Working Life

   It’s a full-time job–actually, five full-time jobs–to keep track of how the economic elites screw working people. Just when everyone is excited–rightly so–about the demonstrations breaking out all over the country, in the back door slides more horror: Congress prepared Wednesday to pass free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, showing unusual bipartisan […]

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    Dear Ms. Warren: congratulations for jumping into the U.S. Senate race in your state. And good luck and be well–you will find that being a "candidate" offers challenges quite different from having to answer to discourteous, uninformed Republicans. Respectfully, I’d like to ask your position on a number of issues.    Quick context. There […]

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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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   While there seem to be some people who think that there is some benefit to having a so-called "free trade" agreement with Panama (the Senate Finance committee had tentatively scheduled a hearing on the deal for this Thursday), I’m wondering if the main people who want this to go through are the people who […]

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   While we are distracted by the minor problem of the financial crisis, and shoveling mountains of cash into the hands of private investors who will enrich themselves (again), there is the small matter of the so-called "free trade" deal with Panama that keeps poking its nose above ground. There are murmurings that there will […]

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   Change has to begin with the transformation of the economy: a rejection of the marketing phrase of the "free market". The president has made some very strong proposals in this area. A large group of Members of Congress is now pushing him to declare a new era in trade.   I just received the […]

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There is a cruel economic hoax being played on millions of American workers, a hoax that unfortunately is being promoted by too many Democrats. The hoax is this: that workers who lose their jobs to so-called "free trade" can simply be retrained to do something else that will be a good substitute for what they […]

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