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Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed led a presentation on his city’s initiative to retrofit a wide range of commercial, public and residential buildings in a 400-block area of downtown that proved the highlight of a gathering of investors, pension fund managers, business, labor and community leaders at Heartland Capital Strategies’ first Responsible Investment Forum.

The forum, sponsored in collaboration with the BlueGreen Alliance, addressed the need for greater alternative investments to sustain the real economy, an investment arena largely abandoned by Wall Street.

In contrast, the responsible investment specialists attending the forum were characterized by Heartland Managing Director Thomas Croft as “a community interested in forging a new alternative path for responsible investment in manufacturing, community development and clean economy growth,” an approach that Heartland brands  as “doing well by doing good.

Mayor Reed urged forum attendees to consider investing in the Better Buildings Challenge, the city’s retrofitting initiative to create a more sustainable economy, improved air and water quality and job growth.

“Capital goes where it is needed and stays where it is well cared for,” he told the gathering. Aided by staff of the Better Buildings Challenge and the Emerald Cities Collaborative, the Mayor provided a comprehensive presentation on how investments in the project would be managed to minimize risk.

Many of the participants in Heartland’s one-day forum committed to further conversations to discuss possible investments in the Atlanta project, which hopes to put many of city’s 57,000 unemployed union tradesmen to work in the massive undertaking. (more…)

Did you know Obama’s health care bill contained a $20 billion a year tax on the richest Americans? I didn’t until I stumbled onto a mention of this the other day, although writing about politics is my life and I was angry at the loss of a national public option. I asked a dozen other friends, half of whom work in health care and most of whom are fellow political junkies. None of them knew either. If those who follow these issues intensely don’t know about something that all of us would cheer as a step toward getting the wealthiest to pay their fair share, most American voters sure aren’t going to know either.

The tax supports Medicare and low-income health care subsidies. Beginning in 2013, it will bring in $210 billion over 10 years by charging households that make over $250,000 a year 3.8% on everything over that amount instead of the current 2.9%. More important, the provision applies to investment and dividend income for those in that category, a key precedent toward ensuring that billionaires pay at least the same share of taxes as self-employed carpenters. It got some modest coverage when it passed, and accountants certainly know about it. But the rest of us don’t, which frustrates me. (more…)

This a listing of the top five greediest American corporate magnates for 2011 from the publication, “Too Much.”

5.  Lloyd Blankfein: Stiffing the sisters.   Back two years ago, Wall Street’s most powerful banker — Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein — impishly told a British journalist he was “doing God’s work.”

God apparently pays well.  In 2007, on the eve of the financial meltdown that banks like Goldman did so much to create, Blankfein collected a $68 million bonus, the largest in Wall Street history.  The year before, his bonus hit $54 million.

In other words, Blankfein has done more than his share to help make New York one of the world’s most unequal cities.  In 2011, Blankfein had a chance to hit the restart button.  He didn’t.

In April, a Goldman Sachs required filing to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission revealed Blankfein, after going two years without a cash bonus, gobbled up $5.4 million in bonus cash for the bank’s latest fiscal year — and plenty more in stock awards and salary.  His total pay for the year: $19 million, about double his total pay the year before.

In May, at the Goldman Sachs annual meeting, Blankfein faced a shareholder resolution — brought by four groups of nuns — that would have initiated an investigation into whether executive pay at the firm rated as “excessive.”

Blankfein didn’t seem to think that investigation would be a good idea.  At the time, he held a stash of Goldman shares worth $527.6 million.  Blankfein and his allies would go on to have the nuns’ resolution crushed in shareholder voting.

4. Alan Mulally: Shrinking to riches.   Alan Mulally took the Ford Motor CEO reins in 2006.  Over his first three years, Ford lost $30 billion.  Over his last two, Ford has gained back $9.3 billion, and that gain has become cause for corporate celebration — and a windfall for Mulally. (more…)

Last week, tragedy was averted when savvy security at Deutsche Bank (DB) in Frankfurt, Germany, spotted a suspicious package and sequestered a letter bomb intended for the DB CEO. This was the second time Deutsche Bank was attacked in this manner. In 1989, their CEO was killed by a bomb later traced to violent extremists in Germany’s Red Army Faction.

Scanning the horizon for someone to blame for the latest attack on Germany’s largest bank, FOX news pundit Dan Gainor worked “the Internets.” Did he detail Deutsche Bank’s track record of making friends by ripping off consumers and foreclosing on their homes? Did he mention that Deutsche Bank stirred public ire when it was bailed out by multiple governments, including two billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve? Did he even bother to notice that it was widely reported that an Italian anarchist group had already claimed responsibility for the attack?

