Working Life

   Here is what austerity and the spread of the "American disease" does for people: Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people […]

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   I have a piece in Tuesday’s The Australian (if you are in the U.S. and you catch this on Monday, hey, it’s the time machine effect), basically, arguing that the 2012 presidential elections won’t change a whole lot.     See it here.     Or read it after the fold:

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    Really. When I read The New York Times editorials about the economy, or the truly shallow reporting from most of the paper’s reporters, often I think: the people at The New York Times actually are dolts. They don’t understand economics–at all. But, more often, it’s worth considering–they actually believe what they write, even if […]

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If you are one who is already bored by the 2012 elections and the rhetorical, mind-numbing repetition, here’s a little taste of what you can expect all the way into the distant future of 2016. The poodle-for-the-rich governor of New York has determined that his path to the White House in 2016–and, despite the boring […]

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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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   See, this is a good example of how the conventional wisdom we hear day after day warps the brain. More people are, in fact, being pushed into minimum wage jobs: The number of workers in New York state earning minimum wage has increased sharply since the start of the recession, one of the driving […]

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   Politicians bickering over private equity’s impact on jobs and how to bring down the high unemployment rate are entirely missing the point about the crisis facing working Americans. The predicament we face isn’t simply that there are too few jobs; it’s also that an increasing number of workers don’t have the kind of job […]

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You want to know how your dollars are spent when you buy stuff? It’s not for the wages of the workers who serve you:

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    In some ways, the worst phenomena in political and public life is the way in which we–the people–give over power to the financial and corporate elite partly because we internalize marketing phrases and economic nonsense beaten into our brains over 30 years by the brain-dead traditional media and a capitulation by the political leaders […]

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   So, The New York Times discovered this startling fact: But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass […]

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