Working Life

This week, Amazon announced which two communities, thanks to willing political cowards, it will fleece for billions in return for siting its new HQ. I expand on the ground-breaking Amazon episode Working Life did in February with three segments on the financial, tax and community implications of the marauding corporation’s breathtaking campaign to extort billions. […]

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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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    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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   To return to my theme of "numbers are a bitch"…here is one to chew on: $1.3 trillion. It’s a gap–a BIG gap…and in that number is part of the story of the crisis we’re in.   At this point, after checking in with my colleague and friend Dean Baker, the Gross Domestic Product is […]

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   I find myself laughing at this–part in disgust and part in admiration for a group of people who have no shame and just do not care what happens to regular people in the country. On the one hand, we have a monumental jobs catastrophe underway. And, on the other hand, you have the people […]

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   Here is part of our predicament. The Tea Party-Republican wing of the political space is filled with lunatics–they want to turn the country back to the 1920s. Too many Democrats have forgotten what it once meant to be a "Democrat". But, the plague of disinformation and stupidity that will cost people their lives is […]

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  Just to return some reality to the discussion–and reassert facts made a number of times by a variety of people…though I argue that there is no debt or deficit "crisis", if you want to figure out where the money is, it’s all about war, corporate welfare and the Bush tax cuts. This needs to […]

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     A crisis is a great time for the richest in the world. When you have a lot of money, it’s a buy, buy, buy atmosphere where you can make even more money from distressed assets or countries like Greece, who are forced by the financial mandarins into a "fire sale" of national assets to […]

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    Yesterday, Bill Clinton foolishly called on the country to use the bank robber Willie Sutton’s maxim to address the debt "crisis" (which, in my opinion, is a phony crisis) by going where the money is. Foolish because Clinton pointed the finger at entitlements. But, the real place where the money is lies with […]

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    Tomorrow, Peter Peterson is going to hold another one of his dumb national "fiscal summits" to further fan the flames of the phony debt and deficit "crisis"–a non-existent crisis that covers up the bigger problem of the widening divide between rich and poor. Since people want to talk about saving money, let’s start by […]

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