Joseph Stiglitz: 'America should be a warning to other countries'

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/05/joseph-stiglitz-america-should-be-a-warning-to-other-countries

Joseph Stiglitz: 'America should be a warning to other countries'

Gareth Hutchens

Sun 4 Nov 2018 17.00 GMT Last modified on Mon 5 Nov 2018 10.05 GMT

It’s a stark message from a Nobel-prize winning economist. “We were a very different country 40 years ago,” he says. “The downhill slide has been pretty fast. America, I think, should be an important warning to other countries not to take for granted their institutions. I worry that things in the United States could get much worse.”
(snip)

Stiglitz is credited with pioneering the concept of the “1 per cent”, the idea that the upper 1% of Americans have accumulated so much political power and wealth in recent decades – through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the corrupting influence of money – that the country’s economy has suffered, and its democracy has been undermined.
(snip)

This month he plotted in Scientific American how inequality had worsened so much over the last 40 years that US democracy was imperilled. “Whereas the income share of the top 0.1% has more than quadrupled and that of the top 1% has almost doubled, that of the bottom 90% has declined,” he wrote.

“Wages at the bottom, adjusted for inflation, are about the same as they were some 60 years ago. Wealth is even less equally distributed, with just three Americans having as much as the bottom 50%.”

“As more of our citizens come to understand why the fruits of economic progress have been so unequally shared, there is a real danger that they will become open to a demagogue blaming the country’s problems on others and making false promises of rectifying ‘a rigged system’.
(snip)

[tblue37]

1. K&R for visibility. nt

[Roy Rolling]

2. Human Nature

Human Nature is little different over centuries. Unless contained by a democratic government, people will lead by waging war and propaganda. Taking down the guardrails in America has led to disaster.

[watoos]

3. Nazi Germany should have been a warning to other countries.

[calimary]

4. Forty years ago, 'eh?

Last edited Tue Nov 6, 2018, 04:31 PM - Edit history (2)

Gee... 40 years ago was about when the Powell Memo had begun to be applied. US Chamber of Commerce commissioned then-prominent attorney Lewis Powell to write up a blueprint for basically how business could be insulated from all those disturbing social changes that had started having an impact on the country.

You know, those “pests” who had the nerve to demand their “rights” - people of color, women, gays, the hippie movement and other miscreants - in other words anybody outside the mainstream perceived as not ranking with or creating challenges to the white male establishment. Which is basically what the Powell Memo was all about.

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

[scipan]

10. Always good to remember the Powell Memo. n/t

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

5. Used to be a beacon of hope...

Now a warning and a joke. All in 4 short decades.

[luvtheGWN]

6. As Jack Beatty said on NPR two years ago...

...the US has returned to the "gilded age", when the Rockefellers and their fellow industrialists ruled.

[dlk]

7. Excellent Article in SA. Should Be Required Reading for All Americans

Time for Americans to take off the rose-colored glasses and take a hard look at what our country has become. If nothing changes, nothing will change. Greed and avarice don’t magically disappear.

[appalachiablue]

8. So glad you posted Stiglitz' outstanding article, saw last night

and was just about to post it now. *He hits the triple headed monster: rising inequality and a new Gilded Age, undermining democracy and devastation from Climate Change. It's a very tall order that I hope we survive.

>"The renowned economist warns of the triple threat of rising inequality, the undermining of democracy and climate change."

40 years ago seems like a pleasant dream now, since we've fallen so far.

[raccoon]

9. This paragraph stood out to me:

“Those on the other side have to undermine democracy if they’re going to thwart the will of such a large majority, so they undermine it by disenfranchisement and disempowerment.”

[Midnight Writer]

11. America's middle class is The Goose That Lays Golden Eggs. But greedy oligarchs are slaying it.