Working Life

Back in the day when I, reluctantly, took statistics (barely passing, is my recollection), the favorite cliche making the rounds was, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” (as an aside, there is some dispute about whether Mark Twain correctly attributed the saying to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli but whatever). […]

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Putting aside the noise that rumbles from the Boehner-McConnell-Fill-In-The-Blank Republican divorced-from-reality view of the economy, who rail about job-killing taxes/regulation/voodoo, the far bigger threat to jobs right now hails from the halls of the Federal Reserve Board. It could, within weeks or months, guarantee that hundreds of thousands of people won’t have a job, and reawaken the deficit-mongering crowd’s call for cuts in government that will hurt millions more.

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Full disclosure: I’ve made by contribution to the popularity of “House of Cards” by watching all three seasons (FWIW, I though the third season was stilted, pretty boring in many parts and, basically, a slightly edgier version of “The West Wing” and that’s not meant as a positive…). That said, this doesn’t surprise me because no corporation is immune from trying to take advantage of our dumb tax system that consistently rewards corporations for no good reason at the expense of taxpayers.

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Laffer. You know, the guy who came up with the most discredited economic theory in modern times that just makes you want to…laugh. It’s a joke but not everyone gets it.

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You’ve probably read about the remarkable political rise of Syriza in Greece, in an election that was a rebuke of the European austerity model led by Germany. Next up: Spain.

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Well, a tip of the hat to some people in labor for reaching down and remembering they have a few cojones left–or maybe it was reaching deep into their pockets and remembering that they have the money, and there are a lot of people (read: politicians) who will do just about anything to get a check. Like vote against fast-track and the Trans Pacific Partnership.

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Workers get killed and injured every day on the job: just the daily toll the “free market” exacts for the glory of CEOs and their enrichment. Mostly, no one goes to jail–sound familiar?–because the laws of the country make it virtually impossible to hold anyone criminally liable when a worker dies. Today, a small tiny bit of justice was done in the case of Sarah Jones.

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Not to be holier than though, I’m writing this on a Mac Air…and the IPad is on the desk along with the Iphone. But, it did make me think: how many of my dollars did Apple find a way of stashing overseas in its $69.7 billion hoard that sits out of reach of the U.S. government? Not to wag a finger just at Apple, it’s a bunch of other tech companies that lead the way on stashing overseas $2.1 trillion in corporate taxes–and the number just swells.

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It’s a good thing when we use real words to describe the truth. When bankers rip off people with mortgage scams, it’s robbery–even if they get away with it because we have a government unwillingness to jail them. And, once and a while, a politician gets it right.

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It’s not enough that Goldman Sachs is a ” financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.” The company has to dodge paying a fair share of taxes, too.

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