Inequality

By Negin Owliaei | – The wealthiest Americans dominate our airwaves. Let’s hear from someone else for a change. Bill Gates wants you to know he pays taxes. “I’ve paid more than $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes,” Gates told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. “But when you say I should […]

Inequality

We Know Exactly Where to Get the Money to Fix Inequality

Jim Hightower

By Jim Hightower | – (Otherwords) – Jesse Jackson ran a strong populist campaign for president in 1988, advocating bold new policies and programs to address inequality. This prompted establishment skeptics to scoff, “Where ‘ya gonna get the money?” It’s no secret where America’s wealth has gone in recent decades: upwards. Jackson answered directly: We’ll […]

Inequality

How Much in ‘Inequality Tax’ Are You Paying?

Sam Pizzigati

(Inequality.org) – The hidden burden America’s top-heavy distribution of income and wealth places on people of modest means What nation ranks as the world’s richest? A simple question to answer, right. Well, not so much, suggests the just-released tenth annual Global Wealth Report from the banking giant Credit Suisse. Everything turns out to depend on […]

Health

In the Billionaires’ America, Inequality Is Literally Killing Us

Sam Pizzigati

( Otherwords.org) – Again and again, studies show that the richer wealthy Americans become, the shorter the rest of us live. What do the folks at the U.S. Census Bureau do between the census they run every 10 years? All sorts of annual surveys, on everything from housing costs to retail sales. The most depressing […]

Featured

On Labor Day, US Workers are 1/3 poorer than in 2003 & Top 1% is 2x Richer

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Labor Day, American workers have little to celebrate. That’s alright. The September Labor Day, while initially proposed by some workers in the 1880s, was backed by conservative President Grover Cleveland over May 1, which he associated with radicalism (i.e. with workers who would demand their rights). So it really […]

Donald Trump

Racist Billionaires, Patriotic Socialists, Climate Emergency and the Fate of America

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – As I turn 75, there’s no simpler way to put it than this: I’m an old man on a new planet — and, in case it isn’t instantly obvious, that’s not good news on either score. I still have a memory of being a camp counselor in upstate New York more […]

Climate Change

Why We Can’t Address the Climate Emergency without confronting Plutocracy

Inequality.org

By Tom Athanasiou Something has changed, as most everyone in the climate movement agrees, and we have plenty of signposts that track the shift, from David Wallace-Well’s 2017 New York Magazine piece, The Uninhabitable Earth, to last year’s Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, a paper downloaded by the hundreds of thousands. The […]

Inequality

Is Bernie Sanders Right that 3 Billionaires Have more Wealth than Half of America?

Institute for Policy Studies

By Chuck Collins | – And in addition to the 3 billionaires Bernie mentioned, we should also be worried about the expanding fortunes of multi-generational wealth dynasties. The wealthiest 3 billionaires in the U.S. –Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population […]

Donald Trump

Trump’s Dismantling of our Government: Deregulating our Way to Disaster

John Buell

(Informed Comment) – While Trump’s xenophobic and protectionist agenda, thankfully often blocked by the courts, has received the lion’s share of media attention, his henchmen have enacted a whole series of game changing initiatives in the area of federal regulation. Deregulating such domestic concerns as transportation, occupational health and safety, the environment is hardly new. […]