Working Life

   In our newest installment of false choices, from The Wall Street Journal: President Barack Obama’s decision to side with the United Steelworkers and impose temporary tariffs on Chinese car tires implies a potentially costly trade-off for the administration, trade and political experts said. In the near term, the move should consolidate the support of […]

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We don’t talk about poverty in our country. Our political discourse, guided by pollsters and consultants, directs leaders to refer to "the middle-class", not to the millions of people who live in conditions that do not get much better, whether we are in something called a "recession" or we are in "recovery". And it is […]

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   It is a failure of the rule of law and accountability that many of the bankers and financiers still have their jobs and, in fact, are not sitting in jail or defending their behavior in court. But, it is even more revealing when you read the following, via The Financial Times today: Lloyd Blankfein, […]

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   The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the president will push for the public option in his speech tonight before Congress–though there seems to be massive wiggle room in this comment: "White House officials say the president will detail what he wants in the health-care overhaul, as well as say he is open […]

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   A few weeks ago, I noted that the powers-that-be inside Washington had the knives out for the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. It’s pretty clear why: this is an agency that, if it works, would shatter the cozy little closed relationship between Wall Street and the regulators (e.g., the Federal Reserve Board) who were […]

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Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may not be in the same political party, but they’re in the same camp when it comes to opposing healthcare. What explains this bipartisan overlap? It’s not surprising that the GOP’s Governator used his veto power to "hasta la vista" child welfare programs, healthcare for the […]

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   I often ask the question: why aren’t more of the bankers and Wall Street financiers going to jail for the financial collapse they created with their manipulations and thirst for greed? Not only are they not serving time, but they still have their jobs–while millions of others lost their jobs because of the bursting […]

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   We are really going to have to push back against what the meaning of "recovery" is. I am sure you are reading the claims of "recovery" coming from various sources. Today, the OECD weighs in, via a report in The Wall Street Journal: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Thursday said the global […]

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   You don’t hear too much about immigration these days. My view has been, for a long time, that immigration cannot be divorced from the economic policies being imposed, largely with the leadership of the U.S. on other countries. If you insist on continuing to ram so-called "free trade" deals down the throats of countries […]

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Our problem in the country is not the lack of money or the lack of resources. It is how we set our priorities, whether we choose, for example, to value our communities over corporate special interests (the health care fight is one clear example of that struggle). Today, we see priorities pitted against each other […]

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