Working Life

   Those bills are also called the so-called "free trade" deals with Colombia, South Korea and Panama. The president is making a concerted push to get these bills rammed through Congress by August. Which just boggles the mind.    Let’s focus today mostly on Colombia, a place that is a dangerous place for trade unionists, […]

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   Yesterday, I wrote about an appalling but typical example of how bi-partisan "debate" is really an argument taking place on one side, in this case King Cuomo’s immoral decision to attack workers’ pensions by regurgitating Republican talking points that the economic crisis we face is the fault of the middle-class, workers, unions, and a […]

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   It really is no surprise, unfortunately, that the country is spinning out of control, the middle-class is dying and we are trapped in some of the dumbest debates imaginable–chief among them the entirely phony argument over a non-existent debt and deficit "crisis". Not surprising because many of these debates have political leaders essentially taking […]

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    Over the next 18 months, brace yourself for a lot of hand-wringing about the economic crisis we’re in. Every so often, we’re going to be told the "recovery" is just around the corner.  Oh, let’s be clear: the worries will have NOTHING to do with what is actually happening to PEOPLE. It will have […]

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   Reaching back all the way to NAFTA (oh, so ancient history…1993), there has been a complete lie and sham underlying virtually every trade deal post-NAFTA–don’t worry, so-called "free trade" advocates tell us (including free trade zealots Bill Clinton and Robert Reich) about these deals…we will put in place "labor protections" to make sure workers […]

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   Sigh. Dumb economics again–promoted by a whole lot of good Democrats who just cannot embrace the idea that you cannot fix so-called "free trade" deals by pretending to retrain people for new jobs. It’s a false, cruel promise. At first glance, it looks like a hard fight on behalf of workers: Forty-one Senate Democrats […]

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    It’s a great time in America–if you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Not so much if you are a regular American. The profit gains of the Fortune 500 registered the third largest gain in history in 2010. By contrast, the people continue to struggle. Even the editors of Fortune recognize the […]

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   Guarantee you this won’t merit front-page news: Progress on a free trade deal with Colombia has cleared the way for the White House to seek Congressional approval of a package of trade agreements that includes pacts with South Korea and Panama, as Republicans have demanded. Obama administration officials said Wednesday that they expected technical […]

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    Why doesn’t Bill Daley, the White House Chief of Staff, just come right out and say it: we’re going to ram through these so-called "free trade" deals because, dammit, we need that corporate cash for the re-election campaign? Just be honest. Stop coloring it in the phony Republican-corporate rhetoric of "job creation". Then, at […]

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    Yesterday, I wrote about how much money Paul Ryan pockets from the insurance industry–and how the health care part of the industry was going to make out like bandits in the Ryan budget proposal. This is worth digging into a bit more because you can learn very quickly how the Ryan budget truly boils […]

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