Working Life

   Apparently, if you shill for the banks AND violate ethical standards set forth by the institution on whose board you sit, no one really cares. Not the editorial boards of newspapers. Not the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as "journalists"). Not elected officials. And not advocates for the public interest.    Nope. The […]

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   I doubt few people think the Federal Reserve is anything but a mouthpiece for the big financial institutions. And most people would be right–after all, the Fed’s Board of Governors and the branches are effectively run by creatures of the banks.     But, the least we can do is make sure that we […]

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   This is the world we live in. When a politician, who represents the people, decides to stand up to powerful interests who have robbed the people, his political peers try to foil him. On the other hand, if you kiss the ass of powerful interests, you get campaign contributions. And we wonder why the […]

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   When I wrote the "The Audacity of Greed" in 2008, I had a chapter called "Vodka and Penises" which detailed a rather unique birthday party thrown in Sardinia, Italy, in 2000 by Tyko CEO Dennis Kozlowski in honor of his wife–it featured vodka spraying from the penis of a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Kozlowski, […]

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    I am perplexed by the storm of criticism leveled at Standard & Poor’s. Don’t get me wrong–that S&P, or any of the ratings agencies, is even taken seriously is a monumental farce, given their role in the financial crisis.   But, we’re missing the point:   It is a mistake to solely blame the […]

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   The hammer that Verizon is seeking to bring down on its unionized workers is an important story–and the importance is being sorely missed, or at least, buried in everything I have read so far. It’s a story that typifies the broad class warfare underway in America: warfare that is happening largely because corporate executives […]

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   My friends say, correctly, that I should not waste my time reading Tom Friedman. Yes, true. But, I dipped into his moronic column yesterday mainly because it’s in the same non-reality based theme that is a plague everywhere–we need "shared sacrifice" to make the cuts "needed". Spare me.     Dumb stuff: Yes, we have […]

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    We still aren’t clear enough about what has happened: the corporate media has framed the debate about the phony debt and deficit "crisis" so adroitly that the back-and-forth on this debate is largely about how much to screw the average person in America, not whether to screw the average person in America. Sorry to […]

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    I’ve maintained for a long time that the civil fines levied against Goldman Sachs ($550 million) and J.P. Morgan ($153 million) for their roles in the financial crisis scam amounted to peanuts–costs that will be ultimately passed on to consumers and shareholders. If a financial executive could aid and abet a massive fraud and […]

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   You hear that great sucking sound? It’s the hundreds of billions of corporate dollars that flood to off-shore tax havens. Time to turn off the spigot… There is some movement here: Saying that offshore tax havens deprive the United States Treasury of tens of billions of dollars of revenue a year, two senior Democratic […]

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