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The huge trading losses suffered by JP Morgan last year—and the cover-up of those losses—stand as just one example of that giant bank's long record of excess, criminality, and deception.

And when you think of who should be held accountable for the London Whale fiasco, one name comes to mind. It's a name that should be on the lips of every regulator and ordinary citizen who wants justice for years of financial malfeasance by JP Morgan. 

That name: Julien Grout.

“Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it,” announced President Obama in last month’s landmark economic address in Galesburg Illinois. Now consensus seems to be building around one thing President Obama can indeed use his executive powers to do to boost hundreds of thousands of workers into the middle class: raise their wages.

The case for raising the pay of low-wage workers usually focuses on the here and now: The biggest low road employers have plenty of profits to spare and sharing them more equitably with their workers would do a load of good, including for the economy as a whole by stimulating more spending and growth. But cast an eye out into the future and you'll see an equally compelling case for upping pay: To avoid an unprecedented poverty crisis among tomorrow's seniors. 

Here's something alarming to imagine: One day, your investment advisor at Merrill Lynch doesn't show up to his job. No warning, no nothing. He just doesn't show. 

Graphic artist Nickolay Lamm's remapping of Manhattan's skyline based on net wealth.

The post-recession party line at the American Bankers Association (ABA) is something like, “Hey Jane/Joe Briefcase. We're just as mad at gosh darn Wall Street as anyone. But only some bankers are evil. A lot of us are honest and work hard, just like you.” Maybe. But this isn’t a reason to lose track of ABA’s political agenda and who pays to set it: Wall Street, coincidentally.

When Walmart broke the bad news to shareholders last week about declining same-store sales and cuts to their profit and sales projections, the company offered a glib explanation. "The retail environment was challenging," asserted Walmart Stores President and CEO Michael Duke. Company executives pointed to weather conditions and the January payroll tax increase to justify the disappointing sales, but larger questions about why consumers weren't buying were never addressed.

A tight labor market is the great conservative answer to the low-wage jobs crisis. If we can just get the economy booming again, the logic goes, wages will rise along with demand for low-skilled workers. 

Bill O'Reilly told me that earlier today, when I taped a segment at Fox on the economy. 

Of course, many progressive economists will tell you the same thing, even if they have very different ideas about how to spur growth and how to share prosperity. 

Yesterday I wrote about why a tight labor market may not return any time soon to raise wages. But here's another scary thought: What if tight labor markets no longer push up wages like was once the case?

On Friday, Paul Krugman dealt with financial market price bubbles, focusing specifically on emerging markets. He takes on the issue of bubble creation as a result of aggressive Fed loose money policy of the recent past. He correctly points out that the emerging markets situation is really one of a series of bubbles (commercial real estate, Asian securities, dot-com, residential real estate), referred to by George Soros as a “super bubble,” that has roiled through the economy since the 1980s.

The Cato Institute came out with a big study recently that argues the familiar point that generous welfare payments undermine incentives to work. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities promptly replied with a four-page paper rebutting key aspects of the report. 

Black culture and the role racism plays in black American history are discussed at length in the national dialogue around race relations. We regularly debate use of the “n-word,” for example, and the impact of historical racism on outcomes for black Americans.

One of the major concerns that surround unpaid internships is access. Wealthier students benefit; poor students don’t.

Retail workers — sales clerks, cashiers and stock people — account for one in six jobs in the United States and a large share of the new positions created in the years since the recession. Many of the jobs are low-paying, making retail a major culprit in one of the most difficult challenges confronting the economy: stagnant wages.

Forty-seven years after the Poor People’s Campaign ended, political discussion in liberal activist circles has bifurcated in unnecessary ways. There are separate economic and racial justice movements, and as my Salon colleague Joan Walsh points out, political leaders too often speak to only one or the other. But these movements are different facets of one fight; if black lives matter, surely their economic lives matter too.

The second largest source of jobs for black people in the country is also one of the worst industries to work in. Although big retailers tout their “entry level” positions as a path to the middle class, retail work is built on dead-end jobs that perpetuate racial inequality.

African-American and Latino cashiers, salespeople and first-line managers are paid less, are less likely to be promoted off the floor and more likely to be poorer than their white counterparts in the retail industry, a new study showed Tuesday.

The study, done by the NAACP and Demos, a public policy organization, found that in the major jobs held by retail workers, African-Americans are paid the least, followed by Hispanics. They also are less likely to get full-time jobs instead of part-time and are underrepresented in management positions.

African-American and Latino retail industry employees earn lower wages than their white colleagues, according to a new study.