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TexasTowelie

(111,292 posts)
Mon Jun 2, 2014, 04:45 PM Jun 2014

Tonight on MoveOn.org: Elizabeth Warren and Thomas Piketty



Tonight at 8:30 (5:30 PT), MoveOn and HuffPo are broadcasting a dialogue between Senator Elizabeth Warren and author Thomas Piketty from Boston's historic Old South Meeting House. I wonder how many other Members of Congress, or how many candidates for Congress, have read Piketty's high acclaimed new book, Capital In The Twenty-First Century. I did an unscientific survey and found that no one had. No one. His critique of the debilitating economic inequality endemic to our current system of irresponsible, unfettered greed-based capitalism, has been under relentless-- and typically dishonest-- attack by conservatives. His proposal to save the planet by imposing a progressive global tax on the super-rich has sent conservatives into a frenzy and they are eagerly attempting to undermine his runaway best-selling book. The attacks have been largely debunked… but when has that ever slowed conservatives and their media mouthpieces down?

In His New York Review of Books essay, Paul Krugman wrote that it was "revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous 'one percent,' and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. And this discovery came with a second revelation: talk of a second Gilded Age, which might have seemed like hyperbole, was nothing of the kind. In America in particular the share of national income going to the top one percent has followed a great U-shaped arc. Before World War I the one percent received around a fifth of total income in both Britain and the United States. By 1950 that share had been cut by more than half. But since 1980 the one percent has seen its income share surge again-- and in the United States it’s back to what it was a century ago… The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to 'patrimonial capitalism,' in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties."

With savage conservatives on the prowl, who is defending Piketty's thesis from the smears of the bought-off minions of the super-rich? Anthropologist David Graeber brought a new set of eyes to the debate this weekend with an incisive column for The Guardian, Save Capitalism Is Back-- And It Will Not Tame Itself.

- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/06/thomas-piketty-on-progressive-taxation.html

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Tonight on MoveOn.org: Elizabeth Warren and Thomas Piketty (Original Post) TexasTowelie Jun 2014 OP
Thx for the heads-up. I shall tune-in. nt Laffy Kat Jun 2014 #1
Here is a link to the Web page with the video: TexasTowelie Jun 2014 #2
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