Economic Justice

At a time when Americans owe close to $800 billion in credit card debt, the myth is that credit cards are primarily financing America’s luxury lifestyles—helping white suburban families pay the costs attached to extravagant homes, luxury cars, and golf club memberships—or helping those who aspire to these lifestyles. Up to Our Eyeballs reveals the disturbing reality that credit cards are in fact the new “safety net,” being used by desperate middle- and low-income families to manage essential expenses.

In the increasingly volatile American economy, where a decline in work-related benefits like health insurance and pensions has accompanied a rising cost of living and increased job instability, consumer debt has become a fact of life for many American families. Up to Our Eyeballs is a troubling examination of the causes and consequences of this explosive rise in consumer debt.

Including a critical look at how the financial industry became the aggressive, hyper-profitable industry it is today, this book also incorporates solutions that will be of real relief to struggling households.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has been sending more and more of its rewards to fewer and fewer people. Once seen as a global exemplar of egalitarianism and middle-class opportunity, America has become the most unequal of developed nations—a land where corporate leaders earn hundreds of times the pay of average workers, and the only population group growing faster than millionaires is the uninsured. Statistics aside, this quarte-century-long trend has changed the texture of American life in ways that threaten our deepest values.

Drawing on the best and latest research, the contributors explore issues such as the real story the numbers tell about how America has changed; dimensions of inequality (education, health, and opportunity); causes of inequality, looking past the usual suspects of technology, trade, and immigration; the persistence of racial disparities; the erosion of democracy and community; and inequality as a moral and religious problem. Not just a catalog of inequality’s ills, the book concludes with a plausible and hopeful policy path—beyond redistribution—to a more just and humane economy.

With contributions by:

• Joel Bakan
• Heather Boushey and Christian E. Weller
• Barbara Ehrenreich
• Robert H. Frank
• Robert M. Franklin
• William Greider
• Christopher Jencks
• David Cay Johnston
• Richard D. Kahlenberg
• Robert Kuttner
• James Lardner
• Betsy Leondar-Wright
• Charles Lewis
• Meizhu Lui
• Bill Moyers
• Miles S. Rapoport and David A. Smith
• Jonathan Rowe
• Theda Skocpol
• David A. Smith and Heather McGhee
• Jim Wallis
• Eric Wanner
• David R. Williams and James Lardner

Critical, independent voices are seldom found within the citadels of international finance. That’s what makes Nomi Prins unique. During fifteen years as an executive at skyscraping banks like Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, Prins never lost her ability to see the broader picture. She walked away from the game in 2002 out of disgust with the burgeoning corporate corruption, just as its magnitude was becoming clear to the public.

In this acclaimed exposé, named one of the best books of 2004 by The Economist, Barron’s, Library Journal, and The Progressive, Prins provides fascinating firsthand details of day-to-day life in the financial leviathans, with all its rich absurdities. She demonstrates how the much-publicized fraud of recent years resulted from deregulation that trashed the rules of responsible corporate behavior, and not simply the unbridled greed of a select few. While the stock market roared on the back of phony balance sheets, executives made out like bandits and Congress looked the other way. Worse yet, as the new foreword to this edition makes clear, everything remains in place for a repeat performance.

Rarely a day went by in the dizzy 1990s without some well-paid pundit heralding the triumphant arrival of a “New Economy.” According to these financial mavens, an unprecedented technological and organizational revolution had extinguished the threat of recession forever. Though much of the rhetoric sounds ridiculous today, few analysts have explored how the New Economy moment emerged from deep within America’s economic and ideological machinery—instead, they’ve preferred to treat it as an episode of mass delusion.

Now, with customary irreverence and acuity, journalist Doug Henwood dissects the New Economy, arguing that the delirious optimism was actually a manic set of variations on ancient themes, all promoted from the highest of places. Claims of New Eras have plenty of historical precedents; in this latest act, our modern mythmakers held that technology would overturn hierarchies, democratizing information and finance and leading inexorably to a virtual social revolution. But, as Henwood vividly demonstrates, the gap between rich and poor has never been so wide, wealth never so concentrated. After the New Economy offers an accessible and entertaining account of the less-than-lustrous reality beneath the gloss of the 1990s boom.

This fully updated and expanded second edition of The Field Guide to the Global Economy presents the latest facts to help make sense of the rapidly changing international economy. Illustrated throughout with charts, graphs, and cartoons, the book documents new trends, including the foreign “outsourcing” of U.S. service jobs, as well as the increasing influence of mega-firms like Wal-Mart and labor union-free China on workers around the globe.

Published in conjunction with the Institute for Policy Studies, an independent research institute based in Washington, D.C., this accessible guide explains how global institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and North American Free Trade Agreement affect communities, workers, the poor, and the environment. The book dispels the widely disseminated propaganda about current globalization policies and provides an update on the burgeoning movement that is challenging them, from Bolivian water warriors to U.S. student anti-sweatshop activists.

Of the hundred largest economies in the world, forty-nine are corporations. A handful of corporate giants control most of the world’s energy, technology, food, banks, industry, and media. Yet despite the ubiquity of enormous multinationals as the leading agents of globalization in the world, the history and character of corporate entities remains largely unknown, daunting, and inaccessible to the general public.

Global Inc. is an atlas that charts this new, multinational geography. It features an extraordinary series of two hundred specially commissioned full-color maps that show how multinational corporations such as General Motors, Toyota, IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, British Petroleum, and AOL Time Warner, have spread out across the globe. Colorful explanatory charts and graphs make clear the tremendous and surprising reach of individual corporations. And additional maps chart the rise of trade, multinational financial institutions, and global tools like the Internet.

The product of several years of collaborative research by leading historians and geographers, Global Inc. is the first book to examine multinational corporations from a truly global perspective, and in atlas format. Impartial, accessible, and engrossing, Global Inc. offers a penetrating look at one of the most powerful phenomena on the planet in the twenty-first century.

A work that sparked widespread controversy when it was first published, Top Heavy is acclaimed economist Edward N. Wolff’s eloquent presentation of the facts of wealth inequality in the United States. In a completely revised and updated edition of the book the Boston Review hailed as “the leading contemporary study of the distribution of wealth,” Wolff reveals the unprecedented rise in recent years of wealth inequality and shows how it is one of the major forces challenging democracy and economic opportunity in America.

Wolff vividly illustrates how the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of wealth is greater now than at any time since 1929, immediately preceding the Great Depression. As the nation considers trillion-dollar tax cuts and the abolishment of the estate tax, Top Heavy takes a sobering look at how the wealth of the top 1 percent of households continues its heart stopping expansion while the current distribution of wealth in America invites the surprisingly apt comparison with the class-dominated societies of nineteenth-century Europe.

Top Heavy will continue to be an essential reference point in any discussion of what an economically healthy America might look like.