Thursday, March 9. 2006
Forget about soaring trade deficits, volatile energy prices, and assorted attempts to inflame religious civil wars! Forget also about the slowest economic recovery in recent US history. Forbes magazine reports that the number of billionaires around the world has soared by 102 to 793! Cumulatively our billionaires are now worth $2.6 trillion. Interestingly, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) help explain this 15% surge in the numbers.
Thursday, December 8. 2005
The $67 billion corporation that cajoled, coerced, bamboozled and otherwise convinced medical establishments and mothers around the world to spurn breastfeeding in favor of risky infant formula, is taking on Franklin County in Maine.
Continue reading "Nestlé versus Franklin County, ME"
Wednesday, November 16. 2005
Two recent research notes on immigration, one by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, provide both immigrant advocates and nativists data to support their causes. MGA, decidedly in the former camp, accepts the data adduced but believes that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the social and policy implications issuing from the numbers.
Sunday, October 30. 2005
Amidst the indicments, failed nominations, body counts and tropical depressions, there is little reason from optimism, let alone gloating on the part of the progressive movement. Even in moral defeat, in the normally harsh glare of negative public opinion, the right-wing flaps on... Witness the suspension of Davis Bacon in NOLA, the issuing of vouchers for use at private schools, new initiatives to undermine foreign governments (Iran & Syria), etc. Even with the Bush Administration's failure to provide the necessary resources to strengthening international public health systems, it seems poised to revive the politics of fear with the Avian Flu threat. The surest index of right-wing success and resilience in the face of moral failure, though, is the corporate bottom line.
Continue reading "Scams, Scandals and Scoundrels - What's Next? Fear the Non-Scandal"
Friday, October 7. 2005
MA Governor Mitt Romney, and for that matter some of the regional press, seem to think that funding retroactive raises for thousands of staffers at state public colleges is some kind of optional thing. It is not. These are unionized workers, and the raises were part of negotiated contracts that state government has been reneging on in one way or another for years.
Friday, September 23. 2005
One big story this week, that saw virtually no progressive spin in any media outlet, was the Massachusetts State Senate's passage of a nasty bill that will bring the Commonwealth down to the truly brutal welfare standards of the rest of the nation.
Continue reading "MA House Minority Leader Lees is a Bad Bad Man"
Friday, September 9. 2005
The Center for Regional and Economic Policy, a "think and do tank" at Northeastern University, recently released their 2004 Housing Report Card for Boston. Their most important finding--that Boston has the most expensive housing in the U.S. and is, therefore, the most expensive city in the U.S. to live--has received significant media coverage.
What has received less attention is the report’s conclusion that young people are fleeing the state, and why building lots of public housing could reverse that trend.
Continue reading "Boston Most Expensive City; Public Housing Needed"
Wednesday, August 24. 2005
Recently, our estimable governor, Mitt Romney, trooped out to Amherst to boast about his new-and-totally-unrelated-to-his-upcoming-presidential-bid $400 million plan for capital improvements to the Massachusetts public higher education system. Even though the UMass Board of Trustees was about to vote on $2.26 billion in capital improvements anyway. Luckily for us, the Springfield Republican was on hand to record the day’s festivities.
Friday, August 19. 2005
The Boston Globe continues their strange reportage of the ongoing job crisis in Massachusetts with a piece on last month’s stats from the Division of Employment and Training.
Despite the fact that the Commonwealth has only gained back a mere 25 percent of the jobs lost during the first year of the 2001 recession, the headline reads “State Reports Robust Jobs Gains.” But as the article makes clear, while the official gains are about 9500 jobs in July (in a job market of over 3,000,000, mind you), even that tepid number is actually overstated by not properly adjusting the figure for the transitory impact of seasonal jobs.
Thursday, July 21. 2005
A long article on the perils of contingent jobs in the latest issue of Commonwealth--monthly magazine of the centrist think-tank, MassInc--might have been a credible effort in the mid-1990s when much about the contingent economy was new to most observers. But after years of research by analysts including MGA's predecessor organization, the Campaign on Contingent Work (CCW), it's pretty weak to spend thousands of words rehashing a problem that's been flogged to death already, and then take only the most tepid stab at proposing any solutions.
Continue reading "Commonwealth Magazine's Weak Take on Bad Jobs"
Wednesday, July 13. 2005
Having spent a childhood hanging out, working at, loving, and hating local malls, it was with disbelief that this blogger read a piece in today's edition of The Republican (Springfield, MA) that says that the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside has instituted an "MB18" ("Must Be 18") policy on Fridays and Saturdays from 4 p.m. to closing at the facility--after some "success" with similar rules at other malls owned by The Pyramid Companies.
Tuesday, July 12. 2005
It was shocking to discover that Massachusetts workers are only 31st in the nation in wasting time on the job. We blow off an average of a mere 1.9 hours a day—not including lunch. This according to a Boston Herald report on a survey by Needham, MA based Salary.com.
Monday, June 20. 2005
The Associated Press (6/20/05) has noticed that American undergraduates are no longer see prospects of a high-income job in the tech sector as realistic. This is consistent with Gartner's research showing that 15% of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010.
Continue reading "Everyone a Manager?"
Saturday, June 18. 2005
Yesterday’s Boston Globe editorial “ Workforce Work” exercises the same peculiar kind of logic that has hamstrung progressives’ ability to advance a successful course of action on the ongoing Massachusetts jobs crisis. While its argument for a better-educated workforce is certainly something to support, the Globe ignores the forest for the trees.
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