Working Life

Barack Obama will be re-elected president Tuesday night, and probably by a relatively comfortable electoral vote margin. The question for workers in the US, and around the world, is: does it matter who wins?

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I had a piece in today’s The Australian. Mainly geared to an Australian audience, it made one basic point: not much has changed in the presidential race.

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It’s not surprising that a growing number of workers around the globe are losing faith in political leaders. After all, the economic debate often seems completely divorced from the realities of workers’ lives, whether it’s blaming workers for national budget squeezes actually caused by bankers or CEOs imposing mass layoffs to cover up obscene executive compensation at the heart of bottom-line revenue shortfalls. The debate in the United States is a good example.

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Right after the now-infamous debate (or, exchange of sounds bites), I wrote a bit about the fallacy of the exchange on taxes. Just a quick clean up here to underscore an important point — both candidates support, in one form or another, extending some or all of the Bush tax cuts. And that is sheer lunacy.

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I guess it’s a function of inflation and/or a numbness to reality but the rhetoric about money isn’t what is used to be. Back in the day, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen (whose name probably means nothing to the shallow commentators who think political history started with Ronald Reagan) is alleged to have said, ” A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”. Dirksen, who served in the 1950s and 1960s (and probably could never win a Republican primary in today’s wing-nut world), would have been a piker by today’s standards of throwing around figures without regard to reality. Which brings me to the Romney lie about taxes–which the president got right, admittedly, in a clumsy way, but most liberal-progressive pundits are getting wrong.

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Maybe you missed it but you got a great example of the absolute failure of the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) to do their job– and it was a failure by the vaunted crowd at 60 Minutes.

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People watching politics are truly ADD, with stunningly short attention spans and even shorter memories. Here’s my very brief argument why this presidential race was over in March– and, ironically, Mitt Romney will have to blame the very conservative billionaires who are shoveling money down the rat hole of his losing campaign.

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Gee, I can’t wait. The Romney ship is sinking, the rats are starting to abandon ship, the leftover cretins are starting to point fingers at each other but, wait, all will be saved because the Romney people are about to give us more details on what their candidate would do as president.

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The barrage against Mitt Romney’s record as the chief executive of a hedge fund is head-shaking. Not because it isn’t legitimate to probe his record of job creation or destruction while at the helm of Bain Capital. Rather, there is a more fundamental question: why would anyone think a business executive is qualified to run a country?

This is a common choice voters are being offered around the world. Unemployment is high, governments appear incapable of charting a course for economic security and people feel afraid.

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   I have a piece in Tuesday’s The Australian (if you are in the U.S. and you catch this on Monday, hey, it’s the time machine effect), basically, arguing that the 2012 presidential elections won’t change a whole lot.     See it here.     Or read it after the fold:

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