Working Life

   Interesting juxtaposition, I think, in these two press reports. First, the financial industry is doing all it can to neuter the rules imposed in what I thought was the relatively meak Dodd-Frank changes: Wall Street and the financial industry spent more to lobby Washington in the first quarter of this year than a year […]

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   I’m about to dash off to a protest at the main postal office here in Manhattan for a Tax Day demonstration sponsored by US Uncut, the NY chapter of the Coffee Party and assorted other malcontents like me. In that spirit, I thought it worth leaving us with this list of the corporate tax […]

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   It never ends. The robbery of the great wealth of the nation. The Audacity of Greed of the CEO class is never quenched. On Friday, I wrote about the huge pay increases sweeping through the CEO class in the financial community. It’s a cancer that is spreading again everywhere. Let me start with this […]

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   The answer is no, I’m not surprised. But, we must never lose the sense of outrage or simply shrug because "it’s just the way it is". Never. The absolute Audacity of Greed has to be challenged every moment.    In the Financial Times today: Jamie Dimon underlined Wall Street’s return to health after the […]

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Sometimes, I wonder whether we all live in a grand farce. But, actually, it’s a real-life story about a robbery of the people that continues every day–and today is no different. The robbers grow richer.   From The Wall Street Journal a story headlined: "On Street, Pay Vaults to Record Altitude": When it comes to […]

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You can’t find a better contrast between the vision for our country than those offered by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Goldman Sachs. One vision sees America as the land of equality and fairness. The other vision sees an America where greed is good.   Here is some of what Trumka will say today at […]

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The swamp has not been drained. Throw them all in jail. The Wall Street Journal today: Federal authorities, capping a three-year investigation, are preparing insider-trading charges that could ensnare consultants, investment bankers, hedge-fund and mutual-fund traders and analysts across the nation, according to people familiar with the matter. The criminal and civil probes, which authorities […]

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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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As the dust has settled a bit from last week’s slap-on-the-wrist to Goldman Sachs, it’s worth making this point again: nothing much has changed.   After the first few hours of the news that Goldman would pay $550 million to make the SEC go away, it became pretty clear that the government had nicked Goldman […]

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  If I was Lloyd Blankfein and you told me that I could pockets hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, play a key role in a scam that cost millions of people their jobs, sent the economy into one of the worst economic tailspins in a half century, escape any personal jail time for […]

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