Working Life

Last week I asked everyone to consider the coronavirus pandemic as a pretty clarifying picture of class warfare—who are the people who get hurt most when millions of jobs go away or at best are in limbo because of a nationwide shutdown? It’s working people, minimum wage workers, service workers—almost none of whom have enough […]

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We are taught as kids to keep your word. If you promised not to do something bad or your promised to do something good, we learned you have to keep your promise otherwise people pretty quickly don’t trust you. Which explains why most people just don’t trust politicians—like politicians who are supposed to be your […]

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Murder, violence and robbery—it sounds like a list for a plot of The Wire. But, no, it’s just another standard operating procedure for the free market system—in which people are murdered in Colombia thanks to so-called “free trade”, workers are beat up and sometimes killed at McDonald’s because the company doesn’t care about its workers […]

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Just hours ago, 25,000 teachers and their supporters massed in Portland, Oregon to demand a fully-funded education system—it’s another moment in the incredible teacher organizing that has swept the country over the past year. With the energy of thousands of revved up teachers pulsing in the background, I chat at the rally with teacher/union leaders, […]

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This is simply a tale of having a gun put to your head: vote “yes” or we screw you even harder.

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I can’t let Detroit go partly because there is so much to learn from the robbery that took place in the past and is continuing to this day. Today, let’s consider for a moment the price regular workers pay when something goes bad versus the price CEOs never pay when something goes askew. It’s a telling story about the deep corruption of the system.

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I mean this in a couple of ways. If people in Detroit were all named “Jamie Dimon,” a bailout would be on its way, free and clear, low-interest, no questions asked, the same kind of bailout JP Morgan Chase’s Dimon and his gang of thieves on Wall Street were able to pocket after they cratered the economy. But, barring Dimon being an actual whore, not simply a financial one, the familial connection ain’t happening for the people of Detroit — not that they’d really want it. That said, there is a real argument to made: Wall Street should pay for Detroit’s fiscal situation. And I’d propose a surtax on profits called “The Jamie Dimon Surtax.”

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Detroit. The filing for bankruptcy is a sad, but, in a way, predictable event — if one is willing to see what this really means. It’s a deep metaphor for the failure of the so-called “free market”.

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Ideology is a powerful factor in the way people see things — or don’t see things, either intentionally or because they just can’t. So, when Bruce Bartlett recently wrote about the risks of retiring without a decent pension, it was both comical and bizarre that he chose to ignore the main reason for the destruction of a comfortable retirement.

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So, Wall Street got to really fuck workers once — when the greedy bastards who cratered the economy with their foolish games, they put millions of people into the streets, people who lost their jobs because of the greed. While not a single high-ranking financial leader is in jail, the greedy bastards are coming back for a second time to fuck workers — this time trying to screw them out of pensions.

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