No. In his piece on FOX News, “Left, Obama Escalate War on Banks Into Dangerous Territory,” Gainor decided to go after the bank-busting activists at the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, specifically our BanksterUSA.org site, because the Bankster masthead is riddled with bullet holes.

While I am Italian, I doubt very much that Italian anarchists are getting their inspiration from our little site, which at the moment features a Smithsonian Magazine profile of Ferdinand Pecora and which has been documenting the financial crisis for the past two years.

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Mary Bottari is an experienced policy wonk and communications professional. Bottari launched the “Real Economy” project at Center for Media and Democracy. It demystifies complex issues like synthetic derivatives. She launched the BanksterUSA.org website which urged the FBI to “Book the Crooks” and Congress to “Repo the Dough” in the form of a financial transaction tax.. She coined the term greedwashing to describe bank PR campaigns. She blogs for multiple sites including Campaign for America’s Future, Huffington Post, and the Nation Magazine. Earlier, Bottari worked as senior analyst in Public Citizen’s Global Trade Division and as press secretary to U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold

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This is republished from Open Salon.

What a year it’s been for workers! From Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., on the football field and the factory floor, we’ve seen unprecedented attacks on working families from big corporations and their friends in elected office. But what the folks behind these attacks didn’t anticipate was that their actions would ignite a movement — that the worst moments for workers in 2011 might just be the beginning of a great political awakening for the 99 percent.

The Worst

1. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker strips public employees of their collective bargaining rights — Last spring, anti-worker legislators in Wisconsin rammed through a bill that strips the state’s public employees of their right to collectively bargain. After initially using the state’s fiscal challenges as the rationale for his bill, Gov. Walker publicly admitted that the collective bargaining repeal saved the state absolutely no money. This revelation affirmed that the nationwide attacks on public employees were solely designed to hurt workers and their unions — not balance the budget.
2. SB 5 passes in Ohio — In early March, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed Senate Bill 5 into law. The bill scaled back public employees’ ability to bargain together for better workplace conditions and improved safety, marking a major victory for the corporate-backed lawmakers playing politics at the expense of the 99 percent.
3. Income inequality soars to new heights — In September, the Census Bureau reported that one in six Americans are living in poverty. Meanwhile, CEO pay has continued to skyrocket. The result? Income inequality that puts the United States on par with countries like Cameroon and Uganda. And recent studies show that the rise in inequality here in the U.S. is directly tied to declining union membership.
4. Right-wing attacks on the NLRB endanger workers’ rights — Instead of creating jobs, GOP politicians in Congress spent the year launching more than 50 attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the National Labor Relations Act — the only recourse workers have when their rights to form unions and bargain collectively are violated. These cynical political games have not only threatened employee safeguards, but the unprecedented overreach by lawmakers has jeopardized the fundamental American principle of due process.
5. Amazon workers face sweatshop conditions — This fall, an investigative report revealed that employees at Amazon.com’s Breinigsville, Pa., warehouse had been working on their hands and knees at a frantic pace in temperatures so high that the company kept ambulances parked outside. Amazon has yet to address the core problems at the warehouse, including brutal working speeds and overuse of temporary employees, for whom organizing for better working conditions is extremely difficult.

The Best

1. The 99 percent fights back — With the attacks on workers escalating from Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., everyday Americans decided it was time to fight back. Beginning this fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement has succeeded in shifting the debate — highlighting the income inequality that puts our whole economy at risk and bringing our nation’s focus back to where it belongs: on the 99 percent. (more…)

The author of this great work — ThinkProgress — needs financial help. If you’re willing, here’s a link.

Been quite a year, huh? We’ll remember this one for a long time.

This new generation of Republicans, the self-styled Tea Partiers, want to repeal just about all of the 20th century. They don’t like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, or any of those Kennedy brothers. They say they want to repeal child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, food safety laws, environmental laws, the income tax, direct election of Senators, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, banking regulation, Pell Grants, Head Start, civil rights, voting rights, and just about every other form of progress the 1900s brought us. You know, William Buckley used to say that “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop.” These guys are standing athwart history yelling “go back!” They will happily shut down government at the drop of a hat, for any reason at any time- even when they get what they asked for in terms of policy concessions. Backed by the 1%, the Wall Street elite and the captains of industry who destroyed the economy but are deeply hurt and offended when anyone tries to hold them accountable for it, these Republicans are hell-bent are creating an economy based on the ideas of Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko, where greed is good, generosity and kindness are weaknesses, and we are taught that it is everyone for themselves and devil take the hindmost.

