Working Life

   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 […]

Read the full story

  This Week in Bigotry In an attempt to "rebrand" Arizona, whose recent immigration law has been called racist, Governor Jan Brewer bans teaching ethnic studies. After smearing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for having worked for civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, GOP furthers discredits her by pointing out that she read The Diary of […]

Read the full story

   Via The Wall Street Journal today: Federal prosecutors, working with securities regulators, are conducting a preliminary criminal probe into whether several major Wall Street banks misled investors about their roles in mortgage-bond deals, according to a person familiar with the matter. The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche […]

Read the full story

    Good news: A federal judge Wednesday put on hold a state plan to furlough about 100,000 employees for a single day next week, as tensions between Gov. David A. Paterson and lawmakers over a budget stalemate escalated. To avoid a government shutdown, lawmakers Monday voted to force about half of the state work force […]

Read the full story

   This past Friday, I wrote that the financial powers were winning the debate on Capitol Hill. Today, another victory for those powers: The Senate on Tuesday voted unanimously to require a one-time audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency actions during and after the 2008 financial crisis as part of broad legislation overhauling the nation’s […]

Read the full story

We know it’s not easy to unionize. It just got easier, at least for people in the railway and airline industries.   The Federal Register out today announces: The National Mediation Board overhauled a decades-old election rule to make it easier for airline and railway employees to unionize, in a sign that labor is getting […]

Read the full story

   A lot of pain is going to continue to wash across the country. Witness this info on the continued lag in the construction industry: Construction is a big employer and one of the better-paid sectors for men who lack a college degree. The sector has shed 2.1 million jobs from its peak in March […]

Read the full story

   The forces trying to instill some rollback of the power of the financial elites suffered two defeats yesterday. First, Bernie Sanders’ amendment to bring more scrutiny to the Fed was watered down. Where did the pressure come from to let the Fed continue to operate in the same way it did before the crisis–a […]

Read the full story

   It may seem relatively small but there will be an excellent window through which to view the president’s future intentions: will he be for the people or for the financial interests? Many people have already made up their minds–for good reason. But, this will be a moment–will the Administration veto the financial reform bill […]

Read the full story

   Duh. The truth is that the only reason they did this and ignored the obvious was greed: Former Bear Stearns Chief Executive Officer James Cayne said Wednesday that his firm’s risk level was too high in the year before it collapsed. "That was the business," Mr. Cayne told a hearing held by the Financial […]

Read the full story