Nothing better illustrates the core critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the financial sector’s dominance of our political institutions than the spectacle of high-profile Democrats, like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, fretting over the “tone” of the Obama campaign’s advertisements targeting Mitt Romney’s days as a vulture...
The Wall Street “veteran” Leon Cooperman has written an “Open Letter to President Obama” that provides us with a glimpse into the mindset of our 21st century corporate overlords. He’s upset not with President Obama’s Treasury Department or his Securities and Exchange Commission, or even his Department of Justice or the IRS. No, what’s...
Corporate and financial elites have largely succeeded in seizing the current economic crisis of their own making to ram through attacks on social programs they’ve always despised. With the politicians and the Supreme Court in their pockets they apparently believe that now is their time to contort the institutions of American society into a...
In 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, Simon Johnson and James Kwak point out that in September 2008 the high-flying masters of the universe were at their weakest point and had no choice but to do whatever the government demanded of them. Never mind the supreme irony of Wall...
Financial Reform: “Too Small to Succeed”
The financial reform legislation currently winding its way through the Congress is a step in the right direction but it retains too much of the status quo that brought down the economy in the first place. The key problem, as many economists have been telling us, is that the top financial institutions remain “too...
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