"Words that make actions speak louder."
The lackluster financial reform bill now nearing a floor vote in the U.S. Senate includes a surprising provision that could help reframe and revitalize the struggle against outrageously excessive CEO pay. Nearly six decades ago, at the height of the Great Depression, an over $1 million pay package for the top executive at National City […]
Windfall rewards give CEOs an incentive to put worker lives at risk. To see all workers safe, our most recent mining tragedy reminds us, maybe we need to end those windfalls. In a perverse sort of way, CEOs like Don Blankenship, the chief executive at Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where […]
Don’t be fooled by all the poor-mouthing around the latest annual executive pay surveys. With Washington dithering on CEO pay reform, chief execs still have plenty of reason to celebrate. The media heavy hitters have once again begun their annual spring deluge of executive compensation surveys. The Wall Street Journal released its numbers on 2009 […]
The health care reform legislation President Obama signed into law last week takes a little-noticed but precedent-setting swipe at executive pay excess. The health care reform package that President Obama signed into law last week will give many millions of Americans better access to health care. We can say that with certainty. Here’s what we […]
Local government elected leaders are claiming we have no alternative to king-size budget cuts. But their numbers don’t add up. You won’t find many suburbs in the United States more affluent than the burbs that ring Washington, D.C. In fact, six of the ten wealthiest counties in the entire United States sit just outside our […]
Republicans in Congress have introduced a breathtaking new budget plan that would essentially put America’s plutocracy on steroids. The Republican Party, critics like to quip, has become the “party of no.” That tag no longer works. The GOP has now become, thanks to a sweeping new legislative proposal from the ranking Republican on the House […]
The world’s super-duper rich, in the new Forbes magazine count, total just over 1,000 — and hold more wealth than half of humanity. The annual billionaire issue of Forbes magazine, published earlier this week, has a bit of everything. You can thumb these pages, in print or online, and find out how much billionaires pay […]
The White House wants to require firms that do business with the government to pay decent wages. That could work — if we go after all pay that’s indecent. Labels can often cloud reality. Take the labels of “private” and “public” sector. We employ these labels all the time, to divide our economy into totally […]
Deep down in our lobes, says new research from an international scientific team, sits a basic tilt toward fairness. Are we humans hard-wired to hoard or to “share the wealth”? Are we selfish by nature? Or do our psyches have a preference for equality built-in, right in our brains? An international team of scientists, from […]
To really reform big bank behavior, we need to scuttle the pay system that ‘entitles’ Wall Streeters to however much loot they can grab. Too many Americans, conservative ideologues often lament, feel entitled to the good life, even if they haven’t worked to achieve it. Conservatives typically go on to blame this sorry state of […]