Working Life

    I often fear I am going to be injured–a victim of the adult "shaken head" syndrome. It’s the syndrome I think many of us are afflicted with–you wake up every day and read some stupid-ass comment or proposal by political leaders of both parties and…you shake your head. I’m telling you, it’s dangerous.   […]

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    So, sometimes, you wade into a fight that just isn’t fair. Here is one of those fights on economic policy–one that boils down to a massive scam on the part of Flagless Corporate-Land aimed at ripping off those of us who still pay taxes. And this is a scam that is being aided and […]

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  A number of people–including your truly–have been making the point for a long time that there is no debt and deficit "crisis". The problem is that there is a bi-partisan obsession with the phony "crisis", helped by the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as "journalists") that has drowned out any rationale discussion–a discussion […]

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   Yee Haw! Some sense. Those questions reflect a common refrain of businesses, their lobbyists and supporters in Washington, who complain that too much regulation is stifling the economy. In both cases, Mr. Obama responded that farmers might be hearing unfounded rumors. “If you hear something is happening, but it hasn’t happened, don’t always believe […]

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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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   There are days when I would just rather be a sports reporter. Today is one of those days. Sports news repeats itself–but every day there is a new twist. Scores may be the same–but how a baseball game ended up 3-2 will always have a different make-up.     Not politics, though–or at least the […]

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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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    Sometimes numbers are a bitch. Because they expose ugly truths that we either choose to ignore or don’t understand. We better get this one straight in the next few months or the bi-partisan cuts just shoved down the throats of the American people will pale in comparison to what will come post 2012.    […]

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   My friends say, correctly, that I should not waste my time reading Tom Friedman. Yes, true. But, I dipped into his moronic column yesterday mainly because it’s in the same non-reality based theme that is a plague everywhere–we need "shared sacrifice" to make the cuts "needed". Spare me.     Dumb stuff: Yes, we have […]

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   You hear that great sucking sound? It’s the hundreds of billions of corporate dollars that flood to off-shore tax havens. Time to turn off the spigot… There is some movement here: Saying that offshore tax havens deprive the United States Treasury of tens of billions of dollars of revenue a year, two senior Democratic […]

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