Inequality

How Big Corporations Are Draining The Life Out Of A Sick America

September 2, 2020 By Paul Buchheit, Commondreams. Educate! Corporatism, Inequality, Taxes, Worker Rights and Jobs

Our richest corporations are much to blame for the free-market "winner take all" philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings. With the 2017 corporate tax cuts came the lofty assurances that money would be freed up for new investment in jobs and R&D. So what happened? Hypocrisy happened. In the following year, S&P 500 companies set a new record for buying back their stock to artificially boost stock prices for management and investors—a practice that was illegal until the Reagan years. While about a third of S&P companies are now curtailing stock buybacks in response to the pandemic, others have depleted so much of their funds that they have turned to the pandemic-inspired CARES Act for relief to "distressed industries."

The Day After Election Day

August 31, 2020 By Rob Urie, Counterpunch. Strategize! 2020 Election, Democracy, Healthcare, Inequality, Liberal Politics

For the second election in a row two of the least favored politicians in American history represent the range of choices speaks to the vacuity of the ‘process.’ In the throes of electoral passion, the insistence has been that personality and tenor are substance, hence the promise ‘to restore dignity to the presidency’ is put forward as a ready substitute for adequate healthcare, meaningful employment at a living wage, environmental repair, and real political participation. The American posture that elections create the political system has it perfectly backward. What better way to counterfeit the consent of the governed than through a system of choice controlled by establishment interests? By analogy, does the choice between two brands of corn chips define the range of food that can be eaten? Who it is that controls this process is demonstrated when the DNC mails ‘swag bags’ to rich donors as unemployment hovers above fifteen million people and millions more are expected to be made homeless in the coming weeks. And if this weren’t enough, healthcare lobbyists have already decided that Democratic campaign promises of a ‘public option’ go too far.

Lenders Deny Mortgages For Black Homeowners At A High Rate

August 22, 2020 By Diana Olick, CNBC. Educate! Big Banks, Housing, Inequality, Racism

Discrimination in home lending goes back to the beginning of home lending itself. During the last housing boom, when subprime mortgages were all the rage, predatory lending to minority borrowers was rampant. When the mortgage market came crashing down, taking the economy with it, some major lenders were held accountable. They ended up paying massive, multibillion-dollar settlements to the federal government. But there is clearly still bias in the market. A majority (59 percent), of Black homebuyers, are concerned about qualifying for a mortgage, while less than half (46 percent) of white buyers are, according to a recent survey by Zillow, a home listing website, which launched its own mortgage lending arm, Zillow Home Loans, late last year. That is because lenders deny mortgages for Black applicants at a rate 80 percent higher than that of white applicants, according to 2020 data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. For refinances specifically, Black borrowers are denied mortgage refinance loans, on average, 30.22 percent of the time, far higher than the overall denial rate of 17.07 percent

Canada’s Post-Pandemic Response

August 19, 2020 By Christian Favreau, Canadian Dimenson. Educate! Canada, Class war, COVID-19, Inequality

The antithesis to a vision of austerity and increased privatization is the set of principles endorsed by hundreds of community organizations and groups across Canada known collectively as a just recovery. The pandemic has shown how crucial investments in communities and public services can be to lift vulnerable folks out of poverty and contribute to stronger public health outcomes. David Bleakney, a representative of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, argued that any stability felt during this crisis has been dependent on frontline labour, including healthcare workers, postal workers, or those on the front lines of warehousing in the gig economy. “We need new terms of value in our recovery,” he said. “We can’t continue to have frontline people used as fodder and sacrifice. We can’t continue to punish women. We can’t continue to treat indigenous people like they’re just an add-on to white society.” When speaking about consumer choice, Bleakney said that, in our current system, choice is virtually nonexistent

The Basic Case For A Wealth Tax

August 19, 2020 By Bob Lord and Lee Price, Inequality.org. Create! Inequality, Recession, Tax cuts for the rich, Wealth Tax

Changes in tax policy since 1980 have been driving U.S. inequality to levels not seen since the original Gilded Age. Reversing that trajectory — and restoring a more egalitarian society — will require a complete overhaul of the changes in tax policy we’ve seen over the past four decades. Taxes as a share of national income have now been remarkably stable for 40 years. Total federal tax revenue last year stood at 17 percent, about the average for the last half-century. Income taxes, meanwhile, have stayed steady at 8 percent of the economy. According to Saez and Zucman, a 10 percent tax rate on wealth in excess of $1 billion would have, if begun in 1982, kept the Forbes 400 share of the nation’s wealth at its 1982 level of 1 percent. We can’t turn the clock back to 1982. But we can take serious steps to undo the inequality damage we’ve experienced since then. Our suggestion: Let’s add a third tier to Senator Warren’s proposal. On wealth in excess of $5 billion, let’s now impose a 10 percent tax.

