1. Improve public disclosure of (a) conflicts of interest among board
members, management and auditors; (b) amount of cash taxes actually paid
and significant sources of tax credits; (c) financing from government
agencies and multinational agencies; and (d) recipients of campaign
contributions and amount of lobbying expense.
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Economic Policy
Barbara Ehrenreich:
Riding with a caravan that descended on Washington Monday, to call for immediate government action to push down fuel prices.
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Economic Policy
Barbara Ehrenreich:
Hard hit by rising costs and the threat of losing their rigs, truckers are staging protests, calling for a bailout and lower fuel prices. What if the rest of us joined them?
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Economic Policy
John Nichols:
As Clinton rewrites the history of her support for NAFTA, Obama needs to
prove he understands what's wrong with global trade pacts.
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Economic Policy
Nicholas von Hoffman:
Gas is up, sneakers are up, onions are up and eggs, too. The only thing that is not up is your income.
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Economic Policy
Robin Blackburn:
Let's reinvent progressive economic policy, starting with our own sovereign wealth fund to deal with urgent social needs.
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Economic Policy
Daniel Brook:
A look at the gap between rich and poor via two books: David Cay Johnson's Free Lunch and Michael J. Thompson's The Politics of Inequality.
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Economic Policy
Frances Moore Lappé:
For Roosevelt, the New Deal was a way of advancing freedom, which depended on economic as much as political rights.
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2. Require 401(k) plans to be diversified, as traditional pension plans
already are.
3. End taxpayer subsidies for excessive executive compensation by
allowing companies to deduct only compensation less than twenty-five
times the compensation of the lowest-paid employee.
4. Ban company loans to executives.
5. Adopt a regulatory standard of board independence.
6. Require complete auditor independence; ban companies' auditors from
doing non-audit consulting work.
7. Require auditors to be changed every five years.
8. Require stock options to be expensed on the company's annual income
statement. (Currently stock options never show up as an expense, an
accounting convention that has inflated corporate earnings by tens of
billions of dollars.)
9. Prohibit the inclusion of pension fund gains in the presentation of
corporate earnings.
10. Adopt a progressive corporate income tax in which larger
corporations pay a higher tax rate than small businesses.
11. Require US and international trade finance agencies to include
sustainable development criteria and democratic input from affected
peoples.
12. Amend corporate laws that mandate shareholder primacy in favor of
rules that balance the needs and interests of all stakeholders.
About Scott Klinger
Scott Klinger is co-director of Responsible Wealth, a project of
United for a Fair Economy.
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About Holly Sklar
Holly Sklar's latest book is
Raise the
Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us (South End).
more...