miserliness

Just last Wednesday, I posted a column reporting how our richest corporations, through sheer miserliness and profit-seeking, left millions of Americans vulnerable to technological attacks on their privacy and welfare.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Paul Benjamin Auster grew up in a middle class Jewish home torn between his father’s thrift, to the point of miserliness, and his mother’s urge to spend, to the point of recklessness.

The broad outlines remain familiar: On Christmas Eve, Scrooge, an ungenerous money lender, is visited by several spirits who help him to understand the boy he was, the man he became and the ways in which his miserliness may reverberate into the future.

In all the versions of the story, there is resistance, skepticism, fear, miserliness, scarcity or a suspicion that must first be conquered.

“It’s a kind of meanness and miserliness on the part of these prosperous countries that say, we don’t want these people,” he said.