Working Life

   We are going to see alot more of this in the next couple of years: More than 50 day laborers stood, bored, anxious and mostly silent, in the sun-blasted parking lot of a Home Depot here last week, tracking the ebb and flow of customers and hoping for work. The hours crawled by. Six, […]

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   For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been focusing a lot of observations about the financial mess–the Paulson bailout for bankers, the AIG bailout, the "The Audacity of Timidity: Where Is The Challenge to Market Fundamentalism"–but, to start off today, I wanted to turn us back to some real voices. And this comes courtesy […]

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   Last night’s debate, not surprisingly, didn’t finger the real culprit in the economic crisis hitting people everywhere–by the way, an economic crisis that is a far more ancient phenomena than the last few weeks. The real culprit is Market Fundamentalism.    And, so, I offer you this: "The Audacity of Timidity: Where Is The […]

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   As I said yesterday, the crazy-assed rise in the stock market on Monday was all about one-time profit-taking. And today look for things to begin to come down to earth because, as The Wall Street Journal reports just now on its website: U.S. retail sales took the sharpest drop in three years during September […]

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   I feel like I’m in the middle of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier movie. You know, when the entity masquerading as God talks a good game and is trying to seduce his listeners into believing that a wonderful future awaits–if only he can hitch a ride on the Enterprise. To which Capt. Kirk […]

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   I thought I’d take a short timeout from the on-going wildness in the markets (don’t pay any attention to the rallies you might see in the markets for one day–things are still very dire) to make an observation about the politics of hypocrisy in New York City. This has some relevance to the lives […]

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   Sounds like one of those spam emails you get, huh? Well, it feels like the members of Congress operate that way. People keep talking about stimulus as a way of stemming the financial global meltdown (um, it might be rough again today–foreign markets all plunged deeply and the Dow futures is showing a huge […]

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  The drumbeat has begun: we have to cut spending because there is no money left. You hear it at every level of the political debate, from candidates to pundits. But, it’s a lie. We have plenty of money if we have the political will, to paraphrase the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, to go […]

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   Yesterday, I said this about what to expect in the near future: One or two or more big retailers go belly up. No one is going to be spending money this holiday season. You know the problem is acute when you read, as I did yesterday in the Financial Times, that Las Vegas is […]

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   The wild swings in the markets around the world are just the most obvious symptom of an economy heading down. You probably know by now that credit is frozen–so businesses can’t borrow to pay off normal bills. Banks are just unwillining to hand out money when they have no idea what the underlying value […]

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