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Four years ago Barack Obama prepared to take the oath of office as a Democratic president, at a moment when free market ideology and Republican incumbency were disgraced by events. But a year that should have marked the end of the laissez-faire fantasy and the resurgence of effective government instead began an era of muddle through.

I have often quoted the British historian A. J. P. Taylor. Speaking of the revolutionary year in Europe, 1848, when democratic revolutions broke out only to be crushed, Taylor observed, “It was a turning point of history, but history didn’t turn.” In many respects, that also describes 2008.

The Republicans were voted out, but the big banks that caused the collapse were propped up rather than broken up. Their basic business model was allowed to continue, with taxpayers guaranteeing billion dollar paydays for corporate moguls. The economic rules of the game continued to tilt against regular working families, who are more precarious than ever. Obama took most of his economic advice from the very people whose belief in complete license for finance caused the collapse.

The administration played softball with a Republican opposition determined to wreck the recovery rather than allow Obama any victories. Democrats were almost as thoroughly in bed with Wall Street as Republicans. The mantle of populist frustration, absurdly, passed to the tea parties. Democrats, in the 2010 mid-term, suffered the worst defeat since 1938, a year when President Roosevelt listened to the Wall Street deficit hawks of that era.

But two years later, even muddle-through managed to beat muddled thinking. Mitt Romney divided his own party, committed one mistake after another; and despite one decent debate performance, he couldn’t beat the incumbent even in a weak economy. (more…)

Some of today’s most greedy are running giant multinationals. Some are just running their mouths. Their stories remind us just how much needs to change, economically and politically, in the year ahead.

The essence of greed? Simple. Greed amounts to taking more than you need when you already have enough — and others don’t. Who among us, by this yardstick, rate as our greediest? Those greediest would be those who have the wherewithal to take whatever they want — and deny others the basics they need.

We abound in these greedy. Most of them wear power suits and dart in and out of the executive suites that sit high atop America’s most elegant corporate towers. Year in and year out, these greedy grab ungodly rewards for their own labor — and deny their employees anything close to decent compensation for theirs.

The Institute for Policy Studies weekly on excess and inequality, Too Much, has been compiling lists of America’s most greedy grabbers since the Great Recession first hit in 2008. This fifth annual Too Much list of our greediest showcases those ten deep pockets who’ve done the most in 2012 to subvert the decency we all like to call, at this time of year, the “holiday spirit.”

10/ Jack Welch: Comforting Comfortables

An oversized ego can be a terrible thing to waste. Jack Welch, the retired General Electric CEO, is doing his best not to waste a bit of his — and pick up a few extras pennies in the process.

Welch, the super CEO of the 1990s, has become a regular on the corporate chattering circuit since he retired in 2001. He collects a sweet $150,000 per appearance.

Not that Welch needs any more money. He left GE with a retirement package worth over $400 million and now divides his time between très chic abodes in Manhattan, Nantucket, and Florida’s North Palm Beach, lapping up luxury while he plots his next moves to protect plutocracy.

Welch particularly enjoys going after Warren Buffett, the billionaire who publicly acknowledges that he and his fellow rich don’t pay nearly enough in taxes. Countered Welch earlier this year: “I don’t feel undertaxed in any way at all.”

Some had hoped that Welch’s retirement would end the actual social damage he could wreak. A reasonable hope. At General Electric, Welch had the power to do everything from nuke 100,000 GE worker jobs to foul the Hudson River with toxic waste. Without that power, what damage could he do? Plenty, turns out.

Much of that damage comes from the wealth of tax-dodging expertise Welch bequeathed his successors at General Electric. In the decade since 2001, one report released this year revealed, GE paid only 1.8 percent of its $80.2 billion overall profits in federal income taxes.

9/ Jamie Dimon: Pounding Reformers

The European Union has just taken a fairly significant step toward limiting excessive banker compensation. Under proposed new rules up for a vote early in 2013, European bankers won’t be able to pocket bonuses greater than twice their straight salary.

Better not try that in the United States, Jamie Dimon — America’s highest-paid bank CEO in 2011 — warned last week. Any limits on Wall Street pay, JPMorgan Chase CEO Dimon intoned, will end freedom as we know it.

“If you don’t want a free society,” Dimon pronounced, “then start dictating what compensation can be.”

And besides, the JPMorgan chief added, any attempt to limit pay would chase talent out of America’s financial system. The banking business, he explained, simply “cannot run” on “second-rate talent.”

For his own presumably “first-rate” talent, Dimon pulled in $23.1 million in 2011, up 11 percent over 2010. The highlight of his first-rate stewardship: JPMorgan suffered a $2 billion trading loss after a bank management blunder that Dimon admitted this past spring he could not “publicly defend.”

That admission left some observers wondering how much the bank would have lost with a second-rate talent in charge.

