Working Life

   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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We know it’s not easy to unionize. It just got easier, at least for people in the railway and airline industries.   The Federal Register out today announces: The National Mediation Board overhauled a decades-old election rule to make it easier for airline and railway employees to unionize, in a sign that labor is getting […]

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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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  It is not easy, under our current "free market" economic rules, to push corporations to do the right thing when the overriding imperative of every CEO is to maximize their own massive pay packages. But, every year, the federal government spends billions of dollars in our tax dollars–our hard-earned money–to buy services. Here is […]

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We are being distracted by numbers that are a sideshow. The new Gross Domestic Product numbers and the obsession about the fiscal deficits are obscuring the real problem in America–wages.   Yes, we have a massive jobs crisis. I have been pretty clearly supporting the idea that we need far bigger stimulus and that the […]

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The Republican world view of "national security" has been laid bare–ideology is more important than the security of the people. In my view, the fallout from the airplane terror plot makes this abundantly clear.   I start from my own touchstones about the definition of "national security": it is a measure of how the people […]

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We don’t talk about poverty in our country. Our political discourse, guided by pollsters and consultants, directs leaders to refer to "the middle-class", not to the millions of people who live in conditions that do not get much better, whether we are in something called a "recession" or we are in "recovery". And it is […]

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   I’ve always wanted to go out and do a week-long series on how the labor movement built the middle-class in Las Vegas–you know, the labor movement that part of the Democratic Party just sold out by eviscerating the Employee Free Choice Act. So, it was with a bit of trepidation that I began reading […]

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   As I noted yesterday in connection with the bankruptcy of General Motors, I am in favor of spending money on trying to save peoples’ jobs–we are talking about the survival of communities and the lives of thousands of people. But, having now spent the morning reading various media reports about the GM bankruptcy, it’s […]

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   It is endlessly fascinating and grotesque at the same time (I have these combined feelings a lot these days–maybe I need professional help) to read media reports about the cuts that the UAW is agreeing to. Here’s another example in The New York Times from today: Ford Motor said Wednesday that its new agreement […]

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