Although I always enjoy Joseph Stiglitz’s opportunities to educate the public about political-economics, and although I loved his fabulous “FreeFall”, I was a bit disappointed that Dr. Stiglitz did not have the time or chance to make a few important and closely related points with Amy during his “Democracy Now” interview today.

It would have been wonderful if the ‘trifecta’ of the most recent $40T ‘Financial Fraud Explosion’ (often deceptively called the “Financial Crisis”), the BP oil blowout, and the Japanese nuclear disaster could have been leveraged together to reinforce their common critical danger of allowing ‘negative externality cost dumping’—- such exploitive “gaming” of this biggest ‘market flaw’ which represents perhaps the penultimate damage done by the ruling-elite corporate/financial/militarist Empire to society, governments, people, and the environment. Average people need to be allowed to understand the massive damage that unaccounted, unregulated, uncontrolled, and perversely incentivized ‘negative externality cost dumping’ can be on our lives and world.

While Dr. Stiglitz wrote in his wonderful VF article that “of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important”, I’m quite confident that he would, upon reflection, agree with Justice Louis Brandeis, and with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their insightful new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics” that the ultimate damage caused by concentrated money-power to our country and our world is the destruction of democracy itself—- as Brandeis said better than anyone, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”.

Secondly, it is interesting to note, relative to Dr. Stiglitz’s comments in his VF article that such vast inequality of wealth and income can be dangerous to the wealthy themselves, that “our own” CIA’s primary predictor for any country to devolve into civil unrest and revolution, is a GINI Coefficient of Income Inequality of greater than 0.45——of which the US is as far above as Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial kleptocracy of Zimbabwe! Perhaps a word dropped to this effect at a cocktail party hosted by Hedge Fund Managers would be useful—- on the off-chance that my favorite humanist Nobel economist ever attends such events.

Sincerely,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Liberty & democracy over violent empire – People’s Party 2012
Global People’s Movement 2011/NOW

In a nut shell. It’s king shit without the outer regalia.

We’ve come full circle from monarchy to the ethic of middling class of the early Eighteenth Century America who put the lie to leisure class governance by virtue of hard work and dignified the self reliant small business owner, to the Gilded Age which embraced a Social Darwinism (wasn’t even Darwin’s idea) as a rationale for self engrandization and the eating up the little guys, therein setting the ideal for untrammelled corportism, to the present day where the wealthy deem it the rule that the general populace sustain their emminence even when they are the ones who fucked things up. Their entitlements!

Monarchies got their loot through divine
right. Today’s plutocracy gets a wax seal by claiming indispensible the hierarchical game of finance on Wall Street.

P.S. - I for one simply cannot imagine what the CEOs and the Wall Street manipulators are thinking.  I think I am probably not alone.  Stiglitz circulates among these people, meets them for lunch now and then, has access to their “think tanks.”  What ARE they thinking, how do their minds work?  Do they see what is directly in front of their noses—the sad dissolution of the country into a few over-privileged haves and millions of people whose lives are unfairly manipulated for obscene profits—the death of the spirit of democracy, the sickening of political will, the schizoid division of people from people?  The slaughter of democratic rights and the corruption of justice?  Is anyone talking to them about the incipient disaster?  Or are they all mad and destitute of human sympathies? 
  The people have a crying need for knowledge about this growing disaffection, its causes and possible remedies. Just the bald assertion that the rich care nothing for the masses of “others” is insufficient information.  Something else is at work behind the scenes, some politico/economic cancer that will kill us all if we don’t understand what is happening.
  Without understanding, resistance is likely to be eitiher insufficient or misguided or both.  We need to see “the whites of some eyes” here, metaphorically speaking.

It would be very helpful if Joseph Stieglitz and other bonafide economists would hasten to point out to the rich 1% and the rest of us just exactly how they will “regret” the collapse they are getting the world into. Apparently they don’t realize what they are doing?  Or they don’t care? Or they think they will escape?  We all desperately need details on their basic attitude of laissez-faire, and we can’t get to them to ask.  But he can.  Fill the gaps. Probably nobody else is ready and willing.