Dimon hasn’t let JPMorgan’s debacle with risky trades slow his charge against the Dodd-Frank Act, the legislation enacted in 2010 to rein in risky trading after the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. Wall Street’s intense opposition to Dodd-Frank, with Dimon a key ringleader, has so far kept the bulk of the legislation unenforced.

8/ Wilbur Ross: Exploiting the Bankrupt

Remember the bank bailout? Private equity kingpin Wilbur Ross surely does. He spent a chunk of the past year trolling for windfalls on the busted-bank landscape — and found a hot prospect in Ohio. In October, he cut a dealto pick up the troubled First Place Financial at just $45 million.

U.S. Treasury officials balked at the deal. The bank, they complained to the courts, had borrowed $72.9 million from the federal bailout program three years earlier and not yet repaid any of the money.

The deal with Ross would likely “chill bidding” for the bank, federal officials pointed out, and cost taxpayers millions.

Not my problem, retorted Ross. So things might not “work out well” for taxpayers? “Unfortunate,” said Ross. Two months later, the Treasury prediction came true. No other bidders for the bank stepped up, and Ross had another notch in his “vulture investing” belt.

Ross has specialized for decades on buying up companies in or near bankruptcy, then “flipping” them for big profits. The secret to his success: Bankrupt companies can dump their liabilities — like mandates to fund pension plans. Ross has followed this flipping formula to fortune in steel, textiles, and coal. His latest estimated personal net worth: $2.3 billion.

In October, Ross celebrated his fabulous stash with a fundraising dinner at his Florida mansion for GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The fee to join him: $50,000 a plate. About 150 people, reports the Palm Beach Post, attended.

7/ Samuel Palmisano: Busting Nest Eggs

IBM, the world’s first computer giant, now has just 92,000 employees stateside, down from 160,000 back in 2002, the year Sam Palmisano took up the IBM CEO reins.

Palmisano stepped down as chief exec last year and retired as the chairman of IBM’s board at the start of this month, but not before green-lighting a change in the IBM 401(k) plan that sets a damaging precedent for millions of Americans outside the IBM ranks.

Up until now, IBM has been matching employee contributions to 401(k)s on a semi-monthly basis. Starting in 2013, IBM will make only one match a year, on December 31. Workers who leave IBM’s employ next December 15 will get no IBM match to their 401(k) for the entire year, even if they were laid off or had to leave because of a disability.

No major U.S. corporation currently short-changes workers through this sort of maneuver. A good many other large corporations “will be looking very closely” at the IBM move, says Brooks Herman of Brightscope, a financial info firm. If they follow IBM’s lead, notes Reuters, working families throughout America will find it “very difficult to build significant nest eggs through the 401(k) system.”

Sam Palmisano doesn’t have to worry about his nest egg. He’s walking out the door with a package of retirement, bonus, and assorted other benefits one analysis values at $224.7 million.

Palmisano isn’t actually walking out the door. He’ll be consulting for IBM. His rate: $20,000 for any day he puts in four hours. In 2013, observes the Wall Street Journal, Palmisano “could pocket $400,000” for a mere “20 half-days of work.” (more…)

As I learned from experience in my “vote-for-me” period, the nature of the political scramble is this: You win some, you lose some. Counting Democratic primary contests, I ran seven statewide races in Texas, winning five.

My final loss was a squeaker in November 1990, having been surprised by a fusillade of truly vile TV ads fired at me in the last two weeks by a fellow who went on to become nationally infamous as the Michelangelo of Smear: Karl Rove. But: Win some, lose some. In my concession press conference, I simply noted that in politics, “One day you’re a peacock, the next day you’re a feather duster.” And, after all, feather dusters are quite useful things to have–in the political arena, as well as in the home.

So, in this 2012 post-election Lowdown, let’s assess the condition of our progressive plumage.

Top prize, of course, was the presidency, and we won! Sort of. Really what we did was avert a hard Romney-Ryan lurch rightward, downward, and backward–all at once. Ouch. That would’ve hurt.

But we also won one more four-year crack at pressuring Obama to be an actual Democrat. We should not waste this opportunity by playing another round of pattycake with him. Gently pushing from the inside–trying to curry favor by being nice and staying quiet–has proven futile with this guy. To the contrary, he’s shown that what he responds to is loud and sustained noise–as he did when confronted by obstreperous tea partiers, intractable Republicans, balky insurance giants, angry Wall Streeters, the pouty US Chamber of Commerce, etc.

He only turned to us when he needed to be re-elected, and we delivered. It was the progressive base (labor, women, Latinos, African Americans, environmentalists, poor people, the LGBT community, students, New Deal defenders, small farmers, anti-war activists, civil libertarians, et al.) that carried him to 332 electoral votes. And for many of us, he was a heavy haul. (more…)

Call your Congressman and demand the rich pay their fair share: 1-888-344-0683.

