Free Market Fundamentalist is an Atlantic Sentinel blog with an exaggerated faith in laissez-faire capitalism.
A series of Goldman Sachs executives, chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein included, were called to Washington this Tuesday to testify before the United States Senate. The firm is front and center in the Democrats’ quest for Wall Street reform, such as preventing banks from becoming “too big to fail” lest taxpayers once again be called […]
Simon Johnson, former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund and currently an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, has been arguing for the forced downsizing of Wall Street’s biggest banks for well over a year. In May 2009 he fiercely criticized what he described as the country’s “financial oligarchy” for creating the 2008 crisis and subsequently […]
Arianna Huffington complains about what she calls “the real Wall Street crime” at her online newspaper today in an entry entitled, “Shorting the Middle Class.” According to Huffington, big banks, for decades, have been “selling” the American people a promise of unending prosperity while in truth, they facilitated the transfer of wealth from America’s middle […]
President Barack Obama was unusually defiant in his weekly televised address this Saturday, attacking special interests and “their allies in Washington” for resisting financial reform. The recession, according to the president, was caused by the financial industry. Indeed, it could have been avoided “if Wall Street firms were more accountable, if financial dealings were more […]
Ayn Rand described as the proudest distinction of Americans, “because it contains all the others,” she believed, the fact that they were the first to coin the phrase “to make money.” Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity, she noted in “The Meaning of Money,” published in For the New Intellectual (1961), […]
Government monopolies cause food shortages and shopping frenzies in Venezuela.
With capitalism under persecution and “Wall Street greed” continually blamed for plunging the world economy into financial crisis, many bankers rather keep a low profile these days in order to avoid the crowds and pitchforks. Jamie Dimon, CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co., however, is no stranger to the political arena and several […]
St Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has announced its intention to stop hiring smokers, stating that it hopes to improve the health of its workforce and reduce medical costs. This May, the hospital starts screening prospective employees for nicotine use. Those testing positive will be precluded from the process. St Luke’s is not the first […]
Surprise, surprise, health-care reform is going to cost corporate America dearly. The Wall Street Journal reports that telephone giant AT&T is among the first businesses to announce multimillion dollar writedowns solely due to the health bill. “The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!” writes the paper. To make health-care reform appear financially responsible, […]
With dozens of states lining up to contest the constitutionality of health-care reform as it passed through Congress last week, there is ample reason to take this charge seriously, not treat it as the final breath of a party of sore losers. The states are fighting reform on two counts: first, that the Constitution doesn’t […]
The treasury secretary misdiagnoses the financial crisis and offers the wrong solutions.
Writing for The Huffington Post about the American health insurance industry, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wonder, “Why is too much not enough?” Living in these United States, there comes a point at which you throw your hands up in exasperation and despair and ask a fundamental question or two: how much excess profit does […]
Unions and regulations protect teachers who don’t do well, to the detriment of their students.
Speaking at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania on Monday, President Barack Obama launched a fierce attack on health insurers who, he said, “continue to ration care on the basis of who’s sick and who’s healthy.” The remark comes amid a renewed wave of renunciations of insurance companies as the administration attempts to push its health-care […]
Step by step, Americans’ freedoms and rights are violated. Is the country on a road to serfdom?
