From The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann on Timothy Noah, Charles Murray, and the politics of America’s inequality. An interview with Frances Fox Piven on rising inequality, poverty, and the condition of the safety net, as well as her sudden and un-intentioned notoriety. US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn’t so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality. Felix Salmon on how the 1% think about their wealth. The big split: Alec MacGillis on why the hedge fund world loved Obama in 2008 — and viscerally despises him today. Too crooked to fail: Bank of America has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed — so why does the government keep bailing it out? If a blunder you committed cost your employer $4 million, how long would you stay employed? In America today, a CEO can cost his company $4 billion and still collect both a paycheck and a bonus. Michael Kazin on why "crony capitalism" is as American as apple pie. A review of American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own by Stuart Banner.
