Working Life

   A fundamental right of a functioning democracy is the right of the people to know what the government is doing–particularly with the peoples money. Let’s not be naive: we all have lived through many chapters in the country’s history where we do not know, in advance or in real-time, what the government does in […]

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   A quick post today since yours truly is in transit. Along the same theme of "don’t pay any attention to the person behind the screen who is promising recovery," today’s version has retail sales having gone up. But, as this points out: Of course, the industry’s 1 to 2 percent increase is not an […]

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Anyone who has ever been caught with his pants down knows it’s easier to look up to Jesus than it is to squat down into a lotus position. So Brit Hume, Fox News commentator and moonlighting theologian, is urging the troubled Tiger Woods to mend his skirt-chasing and om-chanting ways by embracing Christ. On Fox […]

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   This is how fragile–and foolish–the talk of recovery is. Yesterday, you may recall that I pointed out the record level of personal bankruptcies recorded in 2009–at the same time that some "analysts" were heralding a recovery based on some uptick in manufacturing (one would venture to guess that those same "analysts" were among those […]

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   It is going to take the concerted effort of a lot of voices to overcome the noise being generated by the people who would like us to think that economic salvation is at hand. So, we need to keep pointing out some harsh realities facing real people. For example: The number of Americans filing […]

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The Republican world view of "national security" has been laid bare–ideology is more important than the security of the people. In my view, the fallout from the airplane terror plot makes this abundantly clear.   I start from my own touchstones about the definition of "national security": it is a measure of how the people […]

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    There was a bit of wisdom that one could gain from the airline terror plot that, in my view, says a lot about the Republican view of the world and our own definition of national security. Yesterday, to its credit, The New York Times had an editorial entitled "Senator DeMint’s Priorities," which made this […]

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   …is that one in four children in the United States of America–the wealthiest country in human history–are on food stamps.

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   A quick post today on the run…someone is going to have a nice holiday haul thanks to you (from The Wall Street Journal): American International Group Inc. is preparing to pay its outgoing general counsel Anastasia Kelly several million dollars in severance after she resigned over federal pay curbs, according to people familiar with […]

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   Merit is one of the enduring standards we are all taught from the moment we start school. If you get good grades, you advance. If you perform well, you advance. What, then, are we supposed to think about the young children or college-age students who read about this, courtesy of The Times Gretchen Morgenson […]

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