Les Leopold – författare

Top hedge fund managers make more than Oprah, Rupert Murdoch, and A-Rod combined—but they aren''t running news and entertainment empires or playing baseball for the New York Yankees. Aren''t you curious about how these hedge fund dudes make so much doing who knows what? You may even wonder if you can get there, too. After all, this is America!

This book gives you the answers in a twelve-step guide to accumulating vast riches the way hedge fund managers do—by playing trillion-dollar poker with a marked deck. Through each easy step, you''ll learn the sleight of hand and disregard for basic morality you''ll need to move from making tens of dollars an hour to millions an hour! Along the way, you''ll also question whether these hedge fund moguls make markets work better—as they and their apologists insist—or cause instability, siphon off capital, and destroy value without adding so much as a single widget to the economy.

A CIA-connected labor union, an assassination attempt, a mysterious car crash, listening devices, and stolen documents--everything you''d expect from the latest thriller. Yet, this was the reality of Tony Mazzocchi, the Rachel Carson of the U.S. workplace; a dynamic labor leader whose legacy lives on in today''s workplaces and ongoing alliances between labor activists and environmentalists, and those who believe in the promise of America.

In The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, author and labor expert Les Leopold recounts the life of the late Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union leader. Mazzocchi''s struggle to address the unconscionable toxic exposure of tens of thousands of workers led to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and included work alongside nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood. His noble, high-profile efforts forever changed working conditions in American industry--and made him enemy number one to a powerful few.

As early as the 1950s, when the term "environment" was nowhere on the political radar, Mazzocchi learned about nuclear fallout and began integrating environmental concerns into his critique of capitalism and his union work. An early believer in global warming, he believed that the struggle of capital against nature was the irreconcilable contradiction that would force systemic change.

Mazzocchi''s story of non-stop activism parallels the rise and fall of industrial unionism. From his roots in a pro-FDR, immigrant family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, through McCarthyism, the Sixties, and the surge of the environmental movement, Mazzocchi took on Corporate America, the labor establishment and a complacent Democratic Party.

This profound biography should be required reading for those who believe in taking risks and making the world a better place. While Mazzocchi''s story is so full of peril and deception that it seems almost a work of fiction, Leopold proves that the most provocative and lasting stories in life are those of real people.

2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist for Political and Social Sciences

"This book gave me a new lens to see the world.”—Robert Krulwich, former co-host of WNYC’s Radiolab

Addressing the pressing issues affecting everyday Americans during an election year is essential—and one of our nation''s most profound challenges is the devastating impact of mass layoffs. Layoffs upend people’s lives, cause enormous stress, and lead to debilitating personal debt. The societal harm caused by mass layoffs has been known for decades. Yet, we do little to stop them. Why? Why do we allow whole communities to be destroyed by corporate decision-makers? Why do we consider mass layoffs a natural, baked-in feature of modern financialized capitalism? And what are our elected officials going to do about it?

In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of employees. With detailed research and concise language, Leopold explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains.

Original and insightful, Wall Street’s War on Workers places US labor practices in the broader context of our social and political life, examining the impact financial strip-mining and legalized looting are having on party politics, destroying the integrity of democratic institutions. Leopold expertly lays out how the proliferation of opioids coupled with Wall Street’s destruction of jobs in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have led to widespread mass layoff fatalism. Democrats have unarguably lost the longstanding support of millions of urban and rural workers, and Leopold points out how party leaders have been wrong about the assumption that the white working class is becoming less progressive and motivated to abandon the Democratic Party by reactionary positions on divisive social issues.

With deep analyses, stark examples, and surprisingly simple proactive steps forward, Leopold also asserts that:

Both groundbreaking and urgent, Wall Street’s War on Workers not only offers solutions that could halt mass layoffs but also offers new hope for workers everywhere.

"Leopold offers a contrarian yet compelling take on America’s “white working class” . . . [and says] Democrats in 2024 ignore this massive, potentially sympathetic voting bloc at their peril."—Booklist (starred review)

"Wall Street''s War on Workers [is] the book neither party wants you to read . . . [It] penetrates one of the chief media deceptions of the 21st century, namely that working-class voters are driven by racism and xenophobia, and not by a more simple, enraging motive: they’ve been repeatedly ripped off, by the wealthy donors to both parties."—Matt Taibbi