Working Life

  Let’s see. You’re an editorial board member of the vaunted New York Times. You get paid a lot. Is there at least an expectation that you get your facts right? I know–rhetorical question. It happens every day but sometimes there are just whoppers that need correcting–because they do make a difference. In today’s editorial […]

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    Dear Ms. Warren: congratulations for jumping into the U.S. Senate race in your state. And good luck and be well–you will find that being a "candidate" offers challenges quite different from having to answer to discourteous, uninformed Republicans. Respectfully, I’d like to ask your position on a number of issues.    Quick context. There […]

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   I have a good friend who is always sputtering about "how terrible our educational system is because how can people think this?", whatever the preposterous "this" of the moment is. But, I see it differently. Sure, the stupid, mindless invective streaming from FOX News and much of the traditional press is central to framing […]

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   A few days ago, I took part in a meeting organized by the AFL-CIO to launch a new publication called "Exiting From The Crisis"–a roadmap for a new global economy. The main speaker at the small meeting was Joseph Stiglitz. He outlined some great points and realities about the economic crisis with the bottom […]

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 My refrain, whenever I hear about the "deficits", is very simple: we have plenty of money. We are the richest nation in human history. The problem is our priorities. And this week it boils down to this: do we want war or do we want teachers who will make our kids ready for the future? […]

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   Three trillion dollars. Think about all the state budgets that could be helped with that money. The teachers, firemen, police officers whose jobs could be preserved. The millions of people we could put back to work during the greatest economic crisis we have faced in generations. Not to mention the lives that could be […]

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   In the dysfunctional world of politics, games are played that no normal person would think makes sense. Right now, one of those games is being played out in astonishing fashion: Congress is being told that if it wants money for teachers, Haiti reconstruction and other good social needs, it has to vote for billions […]

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   Tax Day is approaching. I did a little exercise, thanks to National Priorities Project, about what we could do with the money spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s worth thinking about since there is more money about to be wasted on the Afghanistan quagmire.    I chose New York. According to the […]

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   The president, having just announced that we would be wasting tens of billions of dollars more in a pointless, tragic, immoral war in Afghanistan, will hold a job summit tomorrow. It is a very small point but telling that we would first be told that vital resources will be spent in a conflict that […]

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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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