Miscellaneous
Episode 211: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The discerning quick minds among you will know that that’s a snippet of the speech by Michael Douglas’ character, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 Truth is, Jeff Bezos makes Gekko look like a penny ante small-time crook. And the crooks who control government on behalf of big corporations are in the same Bezos league when it comes to the massive shift in wealth that they engineer—and that’s the theme of this week’s show. The one enduring fact of any government is the way in which the real powers—corporate and private wealth—push the levers behind the scenes. It’s the Revolving Door between government and Big Money, a door through which all sorts of manipulators and greedy people pass through from government to corporations to pro-corporate lobbying companies. And the story is mixed, as you will hear from Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, who is back on the show to update the picture of whether, and how deeply, corporate interests are dominating and controlling the Biden Administration. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 During this entire pandemic, which is now approaching a full year of horror and destitution for so many, I’ve pointed out in many of the segments we’ve done on frontline workers that the virus has just exposed the sickness we’ve lived with for decades—a sickness which lets a handful of people become filthy rich at the expense of everyone else. You can see that in the poverty-level minimum wage—which means people labor like slaves to make the likes of the Waltons of Walmart billions of dollars in profits. Or the lack of paid sick leave which is a main reason so many people have gotten sick on the job and, then, died because they could not afford to stay home from work when they got sick. Paul O’Brien, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at Oxfam America, is back for our annual discussion about global inequality, tied to Oxfam’s new report, “The Inequality Virus”. And the picture is devasting: driven by the economic pandemic-driven collapse, we are witnessing a historic level of inequality across the globe. Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1 -- Jonathan Tasini Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini Subscribe to the YouTube show, Working Life at: https://www.youtube.com/WorkingLifewithJonathanTasini Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3