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How Ordinary Folks Can Fix America
Tweet Share on Facebook September 30, 2010 Comment (49)We're toast.
The Chinese outwork us, the Indians outsmart us, and the Germans outvacation us. Our biggest corporations have become computerized Potemkin shells that crank out profits without people. Our middle class is too obese to hustle down to the outplacement office. The government takes all of our money and gives it to Goldman Sachs, while the schools rot. The typical high schooler can barely spell "Snooki."
[In pictures: See 12 ways to stop America's decline.]
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The Film That May Rehabilitate Wall Street
Tweet Share on Facebook September 24, 2010 Comment (2)Ever meet a nice Wall Street banker?
Probably not. Most people have never met a Wall Street banker at all, since they tend not to hang out at the fast-food joints and bowling alleys where mere mortals congregate. But there's certainly a public image of the typical financial mogul: Polished, cocksure, and slick, with secret access to a money vacuum that's somehow connected to every savings account in America. Sort of like a legal Mafiosi. Only worse.
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Video: The Real Recession Rolls On
Tweet Share on Facebook September 23, 2010 CommentI recently appeared on ABC News to discuss a strange dichotomy: The recession officially ended more than a year ago, yet the economy still stinks. Here's the clip:
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How Netflix (and Blockbuster) Killed Blockbuster
Tweet Share on Facebook September 23, 2010 Comment (25)When Blockbuster, the huge video-rental chain, set up a mail-delivery service in the summer of 2004, rival Netflix watched its stock price tumble. Netflix had invented the business in the late '90s, and already survived one competitive scare after Wal-Mart began dabbling in DVD rentals. By 2004, Wal-Mart was backing out, having decided that video rentals weren't part of its core business. But Blockbuster, the nation's largest video-rental chain, was a much bigger threat. Video rentals were its entire business. Its very survival depended on conquering Netflix.
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4 Things Missing From the 'Pledge To America'
Tweet Share on Facebook September 23, 2010 Comment (44)The theme is compelling, and certainly timely: Shrink government, get spending under control, and force Congress to do more with less, just like the rest of America. But like most campaign propaganda, the Republicans' "Pledge To America" glosses over the nation's biggest problems and largely substitutes slogans for solutions. Here's what's missing from the pledge:
A plan to reduce the national debt. There's happy talk about putting caps on "discretionary" government spending (with the usual exceptions for seniors, veterans, and the military), enacting a government hiring freeze, and cutting Congress's budget. But that's not really what's driving up the national debt. Every politician knows that the biggest budget-busters are Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The Republicans actually have a coherent starter plan for taking on these spending monsters, called A Roadmap For America's Future, developed by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. But you won't find any mention of the "Roadmap" in the Pledge To America, because it's not what voters want to hear. Ryan's plan, for example, would gradually reduce Social Security benefits, raise the eligibility age for Medicare, and replace some Medicare benefits with vouchers that seniors would use to seek care in the private market. Try campaigning on that.
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What It Is, If It's No Longer a 'Recession'
Tweet Share on Facebook September 22, 2010 Comment (12)We can't call it a recession anymore—the group of economists that determines such things has declared that the recession officially ended in June 2009. But it sure doesn't feel like a recovery. A year after the recession ended, the unemployment rate is more than three percentage points higher than it was at the worst point of the 2001 recession, and two points higher than the worst point of the 1991 downturn. So today's "recovery" is worse than the recessions of yore.
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How to Manage a Bad Boss—And a Lame Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook September 21, 2010 Comment (3)Do. More. With. Less. Everybody knows the mantra. With jobs scarce and the economy barely recovering from a brutal recession, employers are milking workers for all they can get.
[See 11 firms that overdid the layoffs.]
So is this the future? Or do brighter days beckon? To get some clues about the direction of workplace trends, I spoke recently with Stanford University professor Robert Sutton, author of the new book Good Boss, Bad Boss and the 2007 bestseller The No Asshole Rule. Excerpts:
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Why There's No Joy Over the Recession's End
Tweet Share on Facebook September 20, 2010 Comment (9)Maybe we need a new definition of "recession."
It will come as no relief to the 15 million Americans who are unemployed, but a committee of august economists has finally declared that the recession is officially over. In fact, it ended more than a year ago. No, you didn't miss the celebration. There was none.
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How Consumers Lost a Fast $1.5 Trillion
Tweet Share on Facebook September 17, 2010 Comment (5)In Washington these days, there are bitter fights over new types of economic stimulus that might cost $30 billion here, $50 billion there. The biggest battle is over the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts, and whether they should be extended for everybody or just for the middle class. That's a $700 billion argument. Sounds like real money.
[See 11 firms that overdid the layoffs.]
But the turbulent economy, in its normal course, has vaporized far more money than that, and the astonishing decline in Americans' net worth helps explain why government stimulus has been so ineffective. The latest data from the Federal Reserve shows that American households lost about $1.5 trillion in net worth in just three months, ending at the end of June. That's especially distressing because for a year, Americans had been slowly rebuilding wealth lost in the twin housing and stock market busts. The latest numbers are more evidence that the so-called recovery is slowing, if not ending.
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11 Firms That Overdid the Layoffs
Tweet Share on Facebook September 17, 2010 Comment (18)In the midst of a lot of shocking news, it stood out: In November 2008, Citigroup announced it would lay off more than 50,000 people, or one-seventh of its global workforce. Most companies don't even have 50,000 employees, and those that do could barely function if so many workers left at once. Yet Citigroup was in desperate straits, with a plunging stock price that bottomed out near a buck and financial woes that would force a second bailout from the U.S. government. Some worried that the feds might even nationalize the bank. The only company that axed more workers than Citigroup during the recession was General Motors—which declared bankruptcy.
[In pictures: 11 Companies That Shrank Too Much.]
