Working Life

Sometimes CEOs and the economic elites do stuff that is so transparently absurd that it sort of makes me laugh. Add to that list the letter, “A statement on the purpose of a corporation”, released this past week by the Business Roundtable, signed by a couple of hundred CEOs, promising to be, well, nice to […]

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Working on in a hog processing plant is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet—and it’s about to get a whole lot worse, evoking “The Jungle” of the early 20th Century. In a classic profits-over-people move, a new regulation is about to hit which would eliminate any speed restrictions on how fast hog […]

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It’s just basically a good thing when good, new, progressive people run in primaries against incumbents. Even if that incumbent isn’t a horrible human being and has a decent voting record—compared of course to the rest of the politicians out there. Today we get to hear from a darn good candidate, Albert Lee, who’s taking […]

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I like the ring of The Stop Wall Street Looting Act, don’t you? True, it’s part of the business model of the joint, especially the private equity pirates. The Act is, in fact, aimed squarely at the private equity industry, who have stripped and destroyed hundreds of companies. I’ll talk about the Act with the […]

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I have to tip my cap to the conservative, anti-worker right-wing. That whole gang has been far more focused, in a laser-like way, on seizing power in places where it can matter a lot—the local and state political arenas. Progressives, until recently, just didn’t focus enough on state capitols and local races—letting the right wing […]

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Wait, didn’t we just talk last week about the attacks on government workers? Well, a week doesn’t go by when another attack against people, who keep our society working, isn’t launched by this administration—this time it’s the workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. AFGE Local 1236 Bethany Dreyfus joins me to give us the lowdown […]

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If you look hard enough, you can find conspiracies to defraud workers in every corner of the economy—and those conspiracies are usually dressed up as something entirely different. Take the people who work for the VA—there is a conspiracy to crush their union and cut wages, all dressed by in the cloak of “efficiency through […]

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It’s an action-packed, let’s-catch-the-thieves-in-the-act episode. The Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee just wrapped up its two-day secret June meeting without triggering a new cut in interests rates—and what does that mean? I unravel the state of play at the Fed—and ask the question why shouldn’t we change the basic structure of the Fed—with Dean […]

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I just returned from the great city of San Francisco which hosted the state Democratic Party Convention. And in my audio bag are most of the speeches of the Democratic presidential candidates who gave their pitches to the delegates—California, with a much earlier primary than usual, will potentially have a decisive say about who will […]

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Murder, violence and robbery—it sounds like a list for a plot of The Wire. But, no, it’s just another standard operating procedure for the free market system—in which people are murdered in Colombia thanks to so-called “free trade”, workers are beat up and sometimes killed at McDonald’s because the company doesn’t care about its workers […]

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