Working Life

When you cut through the chase about the economic debate of the future, it really boils down to this: What is the standard we should use in setting the  standard for a decent living? Apparently, The New York Times has decided: don’t count on decent pensions, don’t count on health care, and forget decent wages. […]

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Got crabs? Cut corporate taxes. Can’t get your kid to eat spinach? Cut corporate taxes. Worried your skin it too dry? Cut corporate taxes. And, then, of course, want the economy to be more "competitive" and "grow"? Cut corporate taxes. None of the above will be helped by cutting corporate taxes–but the reasons given for […]

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   I have not had time to read the full report of the Congressional commission on the financla crisis. But, here is one thing in the preface worth reading: The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone wild. The captains of finance and the public […]

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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 think we are making a mistake, both economically and politically, by confining our defense of Social Security to an argument about simply preserving current benefits. We should be pushing for an INCREASE in Social Security benefits as both a social and economic necessity.   Let me start with the hardest challenge facing people who […]

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In the lore of political budgetary rhetoric, Sen Everett Dirksen’s observation is often useful: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money” he is rumored to have said–rumored because there is some debate about whether he actually used that whole phrase. But, whatever–it’s useful to our current discussion. Where […]

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  Each day brings a stupefying new chapter in the class warfare underway in America. Today, it’s the unfathomable idea that regular people who had worked their entire lives serving the public should now be effectively cast out into the cold, their pensions ripped up. But, what we need to connect is this: there is […]

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We have an affliction that really undermines a decent society. It’s a tendency to want to ignore inconvenient facts, either explicitly or because we are encouraged to look quite narrowly and myopically at a problem. Which brings me to Wal-Mart’s new attempt to whitewash its practices, using the First Lady as a prop.   We […]

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You can’t find a better contrast between the vision for our country than those offered by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Goldman Sachs. One vision sees America as the land of equality and fairness. The other vision sees an America where greed is good.   Here is some of what Trumka will say today at […]

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   I found this article in the Financial Times quite interesting: Coming out of the crisis, China wants to forge a new phase of globalisation where many of the roads – financial, commercial and perhaps eventually political – converge on Beijing.  China is not seeking a rupture with the international economic system (although some foreign […]

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