Wednesday, March 10, 2010
When the state-friendly Russian oil company Surgutneftegas held its annual shareholders meeting in the Siberian city of Surgut two years ago, the proceedings in the shabby auditorium started off as tightly scripted as a Politburo meeting. That is, until the moderator called for questions and Alexei Navalny took the stage. In front of some 300 [...]
Monday, February 15, 2010
There has been widespread public anger against the hubris of the banks, who are regarded as being to blame for the financial crisis. Their bonus policies, which have persisted even after the system has been bailed out by the taxpayer, have been attacked by politicians and the media. But what I can’t understand is why [...]
Saturday, February 13, 2010
3. You present the question of the draft as a moral issue for society, and you trace it from the draft riots of the Civil War to the present day. Politicians today appear broadly to support a professional army as a way of avoiding the public controversy presented by the draft. It also means that [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Civic Duty, Common Good, Conscription, Conservatives, Consumerism, Corporatism, Democrats, Ethics, Fairness, Justice, Liberals, Libertarians, Military, Morality, Morals, Pay Inequity, Religion, Republicans, The Draft, Wages, War
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Friday, February 12, 2010
In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow [...]
Filed in Journalism, News Blurbs
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Also tagged AIG, CNBC, CNN, Conflict of Interest, Corporatism, Disclosure, Ethics, Fox Business Network, Fox News, Journalism, Lobbyists, Media, MSNBC, PR, Television
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By bailing out the markets, we only subsidized the foolishness that created the disaster in the first place. The incompetents were allowed to keep their jobs. And not only keep their jobs—they reaped huge rewards. Worse, by playing up the “response to crisis” view of the bail out—think about all of the discussion around Bernanke’s [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE[/youtube] Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged AIG, Bailouts, Banking, Bonuses, Christopher Dodd, Congress, Corporatism, Financial Sector, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Lobbyists, Reform, Senate
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Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts. [...] The singer Billy Bragg has reiterated calls for bonuses at RBS to be capped as he prepared to [...]
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Alan Grayson discusses executive compensation in the House Financial Services Committee with Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz, Lucian Bebchuk and Nell Minow. Why is Grayson among the very few public representatives really standing up for America? (I’d count Kucinich, Sanders, and a few others in that group.) Is every other representative completely spineless or beholden to corporations and their lobbyists? [...]
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Bay Area News Project’s CEO Lisa Frazier has a $400,000 salary, which reminds me of the news and criticisms about Paul Steiger getting $570,000 to run ProPublica. This begs the question: how much is too much in the pay of top execs at nonprofit journalism startups. [...] “They can spin it any way they want, [...]
4. “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.” — Daniel Fass, chairman of Obama’s financial-industry fundraising party on Oct. 19, 2009, insisting that despite wrecking the [...]
Friday, December 18, 2009
Obama stands by as Wall Street lives it up and the rest of America struggles A recent report that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs may have received preferential treatment getting doses of the swine flu vaccine was enough to give Ebenezer Scrooge the yips. Then came news that in order for us to get back the [...]
Saturday, December 5, 2009
At a time when the super-sized pay for high-ranking corporate executives is a major politicalissue, the Supreme Court has agreed to sort out whether a pay package can actually amount to criminal fraud, on the theory that it deprives the company or its stockholders of “honest services” in the executive suite. The issue arises in the high-profile prosecution, and [...]
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Even before the crisis, customers resented the capricious and unreasonable charges, the incompetence and the impersonal nature of modern retail banking. Then, highly paid whizz kids managed to destroy their industry through recklessness – the taxpayer then being called upon to rescue them. Then we had rewards for failure (Sir Fred). And latterly there have [...]
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British [...]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0cf5If3cNg[/youtube] While markets surged past 10,000, the official unemployment rate stood near 10 percent. The United States is in a unique historical position. People on top are doing extraordinarily well, but in the real world the middle class is collapsing. The top 1 percent owns more wealth then the bottom 90 percent. CEOs of large [...]
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