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

"...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.

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.

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.

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 re