Working Life

Recently, I mentioned Seymour Hersh’s observation that, while most people count sheep to fall asleep, Henry Kissinger, who orchestrated the massive secret, illegal bombings of Cambodia, must count burned and maimed Cambodian babies. Which makes me wonder: has Amancio Ortega picked up a version of the Kissinger habit, counting overworked Cambodian slaves who have made him the fourth richest person in the world?

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Tick, tick, tick, tick…every minute that goes by is another minute workers are being robbed–in particular, those people forced to work for the slave-like minimum wage. And if you looked back just five years, there’s a price tag to that robbery: over $300 billion.

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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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   Those bills are also called the so-called "free trade" deals with Colombia, South Korea and Panama. The president is making a concerted push to get these bills rammed through Congress by August. Which just boggles the mind.    Let’s focus today mostly on Colombia, a place that is a dangerous place for trade unionists, […]

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   Reaching back all the way to NAFTA (oh, so ancient history…1993), there has been a complete lie and sham underlying virtually every trade deal post-NAFTA–don’t worry, so-called "free trade" advocates tell us (including free trade zealots Bill Clinton and Robert Reich) about these deals…we will put in place "labor protections" to make sure workers […]

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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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   Guarantee you this won’t merit front-page news: Progress on a free trade deal with Colombia has cleared the way for the White House to seek Congressional approval of a package of trade agreements that includes pacts with South Korea and Panama, as Republicans have demanded. Obama administration officials said Wednesday that they expected technical […]

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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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   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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If you share the belief that the greatest economic challenge we face is stopping the stupefying global class warfare underway, then, we have to be quite clear about the tools that support the attack against decent living standards for people and a fair sharing of the wealth. So-called "free trade" is right up there on […]

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