Working Life

   The financial "reform" bill is still not law. One reason is the failure to cobble together enough votes to move past a filibuster. Russ Feingold explains his opposition: Mr. Feingold said he wanted to reimpose Depression-era rules that would bar traditional banks from affiliating with investment firms, among other things. "We need to eliminate […]

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   Chris Dodd is heading into retirement. On the way out, he tried to weaken a key part of the financial reform package but ruffled a few feathers: His amendment would have delayed for two years any ban on derivatives trading and given the Treasury Secretary the ability to quash the proposal outright. Liberal Democrats […]

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   In the dysfunctional world of politics, games are played that no normal person would think makes sense. Right now, one of those games is being played out in astonishing fashion: Congress is being told that if it wants money for teachers, Haiti reconstruction and other good social needs, it has to vote for billions […]

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   Some day, one would hope, journalists would stop accepting the usual erroneous assumptions. One of the biggest has to do with the unionized auto industry. Today, The Wall Street Journal has a piece that bemoans the lack of increase in workers hired at General Motors at a much lower wage, per recent concessions agreed […]

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  This Week in Bigotry In an attempt to "rebrand" Arizona, whose recent immigration law has been called racist, Governor Jan Brewer bans teaching ethnic studies. After smearing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for having worked for civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, GOP furthers discredits her by pointing out that she read The Diary of […]

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   Via The Wall Street Journal today: Federal prosecutors, working with securities regulators, are conducting a preliminary criminal probe into whether several major Wall Street banks misled investors about their roles in mortgage-bond deals, according to a person familiar with the matter. The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche […]

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    Good news: A federal judge Wednesday put on hold a state plan to furlough about 100,000 employees for a single day next week, as tensions between Gov. David A. Paterson and lawmakers over a budget stalemate escalated. To avoid a government shutdown, lawmakers Monday voted to force about half of the state work force […]

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   This past Friday, I wrote that the financial powers were winning the debate on Capitol Hill. Today, another victory for those powers: The Senate on Tuesday voted unanimously to require a one-time audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency actions during and after the 2008 financial crisis as part of broad legislation overhauling the nation’s […]

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We know it’s not easy to unionize. It just got easier, at least for people in the railway and airline industries.   The Federal Register out today announces: The National Mediation Board overhauled a decades-old election rule to make it easier for airline and railway employees to unionize, in a sign that labor is getting […]

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   A lot of pain is going to continue to wash across the country. Witness this info on the continued lag in the construction industry: Construction is a big employer and one of the better-paid sectors for men who lack a college degree. The sector has shed 2.1 million jobs from its peak in March […]

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