The Pandemic Revealed US’s Zip Code Map Of Inequality

August 18, 2020 By Marshall Auerback, Economy for All. Educate! COVID-19, Healthcare, Inequality, Profiteers

The stark divide in the level of health care from testing to treatment is divided by wealth and the legacy of systemic racism. In the words of Ed Yong of the Atlantic: “Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19.” Yong could also add Hispanics to that list, along with virtually any person of limited economic means, regardless of race. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, income and zip code determine everything. And this is not a new phenomenon. COVID-19 has both amplified and revealed these long-standing flaws, tragically reflected in its death count, but it is by no means a historical anomaly. Earlier pandemics reveal a similar pattern, suggesting a more widespread systemic problem: namely, that the high death counts relative to the rest of the world are an inescapable consequence of our for-profit, pervasively oligopolistic health care system. The problems of a for-profit health care system are exacerbated by the diversion of resources and skills into militarism, and unequal food distribution systems’ effect on diet and obesity.

The Consequences Of Inequality Can Be Fatal

August 3, 2020 By Richard D. Wolff, Economy for All. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Inequality, Poverty

The COVID-19 pandemic, inadequately contained by the U.S. system, savages Americans of middle and lower incomes and wealth markedly more than the rich. The rich buy better health care and diets, second homes away from crowded cities, better connections to get government bailouts, and so on. Many of the poor are homeless. Tasteless advice to “shelter at home” is, for them, absurd. Low-income people are often crowded into the kinds of dense housing and dense working conditions that facilitate infection. Poor residents of low-cost nursing homes die disproportionally, as do prison inmates (mostly poor). Pandemic capitalism distributes death in inverse proportion to wealth and income. Social distancing has destroyed especially low-wage service sector jobs. Rarely did top executives lose their positions, and when they did, they found others. The result is a widened gap between high salaries for some and low or no wages for many. Unemployment invites employers to lower wages for the still employed because they can. Pandemic capitalism has provoked a massive increase in money-creation by central banks. That money fuels rising stock markets and thereby enriches the rich who own most shares. The coincidence of rising stock markets and mass unemployment plus falling wages only adds momentum to worsening inequality.

Land Loss Has Plagued Black America Since Emancipation

July 20, 2020 Julian Agyeman and Kofi Boone, The Conversation. Strategize! Inequality, Land Rights, Racism, Slavery

Underlying the recent unrest sweeping U.S. cities over police brutality is a fundamental inequity in wealth, land, and power that has circumscribed black lives since the end of slavery in the U.S. The “40 acres and a mule” promised to formerly enslaved Africans never came to pass. There was no redistribution of land, no reparations for the wealth extracted from stolen land by stolen labor. June 19 is celebrated by black Americans as Juneteenth, marking the date in 1865 that former slaves were informed of their freedom, albeit two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Coming this year at a time of protest over the continued police killing of black people, it provides an opportunity to look back at how black Americans were deprived of land ownership and the economic power that it brings. An expanded concept of the “black commons” – based on shared economic, cultural and digital resources as well as land – could act as one means of redress.

Where Do We Go from Here?

July 13, 2020 Howard Brand, Information Clearinghouse. Strategize! Democracy, Inequality, Racial disparities, Worker Rights

Identity politics currently is in the forefront of the United States political agenda, and things do look quite dismal in regard to wealth, opportunity, and quality of life of a significant number of minority workers—but this is also the case, when we look closely, for a large segment of the overall population of our country. The question I see is where do we want to go and how can we change the situation? It is quite clear to me that the current ruling class has no intention of giving up their ruling position without a concerted fight. The ruling elite (the capitalist class or rich people as a class, not individually) have fought throughout the history of its existence—about 350 years, for its ruling position. I think the choice for us is this: Parity or Emancipation?

