Working Life

I like the ring of The Stop Wall Street Looting Act, don’t you? True, it’s part of the business model of the joint, especially the private equity pirates. The Act is, in fact, aimed squarely at the private equity industry, who have stripped and destroyed hundreds of companies. I’ll talk about the Act with the […]

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Why do we let Wall Street run wild with our money? We don’t have to. With my guest Marc Armstrong, I dig into the idea of a public bank–a bank whose shareholders are we, the people. It’s an idea gaining momentum throughout the country. I refer to a piece on public banks that I wrote […]

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This isn’t a surprise—CEOs are robbing the great wealth created by workers. But, I add a new wrinkle to the robbery of the people—domestic outsourcing. Yup, you got it. Not jobs running to slave-wage countries but jobs vanishing within the borders of the country. And our Robber Baron of the week, for a second time, […]

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peaking a few subway stops away from the epicenter of the global financial crisis, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders promised to remake the financial system to serve America’s working families. Below are his prepared remarks. Watch the live stream here. The American people are catching on. They understand that something is profoundly wrong when, in our country […]

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Let me give credit, up front, to a splendid idea from the actors Greg Wise and Emma Thompson that clarified my own outrage at a simple reality: the bankers destroyed the economy with their greed and incompetence, the Obama Administration lets each bank CEO off the hook with a negotiated deal for a fine that the institution, not the banker pays, and with no jail time for a single high-ranking Wall Streeter and WE PAY FOR THIS.

That’s right: each one of us, with our taxes, pays for this sleazy deal with the financial elite.

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Jamie Dimon lives a charmed life. In a normal world, he would be in jail or at least be out of a job–not earning millions of dollars in pay and benefits. Which is really a parable about the world in which we live in where nothing really changes.

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I like a good sense of humor as much as anyone. So, I tip my hat to the people over at Standard and Poor’s — especially the legal department — for giving me a chance to just have a good ‘ole belly laugh. You see, all that stuff about S&P’s culpability in the mortgage scam that robbed millions of people of their jobs and savings is just made-up, and, to boot, the lawsuit filed by the Justice Department is “political retribution.” Seriously. Now, c’mon, did you laugh or not?

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I mean this in a couple of ways. If people in Detroit were all named “Jamie Dimon,” a bailout would be on its way, free and clear, low-interest, no questions asked, the same kind of bailout JP Morgan Chase’s Dimon and his gang of thieves on Wall Street were able to pocket after they cratered the economy. But, barring Dimon being an actual whore, not simply a financial one, the familial connection ain’t happening for the people of Detroit — not that they’d really want it. That said, there is a real argument to made: Wall Street should pay for Detroit’s fiscal situation. And I’d propose a surtax on profits called “The Jamie Dimon Surtax.”

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It’s hard to pick out, in the world we live in, the greatest of all farces. But, certainly, a top-tier candidate would be the repeated, mind-numbing instances when a Wall Street financier or a big bank pays a massive fine to avoid litigation but is allowed to present the fiction that it did nothing wrong. Everyone knows the law was violated. But, only the big fish get to pretend like it never happened. Well, maybe there is a very tiny crack in the facade of these farces, which could bring, some day, the practice to an end.

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So, Wall Street got to really fuck workers once — when the greedy bastards who cratered the economy with their foolish games, they put millions of people into the streets, people who lost their jobs because of the greed. While not a single high-ranking financial leader is in jail, the greedy bastards are coming back for a second time to fuck workers — this time trying to screw them out of pensions.

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