The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America (Paperback)

~ (Author)

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"Jonathan Tasini is one of the country's premier labor writers. Not just a reporter, he brings a wealth of firsthand, frontline, experience to every issue he tackles."—Barbara Ehrenreich

"This is must reading for anyone who wants to know how we got us into this financial mess—and what it will take to get out of it."—Katrina vanden Heuvel

"In order to comprehend the entirety of our nation’s economic system, an understanding of working-class Americans and the labor movement is absolutely essential. Nobody understands that better than Jonathan Tasini. His writing is infused with a thorough knowledge of not only labor, but how corporate greed is at the root of the recent economic collapse.”—James P. Hoffa, General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

"Jonathan Tasini dares to utter the words that are still not said in "polite" company: The G-word: Greed! The T-word: Theft! No, greed is not good. Enriching oneself by taking the money of others and leaving them poor: that's theft. Tasini shows us the economy as we need to see it-from the perspective of people who work."—George Lakoff,author of The Political Mind and Don't Think of an Elephant!

Over the past quarter century, we have lived through the greatest looting of wealth in human history. While billions of dollars streamed into the pockets of a few elites in the corporate and economic class, the vast majority of citizens have lived through a period of falling wages, disappearing pensions, and dwindling bank accounts—all of which lead to the personal debt crisis that lies at the root of the current financial meltdown. This "audacity of greed" was legally blessed by the ethos of the "free market," a phony marketing phrase that covered up the fleecing of the American public.

In The Audacity of Greed, Jonathan Tasini examines the reasons and exposes the people responsible for the looting of America—from Wall Street executives who funded their lavish lifestyles at the public's expense to the politicians who let it happen—arguing that we need a cultural and philosophical revolution that punctures the fable of market fundamentalism and, by doing so, values the contributions made by ordinary Americans throughout the economy.

Jonathan Tasini is executive director of the Labor Research Association. The longtime president of the National Writers Union, he was the lead plaintiff in Tasini vs. The New York Times, the landmark electronic rights case that took on the corporate media's assault on the rights of freelance authors. In 2006 he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in New York. He has written about labor and economics for a variety of publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on CNBC and Fox News.

About the Author

Jonathan Tasini is the executive director of Labor Research Association. From 1990 to 2003, he served as president of the National Writers Union. In 2006, he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Senate nomination in New York. He has written about labor and economics for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and LA Times.

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Ig Publishing (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935439006
• ISBN-13: 978-1935439004
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #206,093 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Vodka and Penises, September 17, 2009

By	A. Ronzoni Jr. (Astoria, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I recently had a conversation with someone on the topic of why the American people continue to put up with all the crap our corporatized economic system dishes out to them. This is the country that produced Shays's Rebellion, the Populist movement, the IWW, the Bonus Army, the CIO and the sit down strike. Labor activist, CNBC commentator and 2010 U.S. Senate candidate, Jonathan Tasini begins this book by pointing out that the looting of America by corporate and financial interests has been going on since the late 70s. It is only recently, however, that the end result of the unbridled greed of far too many of those at the top of the pyramid has become too disastrous to ignore. Yet while there have been isolated incidents of outcry and resistance to date no national movement has arisen to demand the fundamental reform of the rules that govern our economy.

The reasons for this are varied though as Tasini points out, the American people have been subjected to a decades long, never ending barrage of propaganda from a variety of sources that have seduced many into the delusion that the system works to the benefit of us all. Closely related to this was the was the conscious efforts of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School to rollback the dominance of the Keynesian, regulated, mixed economy philosophy in the Capitalist "free world" during the post-World War II period and to replace it with what Tasini terms: "Free Market Fundamentalism" or the exaggerated faith that when markets are left to operate on their own they can solve all economic and social problems. The degree to which American politicians from both major parties have been rendered incapable of thinking outside Friedman's free market fundamentalist box is driven home by Tasini with a shocking quote from a speech given by liberal environmentalist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the 2005 Sierra Club Convention:

"There is no stronger advocate for free market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free market capitalism in this country because the free market promotes efficiency and efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution of course is waste."