Covid Recovery And Radical Social Change

July 11, 2020 By Christos Zografos, The Ecologist. Strategize! Anti-capitalism, COVID-19, Inequality

I share the hope that the pandemic serves as a wake-up call for mobilizing action for radical societal change, and I don’t think that those who see fragments of this happening in commoning or solidarity practices during this pandemic are either naïve or only see part of the picture. But I am troubled by the signs that the inequality wagon might have a long way before it derails, which I see side-by-side with those other hopeful signs. Still, the care and vulnerability vision I sketched could provide a basis for a more hopeful outlook. Keeping in mind that pain better not be romanticized, valuing care and embracing vulnerability as central to life could begin with seeing the existence of those most vulnerable and marginalized not only as a source for recording misery and pain but also as a deeply political challenge: a source of models of human existence that defy whiteness fantasies of impermeability and containment that are bound to correspond to and elevate the few.

A Decade Of Research On The Rich-Poor Divide In Education

July 8, 2020 By Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report. Educate! Education, Education Funding, Inequality, Systemic Racism

Education inequality is not just a divide between rich and poor but also between the ultra-rich and everyone else. In 2020, a Pennsylvania State University researcher documented how the wealthiest school districts in America — the top 1 percent — fund their schools at much higher levels than everyone else and are increasing their school spending at a faster rate. The school funding gap between a top 1 percent district (mostly white suburbs) and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32 percent between 2000 and 2015, the study calculated. Nassau County, just outside New York City on Long Island, has the highest concentration of students who attend the best-funded public schools among all counties in the country. Almost 17 percent of all the top 1 percent of students in the nation live in this one county.

Pandemic Capitalism: Pervasive Inequality Is A Chosen Catastrophe

July 8, 2020 By Chris Oestereich, Open Democracy. Create! Capitalism, COVID-19, Inequality, Recession

The current flavor of ‘no holds barred’ capitalism sits at this precipice. For years, it has extracted everything within its reach. It has exploited our natural resources and damaged our ecosystems. It has claimed our time and effort, and even our hopes and dreams. All these things have been treated as resources to be mined for a system that’s systematically designed to benefit the few. The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. That might be tough to swallow, but there’s a good trick involved: buying in uncritically allows you to believe that your self-interest is benevolent. That so many people are willing to do so is captured by Upton Sinclair’s famous quip, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Report: White Supremacy Is A Pre-Existing Condition

June 24, 2020 By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo, Institute for Policy Studies. Educate! COVID-19, Inequality, Racial wealth divide, Racism

For months now, a deadly pandemic and deep recession have pummeled the U.S. economy. Yet even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, U.S. billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by leaps and bounds. At the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has drawn attention not just to police brutality against Black Americans, but to systemic racism more broadly. A huge cause and consequence of that systemic injustice is the underlying racial wealth divide — the financial legacy of centuries of white supremacy. Even before the pandemic, we found that median white families had literally dozens of times the net worth of median Black and Latino families. The pandemic is supercharging that inequality, with the skyrocketing wealth of the largely white billionaire class putting most Americans, especially people of color, further and further behind.

Over One Million People View Poor People’s Assembly And Moral March On Washington

June 23, 2020 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Resist! Inequality, Poor People's Campaign, Poverty, Racism

President Trump drew a smaller crowd than he expected for his rally this past Saturday, but that wasn’t the case for the Poor People’s Campaign. Well more than a million people viewed the campaign’s Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington via Facebook that same day. Many more viewed MSNBC and C-SPAN simulcasts and two repeat broadcasts over the weekend. According to organizers, the three and a half hour event was “the largest digital and social media gathering of poor and low-wealth people, moral and religious leaders, advocates, and people of conscience in this nation’s history.” The virtual rally lifted up people who are living the interconnected injustices that have been the campaign’s focus for the past two years: systemic racism, poverty and inequality, ecological devastation, and militarism and the war economy. Many spoke of how the Covid-19 pandemic has only deepened existing inequalities.

The Secret Reason Billionaires Love A Pandemic

June 22, 2020 Lee Camp, Consortium News. Educate! Billionaires, Class war, COVID-19, Inequality

Most billionaires don’t work harder, don’t think harder, and don’t know more. They have nothing over your average person except: a) luck b) sometimes inheriting a fortune and c) being more sociopathic. So I guess you could say they’re extraordinary on the sociopathy front. They are more willing to crush other humans to get what they want and thereby they are more able to get what they want. Billionaires in the U.S. have seen their fortunes skyrocket, increasing by 12.5 percent since the pandemic began. The Institute for Policy Studies released a study “showing that, in the eight weeks between March 18 and May 14, the country’s super-wealthy have added a further $368.8 billion to their already enormous fortunes.”

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