Working Life

   Let’s review a couple of facts. Over the past 30 years, even though productivity has been skyrocketing, wages have been essentially flat for workers. And we are now living through a period where at least one in five Americans does not have full-time work with decent wages.    But, at least some people are […]

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   It is going to take the concerted effort of a lot of voices to overcome the noise being generated by the people who would like us to think that economic salvation is at hand. So, we need to keep pointing out some harsh realities facing real people. For example: The number of Americans filing […]

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   I believe that we can fix the economy–but it will take a focused and entirely different approach. For a long time, I’ve maintained that the government statistics on economic growth often don’t match the reality regular people face. Today, we learn: Spending by Americans took a big tumble in September, as they lost a […]

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   If you read this blog regularly, you know that I have been a skeptic about the talk about the "green shoots" in the economy–the signs that somehow the economy is getting "better". I based most of my skeptical argument about the "green shoots" on a simple fact: until working people see that they have […]

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I want to try to make a subtle distinction here: between something that I’m glad is happening, on the one hand, and changes that fundamentally reshape economic power in the country, on the other hand. The first does not necessarily bring about the second. And it’s important, I would argue, for us to keep our […]

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   Readers here know that I have urged us, for a long time, to be quite careful about the talk of "recovery". I do not put much faith in a rising Dow since that is, in my opinion, mainly a game of a bunch of traders trying to jump in and out of short-term profit-taking. […]

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I’m reading the reports of the awful job reports that came out today. I’ve been arguing for some time that the search of "green shoots" in the economy is a mirage and an experiment that covers up how bad the economy is for real people. But, this made me stop in my tracks.   From […]

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   The financial newspapers are buzzing with the news of a coalition of business leaders stepping forward to propose executive compensation limits. I think this is only a secondary issue. Don’t get me wrong–I think the greed that has swamped the country at the executive suite level is astonishing. And it should be dealt with. […]

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We don’t talk about poverty in our country. Our political discourse, guided by pollsters and consultants, directs leaders to refer to "the middle-class", not to the millions of people who live in conditions that do not get much better, whether we are in something called a "recession" or we are in "recovery". And it is […]

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   It is an article of faith that American consumers are way over leveraged, particularly when it comes to credit card debt. But, a pretty scary article in the Financial Times the other day makes it clear that this is a worldwide phenomena that is likely to prolong the economic crisis we are in. I […]

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