Robert Reich: Only twice before in American history has so much been held by so few, and the gap between them and the great majority been a chasm — the late 1920s, and the era of the robber barons in the 1880s.
Americans Need a Job
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Tracy Emblem: Workers are the backbone of America but the backbone has been aching for some time and needs immediate and serious attention – through job creation policies.
Origins of the Enthusiasm Gap
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Robert Reich: Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections, the activist phase of the Obama administration has likely come to a close. The President may have a fight on his hands even to hold on to what he’s already achieved because his legislative successes have been large enough to fuel strong opposition but not big enough to strengthen his support. The result could be disastrous for him and congressional Democrats.
Technology as a System: An Approach to Creating Jobs
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Robert Letcher: It has become a very cruel world out there, and latecomers are cruelly left out. Until a new economic order emerges, only the technologically aware have a chance to prosper. We hope our approach will help us to that end.
Winograd Supporters Greet Harman at Mar Vista Farmers Market
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Marcy Winograd: 50,000 doors knocked and calls made, over 800 volunteers, $426,000 raised without a dime of corporate money — that’s the Winograd for Congress campaign.
Chuck Grassley Claims ‘Illegal Workers’ And Their Employers Will Benefit From Jobs Bill’
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Andrea Christina Nill: despite his concerns relating to foreign workers, Grassley has already asserted that he isn’t interested in working towards a productive solution that involves even touching a “general immigration reform bill” with a ten-foot pole.
Activists Giving Obama a Pass
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Obama still has time to deliver for his base. But this will require activists and constituency groups to ramp up public demands for such a course, rather than thinking they are helping the progressive cause by making excuses for a president whose inspirational words about social transformation have not been matched by actions.
Winograd Calls on President Obama to Fight the Real Enemy in Afghanistan
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Though Winograd expresses disappointment in the President, she acknowledges Congress’s responsibility in the matter, pointing out that her opponent, Jane Harman, voted last spring to spend another 100-billion dollars to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
Does the Obama Plan for Reforming Wall Street Measure Up?
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In a word: No. The plan doesn’t stop stop bankers from making huge, risky bets with other peoples’ money. It does increase capital requirements and oversight, but it doesn’t require bankers to take their pay in long-term stock options or warrants, and it doesn’t even hint that banks should go back to being partnerships instead [...]
The Great Debt Scare: Why Has It Returned?
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It’s the kind of thing I expect to hear from deficit hawks and chicken littles — from the self-described “fiscally responsible” right, from the scolds Ross Perot and Pete Peterson, from my former cabinet colleague Bob Rubin. But yesterday I was shown slides developed by the putatively liberal Center for American Progress intended to make [...]
Breaking LA’s Auto Dependency
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The Greater Los Angeles area has long been plagued by a thought that individual neighborhoods don’t add up to a whole. And the good of that whole (the Greater Los Angeles area) is the largest micro situation in the macro dependency on foreign oil there is. With the dependency on cars that Los Angeles has [...]
Putting a Smiley Face on the Job Picture Can’t Evade the Growing Tragedy
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Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners, probably summed up last week’s message from Washington best, telling the New York Times, “Less bad is always a prelude to good.” The things one learns. We are being asked to believe that the results of the “stress tests” were “not as [...]
Sorry Folks: Happy Days Are Not Here Again
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“Demonizing the bankers as if they and they alone created the financial meltdown is both inaccurate and short-sighted,” Citigroup chairman Richard Parsons told reporters recently. “Everybody participated in pumping up this balloon and now that the balloon has deflated, everybody has some part in the blame.” Oh no we don’t. Talk about dissembling. The truth [...]
The President’s American Recovery & Reinvestment Act: What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
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One of the first things President Barack Obama did as our nation’s Chief Executive was to urge Congress to pass, then sign, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA), better known as the nation’s “economic stimulus” package. The $787 billion bill, the largest taxpayer footed bill ever passed, was viewed as the primary vehicle to [...]
The Auto Bailout Is Going Off the Road
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GM just announced it was laying of 21,000 more of its workers, as a means of assuring the Treasury Department the company is worthy of more bailout money. A Treasury official was quoted as saying approvingly that the goal is a “slimmed-down” GM. What? Having General Motors or Chrysler cut tens of thousands of jobs [...]
