Working Life

You may have been checking out all the ruckus in the stock market just after the Fed decided to end its bond-buying program to prop up the economy. The strategy of the Fed was simple: try to keep things from really collapsing. But, the mindset before and after this program is really telling about what they don’t get.

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As regular readers of this space know, I’ve argued for a number of years that the whole obsession over the debt and deficit is just crazy. It’s a manufactured crisis and evidence just keeps mounting that the entire austerity-budget-cutting mania is just foolish and, on the facts, wrong. But, if you want to worry about the deficit, here’s a nice wrinkle that will frustrate the hell out of the “keep immigrants out” bozos: immigration cuts the deficit.

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Yet another installment in the decades-long white flag of surrender to the corporate elite took place in a relatively unnoticed vote — what, with the more important, front-page, relentless coverage of the passing of what’s-his-name Gandolfini. The country has a new trade representative…well, that’s not really accurate — Citibank has a new trade representative.

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Poor Amazon. It’s unhappy that it can’t do what it wants with its workers in Europe.

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That elites and the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) don’t understand what is happening to most working people is never more apparent when discussing the Federal Reserve Board, and the basic abandonment of the idea of full employment.

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Sometimes you can get numbed by numbers. Other times numbers make my eyes get wide. This is an example of the latter.

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A few days ago, I wondered why we anyone would think that there needs to be a debate about whether there should be a corporate income tax. Yes, I know the answer — it has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with dumb, blind ideology. I never tire of showing how stupid the argument is. So, here you go.

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I got a couple of emails about my post yesterday that posed the idea that the danger from trade deals is higher than the spying uproar underway. And those emails were, how should I say, skeptical about my point. Fair enough. Let me expand.

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Look, having the government spy on millions of people is not a good thing. But, it’s fascinating to me the lack of interest the traditional media shows in going after an equally dangerous and, arguably, a more damaging power exercised by the president: the power to seize away Congressional power when it comes to trade, and pushing through trade deals cobbled together in secret.

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Well, I have to hand it to Wal-Mart in one sense. The company, if only subconsciously, understands that it deals in fantasy — a fantasy that ignores the deep corruption of the company, from an entirely cavalier attitude towards the mass deaths of garment workers in Bangladesh to its own putrid track record abusing workers in the U.S. to the greed of the Waltons. So, to play out the game of fantasy, they role out one of the best: Tom Cruise.

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