Working Life

The secret money flowing into organizations trying to buy the November election for the Republican Party is motivated by a simple idea: greed. Sure, there is some rhetoric about "smaller government" and ranting about the evils of national health care. But, at the end of the day, it’s about extremely rich people never having enough. […]

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I mean, c’mon–is there no shame? Yes, that’s rhetorical. We have the greatest jobs crisis in decades, with close to one in five Americans not able to find decent, full-time paying work. The minimum wage is a poverty-level wage. But, all is well on Wall Street–as in $144 BILLION in pay.   This just up […]

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Along the road of the past 30 years, productivity has been soaring (and technology has been a minor part of that) while wages have been flat–thanks to de-unionization and a simple corporate decision to cut wages even when profitable. And, despite that assault on wages, the main line of concern was over outsourcing–that is, jobs […]

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Count me in the group, perhaps small, that is unimpressed with the pledge by a group of billionaires to give away large parts of their fortune. Not because I oppose the idea of philanthropy. Rather, the announcement obscures a reality: very little of the money will go to challenging the root causes of the incredible […]

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  If I was Lloyd Blankfein and you told me that I could pockets hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, play a key role in a scam that cost millions of people their jobs, sent the economy into one of the worst economic tailspins in a half century, escape any personal jail time for […]

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   The financial "reform" bill is still not law. One reason is the failure to cobble together enough votes to move past a filibuster. Russ Feingold explains his opposition: Mr. Feingold said he wanted to reimpose Depression-era rules that would bar traditional banks from affiliating with investment firms, among other things. "We need to eliminate […]

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   Via The Wall Street Journal today: Federal prosecutors, working with securities regulators, are conducting a preliminary criminal probe into whether several major Wall Street banks misled investors about their roles in mortgage-bond deals, according to a person familiar with the matter. The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche […]

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   Duh. The truth is that the only reason they did this and ignored the obvious was greed: Former Bear Stearns Chief Executive Officer James Cayne said Wednesday that his firm’s risk level was too high in the year before it collapsed. "That was the business," Mr. Cayne told a hearing held by the Financial […]

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    I applaud the president for trying to impose some new and renewed standards to try to make sure that what happened on Wall Street doesn’t happen again. But, we are about to miss an opportunity–perhaps a missed opportunity that will haunt us for years to come–to change the debate about our economy and the […]

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   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 […]

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