jonathan-tasini-the-audacity-of-greed.thumbnail.JPGJonathan Tasini presents a comprehensive portrait of breathtaking avarice and rampant criminality in his book "The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves and the Looting of America."

Have you tired of stories about regular Americans whose lives have been destroyed by the financial collapse through no fault of their own? Are you bored looking at the ruin of the American economy from the bottom up? Would you like to read, instead, about the utterly corrupt system that has engorged the elite CEO class? Then this book is for you.

Mr Tasini presents a top-down view of the looting of America: how it was planned and executed in American boardrooms by American executives running American companies, midwifed by an American marketing slogan masquerading as an economic principle ("free market fundamentalism") and greased by a political system whose players are addicted to the huge sums of cash our media barons require to participate in our current Thunderdome of elected politics. Imagine The Robb Report, or one of CNBC’s early-millenial executive profiles, or Town & Country magazine — but inverted by a Lewis Carroll who makes no pretense about the missing value added to our society by these bloodsucking scammers and their purchased politicians, in-pocket regulators, and the fawning media elites who enabled them.

You will meet CEOs whose companies’ stock prices were exactly the same after a decade of their "service," but whose takeaway is magnificent: huge annual retirement payouts, access to the corporate jet, armed security for life, cushy club memberships, and back-dated or de-underwatered stock options that, if not illegally obtained, still fit within an absurd legal "framework" completely decoupled from performance. You will meet the politician who assured Wall Street, "We’re not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals" just as the financial world was tilting against Americans with vanishing 401(k)s, absent pension plans, and barely affordable mortgages — the same politician who protected the hedge-fund managers’ 15% "carried interest" tax loophole. You will meet the elite Club members who serve as interlocking members of each others’ Boards of Directors, who chair compensation committees and rubber-stamp CEO decisions about how much they should be rewarded regardless of how poorly the company performs. You’ll read how the Obama economic team — Geithner, Rubin and Summers — was present at the creation of the current crisis they now claim to know how to clean up.

You will wonder, as I did, "How many homes are enough? How many millions of dollars are enough? How many hundreds of millions are enough? Is there ever enough for these rapacious world-destroyers?"

The amounts of money in this book are staggering. Not the trillions in aggregate lost from our economy (because these amounts are simply unimaginable); the hundreds of millions pocketed by the CEO pirates on the high capitalist sea. These buccaneers seemed to develop one scheme after another, not to assure the profitability and continued success of the firms they’d been hired to lead, but to pillage further millions from the corporate treasury for their own benefit: backdated stock options, huge secondary pension systems, monstrous deferred compensation programs, lavish expense accounts.

It’s hard to believe they had time left over for their day jobs while devising these personal enrichment schemes.

And while there are some actual criminals here — Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Rigas, Winnick, Kozlowski — the impression I got is that these were simply the guys who got caught. Our regulators, lawmakers, and prosecutors were ill-equipped, asleep at the switch, or paid to look the other way. Lots and lots went past them and directly into the pockets of our new elite CEO class, never to be recovered.

Fortunately, after painting his picture of revolting excess, Jonathan Tasini makes seven concrete proposals to undo the entrenched corporate and political interests that currently rule our system. Let’s consider these during our chat here today, for their intent and effect as well as for their likelihood:

1. Immediately raise the minimum wage to $10 with additional increases over the next five years until it reaches $20.

2. Pass HR676, Medicare for All Now, to enact single payer health care in America.

3. Create a government-backed universal pension plan, eliminating fees and waste from American’s current retirement programs.

4. Repeal the Bush tax cuts, and raise the top income tax rate — at a minimum — to 40% and 45%, adding an additional 50% tax rate for Americans with taxable income of more than one million dollars. Tax investment income as ordinary income.

5. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act to rebalance the levels of power in the workplace.

6. End the legalized corruption of our electoral system with publicly-financed elections.

7. Impose a proportional pay cut on executives who cut workers’ pay. End the practice of allowing managers to loot a company by paying their workers less — and walking away with a part of the "savings."

If you are as fed up as I am with the inequities of our current economic model, these ideas seem optimistic. Do you think America can accomplish these seven goals? Do you think our current system will permit them? Do you think they go far enough?

{As usual during Book Salon, please be polite to our guest and take off-topic commentary to the previous FDL thread.  Let’s keep our discussion to this superb book.  Thanks!}

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