Working Life

Now it boils down to this: can the White House and its corporate supporters find a sliver of votes in the House to pass fast track and, close on its heels, the Trans Pacific Partnership? To do that end, the president and his allies are going to rely on tried-and-true phony promises conjured up by Bill Clinton and Robert Reich when they squeezed NAFTA through by a handful of votes in 1993–the Clinton-Reich playbook is back on display again.

Today’s false promise: retraining.

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It’s easy enough to have very carefully choreographed appearances, say in front of a controlled crowd at Nike, where you can attack opponents without having to actually engage in a debate. But, the president is a coward: if you want to tear down people and claim they are wrong on such a critical issue, come out and debate people directly.

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There are a ton of bad ideas out there in the world of economic policy–mostly, those are dumb ideas having to do with the complete comfort with class warfare, from “trickle down” to “CEOs are job creators” to so-called “Free trade.” It is one of the great astonishing things that, despite the fact that all […]

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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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   I hate to ruin a good party–or at least the world of the liberal bloviators who want everyone to stand in line and praise the president’s speech last night. Heck, I am glad he was there to push for something–ANYTHING–to be done to try to respond to the great crisis we have.    But, […]

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    Not a day goes by when we don’t hear from the mouth of some talking head or read the words of a transcriber of press releases (formerly known as a "journalist") about the awful "partisanship" or bi-partisan "paralysis" and failure to "compromise". It’s now a macro embedded in the minds and computers of virtually […]

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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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   Every so-called "free trade" deal that has shimmied its way through Congress has been greased with legalized bribery, starting with NAFTA in 1993, which was the king of all "what will buy your vote" deals. But, the biggest scam, in my opinion, is the "retraining" workers are offered in return for…sacrificing their middle-class livelihood […]

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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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