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wealth inequality

An Inequality Tale Of Two Capital Cities

March 11, 2025 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. , , ,
Nine of the world’s ten wealthiest billionaires now call the United States home. The remaining one? He lives in France. And that one — Bernard Arnault, the 76-year-old who owns just about half the world’s largest maker of luxury goods — is now feeling some heat. What has Arnault and his fellow French deep pockets beginning to sweat? Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth. “The tax impunity of billionaires,” the measure’s prime sponsor, the Ecologist Party’s Eva Sas, exulted last month, “is over.”

I Saw Firsthand How Excessive CEO Pay Harms Workers And Customers

March 6, 2025 Kieran Cuadras, Inequality.org. , , , ,
"Remember the 2016 “phony accounts” scandal at Wells Fargo? Executives relentlessly pressured employees to meet extreme sales quotas, leading them to create millions of fraudulent accounts without clients’ consent. As these fake accounts grew, the CEO of Wells Fargo at the time, John Stumpf, raked in bigger and bigger bonuses. After the scandal blew up, regulators hit Stumpf with fines totalling $20 million — only a small dent in the estimated $130 million he walked away with in compensation when he resigned. This is just one of countless stories of CEOs taking reckless actions to pump up their own paychecks while putting their employees and the general public at risk.

The Latest Plot To Privatize Public Lands

February 10, 2025 Joseph Bullington, In These Times. , , ,
On a recent visit to see old friends in Livingston, Mont., I found myself downtown, drinking the free art-walk wine, spearing the free cocktail weenies and admiring the fine skin of the expensively dressed couples bobbing in and out of the galleries that have proliferated here like some aggressive breed of plant. The light was retreating up the peaks of the Absaroka Range, and the summer evening’s golden stillness settled over town. Then a rip formed in this tranquility, and through it a ramshackle Subaru station wagon with local plates came trundling up Main Street, piled floor to ceiling with belongings. ​“Fuck!” shrieked the driver, as he pounded the steering wheel. ​“I fucking hate this!”

New York City’s Congestion Pricing Program Sacrifices Human Rights

January 9, 2025 Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
It’s been said that the road to bad policy is paved with good intentions. The case of New York City’s new congestion pricing program puts this aphorism to the task as both the intentions and the program itself raise salient questions about who benefits, who suffers, and if the inchoate initiative even complies with at least two landmark State statutes that purport to position New York State as the national leader in climate action and environmental justice. The congestion pricing program, which charges drivers entering Manhattan from 60th street and below $9.00 between the hours of 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends.

CEO Salaries Skyrocket 1,085% Since 1978

December 30, 2024 Dax Everly, Kawsachun News. , , , ,
From 1978 to 2023, chief executive officers at America’s largest firms experienced a dramatic 1,085% increase in compensation, while the average worker’s salary rose by just 24%, as highlighted in a recent annual report. The report, produced by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), scrutinizes compensation trends at the top 350 publicly traded U.S. companies measured by revenue. The methodology for assessing CEO pay, which predominantly comprises stock-based components, involves both a retrospective view using realized compensation and a prospective angle via granted compensation.

A Global Minimum Wage Would Reduce Poverty And Corporate Power

December 27, 2024 Lawrence S. Wittner, Foreign Policy in Focus. , , , ,
In today’s world of widespread poverty and unprecedented wealth, how about raising the wages of the most poorly-paid workers? This October, the World Bank reported that “8.5 percent of the global population―almost 700 million people―live today on less than $2.15 per day,” while “44 percent of the global population―around 3.5 billion people―live today on less than $6.85 per day.” Meanwhile, “global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill.” In early 2024, the charity group Oxfam International noted that, since 2020, “148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profit, 52 percent up on 3-year average, and dished out huge payouts to rich shareholders.”

Ghastly Glimpses Of America’s Most Rich-People-Friendly Year

December 22, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Counter Punch. , ,
The good times — for America’s super wealthy — are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast. Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.

