Working Life

    It is a sad story to read, and a sad but powerful comment on who runs America. Rather than come to dinner with subpoenas and maybe even a few warrants for the arrest of the people who helped engineer the economic crisis we are still digging out of, the president is groveling–for campaign cash […]

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   You may recall that Russ Feingold was the only United States Senator to vote against the Patriot Act when it first came up for a vote in the post-9-11 hysteria days. He had good reason to suspect that any Administration–Republican or Democratic–would make reckless use of broad new powers to spy on its citizenry. […]

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   Reaching back all the way to NAFTA (oh, so ancient history…1993), there has been a complete lie and sham underlying virtually every trade deal post-NAFTA–don’t worry, so-called "free trade" advocates tell us (including free trade zealots Bill Clinton and Robert Reich) about these deals…we will put in place "labor protections" to make sure workers […]

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   Sigh. Dumb economics again–promoted by a whole lot of good Democrats who just cannot embrace the idea that you cannot fix so-called "free trade" deals by pretending to retrain people for new jobs. It’s a false, cruel promise. At first glance, it looks like a hard fight on behalf of workers: Forty-one Senate Democrats […]

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   Guarantee you this won’t merit front-page news: Progress on a free trade deal with Colombia has cleared the way for the White House to seek Congressional approval of a package of trade agreements that includes pacts with South Korea and Panama, as Republicans have demanded. Obama administration officials said Wednesday that they expected technical […]

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    Earlier today I wrote about the plan by the European Commission to launch an anti-trust investigation into the credit default swaps market. I thought I was done for the day but now comes word that our own government appears to be going the other way: weakening important rules for derivatives that were part of […]

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    When you swim with piranhas and think they are your friends, well, you’ll eventually get a rude lesson. Especially if you do just a little thing to hurt their interests. So, it is with the folks on Wall Street, and, in particular, the hedge fund world: they are pouring huge amounts of money into […]

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    Why doesn’t Bill Daley, the White House Chief of Staff, just come right out and say it: we’re going to ram through these so-called "free trade" deals because, dammit, we need that corporate cash for the re-election campaign? Just be honest. Stop coloring it in the phony Republican-corporate rhetoric of "job creation". Then, at […]

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   My head hurts every time I read about the phony crisis about the debt and the deficit–whether it be the idiotic headlines bowing down to the rating agencies’ hand-wringing (the same bozos who did such a good job blessing the financial instrument trash churned out by Wall Street) or the daily headlines about a […]

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   I’m about to dash off to a protest at the main postal office here in Manhattan for a Tax Day demonstration sponsored by US Uncut, the NY chapter of the Coffee Party and assorted other malcontents like me. In that spirit, I thought it worth leaving us with this list of the corporate tax […]

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