wealth inequality

Brooklyn CDC Envisions A New Model For Wealth Creation

April 22, 2023 Emily Nonko, Next City. Create! Economic Security, New York City (NYC), Racism, wealth inequality

In Brooklyn, one of the country’s first community development corporations has announced its plans to transform its historic and much-beloved public plaza into a walkable “innovation campus” that supports wealth creation for local Black residents, amid rising gentrification in the neighborhood. The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation was established in the Brooklyn neighborhood in 1967. One year later, Restoration purchased an abandoned milk bottling plant in Bed-Stuy’s heart to serve as its new headquarters. Completed in 1972, Restoration Plaza became a community and business hub responding to the needs of residents. A desire for local arts and culture resulted in the Billie Holiday Theatre and Skylight Gallery.

Reclaiming Our Country

April 5, 2023 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Educate! Capitalism, Class Struggle, Oligarchs, wealth inequality

We are undergoing the most vicious class war in U.S. history. Social inequality has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the era of the robber barons. The legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, along with the media and universities, have been seized by a tiny cabal of billionaires and corporations who pass laws and legislation that consolidate their power and obscene wealth at our expense. We are sacrificial victims, whether on the left or the right, helpless before this modern incarnation of the Biblical idol Moloch.

The Vail-ification Of The West

April 3, 2023 Joseph Bullington, In These Times. Educate! Colorado, Gentrification, wealth inequality, Worker Rights

"Welcome to Colorful Colorado,” reads the sign beside the highway as the road climbs from the alkaline flats of New Mexico into the foothills of the San Juan Mountains. But the landscape holds no color when Ana and her family cross the state line in the predawn dark. When the family arrives in Durango at 6:30 a.m., Ana’s husband goes to his construction job installing heating and A/C ducts. Ana waits at her sister’s house until the bus comes to take their son to school. Then, Ana goes to work, too, cleaning houses. This whole tiresome routine is new. Originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, the family lived for seven years in Durango, where they found work and a supportive immigrant community.

How The Rich Are Prepping For End Times, And Why

April 1, 2023 Lee Camp, Mintpress News. Resistance Report Class Struggle, collapse, wealth inequality, Wealthy Elites

The ultrarich are prepping for doomsday right now. France is on fire. The U.S. ruling elite and the mainstream media they own are avoiding reporting on it. The American rich want to exploit the workers more and more, and facing the wrath of the “common man and woman” is their greatest fear. So they have been increasingly coming up with ways to avoid the guillotines. The ruling class knows what’s coming: social instability caused by a combination of the climate crisis, banks failing, the soul-killing inequality of late-stage capitalism, and the impending dilution of the petrodollar. So what’s going on here?

Biden’s Proposed Budget Is Nothing But Empty Promises

April 1, 2023 Molly Rosenzweig, Left Voice. Educate! Budget, Joe Biden, wealth inequality, Worker Rights

On March 9, Joe Biden announced his budget plan for fiscal year 2024. Not much of it is likely to pass, since there’s a slim majority by Republicans in the House, and much of it is in preparation for the 2024 election. He proposed many social programs and tax increases on the wealthy, many things which he didn’t even fight for when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. Biden likely made these proposals because he knows they won’t pass, but he can still say he’s at least trying. He touts the paltry things he was able to pass and continues to promote his rose-colored outlook and some elements of economic populism, similar to what he pushed at the State of the Union, though with continuing low approval ratings, we can be sure that the many workers and oppressed realize that the rosy picture is far from reality.

In Montana, An Avalanche Of Wealth Is Displacing Workers

March 31, 2023 Joseph Bullington, In These Times. Educate! Class Struggle, Gentrification, Montana, wealth inequality, Worker Rights and Jobs

Archie Martinez goes to bed with stained hands and wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to meet the person he pays to pick him up at the Bozeman homeless shelter. They drive to the shop of a painting company in Belgrade, eight miles away, where Martinez climbs into one of the company vans for the hour-long drive up the mountain to the resort town of Big Sky. As Martinez watches hayfields swim by in the dawn, a billboard blossoms out of the half-light beyond the van windows: “Dreaming of Your Own Equestrian Property?” Another advertises “Montana Life Real Estate.” The mountain sides along the highway glitter with the plate glass and stained wood of houses that weren’t there a few years ago.

In Buffalo, A Medical Campus And Community Collaborate For Equity

March 5, 2023 Matt Enstice, Next City. Organize! Buffalo, Cooperatives, Equity, wealth inequality

“If you want our money, you’ll have to work together.” That’s essentially what The John R. Oishei Foundation told three separate anchor institutions when they asked for money to fund new buildings on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC). As Buffalo’s largest foundation, Oishei has quietly supported the BNMC from the beginning. But all along, there was one steady condition: The institutions had to collaborate. Funding requests from individual organizations would almost invariably be rejected. Any request had to come from the campus as a whole. Insisting that the institutions collaborate wasn’t a popular decision. But it was the right one.