Many Wealthy Members Of Congress Are Descendants Of Rich Slaveholders

December 17, 2024 Neil K. R. Sehgal and Ashwini Sehgal, The Conversation. , , , ,
The legacy of slavery in America remains a divisive issue, with sharp political divides. Some argue that slavery still contributes to modern economic inequalities. Others believe its effects have largely faded. One way to measure the legacy of slavery is to determine whether the disproportionate riches of slaveholders have been passed down to their present-day descendants. Connecting the wealth of a slaveholder in the 1860s to today’s economic conditions is not easy. Doing so requires unearthing data for a large number of people on slaveholder ancestry, current wealth and other factors such as age and education.

Rich-People-Friendly Think Tank Confirms Richest Pay Under One Percent In Annual Taxes

December 2, 2024 Bob Lord, Inequality.org. , , ,
The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation has long functioned as an apologist for America’s deepest pockets. Analysts at the Foundation have spent years assuring us that our wealthiest are paying far more than their fair tax share — in the face of a reality that has our richest aggressively growing their share of the wealth all Americans are creating. This past August, the Biden administration’s Treasury Department commissioned a new study that documented just how little of their wealth America’s richest are actually paying in taxes. Last month, the Tax Foundation responded with a predictable critique.

The Potential Of Cooperatives For Economic Equality

November 25, 2024 Cooperatives Europe. , , ,
Released on October 17th under the title “Social Development in Times of Converging Crises: A Call for Global Action”, the report is the output of the global call by the GA resolution 77/281 in April 2023 to promote the social and solidarity economy for sustainable development.   Overall, the report estimates that the economic cost of crisis mitigation from 2020 until 2030 will translate into “a cumulative output loss of over $50 trillion”, to the detriment of social development. It is a global plea to prioritise people and the planet over profit, and for public-private social investments to be at the same level as their economic counterparts.  

In Baku, At The Climate Conference, Hand-Wringing Abounds

November 17, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. , , ,
The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change — COP29 for short — in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku. But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport, news reports note, have just doubled. What makes that such a big deal?

United States And China Why Not A Deal?

October 21, 2024 Richard D. Wolff, Counter Punch. , , ,
An old theme within social theory holds that societies with very unequal distributions of wealth can sustain their social cohesion so long as total wealth is growing. Such total growth enables all who get a distributed share of that wealth—even those with the smallest shares—to experience at least some increase. The rich with the biggest shares can grab most of the growth so long as some is provided to those with small shares. The pie analogy works well: so long as the pie is growing all distributed shares of it can also grow.

Hotel CEOs Prioritize Their Own Paychecks, Not Improvements

September 6, 2024 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. , , , , ,
Labor disputes are continuing to rage between unionized hotel workers and the bosses at three major chains: Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. Over Labor Day weekend, more than 10,000 UNITE HERE members went on strike at 25 hotels in nine cities after months of unresolved contract negotiations. While most are back on the job for now, they’re urging guests not to patronize any of their target hotels until the union secures good new contracts. (They’ve mapped hotels with labor disputes here) Among the workers’ key demands: higher wages in line with the rising cost of living, fair staffing and workloads, improved benefits, and a reversal of pandemic-era cuts.

Capitalism’s Unequal Distribution Deprives You Of True Freedom

August 9, 2024 Richard D. Wolff, Counter Punch. , , , ,
As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality. Oxfam, a global charity, reported that 2022’s 10 richest men together had six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth. The lack of democracy inside workplaces or enterprises is both a cause and an effect of capitalism’s unequal distribution of income and wealth. Of course, inequality predates capitalism. Powerful feudal lords across Europe had blended autocracy with unequal distributions of wealth on their manorial estates.

Debt Is Political: Why Wealth Flows From Poor To Rich

August 5, 2024 Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. , , ,
You may think that today, given the events of recent weeks, we might be talking about the wars that seem set to spiral out of control, particularly with Israel appearing so determined to escalate its hostilities with Hezbollah that it is willing to make accusations on entirely and visibly flimsy grounds. You might think that we will talk about how it’s not at all clear who’s in control, particularly in that country that so often fancies itself as the world’s policeman or woman, as the case may be. And indeed, we certainly intend to cover these topics in the future. However, today we will focus on a very closely related topic, and that is debt.
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