wealth inequality

COVID-19 Great Depression: Global Ecosocialism Is The Way Out

April 28, 2020 Gilbert Mercier, News Junkie Post. Create! COVID-19, Ecosocialism, Global Recession, wealth inequality

The abstract science of mathematics is a language like music. But while music is in the realm of pure emotion, the language of mathematics only speaks to the mind not the heart. Numbers and equations do not lie. They are not, by essence, subjective. This being said, when the numbers are those of the dead, they can have the chilling emotional effect of a meat cleaver cutting through bones. While we have tried to stay away from the mainstream media litany of the death tolls, on April 25, 2020, we had passed 200,000 deaths globally. In the United States alone, by the end of April, the COVID-19 pandemic will have killed more people than the reported 58,220 US soldiers who died during the Vietnam war.

Stimulus Could Heighten Racial Economic Inequality

April 22, 2020 Layla A. Jones, Billy Penn. Educate! Bailout, Recession, Redlining, wealth inequality

As Americans across the country peeked at their federally stimulated bank accounts last week, Dr. David R. Williams of Harvard University issued an urgent call to action. As chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Harvard’s public health school, Williams focuses on the effects of discrimination and social influences on health. “The striking disparities we are seeing are not a result of the families who are experiencing them,” Williams said in a national press briefing. “Instead they are a result of longstanding policies. Coronavirus is highlighting this for us.” That concept was echoed over and over by historians speaking to Billy Penn about what the federal stimulus funds could mean for communities of color in Philadelphia.

Billionaire Taxes Decreased By 79% Since 1980

April 16, 2020 Bob Lord and Chuck Collins, Inequality.org. Educate! Billionaires, Recession, Taxes, wealth inequality

Conventional economic wisdom says a time of crisis is not the moment to enact tax increases. But, as Eric Toder at the Tax Policy Center recently pointed out: “[Tax experts] can begin to think of the time after the pandemic passes and how government should respond to massive increases in the public debt, and the new tax increases that Congress will need to enact to fund them.” Initial tax increases should hold harmless working- and middle-class families who will be the most economically vulnerable coming out the pandemic. The first several trillion in new revenue should come from America’s wealthiest households, those who have seen their taxes slashed over past decades. At the top of the list of new tax increases should be a wealth tax on our billionaire class.

Landless Workers Are Challenging Unequal Land Distribution And Corporate Agribusiness

April 13, 2020 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Resist! Agribusiness, Brazil, Land Reform, wealth inequality

Brazil is among the most unequal countries in the world when it comes to land distribution and is home to the world’s biggest landed estates. This structure of land concentration and unproductivity has historic roots dating back to Portuguese colonization, which established a foundation of social inequality in the country that persists today. In Brazil—as elsewhere—the relationship with the land is fundamental for the country’s development. To talk about land is to talk not only about people, but also about the control of natural resources and of economic, social, and cultural development; land is an expression of society as a whole. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s new dossier, “Popular Agrarian Reform and the Struggle for Land in Brazil,” discusses the current stage of the struggle for land in the country.

COVID-19 And The Crisis Of Racial Capitalism

April 11, 2020 K. Sabeel Rahman, Demos.org. Organize! Racism, Recession, Voter Rights, wealth inequality

The escalating COVID-19 pandemic impacts all of us, but for Black and brown people in particular, the combined health and economic devastation is truly terrifying. Communities of color have higher rates of asthma, less access to health care centers, are more likely to live in food deserts, and are among the most vulnerable in the face of this virus. The workers most on edge in our economy—and most likely to lose their jobs—are predominantly Black and brown. Most Americans lack even $400 of savings to call upon in times of crisis, and that lack of wealth is even more pronounced for Black and brown communities. Crises reveal deeper realities of power and inequity that have always been present but are often papered over in ordinary times. The conflagration of economic crisis and ailing communities may have been sparked by the novel coronavirus, but the kindling for this fire has been laid by conservatives and liberals alike with the policy choices of the past 40 years.

Wealthy Have Contempt For Those Without Wealth In Pandemics Throughout History And Today

April 11, 2020 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! COVID-19, Economic shutdown, wealth inequality

Earlier this week, in his daily coronavirus briefing, President Trump shared that some of his business friends had been advising him to “don’t do anything, just ride it out and think of it as the flu.” America’s corporate chiefs — and their cheerleaders — haven’t just been whispering that advice into the president’s ear. They’ve been loudly proclaiming their distaste for the corona economic shutdown for some time now. In a “very few weeks,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has advised, “let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.” Former Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich has urged that the nation bring workers back to work and “see what happens.” “Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” Kovacevich continued. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience?”

How The Rich And Powerful Put Their Wealth Above Public Health

April 7, 2020 Gin Armstrong, Eyes On The Ties. Educate! Billionaires, COVID-19, health, wealth inequality

While millions are facing health and financial uncertainty and unemployment rolls are reaching record levels due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, a small group of wealthy elites are thriving. Not only do the rich and powerful seem to have access to otherwise near-impossible to obtain COVID-19 testing and enjoy better access to healthcare, they are also self-isolating at swanky vacation estates in the Hamptons, the Catskills, and Sun Valle – or, like billionaire David Geffen, on lavish private yachts. All the while these billionaires and multi-millionaires are figuring out ways to maintain their wealth and even profit at the expense of everyone else who is struggling to stay afloat. Indeed, as J.C. Pan wrote for The New Republic: “The malfeasance of the ruling class has reached such a level of absurdity that it almost feels as if they’re trying to summon a mob.”

