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

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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.

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.

This is an accurate, hard-hitting account of greed in America. Tasini is running for Senate next year, so if you want to know his worldview this is a place to start.

Needless to say, it's a much more intelligent read than that 800 pages of "I hate Katie Couric" whinefest Sarah Palin calls a book.

"...in 1960, CEO pay was 41 times that of the average worker, by 2005, CEO's earned 411 times that of the average worker." Many readers may not be much surprised by such figures, but Tasini goes on to document how executives of vast corporations are rewarded even when they are thoroughly incompetent or thoroughly corrupt.

In bankruptcy after bankruptcy, the upper management of such corporations retired with luxurious rewards amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, while shareholders lost their investments, and the ordinary workers were turned loose, sometimes with their pension plans destroyed, seldom with severance pay, often with the loss of any health coverage they may have had.

The documentation is thorough and extensive, drawing its evidence from company documents, government sources, financial media and a host of other publications. The conclusions are damning. This is a current book that is well worth reading. The only unfortunate part is that it doesn't include an index. That would have made it a quick and excellent reference source for pointing to those who have profited and continue to profit from the current economic debacle that is causing so much suffering for the rest of us.

THE AUDACITY OF GREED addresses the causes of the economic crisis in a shorter book than some of the other current offerings.

Mr. Tasini explains that NAFTA worked the way it was planned if one understands that it was crafted for corporations and not workers.

He also feels that education is a "phony solution" to depressed wages. Stagnated wages are a crucial part of the crisis.
Along those lines he suggests that we need to re-value the work of the working class in our country over CEOs.

In the chapter "Stock Options Scam" he details how CEOs game the system even when they ruin the company.

Mr. Tasini provides some brief sketches of a rogue's gallery of players in the crisis.

He also exposes the myth that employees' benefits caused hardships for companies like GM when in fact, it was executive's compensation that was more responsible.
In a lot of cases employee benefit costs are set aside where executive compensation is not.

Another part of the problem is cronyism between CEOs and corporate boards who often have close, parasitic relationships.

On page 90 he highlights the fact that "In our era of audacious greed, the better things get for the corporate elite, the worse they get for the American worker."
And on page 92 he continues- "In the end, the rhetoric of the 'free market' allowed a small elite to rob the treasuries of companies to pad their own already lavish retirements."
This is paralleled by a decline in pension plans for workers.

This book frequently quotes statistics from the Center for Responsible Politics. Those are some sobering numbers in many respects!

Jonathan Tasini concludes the book with seven sensible proposals to "return to sanity".

This book is a "must read" for all populist readers in particular.

Most insight book of the Wall Street debacle I have read. Everyone should read this book.

This book is really important because it explains HOW the overpaid executives are gouging their companies, their employees and the rest of us for their own gain. They apparently have no sense of fair play. How these people feel entitled to rip so many others off is part of a system where the rich are clever and the rest of us are shlubs. It has got to change.

have not read my book yet, looking foward

to it

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.

This book is one long emotional rant that has absolutely no intellectual substance. The author has obviously not studied the history of money or the history of economics. While his premise that America's wealth has been looted is correct, his shotgun approach that everyone on Wall Street is abhorent, is ludicrous. Without Wall Street, the very computer he typed his manuscript on would not exist. He needs to learn how big government and big banks and their ability to create money out of thin air is the root cause of our current crisis. -- Steve Woods