Leo W. Gerard

Mitt Romney made a boatload of money for himself and his fellow fat cats. No doubt about it. Billions. But he made it the way Americans hate most -- Wall Street style wheeling and dealing.

Americans hate it because when all that scheming went bad, when the market collapsed, it...

At Citigroup, shareholders had their say on CEO pay -- and they yelled, "No damn way!"

Concerted action by shareholders, workers and public interest groups compelled corporate change in several other cases this spring as well.

At least three CEOs resigned. Executives truncated one shareholder meeting to 12 minutes....

Last September we renewed our earlier pleas to Congress to 'pick' the four low-hanging initiatives that would, if the administration and Congress together would only pick them, quickly create millions of new jobs. They were and remain:

1. Buy-Domestic Procurement Requirements. All infrastructure projects funded and guaranteed by the...

"What's it all about, Romney?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What's it all about when you sort it out, Romney?
Are we meant to take more than we give. . ." ~With apologies to Burt Bacharach and Hal David who wrote...

In a famous Laugh In sketch, Lily Tomlin, playing arrogant operator Ernestine, telephones a customer to demand payment of $23.64 for three calls to Topeka and threatens to send a burly serviceman to the customer's house to rip his phone out of the wall if he doesn't pay.

Corporations, 1 percenters and Republicans want to take America back. And by that, they mean all the way to the 1780s when wealthy white men controlled the nation.

Because only they could vote.

In the intervening 230 or so years, America became increasingly democratic, eventually awarding the vote to...

Wear black on Saturday. It is Workers' Memorial Day, a time devoted to commemorating those killed on the job.

A month later, on soldiers' Memorial Day, the nation will recognize those who sacrificed their lives for American ideals, for a nation's freedom. That ultimate gift is given in most cases...

President Obama's 2011 income tax documents showed on Friday that he paid a significantly higher rate than the significantly richer Mitt Romney, highlighting the titanic level of tax shirking committed by far too many 1 percenters.

President Obama paid 20.5 percent on earnings of $789,674. The president's...

A spring awash with Etch A Sketch conservatives, camera-wielding GOP con men and a bogus deficit reduction budget from House Republicans shows that for the right, wrong is justified when it achieves the desired results.

A perfect example of this political philosophy is the work of James E. O'Keefe III,...

A trio of governors and a duo of lieutenant governors last week dined on pink slime burgers and pronounced them mouth-wateringly-delicious-and-nutritious as TV cameras rolled on their barbecue in a Nebraska factory that manufactures the stuff.

Shoppers have reacted somewhat differently to pink slime secreted into their hamburger, so...

As a favor to struggling Americans, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed a federal budget last week ravaging programs for the poor, elderly, disabled, young, veterans, jobless, students and other vulnerable people. Ryan did it, he said, because these programs, food stamps, health insurance, Pell grants, veterans' hospitals and the...

The chair of Sunoco's board of directors is a refinery assassin.

Lynn Laverty Elsenhans, who will remain Sunoco chair until May, tried to kill off a Shell refinery in Bakersfield, Calif., when she was CEO at Shell Oil Products. At Sunoco, where she was CEO until March 1, she...

Across America, people are dying for work. It's not because they're unemployed. It's because they work for corporations that don't care if they die.

Every day, 12 workers die on the job in America -- often because a corporation has defied regulations or ignored standard safety procedures. Many...

Remember the fear in 2008? Think of the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Wall Street melting down. Pension savings disappearing. Housing values plunging and foreclosures skyrocketing. Three million workers losing their jobs.

It had all the makings of another Great Depression. As Barack Obama took office on Jan....

There's just something about manufacturing. Ask Rosie the Riveter. Ask the computer geeks and artists across America who create "Hacker Space" workshops to help each other invent and fabricate to their imaginations' content.

Yeah, it's cool to make stuff. The "maker," whether an inventor or engineer or welder...

First, Republicans opposed extending the payroll tax cut that put an extra $20 a week in the pockets of 160 million working Americans.

Next, they supported it. If the cost were offset the way they wanted. Even though Republicans previously had said that tax cuts never need be...

Americans love an underdog. Maybe it's an artifact of the American Revolution, when a rag-tag rabble of farmers and frontiersmen defeated the disciplined and well-provisioned military of the most powerful nation on earth.

Even though the United States has usurped most powerful status, Americans still ally with Davids in contests...

Last week several groups, including the United Steelworkers, petitioned the federal government to whack the latest trade mole -- illegally traded auto parts from China.

With President Obama announcing creation of a new trade enforcement unit in his State of the Union Address, the feds probably will investigate. But...

On Dec. 18, a dozen retirees, men and women in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, began occupying a median strip along Route 33 in front of the closed Century Aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, W.Va. In tents and under tarps, a small group stays overnight, despite hypertension, arthritis and other...

Four years ago, Cooper Tire told its workers they'd have to sacrifice to save the company. With a straight face, Cooper executives said it was essential for the corporation's survival that workers take tens of millions in pay and benefit cuts.

The workers understood the link between their livelihoods long...