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(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 16, 2013 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.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, November 18, 2013 A Daring Bid to Stomp Out CEO Pay Excess
Young activists in Switzerland have plutocrats hyperventilating -- and spending a fortune to beat back a ballot initiative that would establish a legal limit on the pay gap between top execs and their workers.
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, November 4, 2013 Are Heartless People Simply Born That Way?
People who cut food stamps -- and gut child labor laws -- most all had empathy when they came into the world. So what squeezed the empathy out? Analysts are pointing to inequality.
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 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.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, November 11, 2013 Counting Dollars the Rich Want Uncounted
Americans are gaining, ever so slowly, a more accurate picture of just how wide the gap has stretched between the nation's most fabulously privileged and everyone else.
(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, 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.
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."
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 4, 2018 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.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, February 24, 2014 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.
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.
(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.
(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 Sunday, August 1, 2021 America's Billionaires: Borrowing Their Way to Ever More Fabulous Fortunes
No widely acclaimed artist in the 20th century baited and battled the rich with as much gusto as Diego Rivera. The Mexican painter's Great Depression-era confrontation with Nelson Rockefeller, then the 20-something grandson of the world's single richest individual.
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 Friday, April 27, 2018 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.
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, 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 Monday, January 5, 2015 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.
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.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, June 4, 2012 Behind Super-Sized Sodas, a Deeper Danger
Nature did not design our metabolisms to process the amount & varieties of sweeteners, salt & fats available to us. The stresses of poverty make it all so much worse.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 26, 2020 Let's Start Debating What Dooms Democracy: Concentrated Wealth
Tuesday's debate will almost certainly come and go without any serious discussion of how economically unequal we have become as a nation. In these days of despair over the state of our democracy, we desperately need that discussion.
(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.
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 13, 2014 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.
SHARE Friday, October 30, 2015 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.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 9, 2020 How Taxpayers Funded "Consulting Fees" For Ivanka Trump
Between 2010 and 2018, Trump's hotel projects around the world cleared an income of well over $100 million. On his tax returns, Trump claimed $26 million in "consulting" expenses, about 20 percent of all the income he made on these hotel deals.
(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.
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.
SHARE Tuesday, February 9, 2021 The Unintentional Honesty of Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon. He'll stay on as the executive chairman of Amazon's board, but he'll no longer be managing the company on a daily basis.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, December 2, 2013 From Rome, Five Essential Inequality Truths
In plain yet powerful language, Pope Francis is challenging the givens of our deeply unequal world -- and helping inspire resistance to it.
(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.
SHARE Wednesday, January 8, 2014 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.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, December 9, 2013 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.
(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 Monday, May 12, 2014 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.
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.
SHARE Wednesday, June 27, 2012 The Tea Party Shtick
The Tea Party, low information right wing activiists, have lost their connection to this country's founding values.
SHARE Monday, May 14, 2012 No Country for Rich Men
From Manhattan to Monaco, the world's wealthiest people are disconnecting into a class of stateless transients. Those who care about their country are left to pick up the tab.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 31, 2006 Beyond the Living Wage: A New Challenge for Progressives
Over the past dozen years, probably no grassroots campaign has excited progressives more and generated more real victories than the living wage movement.