Working Life

For your digestion, or indigestion, another chapter in the astonishing chutzpah and greed. When the rich don’t have enough room or covet something else, they just buy another property for a nice cool $60 million — and, then, they whine about taxes being too high.

Read the full story

Ok, a little test to see who has been paying attention. What do you see in this story that seems really familiar?

Read the full story

Hey, no big deal — you run a company rife with conflicts of interest, you help crater the economy, costing millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth…and you keep racking up more and more money. Life is good for Lloyd Blankfein.

Read the full story

One of the most grating parts about the Fix-The-Debt crowd is their sanctimoniousness — only *they* care about the country and only *they* know the truth and everyone else is an idiot and blind. The truth is this is a gang of phonies — led by the corporate hacks named Bowles and Simpson — who have an ideological hatred of anything that smells of a “social good” and mostly standout for the amount of riches they’ve siphoned off from various companies or investments they’ve tapped into. And here is hard evidence.

Read the full story

You want a visual of what the phony fight about the fiscal “crisis” really is about? Here you go.

Read the full story

So, it’s easy to capture our predicament today–though you’d never get that from the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”). Here is is neatly summed up: we’ve been robbed, only little fish are being held accountable for relatively small crimes and, even more to the point, in a political rhetorical world where shareholders are revered, the shareholders are being left to pay the bill.

Read the full story

Clarity in politics requires that you pay attention. It’s not hard to see the game being played. And it is often so easy — as easy as a campaign contribution — to see the game that you burst out laughing because, well, humor must never be abandoned, even if you see your country being sold off to the highest bidder.

Read the full story

I guess it’s a function of inflation and/or a numbness to reality but the rhetoric about money isn’t what is used to be. Back in the day, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen (whose name probably means nothing to the shallow commentators who think political history started with Ronald Reagan) is alleged to have said, ” A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”. Dirksen, who served in the 1950s and 1960s (and probably could never win a Republican primary in today’s wing-nut world), would have been a piker by today’s standards of throwing around figures without regard to reality. Which brings me to the Romney lie about taxes–which the president got right, admittedly, in a clumsy way, but most liberal-progressive pundits are getting wrong.

Read the full story

Hey, Bank of America shareholder, how does it feel to have the executives deceive investors (in other words, lie), escape any personal responsibility for the lies, cause huge losses and, then, stick YOU with a bill for over $2 BILLION? Well, probably not a great feeling but, screw you, you are just an investor, not a coddled, overpaid executive who just got handed a stay-out-of-jail card.

Read the full story

TasiniFollowSend Message RSS
Daily Kos member

My Diaries (list)
My Stream
My Groups
Following
Comments
Messages
Profile

Wed Aug 29, 2012 at 07:30 PM EDT
Banksters Get Off Again: Citibank Pays Off Crimes, Robert Rubin Skates

by Tasini

Same old story. The crimes of the financial crisis remain, for the most part, unpunished-except if you are a shareholder of a financial institution who is paying the price for the misdeeds and crimes of the greedy, overpaid executives who destroyed the lives of millions of people. Today’s example: Citibank.

Read the full story

    In my search to find something positive among the rubbish cascading across our eyes, let us behold a small ray of positive action. Citibank’s CEO Vikram S. Pandit tried to stuff his pockets full of millions of dollars more in bank money. The shareholders were not buying it–and turned thumbs down on his proposed [...]

Read the full story

   If I was a "one percenter", I’d love the debate under way in the U.S. right now. What’s not to love? You whine and cry about the "Buffett Rule", how unfair it is and hurts the "job creators", and, then, laugh all the way to the bank as you barely can see where the [...]

Read the full story

   A few months ago, I spent 5-6 hours interviewing Paul Krugman for Playboy magazine. It’s now on-line here. He speaks candidly–surprise–about the economic misdeeds of Wall Street, the foolishness of the current austerity obsession and focus on the non-existent debt crisis, and a whole range of topics including his view that the Obama Administration [...]

Read the full story

   On the face of it, it’s a good thing when the labor movement leverages the trillions of dollars–yes, that’s TRILLIONS–that sit in pension funds. It’s been a topic of debate for a long time. The question is: what do we get? Here is the example, via The Wall Street Journal: New York Gov. Andrew [...]

Read the full story

    May I introduce to you my hero for the day: Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan. Yesterday, Rakoff said what we all know: the government, our government, is not serious about holding people accountable for the robbery and greed and incompetence that led to the financial collapse, costing millions of [...]

Read the full story

   The "Greed is Good" ethos–let me get my hands on every dollar possible no matter how many people lose their jobs or how sleazy I look or how bad this is for the shareholders–has not gone away. As I’ve argued, part of the problem is that, since the financial crisis in 2008, the system [...]

Read the full story