The hammer that Verizon is seeking to bring down on its unionized workers is an important story–and the importance is being sorely missed, or at least, buried in everything I have read so far. It’s a story that typifies the broad class warfare underway in America: warfare that is happening largely because corporate executives […]

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