Richest 1% Took 2/3rds Of Global Wealth Since 2020

January 18, 2023 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy Report. Resistance Report Global Economy, Poverty, Taxes, wealth inequality

In the past decade, the richest 1% of people on Earth sucked up half of all new wealth. In 2020 and 2021, the richest 1% took nearly two-thirds of all new wealth – six times greater than the wealth made by the poorest 90% of the global population. “Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million”, wrote Oxfam. In the meantime, global poverty is getting worse, not better. These shocking statistics were published in “Survival of the Richest“, a report authored by Oxfam, an international humanitarian organization dedicated to fighting poverty and hunger. The document details how, while hundreds of billions of working people across the planet suffer from hunger, insecurity, rising costs of living, and decreasing wages, “The very richest have become dramatically richer and corporate profits have hit record highs, driving an explosion of inequality”.

Oxfam Wants To More Than Double The Tax Rate On Our Richest

January 16, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

Every January, the deep pockets of our world who see themselves as deep thinkers gather high up in the Alps to contemplate the world’s most pressing problems at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. Every January, analysts at Oxfam, the global group that champions economic justice, take this annual Davos moment to report out just how much our world’s richest contribute to those problems – and just how many of those problems they outright create. This year’s Oxfam Davos-time report, Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality, adds to this pattern a fascinating new twist. Just what do we have to do, this Oxfam paper essentially asks, to keep our super-rich from being super? Central to Oxfam’s answer: a call for a tax rate “of at least 75 percent on all personal income” of those making over $5 million a year, basically those who sit in our world’s wealthiest 0.1 percent.

Inequality In Annual Earnings Worsens In 2021

January 2, 2023 Elise Gould and Jori Kandra, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Wages, wealth inequality

Rising wage inequality and slow and uneven growth in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages for the vast majority of workers have been defining features of the U.S. labor market for most of the last 40 or so years. In only about 10 years since 1979 did most workers see any consistent positive wage growth: in the tight labor market of the late 1990s and in the five years leading up to the pre-pandemic labor market peak in 2019 (Gould 2020). Some low-wage workers have experienced disproportionate wage gains in the current business cycle—gains that even beat out high inflation (Gould and Kandra 2022). However, the latest data on annual earnings from the Social Security Administration (SSA 2022a) show that the very top continues to pull away and amass a larger share of the earnings pie, while the bottom 90% continues to fall further behind.

Tax The Rich? We Did That Once

December 7, 2022 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Class Struggle, History, Taxes, wealth inequality

Once upon a time, the United States seriously taxed the nation’s rich. You remember that time? Probably not. To have a personal memory of that tax-the-rich era, you now have to be well into your seventies. Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket. That top rate had been hovering around 90 percent for the previous two decades. In the 1950s, a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made no move to knock it down. The rich felt those taxes. The high life struggled. Consider what happened to one fabled emblem of that era’s excess, the nation’s first-ever penthouse.

A Promising Challenge To The World’s Richest Man

November 23, 2022 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Resist! Delaware, Elon Musk, Legal System, wealth inequality

A good day’s work for a good day’s pay. Should this age-old wisdom define how our workplaces here in the 21st century go about compensating work? More to the point: Should our corporations start applying this common-sense standard across the board, to both front-line workers and our most powerful corporate CEOs? Kathaleen McCormick will soon let us know, in a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe — Elon Musk — more than a little bit uneasy. McCormick currently serves as the chancellor — top judge — in what amounts to Corporate America’s top go-to judicial body, Delaware’s little-known Court of Chancery. Why does corporate law so often come down to what judges in Delaware say that law should be?

Vectors Of Inflation

November 8, 2022 Radhika Desai, New Left Review. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, wealth inequality

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s recent speech at the Jackson Hole conference, delivered to an audience of central bankers from around the world, was a highly anticipated event. He arrived there a chastened man, having previously claimed that US inflation was a transitory phenomenon while implementing the lax monetary policies that many blamed for its recent surge. Could he now pull off a ‘soft landing’, bringing inflation back down from its forty-year high of 9.1% to the desired 2%, without causing a recession? Central banks have various tools at their disposal for managing inflation: higher rates, quantitative tightening (i.e. selling assets to reduce liquidity in the system) and managing expectations about future monetary policy through ‘forward guidance’.

Wealthiest 10% Responsible For Nearly 50% Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

October 3, 2022 Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch. Educate! Carbon emissions, climate crisis, greenhouse gases, wealth inequality

A new study has highlighted the inequality underriding the climate crisis. The paper, published in Nature Sustainability Thursday, looked at the difference in per-capita emissions across the global economic spectrum between 1990 and 2019. During this time, the top one percent of emitters were responsible for nearly a quarter of all emissions contributing to the climate crisis and the top 10 percent are now responsible for nearly half of the total. “In my benchmark estimates, I find that the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total,” the study’s sole author Lucas Chancel of the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab wrote. “Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total.”

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