STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 22 June 2012

[Demeter]

29. The World's 99% Knows Capitalism Is Failing and Believes That Change Is Possible

http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/9907-the-price-of-inequality-99

In Joseph E. Stiglitz's new book, "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future," the Nobel Prize-winning economist argues that there is a price to be paid for economic inequality...

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There are moments in history when people all over the world seem to rise up, to say that something is wrong, to ask for change. This is what happened in the tumultuous years 1848 and 1968. Each of these years of upheaval marked the beginning of a new era. The year 2011 may prove to be another such moment...A youth uprising that began in Tunisia, a little country on the coast of North Africa, spread to nearby Egypt, then to other countries of the Middle East. In some cases, the spark of protest seemed at least temporarily doused. In others, though, small protests precipitated cataclysmic societal change, taking down long-established dictators such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. Soon the people of Spain and Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and other countries around the world, had their own reasons to be in the streets.

Throughout 2011, I gladly accepted invitations to Egypt, Spain, and Tunisia and met with protesters in Madrid's Buen Retiro Park, at Zuccotti Park in New York, and in Cairo, where I spoke with young men and women who had been at Tahrir Square. As we talked, it was clear to me that while specific grievances varied from country to country and, in particular, that the political grievances in the Middle East were very different from those in the West, there were some shared themes. There was a common understanding that in many ways the economic and political system had failed and that both were fundamentally unfair.

The protesters were right that something was wrong. The gap between what our economic and political systems are supposed to do - what we were told they did do - and what they actually do became too large to be ignored. Governments around the world were not addressing key economic problems, including that of persistent unemployment; and as universal values of fairness became sacrificed to the greed of a few, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, the feeling of unfairness became a feeling of betrayal.

....Three themes resonated around the world: that markets weren't working the way they were supposed to, for they were obviously neither efficient nor stable; that the political system hadn't corrected the market failures; and that the economic and political systems are fundamentally unfair. While this book focuses on the excessive inequality that marks the United States and some other advanced industrial countries today, it explains how the three themes are intimately interlinked: the inequality is cause and consequence of the failure of the political system, and it contributes to the instability of our economic system, which in turn contributes to increased inequality—a vicious downward spiral into which we have descended, and from which we can emerge only through concerted policies that I describe below....

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