Working Life

“Bi-partisanship” is an idea that should make everyone sick to their stomach. When someone is out to kill you, or your nation and community, making a deal for the sake of “bi-partisanship” or, its related political spineless copout “compromise”, makes no sense when the end result is injustice and a worsening of our lives. That’s […]

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Bernie, as usual, has it right. His full statement on this despicable bill: Late last night, Congress passed a $908 billion COVID relief bill that will extend unemployment benefits through the early spring, provide support for small businesses, schools, health care, nutrition, rental assistance, childcare, broadband, and the Postal Service, as well as funding to […]

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It’s never enough to remind people every single day how many workers are out there on the frontlines risking their lives in the pandemic. I’ve talked about those folks regularly on the show: the transit workers, retail workers, and teachers. And, surely, the workers who put food on our plates are right up there on […]

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 Let’s go really big! I outline a $6.5 trillion stimulus—more than double what the Democrats in the House passed—because that’s what the people need over the next year: $1.3 trillion in wage guarantees; $715 billion for state and local governments; $600 billion for a “Pandemic Medicare For All”; $1.5 trillion to cancel all student […]

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The dinner plates of millions of people are soon going to be an interesting place to focus the mind on the balance between the desire to fill bellies with protein—poultry and pork, mainly—versus the worthiness of peoples’ lives, specifically the lives of the workers who process the chickens and hogs in plants across the country. […]

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   I don’t know–does every day that passes seem to you to bring even more bizarre behavior? Republicans write to the Federal Reserve Board and say, don’t you dare do shit to help the people. Ok, not quite in those words: “We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current […]

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    I often fear I am going to be injured–a victim of the adult "shaken head" syndrome. It’s the syndrome I think many of us are afflicted with–you wake up every day and read some stupid-ass comment or proposal by political leaders of both parties and…you shake your head. I’m telling you, it’s dangerous.   […]

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   I mean, this is pretty funny–except it’s pathetic, bizarre and, ultimately, gives all of us a great window on the "they haven’t learned anything" culture on Wall Street and the business world in general. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan (and the Ten of Hearts in the 52 deck-of cards Audacity of Greed), is […]

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   If you agree with this, from a Financial Times columnist, we are in a bad place: The Fed is divided on how far the risk of higher inflation argues for caution in maintaining, let alone increasing, the monetary stimulus provided by very low short-term interest rates and quantitative easing. Markets had come to assume […]

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Putting aside the larger argument for the moment about whether we–the taxpayers–should have stepped into to save failing institutions, it is pretty clear now that what we also did was just give a nice new revenue stream for banks that did not need the money but figured, heck, why not get our taste from the […]

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