Before I get into the title subject, let me explain that I was led by two items on the Coffee Party Facebook page to two different Forbes Magazine articles. Remember that Forbes is a magazine for business leaders; the current slogan of Forbes.com is "Information for the World's business leaders". Also, the CEO and Editor-in-Chief is Steve Forbes who ran for president in the Republican primaries in 1996 and 2000. Among other "conservative" proposals, he called for a flat tax. For more, see Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Forbes.
The two articles I found are both by Steve Denning, who writes a column called "Radical Management" and wrote a book "The Leader's Guide to Radical Management. The two articles are titled "Retirement Heist: How Firms Plunder Workers' Nest Eggs" and "Lest We Forget: Why We Had A Financial Crisis".
The first is about how many companies take funds out of employee pension plans and use these to bolster returns. Companies have also sought to reduce contributions to pension plans, citing them as a drain on profits. Many of these same executives do not look on their golden parachutes and high-priced pensions, including platinum life-time health care as a drain on profits.
The second is an examination of the causes of the financial crises and the lies to deny these causes. Many say that the Federal Government caused banks to make risky loans. But it wasn't banks that made the risky loans, it was non-bank companies that did. For various reasons, these non-bank companies were not supervised by the government anywhere near the extent banks were supervised. Even then, there were many who prodded Congress to weaken the laws governing financial institutions. "These agencies of government were being strenuously lobbied to do the very things that would benefit the financial sector and their managers and traders. And behind it all, was the drive for short-term profits."
Maybe we should stop conjoining "pro business" and "pro overpaid executives".
