Rethinking the Economy

One of the many benefits of playing big on the Corporate Accountability Board is that it gives an assist to other players. Take Newsweek’s interview with 5 of the 800 CEOs who’ve signed the Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change. Newsweek asked:
Isn’t there an inherent contradiction between the interests of business and the environment?
Reinoldo [...]

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Can we create rules to stop Wall Street from ripping us off? No, says Wall Street. You aren’t smart enough to understand what we do. Your rules and regulators will just get stomped by traders. All your pathetic attempt to keep up with us will do is stifle innovation. So shut up and let [...]

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Speaking of thieves, it’s not everyday that a former CEO lays out how stacked the deck has become against working families. Atlantic blogger Mike Konczal on a recent Frontline special on the credit card industry:
[It] traces a narrative of the changing nature of credit and debit cards, where services and goods became [...]

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From inside US Trade, courtesy of David Sirota:
Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles [...]

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While playing around with the new rules metaphor, I realized it’s also time to replace one of my favorites: Stack the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys. I really like juxtaposing stacking the deck with good guys. But there’s a problem with that metaphor — control.
According to Wikipedia:
The term originated from the magician’s [...]

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Monday’s post explored how Big Pharma ghostwrites articles for doctors to promote their drugs. Universities, the AMA — they’re all basically do what they can to avoid seriously dealing with this crisis in medical ethics. Guess who’s decided to step in? Senator Charles Obama-wants-death-panels, “the government is a predator not a competitor” Grassley.
Grassley [...]

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An interesting article by Newsweek’s Sharon Begley about how Greenpeace acts as a check on corporations by helping companies interested in protecting the environment and smacking upside the head companies that aren’t — in short, by Stacking the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys:
As [Kimberly-Clark] CEO Thomas Falk began a speech to [...]

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Say you’re running a small business and you want to do right by your employees. You want to pay a good wage, offer good health care benefits, support worklife balance. But you’re swimming in an ecological niche where most of your competitors pay crappy wages and no benefits. Treating your employees better would give you [...]

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