Working Life

Jan Schakowsky is really one of my favorite elected leaders. I wish she had run for the U.S. Illinois Senate seat in 2010 but she continues to carry the torch in the House. Yesterday, she unveiled a serious proposal to tax the richest people in the country–as a response to the rising rhetorical nonsense coming […]

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   Were you wondering whether the title refers to the cost to build 413 high-speed railway lines? Or perhaps 413 wind turbines to address global warming? Or maybe for $1.5 trillion you were thinking we could construct 413 new factories for businesses to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs? Nah. Here it is: we […]

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   Let me be quite clear again about one fact that gets lost: we have plenty of money in the country. There is no debt or deficit "crisis" even if people across the political spectrum, including former labor leaders, are regurgitating complete nonsense about the "crisis". This is simple: it’s class warfare and the rich […]

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   You’ve heard (and, in some cases, unfortunately, been persuaded) that "generous" pensions given to public employees has caused great deficits in pensions and state budgets. It’s nonsense. And here are the facts to prove it.    The Center for Economic and Policy Research has a very important study out. It must be given wide […]

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   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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If Jeffrey Immelt, the White House’s just-appointed head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, has anything to say about corporate taxes, you can bet the message will be simple: corporations should pay lower taxes. How do we know that? Because in his job, as CEO of General Electric, he excelled at fleecing the […]

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Got crabs? Cut corporate taxes. Can’t get your kid to eat spinach? Cut corporate taxes. Worried your skin it too dry? Cut corporate taxes. And, then, of course, want the economy to be more "competitive" and "grow"? Cut corporate taxes. None of the above will be helped by cutting corporate taxes–but the reasons given for […]

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  Each day brings a stupefying new chapter in the class warfare underway in America. Today, it’s the unfathomable idea that regular people who had worked their entire lives serving the public should now be effectively cast out into the cold, their pensions ripped up. But, what we need to connect is this: there is […]

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You can’t find a better contrast between the vision for our country than those offered by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Goldman Sachs. One vision sees America as the land of equality and fairness. The other vision sees an America where greed is good.   Here is some of what Trumka will say today at […]

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   We have a huge crisis in the country. The private pension system is collapsing. The public pension system is on the brink of collapse, and people are being pitted one against the other. But, what we often fail to do is connect the dots: between the collapse of the public pensions system and the […]

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