This is no time for trade union idiocy, but we’ve got it anyway. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees are back at work, but employers succeeded in making the case that this union struck for what used to be called featherbedding. Featherbedding is a union contract that includes paying workers for not working. In Read More

In business circles these days people speak of “the real economy” as contrasted to whatever the hell is happening downtown on Wall Street. Perhaps Wall Street is the name for a virtual or playland economy.

Evidently some kind of convergence of the real economy and the other one occurred recently when it was announced Read More

Since there is no rule requiring the United States to finish one war before starting the next, with each passing day the bookies are shortening the odds that Iran will be next. No war will have less justification in light of the number of chances the U.S. has been offered to settle its differences with Read More

The tiresome boast put forth by secretaries of the treasury, stock exchange executives, Wall Street C.E.O.s, their economists, their consultants, their think-tankers, their B-school professors and suck-up business journalists is that Wall Street is the “world’s most efficient capital market.”

Exactly what we are to take that to mean is rarely explained. We are Read More

It took forever, but the government has announced that Medicare will no longer pay for hospital-caused diseases. The policy will cover hospital-caused injuries, preventable errors and infections.

The Center for Disease Control estimates that hospital-caused infections alone result in 270 deaths a day, or nearly 100,000 deaths per year. In addition more than a Read More

As the subprime mortgage mess continues to play itself out, certain words that ought to pop up in the discussion are not to be heard. These are words like “fraud,” “conspiracy,” “misrepresentation” and “felony.”

We are looking at more than greed gone awry. We are looking at an industry that tolerated and fostered what Read More

The Supreme Court left Washington the other day for its summer vacation. The court’s vacations are getting longer as, year after year, the justices take fewer cases.

They use the extra time to make money from part-time jobs. Chief Justice Roberts picked up 15 grand for a week’s worth of teaching at Penn State Read More

There are a few tatters left to it, but basically after what the Supreme Court did to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, there isn’t much that remains. That it has limped along for almost five years is remarkable considering it was a political thalidomide baby, deformed and weird-looking from birth.

Even monsters have Read More