Working Life

I think the White House has been brilliant just this once. The nonsense about Larry Summers being the leading candidate to replace Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is an elaborate ploy designed to do one thing: avoid real questions about the Fed.

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Not a new story. But, it’s kind of amusing to see it in The Wall Street Journal, framed as the scary threat to business.

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I mean this in a couple of ways. If people in Detroit were all named “Jamie Dimon,” a bailout would be on its way, free and clear, low-interest, no questions asked, the same kind of bailout JP Morgan Chase’s Dimon and his gang of thieves on Wall Street were able to pocket after they cratered the economy. But, barring Dimon being an actual whore, not simply a financial one, the familial connection ain’t happening for the people of Detroit — not that they’d really want it. That said, there is a real argument to made: Wall Street should pay for Detroit’s fiscal situation. And I’d propose a surtax on profits called “The Jamie Dimon Surtax.”

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Ah, yes, this is the corporate version of “I want to spend more time with my family” because you can’t actually say a lot of people didn’t want me around. Which is the truth for David Cote and Ellen Futter.

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Detroit. The filing for bankruptcy is a sad, but, in a way, predictable event — if one is willing to see what this really means. It’s a deep metaphor for the failure of the so-called “free market”.

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Let me make a list of thankless jobs: taking out the trash, rooting for the Yankees and absorbing the knee-jerk hate and…defending the IRS. That last one…whew…not a pretty one. So, a tip of the hat to Citizens for Tax Justice.

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It’s an ingrained fact that health care costs in the U.S. are outrageous and economically foolish — even if the drug companies and insurance industry maggots are are happy to keep raking in billions on the backs of sick or dying people…all in a day’s work. And so the way in which the media, and others, are greeting the new health care programs coming on-line should be viewed in context.

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Corporate raiders now control the Twinkies brand. You may remember almost a year ago that Hostess Brands wanted to eviscerate wages and benefits for the thousands of workers.Typical story: the company shut the place down and it reopened with non-union workers at lower wages, all courtesy of private equity pirates. But the union hasn’t gone away.

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The bankers and other elites who were behind the global financial crisis are still out there making a whole lot of money — so the system has not really changed much. The message has been: hey, screw millions of people, no problem, go right ahead and keep your jobs. But, a smidgen more of this might help.

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A basic economic truism: if people don’t have money to spend, stuff won’t get bought. Sounds like a Yogi Berra observation? Anyway, it’s just another day showing why the idiots running economic policy are, well, idiots.

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