"Words that make actions speak louder."
By every measure that matters, The Spirit Level helps us understand, relatively equal nations far outperform nations where income and wealth concentrate at the top. Many of us have read, over the past 12 months, a variety of books that address America’s vast economic gap between our rich and everyone else. Books that trace the […]
Who deserves to sit on this year’s list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun? Has picking a year’s greediest “top ten” ever been easier? We don’t think so. We could, this year, fill an entire top […]
AOL and Time Warner split, Comcast and NBC join. The merger merry-go-round continues to spin. Investment bankers and corporate execs get the brass ring. The rest of us get pink slips and higher prices. What may be the dumbest corporate merger of all time — the $165 billion deal that saw AOL gobble up Time […]
The U.S. House of Reps has voted to extend the only federal tax levy on grand accumulations of private wealth. But that extension essentially keeps in place all of George W.’s tax rate cuts on billionaire bequests. Congress flipped another page in the estate tax story last week, with a 225-200 House vote to make […]
But Wall Street’s mainstream critics still can’t bring themselves to challenge the top executive ‘right’ to reap enormous riches. Great minds have been searching, ever since last fall’s financial sector meltdown, for an antidote to the wildly excessive Wall Street paydays that made that meltdown inevitable. That search, after over a year, still hasn’t generated […]
Don’t expect an answer from the ranters and ravers who frequent ‘Tea Parties’ — or the politicians who egg them on. You don’t have to dig particularly deep, in the United States today, to find some striking similarities between today’s virulently anti-Obama “Tea Party” crowd and the media darlings who birthed the “Tax Revolt” phenomenon […]
What has the potential to save more lives, the insurance reforms in the House health care bill or the higher taxes on the rich the bill imposes to pay for those reforms? This rather odd question, suggests a new study on inequality and health, really does merit asking. Over the past year, Americans have been […]
Unfortunately, lawmakers aren’t doing too well either — and the big bank bonus grab has once again shifted into overdrive. The bankers at Goldman Sachs, Goldman’s CEO pronounced last week, are doing “God’s work.” God, these days, must truly be working in strange ways. Take what happened a few short years ago, right before the […]
Amid double-digit joblessness, two top U.S. corporations cut still another mega merger deal that enriches execs and tosses workers, by the thousands, out onto the street. You don’t have to be a high-flyer in high finance to get a kick — and a fortune — out of wheeling and dealing. Greed and grasping, we need […]
Investing recklessness at Harvard is making ‘the best and the brightest’ look awfully silly — almost as silly as a nation that lets staggering quantities of wealth continue to concentrate. Wild chases after vast riches, last fall’s global meltdown reminded the world, can destroy economies — and corrupt entire societies. Great universities, in theory at […]