Working Life

 The number that sticks in my mind today, and has since I heard it, is 40 percent. While over half a million people in the U.S. have died of COVID in one year, while millions of people have become sick, while millions of people have lost their jobs, savings and homes, and many people […]

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How many of you dealt with that chaos when it came to wrestling with the unemployment insurance system last year? Some of the rhetoric we heard was, “well that chaos was just the pandemic crush overwhelming the system”. Yes, that’s true in a very narrow sense—the system collapsed in many places, meaning people who were […]

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Yawn. That’s my reaction to this perennial debate about whether a progressive agenda is a winning agenda. Of course, it is—and that has a lot to do with how you define “progressive”. At least, on economics, it’s clear: what puts more money in peoples’ pockets, what makes it possible for people to make a decent […]

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It’s the permanent government—the corporate lobbyists who have friends in both parties. It is at the heart of why we don’t have Medicare for All, why the Pentagon is rolling in dough and why banks and Wall Street rip us off. Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, talks about what the […]

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The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights. Now, this is a […]

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As we enter into the final three weeks of the election, I’m updating my first set of predictions and musings—updates are partly adding new information (for example, actual turnout so far and a lot more on the Senate seats) and some new thoughts. Very little of the below, in its basics, has changed. I will […]

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When Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerated in less than three weeks so the country can survive, I can’t think of a better illustration of the fight still to come for progressives than taxes. Joe Biden’s tax proposals are, well, meek. Every time Joe Biden made a big deal during the TV mud wrestling […]

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 If I say that drug companies are sleazy leeches whose CEOs make millions of dollars while basically killing thousands of people who can’t afford outrageous drug prices, you’d shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, well, duh.” Drug companies make these huge profits largely because of an absolutely insane system of patents, which you could […]

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There’s been a lot of Joe Biden news–will he run?–and one of the things that has been clear to me is that a significant part of the conversation is being driven by elite, traditional media and the insiders of the Democratic Party who (a) are petrified–in the latter’s case–that the “presumed front-runner”, if she is the nominee, will lose the White House (and potentially open the door to 1-3 more right-wing Supreme Court nominees and (b) are petrified–in both cases–that Bernie’s movement is going to leave them outside the money trough they all suck off.

A question: would Biden drain Bernie’s support? Nah.

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    Ha! You wonder, why I would praise one of the people most determined to destroy a decent government? Because he may have single-handidly cratered the idiotic "Gang of Six". So, for that, he deserves praise.    The whole premise of the "Gang of Six"–Democratic Sens. Mark Warner, Dick Durbin and Kent Conrad and Republican […]

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