Working Life

   I’ve written a lot about the complete immoral insanity of the obsession over the phony debt and deficit "crisis"and the rush to impose austerity on the people when we really need much more public spending to employ the masses of people who are falling, falling, falling further behind. Well, truth is austerity is not […]

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   Willie Sutton, the infamous bank robber, could not have said it better than Hassan Heikal. And Heikal is no bank robber—he’s the chief executive of EFG Hermes, which describes itself as the premier investment bank in the Middle East. But, like Sutton, he kows where the money is—and that’s where he wants to go […]

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    You may join me in the celebration of failure–a celebration I have been urging we look forward to for a very long time. Do not listen to the hand-wringing and whining about the implosion of the Catfood Commission II. This is a great thing. It is fabulous.    BUT…    Let us also pause, […]

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   One of the things I’ve said, only half-jokingly, to a bunch of radio stations and in numerous posts (including just a couple of days ago) is that I am not a religious person but I get down on my hands and knees every day and pray, pray, pray that the Catfood Commission II fails […]

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   Paul Krugman wasn’t actually writing directly to the Catfood Commission II (speaking for myself, I decline to use a superlative being used by many to describe the Congressional fool’s gathering because the superlative implies higher quality). But, his message, looking at the debacle in Europe, is very clear: austerity is a loser.    In […]

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   Greeks have taken a big part of the brunt in Europe because of the preying on its country by banks and international institutions. Essentially, the failed strategy has been all about AUSTERITY: shrink the economy even more in return for not…plunging the economy even deeper.    The people in Greece have had enough–and they’ve […]

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   You can smell the fear and the alarms going off–not by reading The Nation (snore…kick me when it has something new to say) or The New York Times, whose "economic" reporters, with one or two exceptions, are astonishingly dumb. For some real insights, look to the Financial Times and The Economist. And the message […]

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   In the list of really annoying habits of the bi-partisan obsession with the phony debt and deficit "crisis" is the inability, or the ideological desire to willfully refuse, to do simple math. Because if you did simple math, then, you cannot be FOR cheaper government without being FOR single-payer health care. Put another way, […]

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    I am perplexed by the storm of criticism leveled at Standard & Poor’s. Don’t get me wrong–that S&P, or any of the ratings agencies, is even taken seriously is a monumental farce, given their role in the financial crisis.   But, we’re missing the point:   It is a mistake to solely blame the […]

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    So, I remember from history books the great lessons learned from the Greeks, starting with democracy, no? Time to follow them again: Greeks walked off the job for 48 hours on Tuesday, a day before Parliament is to vote on unpopular austerity measures that are deemed critical to unlocking international financial support.    After […]

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