Working Life

If you want to know why the Wall Street elite and the bankers who robbed us blind are laughing all the way to their mansions, it’s because the joke is on YOU. On every American. Because after they robbed the country, and destroyed millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in value, YOU get to pick a nice part of the tab.

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Just to close the loop on a farce I’ve written about a couple of times recently (here and here), please try not to be too impressed by the optics of the publicly announced $1.37 billion fine agreed to by Standard & Poor’s to settle charges of inflating mortgage ratings. It’s rubbish. And it means the day is coming soon when the new financial industry scandal/scam will unfold and screw millions of hard-working people.

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So, you really have to work hard at lying or fibbing or misstating the facts to get the traditional media elites to come down hard on you when it comes to so-called “Free trade”. Those elites have been cheerleaders for the rancid NAFTA-style trade deals going back three decades. But, the president has earned it when it comes to his claims about job benefits in the Trans Pacific Partnership: Four Pinocchios, considered “whoppers”, from The Washington Post

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Recently, I’ve written about the ways in which TPP destroys our economic base, jobs, and, when it comes to health care, actual lives (here and here are two recent contributions). So, we should appreciate Nobel Prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz’s voice on the issue of how TPP will threaten the health of millions of people.

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I start from the basic presumption that the president, and most of the people who work for him, are very, very smart people. So, when the president’s point person on the Trans Pacific Partnership, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, marches up to Capitol to testify on the TPP and gives false information, you can only conclude that he’s lying and intentionally misleading Congress. That’s the upshot of what happened on Tuesday.

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It seems like…just a week ago that I wrote about a proposed slap-on-the-wristfor Standard & Poor’s. Ah, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving. But, this one may give a new twist to the absurd world in which these guys in the executive suites of Wall Street and the financial world commit crimes, never pay for those crimes, keep their jobs, continue to get huge pay and benefits, sock the shareholders/customers with the cost of paying miniscule fines…and never admit to the crimes.

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Thank you, Greece voters.

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As I wrote the other day, an anti-Trans Pacific Partnership rally was set for today to confront the negotiators for this odious deal–a deal that contradicts the president’s own rhetoric to combat inequality. As much of the news was about the approaching snow (as aside: when did New Yorkers become such a soft, coddled bunch to go into full panic mode over a little blizzard?), a hardy group of activists and good people stood outside the Sheraton New York (7th Avenue and 53rd), where the negotiators were meeting, to denounce this travesty. A few pics.

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It just gets worse for workers.

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It’s pretty simple: you can’t advance a progressive agenda, or even one you call “liberal”, that claims to want to combat inequality AND go all out to ram through the Trans Pacific Partnership using the odious “Fast track” authority. Here are the contradictions.

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