Working Life

   It’s official. The president’s stroll to the Chamber of Commerce marks the handing over of the keys to the future of the middle class to the business world (not to mention the complete airbrushing out of the entire economic picture anyone considered poor). And it really has happened with not much struggle.   For […]

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 Sure, elections do matter, at some level–it is no coincidence that, in the wake of Citizens United, a torrent of corporate money is flowing to mostly Republican candidates. But, the truth is that, whatever the results of the elections, we will not end up with a government willing to stop the global movement of jobs […]

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Yesterday, I wrote about how the decline of U.S. wages has made workers here cheaper to hire than workers in India, at least in the call center industry. Today, the news hails from Asia where workers are rising up against poverty-level wages.   From the Financial Times (and, as a side observation, the FT gives […]

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As the dust has settled a bit from last week’s slap-on-the-wrist to Goldman Sachs, it’s worth making this point again: nothing much has changed.   After the first few hours of the news that Goldman would pay $550 million to make the SEC go away, it became pretty clear that the government had nicked Goldman […]

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  If I was Lloyd Blankfein and you told me that I could pockets hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, play a key role in a scam that cost millions of people their jobs, sent the economy into one of the worst economic tailspins in a half century, escape any personal jail time for […]

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    Even investors are now starting to distance themselves from Goldman Sachs: After reports on Thursday evening that federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into trading at Goldman, raising the possibility of criminal charges against the Wall Street giant, the firm’s stock was downgraded on Friday by two analysts. Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating […]

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   And the next shoe to drop: Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say. The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is at a preliminary stage, stemmed from a […]

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   The Senate hearings made clear: Goldman Sachs—and other Wall Street firms—profited by gambling with the American peoples’ livelihoods. It was a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” scam. As Sen. Carl Levin memorably stated: “You knew it was a shitty deal, and that’s what your emails showed.”     But, what Levin and other […]

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   Over the weekend we learned this: In late 2007 as the mortgage crisis gained momentum and many banks were suffering losses, Goldman Sachs executives traded e-mail messages saying that they were making "some serious money" betting against the housing markets.   The e-mails, released Saturday morning by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appear […]

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   I will have a lot more to say next week about the whole executive compensation issue and how it fits into the larger picture of our economy. But, for today, I think we should not get too excited about this news: Bowing to calls for restraint in tough economic times, Goldman said that its […]

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