I was working my way across the radio dial on my way home the other night, delighted to hear the right-wing blathersphere ablaze with denunciations of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, a sure sign that they’re starting to have an impact. Oh, those commies, those hippies, those radicals, those anarchists, those evil revolutionaries and their [...]

Funny, you’d think Wally Piper’s classic children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, would have been a rich source for cartoon metaphors, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever used it. The tragic oddity of the economic recovery now well underway is how few people are yet benefitting from it. Wall [...]

I tried to imagine how it must feel to be one of those Wall Street bankers who stand to make tens of millions in bonuses from bailout money after nearly bringing the world’s economy to its knees. I know I’d feel too guilty to take the money, so I could only speculate that these guys [...]

Goldman Sachs has recovered quite nicely from the recession they helped create. They’ve paid back the bailout money already, and freed from the strings that came with it, they’re rewarding themselves for their business prowess with executive compensation above pre-crash levels. How did they do it? By being smarter than the other banks. Oh, it’s [...]

A line in Dashiell Hammett’s great detective novel, The Thin Man, keeps coming back to me. About a particularly toxic family she and Nick Charles have become involved with, Nora asks, “Are they the first of a new race of monsters?” Could there be a more apt description of the contemporary lords of finance, this [...]