Working Life

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 […]

Read the full story

There is little doubt that if Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today–and he would be 85 years old–he would be at the forefront of decrying the class warfare that has reached levels that even he could not have imagined during his short lifetime. He once said that what we “are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism…. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”

And he would have woken up to this startling fact: the richest 1% of people throughout the globe control 48% of the planet’s wealth, leaving the other 52% for the other 99% of humanity.

Read the full story

Well, of course, you didn’t–and this is no Nigerian prince scam. Rather, it’s the average income for the top 400 earners in the U.S. This isn’t the top 1 percent. This is the ubber top percenters, the .001 percent.

Read the full story

For your digestion, or indigestion, another chapter in the astonishing chutzpah and greed. When the rich don’t have enough room or covet something else, they just buy another property for a nice cool $60 million — and, then, they whine about taxes being too high.

Read the full story

This is not another analysis or observation focusing on the strategy and tactics that led to the deal just made on taxes. I was bored by the whole debate weeks ago because, frankly, it missed a much more central fact: the Democratic Party long ago gave up the fight over having a sensible tax rate for the richest people.

Read the full story

Facts and figures are useful when you try to get through the smokescreen of political spin. Here are facts about the tax deal — a bad one, in my view.

Read the full story

You want a visual of what the phony fight about the fiscal “crisis” really is about? Here you go.

Read the full story

I’m not sure if this is true — I treat anything written in The New York Times on economics with a grain of salt. But, it’s worth considering that the rich have nothing to fear but that’s not a surprise.

Read the full story

   If I was a "one percenter", I’d love the debate under way in the U.S. right now. What’s not to love? You whine and cry about the "Buffett Rule", how unfair it is and hurts the "job creators", and, then, laugh all the way to the bank as you barely can see where the […]

Read the full story

If you are one who is already bored by the 2012 elections and the rhetorical, mind-numbing repetition, here’s a little taste of what you can expect all the way into the distant future of 2016. The poodle-for-the-rich governor of New York has determined that his path to the White House in 2016–and, despite the boring […]

Read the full story