An All-American Urge To Offer Corporate Welfare

April 7, 2020 Nomi Prins, TomDispatch.com. Educate! Bailout, Corporatism, Wall Street, wealth inequality

To say that these are unprecedented times would be the understatement of the century. Even as the United States became the latest target of Hurricane COVID-19, in “hot spots” around the globe a continuing frenzy of health concerns represented yet another drop down the economic rabbit hole. Stay-at-home orders have engulfed the planet, encompassing a majority of Americans, all of India, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe. A second round of cases may be starting to surface in China. Meanwhile, small- and medium-sized businesses, not to speak of giant corporate entities, are already facing severe financial pain. I was in New York City on 9/11 and for the weeks that followed. At first, there was a sense of overriding panic about the possibility of more attacks, while the air was still thick with smoke.

It Didn’t Have To Be Like This

March 31, 2020 Stephanie Luce, Labornotes.org Create! COVID-19, Depression, wealth inequality, Workers

We have been forced to choose between two terrible options: 1. Lock ourselves down to prevent the spread of the virus, resulting in massive job loss —while many vulnerable workers are still forced to work in unsafe conditions, or 2. Maintain some business as usual, stemming the economic impact but putting tens of millions of people at risk. It didn’t have to be like this. We could not have prevented the virus itself, nor the resulting loss of life altogether. But imagine if: Instead of cutting public health budgets and access to health care for decades, we had expanded it by enacting a single-payer health care system—an improved Medicare for All. We had community health centers that did low-cost preventive care, giving people the education and resources to stay healthy to begin with and making a much smaller share of the population at risk for dangerous disease.

Global Poll Finds Majority Believe Capitalism More Harmful Than Good

January 21, 2020 Andrea Germanos, Commondreams. Educate! Capitalism, Government, wealth inequality, World Economic Forum

A global survey out Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos shows that over half of respondents believe capitalism in its current form does "more harm than good." "Welp, glad that's settled then," mused one Twitter user. The findings are from the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, which polled over 34,000 respondents in 28 markets to measure trust in government, business, NGOs, and media. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they agree with statement, "Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world." That belief was expressed by a majority across age group, gender, and income level divides. In fact, there were just six markets were the majority of respondents did not agree—Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Can Now Really Be The Best Time To Be Alive?

December 29, 2019 George Lakey and Yotam Marom, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Activism, Climate Change, Medicare for all, wealth inequality

Whenever I muster the courage to stop and think about it, I feel pretty unlucky to be alive at this time. I wake up with the sense that we might have a chance to overcome the many political, economic and social crises we’re facing. But climate change makes the stakes completely existential, and puts a time limit on what we can do about it. I live with a quiet dread, a constant sadness at the loss people around the world are already facing, a nagging fear of what’s to come and a sort of ashamed hopelessness about what we can do to stop it. I don’t think I’m alone in that. It seems that other folks in my peer group, people in our 30s, feel similarly. Younger generations — kids in high school now — are reportedly showing deeper signs of depression.

The Racial Wealth Divide Hurts The Entire Middle Class

October 30, 2019 By Dedrick Asante Muhammad, Inequality.org Educate! Racial inequality, wealth inequality

Americans are more aware than ever that America has a race problem — and, more specifically, a racial wealth divide problem. As researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies and I found earlier this year, median white families are 41 times wealthier than median Black families in the United States. As our country becomes more diverse, this shocking racial wealth divide is no longer a challenge for disenfranchised minorities alone. It’s a threat to the entire American middle class. Let me show you how.

Wealth that Concentrates Kills

September 16, 2019 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org Educate! Income, New Economy, wealth inequality

The weight of the wealth that sits at the top of America’s economic order isn’t just squeezing dollars out of the wallets of average Americans. That concentrated wealth is shearing years off of American lives. The latest evidence for that squeeze on American wallets comes from the Census Bureau. Researchers there have just released results from their latest annual sampling of U.S. incomes. In 2018, the new Census stats show, incomes for typical American households saw a “marked slowdown.” In effect, average Americans have spent this entire century on a treadmill getting nowhere fast.

Are Ordinary People In The United States Screwed? My Reply

August 18, 2019 Jack Rasmus on his website. Educate! Debt, Finance and the Economy, New Economy, Recession, wealth inequality

In short, the policies since 2008–both Obama’s and Trump’s–for ten years now have been subsidizing the rich, the elites, the owners of capital incomes like never before in US history. Tax cuts and Fed policies have subsidized (i.e. redistributed) tens of trillions of dollars for the elites from fiscal and monetary policies. The redistribution/subsidization has been so extreme that that fiscal and monetary policies are now effectively ‘dead in the water’ when it comes to try to stimulate the real US economy once it descends into recession–which is less than 12 months away for the US and already happening in Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Fiscal policy in the US is now dead-ended as an effective stimulus policy tool due to the $22 trillion current US national debt levels and annual $1 trillion plus budget deficits.

The Exploitation Time Bomb

July 29, 2019 Jayati Ghosh, Project Syndicate. Educate! Green New Deal, Poverty, Taxes, wealth inequality

New Delhi – Since reducing inequality became an official goal of the international community, income disparities have widened. This trend, typically blamed on trade liberalization and technological advances that have weakened the bargaining power of labor vis-à-viscapital, has generated a political backlash in many countries, with voters blaming their economic plight on “others” rather than on national policies. And such sentiments of course merely aggravate social tensions without addressing the root causes of worsening inequality. But in an important new article, University of Cambridge economist José Gabriel Palma argues that national income distributions are the result not of impersonal global forces, but rather of policy choices that reflect the control and lobbying power of the rich.

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