February 2007
9 posts
Why the Stock Market Tumbled -- and What's to Come
As of right now (11:15 am Pacific time, Wednesday), it looks like Wall Street is putting a the best face possible on yesterday’s “correction.” (A “correction” is a Wall Street euphemism for “holy shit!”) But it’s way too early for a sigh of relief. When the stock market takes a big hit, as it did yesterday, ask yourself two questions: What underlying...
Time to Join a Union (Or At Least Have the Right...
You’d think that more than seventy years after the right to form a union was enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act, workers could have a union if a majority wanted one. Think again. Under current law, a majority vote isn’t nearly enough. Even if one hundred percent of workers want a union, employers can still stop them by demanding that the simple vote be followed by a complex process...
A Labor Standard for Future Trade Deals: Minimum...
The Bushies want to renew the President’s authority to negotiate trade deals (it expires at the end of June). This gives House and Senate Dems an opportunity to win a long-sought Democratic goal — putting labor standards into all future trade deals. But what sort of labor standard? If workers in developing nations were required to have the same, or even nearly, the level of wages and...
Betting on the Oscar
The odds are better than 50-50 that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” will win an Oscar for best documentary at next Sunday’s Academy Awards. The odds are better than one in three that, when accepting the Oscar, and while being watched by 29 million people, Gore will announce he is running for president in 2008.
Why Balancing the Budget is a Stupid Idea
When Bill Clinton was in the White House and the Republicans ran Congress, it was Republicans who demanded that the federal budget be balanced. That was because they wanted to cut federal spending. Now that George Bush is in the White House and Democrats run Congress, it’s Democrats who are outraged by what they consider to be an irresponsibly rosy scenario in the President’s new budget, which he...
Nelson Polsby, 1934-2007
Nelson agreed businesses largely run Congress but “not ‘business,’ in the singular,” he told me a few months ago. The great mistake of populists is to assume that corporate power is monolithic. Pluralists, of which he was a founding father, understood better. “Much of the congressional agenda can be explained by competition among corporate elites,” he said. “Their...
The President's Budget Ploy: Force the Dems to...
Democrats in Congress should be careful what they wish for. They’ve been complaining for years that Bush has financed his war with supplemental appropriations that never make it into budget documents so the public never knows – and the media doesn’t focus on – the war’s real cost. The President has sent to Congress a budget that makes it crystal clear. He wants $365 billion – over and above the...
A Windfall Profits Tax on Oil Companies to Finance...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver. The United States, with five percent of the world’s population, contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, far more than other country. But you can forget a carbon tax any time soon. Dems don’t have the intestinal fortitude to propose it....
Bush on CEO Pay, and the Truth about CEO Pay
President Bush yesterday told corporations they should hold their CEOs more accountable by tying pay to performance. Good sound bite, but meaningless piffle. Pay-for-performance is what got us to CEO compensation that’s today 350 times that of the average worker. The problem of CEO pay doesn’t really have anything to do with whether stockholders are getting their money’s worth. Stock prices of...
