Working Life

   The man behind the curtain is working hard, I’ll tell you. The spectacle out front, full of blaring headlines and prosecutors hype, tells us: we got those bad guys. Really? Nonsense.     We’ve all read about this: Federal prosecutors in Manhattan accused Raj Rajaratnam, the chief of the Galleon Group, of being at the […]

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     Earlier today, I wrote about John Boehner’s very loose connection to the actual facts of our economic crisis. Well, in the meantime, Boehner is in trouble with the facts and a whole bunch of Catholic professors. To wit: More than 75 professors at Catholic University and other prominent Catholic colleges have written a […]

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   Rhetoric is a good thing–except when you have the facts wrong. And, boy, the relentless, daily idiocy spewed out of the mouths of our elected officials about the economic crisis is astonishing. Consider, this morning, Speaker of the House John Boehner. Two days ago, Boehner gave a speech to the Economic Club of New […]

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    Scott Walker, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Paul Ryan…make your own list of the people who are viciously anti-union. We know the threat they pose: attacking the labor movement, and undermining the right to strike, is a death blow to the middle class and justice in America. The problem is that we are also undermined […]

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    Do not get distracted by the claims by people who want your vote. Nothing has changed. The robbery of the wealth of the country continues. And the rhetoric aiding and abetting the robbery is going to get ramped up around corporate tax cuts.     Let’s start with the hardship sweeping the country…It’s been a […]

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    I think we make a mistake describing the unrelenting class warfare underway as a campaign undertaken by evil, crazed or demented very rich people. Sure, there are a few of them and it is certainly a part of an ideological belief ("we rich people are just better and more skilled and tough luck"). But, […]

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    It’s a great time in America–if you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Not so much if you are a regular American. The profit gains of the Fortune 500 registered the third largest gain in history in 2010. By contrast, the people continue to struggle. Even the editors of Fortune recognize the […]

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   Guarantee you this won’t merit front-page news: Progress on a free trade deal with Colombia has cleared the way for the White House to seek Congressional approval of a package of trade agreements that includes pacts with South Korea and Panama, as Republicans have demanded. Obama administration officials said Wednesday that they expected technical […]

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   This was a bit of a surprise to me, though I have not been watching that closely: Faye Moore, the up-and-coming president of Local 371, who was seen as a possible contender to lead DC 37, was ousted as president of her union by a decisive margin on Friday. Moore lost a hotly contested […]

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   I have a small amount of sympathy for Kent Conrad, even though he is one of the leading obsessed people about the phony deficit crisis. He is one of the so-called "Gang of Six" in the Senate working to come up with a "bi-partisan" solution to the phony crisis. But, things are tough: Kent […]

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