SHARE        Monday, September 14, 2020
Why Don't People Call You a Genius? You Don't Have a Billion Dollars Nearly four decades ago, Big Oil totally dominated the upper reaches of the Forbes 400. Eight of the top 10 owed their fortunes directly to fossil fuels. In other words, America's "smartest" people in 1982 almost all centered their lives around oil. What a coincidence. How odd.

(1 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, September 8, 2020
For the Ultra Rich, Those Short Putts Sure Can be Killers Trying to keep up with the stunningly inappropriate remarks of Donald Trump can sometimes seem a full-time job. Just this past week, for instance, we've seen the president seem to encourage voters in North Carolina to vote twice, once by mail and once by person, a felony under state law.

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, May 17, 2020
Civil Disobedience, Billionaire-Style Musk's successful bullying has vividly revealed that our duly elected leaders and the governments they lead cannot, when push comes to shove, adequately safeguard the health and well-being of average working people. Democracy cannot work particularly well or endure particularly long when those we elect cannot protect us from the wealthy and powerful who loom large so high above us.

(1 comments) SHARE        Sunday, May 3, 2020
Our Slaughterhouses Not Just for Cattle, Hogs, and Poultry Anymore. Add People. Our modern-day emperors of meat, pork, and poultry now have enough might to imperil the lives of their workers with a president of the United States cheering them on.

SHARE        Sunday, March 22, 2020
How to Wage War, FDR-Style, on Our Pandemic In 1942, in the months right after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt faced the same basic challenge as we do today. To overcome the fascist forces aligned globally against us, FDR understood, the American people were going to have to sacrifice as never before.

SHARE        Friday, March 20, 2020
Coronavirus and the "Shock Doctrine" We need, in effect, a "shock doctrine" in reverse. We need to seize the openings for change the coronavirus presents and challenge the capacity of our rich and powerful to become ever richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else.

SHARE        Monday, January 27, 2020
The Evolution of "Davos Man" into . . . Trump Fan! Trump loves the Davos deep pockets back, at one point hailing the big-time corporate CEOs gathered around him as "the greatest businessmen in the world."

SHARE        Saturday, December 7, 2019
Will The 2020 Contenders Take On Inequality? Those who seek our nation's highest office -- at least on the Democratic side -- no longer see safe harbor in the warm embrace of the ultra-rich. To be sure, our political class has not yet abandoned the billionaire class. But the political consensus that nurtured our contemporary top-heavy economy has cracked.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 7, 2019
Inequality and the Iron Law of Decaying Public Services In communities where wealth is concentrating, the affluent have the clout and the numbers to go beyond grumbling. They mobilize politically to slash budgets and roll taxes back. And they succeed, because fewer people, in an unequal community, have a stake in the public services that taxes support.

SHARE        Saturday, October 12, 2019
Inequality is Literally Killing Us Over recent decades, a steady stream of studies have shown consistent links between rising inequality and shorter lifespans. The trends we see in the United States reflect similar dynamics worldwide, wherever income and wealth are concentrating. The more unequal a society becomes, the less healthy the society.

SHARE        Sunday, September 15, 2019
Wealth That Concentrates Kills 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.

SHARE        Sunday, July 21, 2019
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."

SHARE        Wednesday, June 5, 2019
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.

SHARE        Monday, April 29, 2019
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.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, April 4, 2019
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.

SHARE        Friday, July 13, 2018
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.

SHARE        Saturday, June 16, 2018
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.

(6 comments) SHARE        Monday, June 4, 2018
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.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, May 30, 2018
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.

(2 comments) SHARE        Monday, May 14, 2018
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.