Working Life

The raid on our country’s treasury has been underway for 30 years (and more). The corporate leaders have successfully drained our common wealth, shifting money away from the community and, instead, diverting it into the hands of a few. And now the din is growing for another robbery of the people to the tune of […]

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I mean, c’mon–is there no shame? Yes, that’s rhetorical. We have the greatest jobs crisis in decades, with close to one in five Americans not able to find decent, full-time paying work. The minimum wage is a poverty-level wage. But, all is well on Wall Street–as in $144 BILLION in pay.   This just up […]

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Count me in the group, perhaps small, that is unimpressed with the pledge by a group of billionaires to give away large parts of their fortune. Not because I oppose the idea of philanthropy. Rather, the announcement obscures a reality: very little of the money will go to challenging the root causes of the incredible […]

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   The financial "reform" bill is still not law. One reason is the failure to cobble together enough votes to move past a filibuster. Russ Feingold explains his opposition: Mr. Feingold said he wanted to reimpose Depression-era rules that would bar traditional banks from affiliating with investment firms, among other things. "We need to eliminate […]

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   Via The Wall Street Journal today: Federal prosecutors, working with securities regulators, are conducting a preliminary criminal probe into whether several major Wall Street banks misled investors about their roles in mortgage-bond deals, according to a person familiar with the matter. The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche […]

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    I applaud the president for trying to impose some new and renewed standards to try to make sure that what happened on Wall Street doesn’t happen again. But, we are about to miss an opportunity–perhaps a missed opportunity that will haunt us for years to come–to change the debate about our economy and the […]

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   This just in, via The Wall Street Journal: Germany on Wednesday moved toward a new bank levy to cover the cost of future bailouts, and France said it would pursue a parallel effort as leading world economies weigh strategies for curbing speculation and preventing future crises. A proposal approved by the German cabinet would […]

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   The momentum for a worldwide agreement to tax banks is apparently on the rise: The U.S. and European governments are moving toward a consensus on taxing large banks to cover the cost of any future bailouts rather than asking taxpayers to foot the bill, as happened regularly in past banking crises. The tax proposals […]

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The lines are clear: it’s the people versus the banks and Wall Street. While both the House and Senate bills do not go far enough and have already been, in my view, watered down, there is one issue that we can still fight hard on–and have the back of the president: an independent Consumer Financial […]

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   There are roughly 400 amendments being proposed to the financial reform legislation proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd. I’ve written previously that I think that the legislation is, at best, a modest step forward. Many of the amendments are aimed at weakening reform and are being pushed by the financial inustry’s lobbying machine.     One […]

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