Marginal Christianity

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/27/1309937/-Stiglitz-From-The-Myth-of-America-s-Golden-Age-to-Geithner-s-Summers-and-Obama-s-Culpability?detail=facebook What growing up in Gary, Indiana, taught me about inequality. By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ July/August 2014              I hadn’t realized when I was growing up in Gary, Indiana, an industrial town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan plagued by discrimination, poverty and bouts of high unemployment, that I was living in the golden era of capitalism. It was a company town, named after the chairman of the board of U.S. Steel. It had the world’s largest integrated steel mill and a progressive school system designed to turn Gary into a melting pot fed by migrants from all over Europe. But by the time I was born in 1943, cracks in the pot were already appearing. To break strikes—to ensure that w...

THE PRICE OF INEQUALITY Joseph E. Stiglitz 414 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95. Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, “The Price of Inequality,” is the single most comprehensive counter¬argument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories. While credible economists running the gamut from center right to center left describe our bleak present as the result of seemingly unstoppable developments — globalization and automation, a self-¬replicating establishment built on “meritocratic” competition, the debt-driven collapse of 2008 — Stiglitz stands apart in his defiant rejection of such notions of inevitability. He seeks to shift the terms of the debate. It is not uncontrollable technological and social change that has produced a two-tier society, Stiglitz argues, but the exercise of political power by moneyed...