Working Life

   Interesting juxtaposition, I think, in these two press reports. First, the financial industry is doing all it can to neuter the rules imposed in what I thought was the relatively meak Dodd-Frank changes: Wall Street and the financial industry spent more to lobby Washington in the first quarter of this year than a year […]

Read the full story

   This is a story that cannot be retold enough and updated enough because it highlights, as much as any trend, how nothing has changed. The people suffer–while CEO pay continues to go up. The robbery continues unabated.     Let’s start with the hospital sector. In New York, and I would suspect everywhere else […]

Read the full story

Every day, I get a new email from some group about a new 55-page proposal to fix the economy, or I see some expert propose a sure-fired way to get us "back" to a go-go world of "positive growth". There’s value in a whole lot of some of those ideas. But, my can’t-lose strategy boils […]

Read the full story

     Forget the criminals on Wall Street. What is more telling, troubling and almost bizarre is how quickly the chattering classes and political power brokers have shaken off the stain of the financial crisis, inviting back to center stage some of the very people responsible for destroying trillions of dollars in wealth and costing millions […]

Read the full story

    We have a real problem in the debate about pensions that is very closely connected to the financial implosion we’re still trying to dig our way out of: the criminals and fools on Wall Street are hiding and avoiding prosecution, or at the very least, they are managing to keep their jobs despite their […]

Read the full story

    I am struck every day by the incredibly bizarre world we live in, where "up" is "down" and "down" is "up". I think many people are angry and confused because what they see in their daily lives–upheaval, struggle, fear–does not match much of the rhetoric coming from the people who have their hands on […]

Read the full story

Sometimes, I wonder whether we all live in a grand farce. But, actually, it’s a real-life story about a robbery of the people that continues every day–and today is no different. The robbers grow richer.   From The Wall Street Journal a story headlined: "On Street, Pay Vaults to Record Altitude": When it comes to […]

Read the full story

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. […]

Read the full story

   I have not had time to read the full report of the Congressional commission on the financla crisis. But, here is one thing in the preface worth reading: The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone wild. The captains of finance and the public […]

Read the full story

I think we are making a mistake, both economically and politically, by confining our defense of Social Security to an argument about simply preserving current benefits. We should be pushing for an INCREASE in Social Security benefits as both a social and economic necessity.   Let me start with the hardest challenge facing people who […]

Read the full story