Working Life

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The discerning quick minds among you will know […]

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The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights. Now, this is a […]

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“Economic inequality is out of control. In 2019, the world’s billionaires, only 2,153 people, had more wealth than 4.6 billion people.” Those two sentences lead off Oxfam’s annual look at inequality. This year, Oxfam looks at unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis. I speak with Paul O’Brien, Vice President of Policy […]

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The rich are living the creed of the 1987 film “Wall Street”: Greed is good! Consider this: 26 billionaires now have a collective wealth of $1.4 trillion—equal to the wealth of the bottom 3.8 billion people on the planet. That’s just a smidgen of the immorality I discuss with Oxfam America’s Paul O’Brien, whose organization […]

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As Labor Day looms on the horizon, I ring up Larry Mishel, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, to talk about his new study looking at CEO greed. Not a shock, but if you are wondering where that pay increase went, it’s probably in the CEO’s bank account. A logical conversation after digging into […]

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The teachers’ uprisings around the nation have challenged the bankrupt ideology of supply-side tax cutting—and maybe marks a shift in the public’s view of taxes and public spending. I talk about that with Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. I welcome back Arizona teacher activist Amber Gould for an […]

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The Pope and Bernie Sanders share something: concern for the poor and a sharp critique of capitalism, as well as no fondness for the Wall Street class which funds virtually every other candidate, including the presumed front-runner. While others jostle for tickets to be in the picture with the Pope, Bernie’s hitting the streets with the very people he is campaigning to defend.

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Sometimes, you just got to connect the dots–even when the stuff is so obvious and screams out with the truth. In this case, some evidence on why these so-called “free trade” agreements are so destructive, though, I have to say I chuckled when I read that the very forum consisting of the planet’s wealthy countries has discovered, shockingly, that global inequality is at record levels.

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If you ever read the real estate section of The New York Times, there’s a section on page 2 called “Big Ticket”…it’s the place where you can read about the most expensive sale of the week, and that usually means something around $30-$40 million. Well, then, no wonder the gap between rich and poor in Manhattan is tops in the country.

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When do we get to the point when the obvious–DUH–doesn’t come as some surprise or revelation to the elites? Probably never when it comes to inequality because they can’t see because they don’t live it. Last week, I wrote about a “Duh”–the G20 being told that higher wages will lift the global economy. Today, it’s the dopes over at Standard & Poor’s who wake up from a slumber–or self-imposed denial.

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