Working Life

  I suspect we are going to be distracted by an emerging debate between Congressional Democrats and The White House on how to handle the CEO pay caps written into the economic stimulus bill. This is a distraction because, in all honesty, the pay caps aren’t real.   Today, there is this news in The […]

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To the question "have they no shame?" we already know the answer. And as we dig deeper and scrape the bottom of the barrel where the bottom-feeders have been lurking, we learn more about the immoral behavior of the incompetent, greedy elites. Today, the the tally is $121 million for FOUR–count ’em, FOUR–Merrill Lynch executives. […]

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I’m all for a little rhetoric and bashing CEOs who, as a class, have lined their pockets while pillaging the country. But, if the point is to stop the legal looting of corporate treasuries and leave some money in the till for regular workers, when you get right down to it, the CEO pay caps […]

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    I would have put a "BREAKING" on this title but, in some ways, this is not a new story–just another twist to the same-old political as usual. I’m all for the cap on executive compensation announced by the president. But, the culture of Washington is not changing–and it’s getting worse.   Today, the Center […]

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   I know this would be a tough one for most everyone because, let’s face it, half a million dollars a year is not what it once was. Pity those poor executives who may have their pay capped if they come to taxpayers for a bailout: “That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a […]

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   Yes, as the president said, the bonuses taken by Wall Street bankers are shameful. But, there is an even larger shame happening in the country: the plundering of America by the richest Americans and our unwillingness to call for significantly higher taxes on the elite.   Buried in the business section of The New […]

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   Yours truly is on a plane soon for the rest of the day, more or less. But, here’s a quick little something to make your heart grow fonder for those incomptent, greedy people who helped crater the financial system: By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that […]

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I’ve been pretty clear that we should be significantly raising the taxes on the richest Americans–much higher than the top rates that were in place during the Clinton Administration, which is where the president-elect believes they should go. But, I’m happy at least to see some lines being drawn on estate taxes.   The Wall […]

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   For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been focusing a lot of observations about the financial mess–the Paulson bailout for bankers, the AIG bailout, the "The Audacity of Timidity: Where Is The Challenge to Market Fundamentalism"–but, to start off today, I wanted to turn us back to some real voices. And this comes courtesy […]

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   Huh. Why worry about cutting corporate taxes when they don’t even bother to pay any?: Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The study, which is likely to […]

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