And speaking of the Wall Street big boys (not being sexist, virtually all of them are) who are not just the top 1% but part of the top 0.1 %, they set new records in 2011 for arrogance that even I didn’t think they could. I had assumed that after some of their more ridiculous moments of the last few years (like one financier comparing Obama to a Nazi because he wanted to take away one of their loopholes), that their very well paid PR guys would tell them “hey, the anger level at us is really rising, we should try to avoid public displays of unbearable hubris”. But the PR team’s nightmares continue multiplying because of quotes like these referring to protesters, one 0.1 percenter said “who gives a crap about some imbecile?” And here’s another 0.1 percenter: “instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.”

But this was also the year when the movement of, by, and for the bottom 99% started to rise up. This 99er movement is forcing economic issues — and yes, issues of class and economic inequity — onto the American table to be debated and talked about in new ways. The push and shove of these two fundamental ideas- that society should be organized on behalf of the 99% not the 1% vs. the Social Darwinism of greed being good- will dominate our political debate not only in 2012 but for years to come. (more…)

Okay, sorry, that headline is a little deceptive.

Rick Perry is still Governor of Texas. Rick Perry is still running for President of the United States. He is still making money as the author of the bestselling book Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington, which decries the role of government in our lives.

And yet, Rick Perry is retired. According to the Texas Tribune, Governor Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting pension benefits.

Perry makes a $150,000 annual gross salary as Texas governor. Now, thanks to his early retirement, Perry, 61, gets a monthly retirement annuity of $7,698 before taxes, or $6,588 net. That raises his gross annual salary to more than $240,000.

Not only is he getting a bump in his take-home pay now, but he can expect another one when he leaves the governor’s office. Perry is in two public pension systems: the “employee class” and the “elected class.” He only retired from the former.

While public workers see their pensions slashed across the country, small government champion Rick Perry gets to retire not once, but twice with pension benefits courtesy of Texas taxpayers.

Most people who spent their careers railing against government spending would think twice before simultaneously drawing salary and pension from the public dole.

But this is Rick Perry, a politician who has always exceled in manipulating public institutions for personal gain. (more…)

If there’s one thing everyone in America knows, it’s that free-market economics is true and free markets are best.

After all, we’re not Communists, are we? They starved and lost the Cold War because they believed otherwise. And their watered-down European cousins, the socialists? More of the same, only less so. Even liberals get this nowadays. All hail the free market!

Trouble is, things “everyone” knows are often wrong. And this is no exception.

It’s time to start getting honest about a very simple fact: Nobody, but nobody, really believes in free markets. That’s right. Not the Republican Party, not the libertarians, not the Wall Street Journal, nobody.

Here’s why: a truly free market is a perfectly competitive market. Which means that whatever you have to sell in that market, so does your competition. Which means price war. Which means your price gets driven down. Which means little or no profit for you.

Oops!

Naturally, businesses flee perfectly competitive markets like the plague. In fact, the fine art of doing so is a big part of what they teach in business schools.

That’s why businesses use strategies like product differentiation, so their competition is no longer selling the exact same product they are. That’s why they use strategies like branding, so their buyers don’t think the products are the same.

Businesses will, in fact, do almost anything to get out of the hell of pure head-to-head competition.

They don’t do it because they’re crooked; they do it because they have an intrinsic economic incentive to. Always. (more…)

Union workers at West Hartford’s Colt Firearms plant are scared for their jobs after the company announced they will open a new manufacturing plant in Central Florida. The move can’t help but remind one of this year’s NLRB complaint against Boeing for moving a plant of theirs to South Carolina from Washington as retaliation against their union workforce.

After 175 years in Hartford, Colt’s move to Kissimmee, FL marks the first time that Colt has considered any U.S. operations outside of Connecticut. According to The Hartford Courant, United Auto Workers (UAW) members met on Sunday in Newington where they learned that part of the company’s plan is to freeze jobs at the West Hartford plant and begin cutting them in the New Year. The UAW represents 350 workers at the plant.

In June of 2010, 128 union workers were layed off. Since then, though, all but 26 have been hired back. But the news that the company will begin operations in “Right-to-Work” Florida has bleakened the outlook of the Local 350 members:

“They told us to expect more layoffs after the holidays,” said Mike Holmes, the shop chairman at Colt’s for UAW Local 376. (more…)