Updates on capitalism and Earth Day, Chinese movie industry overtakes Hollywood, small businesses use cooperatives to compete better with big business. Interview: Richard Bartlett, cofounder of Loomio, powerful software worker-coop facilitating collective decision-making.
Deirdre Fulton – Big Pharma Preps to Spend Hundreds of Millions to Keep Drug Prices High
Facing an increasingly outraged public, the leading Big Pharma lobby group is hiking its annual dues by more than 50 percent as it prepares to defend its pharmaceutical company members against lawmakers and voters who want to rein in out-of-control drug prices. Politico reported Tuesday that “PhRMA hopes to improve its public image next year and stave off any legislative …
SIMON LAZARUS – Don’t Just Whack Wells Fargo’s CEO
Too-big-to-fail Wells Fargo, with its too-big-to-whitewash scheme of charging customers for two million bogus accounts, has done something consumer champions have seldom accomplished on their own: showing ordinary Americans that even the most respected big corporations can opt for blatant, systematic cheating if their leaders believe they can get away with it. Even the banking industry’s most reliable defenders, the …
Our Giant Experiment With “Greed Is Good” Has Failed
Another day, another example of the disastrous effect Reaganomics has had on our country’s business culture. Ever since his bank was fined $185 million for illegally opening millions of accounts in its customers’ names to help boost profits, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf has insisted that he only discovered what was going on in 2013. That’s what he said when …
Pam Martens and Russ Martens – Wall Street Today: Fake Accounts, Fake Money, Fake Courts, Fake Regulators
Last Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced that Wells Fargo was paying $185 million in fines and penalties for allowing its employees to open “more than two million deposit and credit card accounts” that were not authorized by its customers. The employees were attempting to “hit sales targets and receive bonuses.” In one of the most audacious forms of bank fraud, …