Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality That Limits Our Lives

Congressman George Miller (D-Calif.), chair, House Democratic Policy Committee
What price do we pay for inequality in America? No book exposes the full cost better than Greed and Good.


William Greider, author, "The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy"
...big ideas for rescuing American ideas from plutocracy and for restoring our bedrock values of equality and equality.


Jeff Faux, distinguished fellow, co-founder, Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC
If you care about your country, read this book.


Book Description
Should we care that wealth in the United States is unequally distributed--and getting more so every year? Should we worry that America's most wealthy, in just a generation, have doubled their share of the nation's wealth? Should we be alarmed that America's richest 1 percent now holds more wealth--over $2 trillion more--than America's entire bottom 90 percent? Apparently not. Our nation's top elected leaders see absolutely no reason to challenge, or even discomfort, America's remarkably grand concentrations of wealth. That reluctance, Sam Pizzigati argues in his new "Greed and Good", endangers us all. Over recent years, academics and activists the world over have generated a broad and often brilliant body of work that exposes just how concentrated wealth is poisoning everything we hold dear, from our health to our happiness, from our professions to our pastimes, from our Earth to our arts. In "Greed and Good", author Sam Pizzigati brings this critically important body of work together, for the first time ever inside a single book, and builds upon it. His riveting pages make undeniably plain the horrific price we pay for accepting, as an inevitable given, wealth's domination. Along the way, "Greed and Good" engagingly dissects and demolishes what amounts to the case for greed, the old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trop out to justify the gaps that divide us. These gaps, Sam Pizzigati counsels, can be narrowed. And what can we do to create a significantly less unequal America? "Greed and Good" explores the most promising options, then offers a practical political guide for moving toward the boldest option of all, a "maximum wage", a national ceiling on annual individual income that would rise if and only if the minimum wage rose first. A century ago, with wealth concentrating at levels much like today's, Americans arose in anger. "Greed and Good" reminds us all, powerfully, and unforgettably, why such concentrations once again need to be feared--and fought.


About the Author
Sam Pizzigati has written widely on economic inequality, with op-eds and articles appearing in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a host of other newspapers and periodicals. A long-time labor movement journalist, he has edited publications for four different national unions and directed, for twenty years, the publishing operations of America's largest union, the 2.7 million-member National Education Association. Pizzigati currently edits Too Much, a quarterly commentary on capping excessive income and wealth, and serves on the boards of directors of two groups active in economic justice education and organizing, the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy, a national effort, and Progressive Maryland, a statewide alliance of labor, community, civil rights, and religious organizations.


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