Where Government Spending Should be Trimmed — And Why It’s Necessary to Fast-Track Universal Health Care
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It’s no accident that as Congress returns this week from its two-week recess and begins debate on the $3.5 trillion budget plans for the fiscal year starting in October — which may or may not include a provision that fast-tracks Obama’s health care proposal by allowing it to pass the Senate with a mere majority [...]
Stimulus Mania: Is It The 21st Century Soup Line?
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The efforts to jump start the economy in the United States, in hopes of causing a global ripple, have taken on an entirely new meaning as people and industry alike wait for the $787 billion dollar economic stimulus package to drop. It’s like a “mania” as so many cities, states, industries, school districts, homeowners, small [...]
A Short Citizen’s Guide to Kooks, Demagogues, and Right-Wingers On Tax Day
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No one likes to pay taxes, so tax day typically attracts a range of right-wing Republicans, kooks, and demagogues, all of whom tell us how awful we have it. Herewith a short citizen’s guide (that is, a citizen’s guide that’s short rather than a guide for short citizens) responding to the predictable charges: “Americans pay [...]
We Need More Stimulus, Not More Bailout
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With only $110 billion remaining in the TARP bailout fund, all signs are that Tim Geithner is preparing to return to Congress seeking more bailout money. He’ll bring along the results of his bank “stress tests,” which will probably show many that big banks are still technically insolvent, along with bankruptcy scenarios for General Motors [...]
Nationalizing Banks and Industry: Why Capitalists Hate Socialism
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The United States has always been a political economy, requiring government regulation of its finance and money markets, and using government stimulation on its labor force. “Free Market” enterprise is based on the notion that open markets and the competition derived from competing ideas for consumer patronage will create a market balance (equilibrium) that will [...]
Why We’re Not at the Beginning of the End, and Probably Not Even at the End of the Beginning
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Are we at the beginning of the end? Mortgage interests are now so low (the average rate on 30-year fixed mortgages was 4.87% Thursday, slightly higher than the 4.78% last week, but still the lowest level since 1971) that President Obama has begun urging Americans to refinance their homes so they can save money and [...]
CSI Bailout, with William K. Black — Bill Moyers Journal Interview
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William K. Black suspects that it was more than greed and incompetence that brought down the U.S. financial sector and plunged the economy in recession — it was fraud. And he would know. When it comes to financial shenanigans, William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and [...]
Why You Should Work for a Hedge Fund
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Just because I lost a big chunk of my total retirement savings over the last year doesn’t mean I should be upset that 25 hedge-fund managers reaped a total of $11.6 billion during the same interval, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine — including $2.5 billion for James Simons of Renaissance Technologies and $2 billion [...]
Friday Feedback: Eight Years of Job Declines Under Bush II
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Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment submitted by Richard Mathews, updating his own article, “Who Creates Jobs? Democratic Presidents Do!” Richard writes: UPDATE: With today’s final job numbers for January, we can now close the books on Bush II. After eight years, [...]
The Administration’s Proposed Responsible Wall Streeter Tax Credit
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The Administration is about to launch a new plan designed both to stimulate the economy and clean up Wall Street at the same time, the “Responsible Wall Streeter Tax Credit”.
AIG Bonuses: Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game
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I watched this week as the nation’s furor turned towards employees of insurance giant American International Group (A.I.G.) and the $200 million-plus in retention bonus payments recently doled out to executives. Executives, who, as we already know, are largely to blame for their role in A.I.G.’s financial crisis that led to the country’s economic meltdown [...]
AIG and the Undeserving Rich
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Charles Blow, the “moderate” who seems to write a lot of words but never takes a clear stand on anything, recently lamented on the op-ed page of the New York Times about what a small matter the $165 million in bonuses really were compared to the $170 billion AIG received in government welfare. Sheryl Gay [...]
The Auto Bailout: A Bad Deal
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With the economy tanking and unemployment skyrocketing, you’d think the Obama administration would be doing all it could to save jobs. But if its auto bailout plan is any indicator of its current direction, we’re on our way to losing a lot more jobs.
Thoughts on the End of a Hell of a Year
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The biggest thing to happen to me this year was the birth of my first grandchild, a little girl named Ella. I know this kind of thing happens all the time and frankly I get bored with people who go all gushy about the birth of kids or grandkids.
How Obama Is Already Taking Charge
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by Robert Reich – Obama’s immediate challenge is to fill the leadership vacuum created by a lame-duck president with historically-low approval ratings who seems to have lost interest in his job (at this writing, he’s out of the country) and who’s disappeared from the media, and a Treasury chief who has all but punted on [...]
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