That is what the headlines would say if anyone really believed that the anti-union laws passed last week in Michigan actually had anything to do with the rights of workers. When the legislature outlawed contracts requiring workers who benefit from union representation to pay for that representation, it explicitly exempted the police and firefighters’ unions. If this law was actually about the “right to work,” the Republican legislature and Governor Snyder were effectively denying the right to work to the state’s police officers and firefighters.

Of course this law has nothing to do with the right to work (RTW), as everyone involved knows; that is just the spin from the anti-labor coalition. This is why police unions and firefighters’ unions were exempted. The Republicans were trying to buy off these workers with special favors, not singling them out for punishment.

There is no issue of rights involved in this dispute. The question is whether workers, through their union, can sign a contract that imposes conditions on employment, just as the employer can impose conditions on employment.

When an employer advertises a job, it offers a specific pay and benefit package. If a worker doesn’t like that pay and benefit package no one says that she is being denied the right to work. The obvious answer is that the worker should go somewhere else.

In this case, the question is whether a union contract can require that everyone who benefits from the union’s representation to pay for that representation. (Under the law, a union is required to represent everyone in a bargaining unit, whether or not they join the union.) This is a condition of work, just like the pay and benefit package offered by the employer. And the answer for the people who don’t like a particular union, or unions in general, is that they have the right to work somewhere else.

Republicans have not suddenly developed a fondness for workers’ rights. They know the obvious. If workers are given the opportunity to freeload on the union that represents them, then some workers will take advantage of this opportunity. This will make unions weaker and therefore less effective in bargaining with management. (more…)

Last week, after Michigan became the latest state to pass “right to work” for less legislation, many began to dig into the history of such laws and discovered that one of the earliest pushes for “right to work” came from an extreme right-wing activist Vance Muse, who was staunchly anti-communist, anti-integration and anti-union. Muse was the leader of the Christian American Association, an organization that fought to pass “right to work” in more than a dozen states in the 1940s.

Muse was a Texas conservative activist in the 1930s and 1940s who founded the Christian American Association, the first notable organization to push for “right to work” laws. Prior to the big push for “right to work,” he was involved in opposing women’s rights, child labor laws, integration and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Muse and the Christian American Association ramped up their activism in the 1930s as Texas saw massive growth in union membership. Working with conservative business leaders and segregationist groups, the Christian American Association first pushed for so-called “anti-violence” laws that were designed to clamp down on picketing by unions. After they successfully passed that law in Texas and in other Southern states, they moved on to “right to work” in 1945, passing the first such law in Texas in 1947. In Florida and Arkansas, the Christian American Association used messaging that compared union growth to race-mixing and communism.  (more…)

Fix the Debt, a front group for corporations, billionaires, and defense contractors, wants people to call their Representatives and demand that they avoid the “fiscal cliff.”

The group’s latest email is so badly written that it cries out for laughter, but its potential consequences call out for tears.
The writing borders on the unintelligble, as when it urges people to contact their Member of Congress and say this:

“I’m calling to urge the Represntative (sic) to pass an agreement to tackle our nation’s debt crisis that is supported by members of both parties that both raises revenue and cuts government spending in order to pave the way for a strong economic future.”

Now try saying it three times fast.

It’s easy to make fun of something this inept, and the overpaid cynics at Fix the Debt – and fellow shell organizations like the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget – certainly have it coming. But this time they’ve crossed a line. They’re claiming to speak in the very interests of the people who would be most hurt by their actions.

Shame on them.

The email provides a script to be used when calling your Representative. They suggest you begin by saying that the deficit ”matters to me because ______________”.

It then offers three “helpful” examples of how that sentence might be completed, by a concerned parent, a small business owner, and a veteran – three of the many populations whose financial security would be gravely wounded by Fix the Debt’s political agenda.

That doesn’t mean everybody would be hurt by it, of course. Here are some scripts that the group’s real beneficiaries might want to use:

– I’m rich as hell – I mean, I’m not naming figures, but we’re talking stinkin‘ rich – and I want to cut Social Security and Medicare while lowering my own corporate and personal taxes.  (more…)

Public opinion is steadily moving away from the Republican Party, as is America’s demographic future. President Obama’s three-point re-election win understated that reality, while events since Election Day have underscored it.

Public opinion dramatically favors restoring higher tax rates on the top 2 percent. Large majorities oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare. Acceptance of same-sex marriage is increasing, and is already the overwhelming majority view of those under 40 — the future electorate. Most Americans don’t support the absence of any regulation of combat weapons.

It is hard to know who was the bigger fool of the week’s public debates, House Speaker John Boehner or NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. No critic could have done a better job of discrediting the NRA than LaPierre himself. And Boehner, trying to corral a caucus divided between right-wingers and ultra-right-wingers, fell on his face.

And yet a Republican Party, as personified by the House Majority, is the zombie that has been overtaken by public opinion but will neither change nor get out-of-the-way.

So reforms desired by most American voters will be a long time coming. (more…)