wealth inequality

Hotel CEOs Prioritize Their Own Paychecks, Not Improvements

September 6, 2024 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Educate! Hotels, Service Industry, Strikes, Unions, wealth inequality, Worker Rights and Jobs

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. Educate! Capitalism, Democracy, Freedom, wealth inequality, Worker Rights

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. Resistance Report Capitalism, Debt, Federal Reserve, wealth inequality

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.

The World’s Richest Just Got Extraordinarily More Wealthy

July 13, 2024 Max B. Sawicky, In These Times. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

In every measurement of economic inequality, personal wealth is found to be more unequal than income. Naturally, this state of affairs invites attention and criticism, along with demands for a reduction of that inequality by various means, including to reduce the stubborn racial wealth gap. The latest World Wealth Report for 2024, published last month by The Capgemini Research Institute, brings this level of inequality into stark relief. We learn from the report that very high net-worth individuals (“HNWI,” defined as those with at least $1 million of investable assets) have been doing quite well, which is probably not a surprise.

To Best Understand Inequality, Think Class, Not Generation

July 7, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Multigenerational, Public investment, wealth inequality

How much does the generation we belong to define the comfort of the lives we lead? Just about nothing impacts our comfort, suggests a recent spate of major media news analyses, more than our generation. “Millennials had it bad financially,” as a Washington Post feature put it last month, “but Gen Z may have it worse.” Demographers typically define millennials as those Americans born between 1980 and 1994. Gen Z covers the cohort that came on the scene between 1995 and 2012. The tens of millions of Americans in both these generations, goes the standard analysis, enjoy precious little of the good life that has blessed America’s baby boomers, those lucky 60- and 70-year-olds born right after World War II between 1946 and 1964.

A Practical Prescription For Taxing Our World’s Richest

June 29, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Tax the rich, Taxes, wealth inequality

Ever wonder why the divide between the world’s richest and everybody else keeps getting wider? Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s finest young economists, has just produced a report that riffs on one key reason: Our super rich pay next to nothing in taxes. Just how close to nothing? This close: Over the past four decades, the world’s “ultra-high-net-worth individuals” have seen their fortunes increase, after taking inflation into account, an average 7.5 percent per year. How much annually have these rich paid in taxes? They’ve been paying, Zucman calculates, an effective tax rate “equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth.”

A Fair Tax Agenda For Wall Street

June 15, 2024 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Create! Economic crisis, Tax Reform, Wall Street, wealth inequality

Financial institutions still extract too much wealth from working families and funnel too much of that wealth into massive executive bonuses that encourage excessive risk-taking – and even financial fraud.[2] And, as we saw with the spate of regional bank failures in 2023, reckless executives can still drive their firms into the ground and walk away with grand fortunes while relying on taxpayer money to contain the damage.[3] Much more needs to be done to ensure our financial system contributes to a healthy economy and focuses on long-term value creation instead of short-term speculation that might pump up CEO pay but does little for the rest of us. Today’s hearing will examine one important tool for guiding Wall Street in this direction: tax policy. Next year, the scheduled expiration of several provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will force a major tax debate in Congress.

For The Rich, One Nation Isn’t Rolling Out The Red Carpet

June 10, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Norway, Taxes, wealth inequality, Wealth Tax

So you think the rich have life easy, do you? Just try telling that to the deep pockets who’ve spent tens of millions buying condos at 432 Park Avenue, the 11-year-old Manhattan luxury tower that once rated as our hemisphere’s tallest residence. Condo owners in the tower have had to put up with “faulty elevators, leaky plumbing, and noise issues.” They’re now suing the building’s operator. Or consider the plight of those fabulously wealthy souls who’ve had to pay millions to move their mansions off the sandy coast of Nantucket, the one-time hippie refuge that’s become a summer “holiday hot spot for billionaires.” The problem?

The Climate Crisis Is Directly Related To Inequality

May 31, 2024 Diane Bernard, DeSmog. Educate! climate crisis, Inequality, Transformation, wealth inequality

In an interview with Rachel Donald of the podcast Planet: Critical, science historian Naomi Oreskes spoke about her new book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, cowritten with Erik M. Conway. She explored why our climate is in crisis, detailing how institutions, lobbyists, and corporations continue to undermine democracy; and why a renewable world threatens the powers that be. Ultimately, Oreskes points out that the climate crisis is not a scientific problem, but a political, economic, and social issue. Oreskes is a professor at Harvard University who co-authored the bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, and has written nearly 200 scholarly papers and popular articles.

White Residents Of Baton Rouge, Louisiana To Form Separate City

May 10, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Louisiana, Poverty, Racism, Segregation, US South, wealth inequality, White Supremacy

The State Supreme Court in the southern US state of Louisiana, on April 26, gave the city of St. George the right to secede from the larger capital city of Baton Rouge. This has cleared the way for a group of wealthy white Baton Rouge residents to carve out a majority-white enclave of the largely Black city—recalling the history in the US of segregation and white flight. Wealthy, white residents of Baton Rouge have been trying to secede from the rest of the city in some shape or form for over a decade. In 2012, a group of parents went to the state legislature to propose the creation of a separate school district which they called the Southeast Community School District. This effort failed, but the following year they tried once again and also failed.

How To Unite Local Initiatives For A More Sustainable Global Future

May 5, 2024 Vasilis Kostakis and Nikiforos Tsiouris, Resilience. Create! Local Economies, Sustainability, The Commons, wealth inequality

This article challenges the belief in high-tech solutions to solve socio-environmental crises, proposing a political vision beyond “green growth” and “ecomodernism.”. It advocates for a commons-based technology framework, promoting collective resource management for sustainability. We thus introduce “cosmolocal” production, a configuration that strives to connect communities around shared resources and serve their needs while minimizing ecological impact. Despite acknowledged tensions, we contend that the cosmolocal framework could foster institutional and social change, aiming to address environmental degradation and wealth inequality.

U.S. Billionaire Wealth Is Up 88% Since The Pandemic

March 26, 2024 Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo, In These Times. Educate! Billionaires, Pandemic, Tax the rich, wealth inequality

Four years ago, the United States entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the United States had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion. Four years later, on March 18, 2024, the country has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to Institute for Policy Studies calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data.

Why Did Baltimore Lavish Tens Of Millions In Tax Breaks?

March 7, 2024 Taya Graham, Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, The Real News Network. Educate! Affordable Housing, Baltimore, Maryland, Poverty, Tax Breaks, wealth inequality

Baltimore is often maligned as a shrinking city beset by crime and intractable poverty. But take a walk down President Street just south of Little Italy on a Friday night, and you will enter a world that appears far removed from the idea of a city that is terminally in decay. Past the empty pavilions of the Inner Harbor and east of the city’s increasingly troubled downtown business district, a cluster of towering high-rises emerges from the harbor like a defiant mountain range of concrete. A cobblestone boulevard leads to a European-style thoroughfare dotted with a dazzling array of upscale restaurants and outdoor dining patios.

It’s Time To Act Locally To Address Racial Wealth Inequality

March 1, 2024 Natasha Hicks, Next City. Create! Local Economy, Racial disparities, Systemic Racism, wealth inequality

As we close out Black History Month and the celebration of the many invaluable contributions Black people have made to the U.S., we must also reflect, acknowledge and confront one of the most pernicious issues that has faced generations of Black Americans: racial wealth inequality. Black people have never been able to fully realize the power and freedom that wealth affords since throughout history they have had their wealth systematically blocked or stolen. Despite having the deck stacked against them, generations of Black Americans have been able to save, buy land, start businesses and create their own economic engines.

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