Working Life

I am guessing everyone who listens to this show considers himself or herself an environmentalist and cares about the planet. You believe in science—a shocking notion—so you get the climate change emergency. We know we have to do some pretty radical stuff to keep this spaceship habitable for generations to come. Here’s the problem: there […]

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Poor Amazon. It’s unhappy that it can’t do what it wants with its workers in Europe.

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Oh, pity those poor bankers in Europe. Capping their bonuses? What’s next? Having to be honest?

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A few of us have never bought the idea that the world economy has recovered from the financial crisis—mainly because people were struggling to make ends meet before the crisis. Add to that a mind-boggling obsession to impose austerity on the very people are struggling and, presto, you have the perfect storm for a mess. And just in the past 24 hours we get a flavor of this.

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Austerity is a bad thing. As I’ve pointed out before, when an economy is suffering from lower demand, the last thing you want to do is squeeze the pocketbooks of the very people who you want to have out there spending money. But, here’s another thing: it makes you sick. Literally.

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   Here is what austerity and the spread of the "American disease" does for people: Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people […]

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    Really. When I read The New York Times editorials about the economy, or the truly shallow reporting from most of the paper’s reporters, often I think: the people at The New York Times actually are dolts. They don’t understand economics–at all. But, more often, it’s worth considering–they actually believe what they write, even if […]

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    In some ways, the worst phenomena in political and public life is the way in which we–the people–give over power to the financial and corporate elite partly because we internalize marketing phrases and economic nonsense beaten into our brains over 30 years by the brain-dead traditional media and a capitulation by the political leaders […]

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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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