Working Life

It’s easy to get dragged into a negative head space if you do any kind of politics or movement building work—it’s hard out there and too often we have a tendency to focus on the really bad stuff, like “the planet is burning up and imploding” or a few people own more wealth in the […]

Read the full story

     So, it’s not all bad news in the world. Some sanity prevails when real-life economics, not blather about the glories of the "free market", triumphs and one can hope for a bit of truthiness to spread.    First, the good news: President François Hollande’s Socialists and their allies won an absolute majority in runoff […]

Read the full story

    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 […]

Read the full story

    Yesterday, I wrote about the monumentally crazy letter co-signed by 60 House DEMOCRATS, who, by adding their names to the letter, in my view, were embracing austerity, cuts in Medicare and a de-funding of basic government services. One of the signers of the letter, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), responded to my post. So, in […]

Read the full story

I think we are making a mistake, both economically and politically, by confining our defense of Social Security to an argument about simply preserving current benefits. We should be pushing for an INCREASE in Social Security benefits as both a social and economic necessity.   Let me start with the hardest challenge facing people who […]

Read the full story

In the lore of political budgetary rhetoric, Sen Everett Dirksen’s observation is often useful: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money” he is rumored to have said–rumored because there is some debate about whether he actually used that whole phrase. But, whatever–it’s useful to our current discussion. Where […]

Read the full story

   The Wall Street Journal has an illiuminating piece about Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, today. It is both astounding and revealing because it shows exactly what we, the people, are up against when it comes to taking back the country from the people who gambled away–for their own enrichment and/or because of […]

Read the full story

One of the biggest challenges that we face as a country is not that we lack money or wealth–we have plenty of money. Rather, we have a distorted set of priorities and an ideological frame that walls off many possibilities to create a decent society. For example: the belief in the so-called "free market" that […]

Read the full story