Mad Magazine once satirized the movie Rocky complete with a re-christened character called "Appalling Greed." And the greed of corporate the CEOs chronicled in here is just that, appalling and at times nothing short of pathological. Tasini cites instances where certain CEOs were involved in schemes to illegally back date the stock options that provide them with so much of their wealth, when they were already getting away with murder by legally backdating and re-pricing options. For the epitome of this orgy of greed and the metaphor for the age, Tasini chooses the party Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski threw for his wife on her 40th birthday on the isle of Sardinia, replete with a replica of Michelangelo's statue of David rigged to spray vodka from its penis (Tasini titles this chapter "Vodka and Penises")! Yes, this is right up there with the bacchanalian excesses of late imperial Rome or the extravagances of Marie Antoinette. And if this kind of thing keeps up the United States may some day soon follow these historical predecessors into similar oblivion.

But Tasini ends his book with hopeful message, calling for a sensible program of reform including a significant increase in the minimum wage, demanding passage of H.R. 676, a bill currently stalled in Congress that would expand Medicare to provide basic health insurance coverage to every American, a redistribution of the nation's tax burden upward towards the top 5 to 1% of income earners and ending the preferential tax treatment of unearned investment income, increasing the power of labor unions by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, also currently languishing in Congress, and creating a new system of public financing for elections.

But Tasini's analysis of the cure for what ails us goes a lot deeper than just these important reforms. He also calls for a reexamination of the values and assumptions that underlie our economic system, such as whether Gross National and Domestic Product figures are really an accurate measure of societal well being and whether or not we should demand first and foremost that policies should be geared towards a sustainable, equitable global economy that, to paraphrase Tasini: "gets better for everyone without necessarily getting bigger."

This is a debate worth having and The Audacity of Greed is a book worthy of being read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tasini's courage: telling the truth, October 2, 2009

By	William M. Fudeman (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Jonathan Tasini's book helps us understand what's been happening in the US
economy in recent decades, by describing how the bogus faith in "free" markets
enabled the CEO's of America's largest corporations to expand their wealth while their actions hurt ordinary working people. Tasini has done his research, and the information he shares is disturbing, but it's information we need if we are going to remedy what's wrong with our economic system. Buy 4 copies of the book- one for yourself and one for each of your Senators and your Representative in Congress.

4 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Second time farce., September 30, 2009

By	Mark Twain "book_man" (St. Louis, Missouri) - See all my reviews

Karl, the original Marx brother, once claimed that all history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. He obviously inspired Jonathan Tasini in more ways than one.

This book is a farce that reflects a genuine tragedy. The farce comes with Tasini's mock horror at the "audacity" of greed that he discovers on Wall Street. Nobody except economic newborns or congenital fools is shocked to discover that those who allocate capital for a living managed to allocate a good bit of it to themselves. Moreover, not all corporate behavior was greed and not every tired policy Tasini dreams of would fix it. AIG was at least as much about confusion as garden variety greed. Enron was plain theft and the guy who stole the most is out of jail. Much of what happened on Wall Street was pure stupidity. And a lot of it was a failure of Democratic policy makers and Republican regulators. Greed was not always the root cause and sometimes had nothing to do with it.

Greed is never scarce when humans are concerned, which is why it is banal. Saying that someone is greedy is like saying they are hungry or sleepy. At times most of us are greedy. Many of us would take home tens of millions of dollars given the chance to do so legally. Does that make us greedy? Yes, it does. It this an interesting discovery? Not at all. What matters is why our rules and ethics permit and encourage greed. About this question, Tasini has absolutely nothing original or even interesting to say.

Which leads to the tragedy. The American labor movement has lived off of its glory days for fifty years. It is a hidebound, conservative, undemocratic, and profoundly unimaginative institution. Despite profound changes in America's economy, technology, demography, and politics, labor has changed less in five decades than any American institution with the possible exception of the Catholic Church. If it had competitors (it doesn't, thanks to a legal monopoly granted by Congress), it would be gone and, labor's illusions of holding back the deluge notwithstanding, few would notice.

Tasini is a talented writer but he is of this movement and it shows on every page. Never is organized labor criticized in a thoughtful or fundamental way. Never are policies advanced that would not have been familiar to the faithful in 1936. He is Michael Moore on a rant without a sense of theater or irony or moment. And he has the audacity to copy Obama's title.

Jonathan Tasini can do much better work than this. Even if his dust jacket buddies won't tell him, we do not need another pundit of the left or the right whose only real topic is themselves.