Working Life

    Earlier today I wrote about the plan by the European Commission to launch an anti-trust investigation into the credit default swaps market. I thought I was done for the day but now comes word that our own government appears to be going the other way: weakening important rules for derivatives that were part of […]

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    Via the Financial Times today: The European Commission has opened sweeping antitrust investigations into a collection of the biggest players in the credit default swaps market, including ICE, the industry’s leading clearing house. The investigations, launched by Joaquín Almunia, the competition commissioner, open a new chapter in the commission’s attempts to regulate a group […]

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   Interesting to see different takes on the deal reached in Los Angeles for city workers’ contracts. First, the LATimes: Unions representing 6,300 L.A. workers reject Villaraigosa’s labor deal Four out of 18 labor groups at Los Angeles City Hall have rejected Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposal for reducing the city’s budget shortfall by scaling back […]

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   Applause for this move: As newly elected Republican state legislatures aggressively push a slew of anti-union measures, the International Association of Fire Fighters is freezing its federal political spending and shifting all resources toward its beleaguered state and local colleagues. “With the survival of our union and the ability to preserve and protect the […]

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    When you swim with piranhas and think they are your friends, well, you’ll eventually get a rude lesson. Especially if you do just a little thing to hurt their interests. So, it is with the folks on Wall Street, and, in particular, the hedge fund world: they are pouring huge amounts of money into […]

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   For all of those people who criticize empire and for those out there who correctly worry about the unequal distribution of economic power, come close and absorb another truth: the obsession around keeping the dollar high is not healthy. In fact, a lower dollar would be better for most of us–and for the environment… […]

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    I happened on this one during my Sunday morning check of the West Coast weather (since I have to head out there this week–beach weather? Baseball weather?). California is often cited as the place where national trends start. True or not–here’s some good news: Californians are ready to have taxes raised to preserve a […]

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   Interesting juxtaposition, I think, in these two press reports. First, the financial industry is doing all it can to neuter the rules imposed in what I thought was the relatively meak Dodd-Frank changes: Wall Street and the financial industry spent more to lobby Washington in the first quarter of this year than a year […]

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    Why doesn’t Bill Daley, the White House Chief of Staff, just come right out and say it: we’re going to ram through these so-called "free trade" deals because, dammit, we need that corporate cash for the re-election campaign? Just be honest. Stop coloring it in the phony Republican-corporate rhetoric of "job creation". Then, at […]

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   My head hurts every time I read about the phony crisis about the debt and the deficit–whether it be the idiotic headlines bowing down to the rating agencies’ hand-wringing (the same bozos who did such a good job blessing the financial instrument trash churned out by Wall Street) or the daily headlines about a […]

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