The upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is using a process that is rigged from the start. It is not being negotiated by governments for the benefit of their people, it is being negotiated by executives (or future executives/lobbyists currently in government) largely for the benefit of the giant corporations they serve. The process has these [...]

On Monday afternoon 27 people were arrested in front of the Department of Justice and put behind bars. Their crime: Being sick and tired of Washington bailing out banks while there is no bailout for those among the other 99 percent of the country who are drowning in underwater mortgages. Almost 500 activists from the [...]

Police in Washington made numerous arrests today in connection with the ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis, in which millions of homeowners lost billions of dollars due to the fraudulent actions of bank executives. But the arrests were not of the criminals who caused the crisis; the people led away in handcuffs today were the victims of [...]

The CEO of a big company makes 1795 times what its clerks are making, and the company is now in trouble. Does it matter which company, when so many other companies are in a similar situation? There is a three-year-old law that requires companies to disclose to shareholders the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay, but the [...]

What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be an American corporation? An article in the Wall Street Journal the other day should trigger questions like these. WSJ: Domestic-Based Multinationals Hiring Overseas, Multinational companies based in the U.S. boosted their global work forces in 2011 almost entirely by hiring workers [...]

The corporate/conservative effort to gut the country’s labor-law enforcement continues at full steam. Senate Republicans are blocking NLRB Board confirmations. Republican judges blocked the the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from operating until the Senate confirms Board members. Today House Republicans are moving on a bill to just shut the NLRB down. People vs Concentrated [...]

Congressional Republicans came to Silicon Valley this week to raise money from CEOs and their companies. They were offering a flat-out quid pro quo: give us money and in exchange we will cut your taxes, block taxes on profits made from moving jobs out of the country, cut government oversight of various schemes you try, [...]

A JPMorgan Chase employee stepped onstage at a black-tie gala on Wall Street last week to accept a “best crisis management” award given by an investor relations magazine. The bank, which was recently the subject of a U.S. Senate investigative hearing and an ongoing FBI probe into $6.2 billion in trading losses known as the [...]

There is a lesson from the Cyprus situation: If you are a large depositor you need to watch your bank. You can’t just assume someone will bail out the banks — and you. The big banks have been able to keep governments from reigning them in, while getting governments to bail them out. That game is over.

When you think European financial crisis, you think Greece, or Spain, or Italy. But economic trouble in the small island nation of Cyprus is causing a serious panic throughout Europe. Because of Cyprus banks’ exposure to the financial troubles in neighboring Greece, the island nation’s banks need a bailout.