If there is any proof that our government is bought off the trade deals would be it. Those Representatives knew jobs would be leaving in droves, but their campaign contributions and private industry jobs for obscene amounts of money were too much to resist for ambitious individuals who love money and power over everything else! This applied to Democrats and Repugs alike, including the Big Dog, Bill Clinton with NAFTA.

captains of industry who are creating jobs and leading us poor masses to a glorious life of productivity while being paragons of virtue and by the virtue and creativity and intelligence and because of that deserve to be showered with riches?

Oh and I forgot to add that they just WORK SO MUCH HARDER than the rest of us. Such burdens are put upon them.

High/progressive taxes;
Strong safety net and national health care;
Legal support for strong unions.

The US has none of those. Our taxes are low and regressive; our safety net is weak; our health care system may be improving but it way below the standard of progressive countries; with the enactment of Taft-Hartley we not only do not legally support strong unions we actively undercut them with "right-to-work" states.

The list of those with the most equitable income distributions includes no countries with low/regressive taxes, a porous safety net and weak unions that is on If we are going to deal with our inequality we have to deal with these issues. We don't need to reinvent the "income equality" 'wheel' that has already been proven to work in many progressive countries.

OTOH, the countries on that list that have the best distributions of income in the world, all recognize the value of international trade. Such trade is a much, much larger part of their economies than it is in the US.

74% in Germany
62% in Sweden
51% in Canada
47% in France
37% in the UK
22% in the US

The US cannot effectively deal with inequality by restricting international trade. None of the progressive countries in the world do this.

And the US actually tried this in the 1920's when republicans repeatedly raised tariffs and reduced trade substantially. The result: by the end of the 1920's we had a record level of income inequality. FDR dealt with this by enacting higher/progressive taxes, improving the safety net and creating legal support for unions - just what progressive countries do today. And FDR took steps to increase international trade - just what progressive countries do today.

It's never made sense to me that we can only this year's and last year's financial data. I want to see yearly comparisons of income vs expenditures going back 10 years, preferably categorized into things like salaries, bonuses, taxes, research, write-offs, etc. I want to see on a stacked bar graph how the income and expenditures relate to each other over the long term.
A company that loses 600,000,000 in a year doesn't easily recover, but we can't see the effect of that loss more than 2 years from its announcement.

There are all sorts of ways other complex financial data is hidden from the investor's view.

I also want to see the effect of mergers and acquisitions on the overall profitability (and share price) many years later. How many have actually been beneficial to all concerned (I suspect the real answer is NONE!). Even if the share price goes up, does the value of the company stay the same, or is it asset-stripped until it's worthless and then the "goodwill" gets quietly written-off?

Those CEOs are NOT earning their fabulous salaries. I think far more of their compensation should be locked in for 5 or more years to ensure that the supposed benefits last long-term.