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Sam Pizzigati is an Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies
Editor, Too Much , an online weekly on excess and inequality
Author, The Rich Don't Always Win:
The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (November 2012)
OpEdNews Member for 672 week(s) and 4 day(s)
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A Tale of Two Druglords Some 2,000 American cities, towns, and counties are now suing McKesson and the rest of the corporate drug distribution complex. They're charging that these corporations "conspired to flood the nation with opioids." The companies, the charge continues, didn't just fail to report suspicious orders. They "filled those orders to maximize profits."
In an unequal America, empathy, not just housing, has become too pricey San Francisco, recent research shows, now has more billionaires per capita than any other city in the world. By one reckoning, San Francisco also has the highest cost of living in the world, as all those billionaires and the rest of the city's ultra rich bid up prices on the most desirable local real estate.
A Plaintive Plea from America's Rich: Let's Change the Subject! The rich, after all, simply adore the mainstream "opportunity" gospel. Talking about increasing opportunity distracts attention from how rich people and the corporations they run behave, how what the rich do to become and stay rich keeps poor people poor and most of the rest of us struggling.
A "Buyback" for Our Future? The White House promised that corporations would use their savings from this corporate tax cut to create jobs and promote prosperity. Corporations did create prosperity via buybacks for the people who run corporations. The rest of the economy, the latest stats seem to indicate, is sinking into a new recession.
How "Janus" Will Boost Income Inequality in America A level of income and wealth inequality not seen since the 1920s, another era of minimal union influence. The history of America's past century paints a vividly clear picture: Inequality in America has increased in the years when unions have been at their weakest and decreased in the years when unions have been at their strongest.
Wage Theft: To Fight the Crime, Address the Motive Those who run our corporations aren't going to abandon their thieving ways so long as that thievery can pay so well for them personally. Wage theft didn't start soaring in the United States until the late 1970s, the same years that eye-popping CEO pay packages became a standard fixture on the corporate scene.
For Minimum Decency, A Maximum Wage Many millions of American households have essentially almost nothing in the way of savings. And not much in the way of income either. Two out of every five Americans, the new Federal Reserve study details, have annual household incomes less than $40,000.
U.S. CEOs Are World's Best -- For Themselves CEOs in the United States top the Bloomberg global CEO charts. U.S. CEOs average over quadruple the global major corporate CEO average, with $14.25 million in annual pay and a 401 index value. U.S. workers labor under the world's highest-paid bosses. These workers turn out to have smaller paychecks than wage-earners in 11 other major nations. Average workers in Switzerland made $70,835 in 2017.
Convenient Tales About Riches Within Reach The caring, upright life of Sylvia Bloom, and the remarkable -- and hidden -- fortune she quietly accumulated over the course of her 67-year career as a Manhattan legal secretary. That fortune totaled, in the end, over $9 million. The bulk of that wealth, is going -- per Bloom's wishes -- to help students from poor families advance their educations.
How Inequality Concentrates Talent, Not Just Money Black holes in space may be too powerful to stop. But that doesn't hold for black holes in human affairs. We have the power to stop wealth's concentration before grand fortune -- and the chase after it -- devours us all.
What "Toys R Us" Teaches Us About Taxes Conservative pundits and politicians have been insisting for a generation now that entrepreneurs only start exciting new businesses when governments "back off." So governments have backed off. At every level, they've deep-sixed regulations and cut taxes on rich people. No one is going to start a business, conservatives argue, if Uncle Sam is just going to tax away the rewards.
Does Big Giving Justify Big Fortunes? Handy rejoinders to the apologists for our top-heavy status quo
Have We Finally Moved Beyond GDP? To help overcome inequality, the latest global gathering of economic statisticians agrees, we need to do more than total up an economy's goods and services.
Two Irrepressible Egalitarian Spirits British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have changed how the world thinks about inequality -- and they have plenty more insights to share.
Our Empathetic Rich: The Rarest of Birds A landmark new study has laid bare the dirty little secret of modern American philanthropy: America's wealthy don't particularly care all that much about the rest of us.
In High Finance, Humming a Happy Tune The latest annual hedge fund industry pay stats have suits smiling -- and ordinary mortals worrying about public education's future.
The Mess on Our 'Information Superhighway' The Comcast merger: Why should moving data around be any different from moving people? No private party ought to be getting rich off a basic public trust. The first step toward turning this situation around? Stop the Comcast and Time Warner merger. The more fundamental task: Give our private corporate Internet access giants some public competition.
Could 2014 Be Year One of the Pay Ratio Era? In the year ahead, nurses and college students just might jump-start the struggle against chronic -- and growing -- income inequality.
Presenting America's Ten Greediest of 2013 Abstractions -- like inequality -- can only take us so far. To really understand the ills that ail us, we usually need to put some human faces upon them. Here's a year-end list to identify those faces of avarice that can help tell inequality's story.
Inequality: A Sure Way to Kill a Good Time What makes a society a fun place to be? Really nice weather and exciting nightlife options certainly help. So does avoiding a starkly skewed distribution of income and wealth.