Marginal Christianity

Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism . In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality. Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing our current politics – or more precisely, the range...

James Gordon Wednesday, March 9, 2016 6:15 am In his poem, "From the Bleak Liturgies," R.S. Thomas condemns those "kings" who launder their feet in the tears of the poor, Gordon says. Economics eventually lead back to God. Justice and injustice, generosity and greed, compassion and callousness, sharing and possessiveness, these and many other contrasts in the human condition are inextricably woven into the fabric of human ethics, and for people of faith, provide the texture of holiness in practical terms. Living in contemporary Western affluence, there was a time not so long ago when we could say that at least people didn't starve, that there is a welfare safety net and that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. We believed that at its best our benefit system seeks to be all those positive things listed above: just, generous, compassionate, sharing.  See more at: http://ethicsdaily.com/when-the-...

Robert Reich Monday, May 5, 2014                  Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it. Herewith, the four biggest right-wing lies about inequality, followed by the truth. Lie number one: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators.  So we dare not tax them. The truth is the middle class and poor are the job-creators through their purchases of goods and services. If they don’t have enough purchasing power because they’re not paid enough, companies won’t create more jobs and economy won’t grow. We’ve endured the most anemic recovery on record because most Americans don’t have enough money to get the economy out of first gear. The economy is barely g...

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract • David Simon, creator of The Wire, near his office in Baltimore. Photograph: Stephen Voss/Redux / eyevine A merica is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity. There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divo...

                            Joseph E. Stiglitz                                                     Enlarge                                                    (Credit: Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock ) This article was adapted from the new book The Price of Inequality How, in a democracy supposedly based on one pers...

  Why Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book Capital struck a nerve in America and beyond. BY Gillian Tett Until recently, it was a safe assumption that it would be impossibly hard to sell a book by an obscure left-wing French intellectual to Americans, especially a 700-page tome. No longer. This spring Thomas Piketty, a 43-year-old Paris-based economist and expert on wealth and inequality, published Capital in the Twenty-First Century in English. The book compares how wealth patterns have evolved in different countries over the past few centuries and points out that inequality has been rising almost everywhere, including in the United States. Piketty’s academic publisher initially expected to sell only a modest number of copies. But Capital shot into best-sellers lists. Sales of the book were so high that it even beat out two literary adaptations of Frozen , the hit Disney film. When Piketty appeared at literary events to discuss his work, he attracted...

Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse NOV. 16, 2014                              Steven Rattner   THE Democrats’ drubbing in the midterm elections was unfortunate on many levels, but particularly because the prospect of addressing income inequality grows dimmer, even as the problem worsens. To only modest notice, during the campaign the Federal Reserve put forth more sobering news about income inequality: Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013, with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose.             Declining Incomes, But Not at the Top Percent change in median family income, 2010-2013. ...

  Posted on 11.12.2014 After the midterm elections a lot of my Democrat friends were demoralized. In their estimation Obama had helped America claw her way out of the pit of the Great Recession that started with the financial sector collapse in 2007 under George W. Bush. And yet, exit polls from the midterms suggested that there remains a lot of angst about the economy in America and the President's party was punished for it. These observations have led to a lot of head-scratching. Obama saved the US economy. So why is he being punished over the economy? Consider, by way of illustration, this letter to the editor shared by Andrew Sullivan written by a Canadian and published in a Detroit paper: Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections. Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country’s adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Orga...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/opinion/nicholas-kristof-idiots-guide-to-inequality-piketty-capital.html campaign: nyt2014_sharetools_mkt_opinion_47K78 -- 249335, creative: nyt2014_sharetools_mktg_opinion_47K78 -- 375123, page: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/opinion/nicholas-kristof-idiots-guide-to-inequality-piketty-capital.html, targetedPage: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/opinion, position: MiddleLeft We may now have a new “most unread best seller of all time.”   Data from Amazon Kindles suggests that that honor may go to Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which reached No. 1 on the best-seller list this year. Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Piketty’s book seems to eclipse its rivals in losing readers: All five of the passages that readers on Kindle have highlighted most are in the first 26 pages of a tome that runs 685 pages.   The rush to purchase Piket...

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...