Portside

26 top world economists say austerity is not working, won't and can't. The future of the EU is at stake in the negotiations between Greece and its creditor institutions, now close to a climax. To avoid failure, concessions will be needed from both sides. From the EU, forbearance and finance to promote structural reform and economic recovery, and to preserve the integrity of the Eurozone.

What is needed is not structural reform within Greece and Spain so much as structural reform of the Eurozone and a fundamental rethinking of the policy frameworks that have resulted in the monetary union’s spectacularly bad performance. Failure to restructure Greece's debt would be a failure of democracy and morality.

Reader Comments - Selma; Civil Rights Tour led by Julian Bond; Ferguson Grand Jury; Police, NYPD, PBA, de Blasio; Women telling their Story; Wealth and Inequality; Sports - A Radical Proposal; BDS, Israel, Palestine, Solidarity; Sony; The Interview; Privatization and Hucksterism; Climate Change, Marx and Nature; Healthcare; Superbugs; the Ukraine; Announcements - The American Labor Movement At A Crossroads; Elections in Greece: Can Syriza Break with Austerity?

Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz talks about what forces are driving economic inequality and a policy framework for reversing the trend.

According to a new white paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, our labyrinthine tax system is encouraging corporations to invest in creating jobs overseas, when unemployment remains doggedly high here at home, while giving US-based multinationals good reason to deprive our treasury of revenues when we should be investing in infrastructure and the American people.

New scholarship by the French economist is a bona fide phenomenon - and the right is terrified. Thomas Piketty argues that the main driver of inequality - the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth - threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. He calls for political action and policy intervention. Video - Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman on the significance of the work, and the stir.

In his powerful speech to the AFL-CIO convention, the famed economist says '95% of the gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the upper 1%.'