Working Life

Because what has happened is robbery. Pure and simple. “Stagnation” is too passive. It makes it sound like a natural phenomena, like a sunset.

It makes it sound like there were never active players in the daily robbery of workers–either by outright breaking of the law or by using the so-called “free market” system to take from people the fruits of their labor.

I raise this because of two elite views expressed in the past couple of days that are pretty common repetitions of the myth of “gee, isn’t it terrible this thing just happened”.

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You could not cook up a better farce in the world of transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) than the one that’s all the rage right now: the hand-wringing about the practice of so-called “quote approval”. In a nutshell, a transcriber of press releases talks to a source under the condition that the source can review the quotes before publication. But, as usual, much of the debate is missing the bigger point.

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    Really. When I read The New York Times editorials about the economy, or the truly shallow reporting from most of the paper’s reporters, often I think: the people at The New York Times actually are dolts. They don’t understand economics–at all. But, more often, it’s worth considering–they actually believe what they write, even if […]

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   Here is part of our predicament. The Tea Party-Republican wing of the political space is filled with lunatics–they want to turn the country back to the 1920s. Too many Democrats have forgotten what it once meant to be a "Democrat". But, the plague of disinformation and stupidity that will cost people their lives is […]

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   Yesterday, I wrote about an appalling but typical example of how bi-partisan "debate" is really an argument taking place on one side, in this case King Cuomo’s immoral decision to attack workers’ pensions by regurgitating Republican talking points that the economic crisis we face is the fault of the middle-class, workers, unions, and a […]

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When you cut through the chase about the economic debate of the future, it really boils down to this: What is the standard we should use in setting the  standard for a decent living? Apparently, The New York Times has decided: don’t count on decent pensions, don’t count on health care, and forget decent wages. […]

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   This will be a bit of a tough week to blog (in theory, I’m on vacation…ha!!!) but you will get what I can sneak in here. Today, my heart goes out to the journalists at The Boston Globe: Months of labor acrimony at The Boston Globe will come to a head on Monday, when […]

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    It’s a fascinating spectacle reading the news reports about Mattel’s recall of 19 million toys sent from China. Most of the reports and editorials focus, rightly, on the low level of safety standards in China. But, it’s foolish to simply blame the Chinese for the lead in toys. The fact is that those dangers […]

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