Our Inequality Weekly

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The first question that came to my mind after the U.S. attack and coup in Venezuela: Who’s gonna make big bucks off of all this?

In the 2000s, I spent a lot of time tracking Iraq War profiteers. The most infamous would be Halliburton. This defense contracting giant faced a series of damning charges — from massive fraud to serving soldiers contaminated water — but none of those scandals stopped Halliburton’s CEO from becoming one of America’s highest-paid executives.

Now the #1 Iraq War profiteer stands to profit from yet another U.S. war for oil. Just weeks before the invasion, Halliburton sued Venezuela over lost profits related to the U.S.-imposed sanctions that had halted their operations in that country five years ago. Suddenly, Halliburton decided to demand $200 million in compensation — not from the United States, but from Venezuela. A U.S.-backed puppet government might actually comply with that absurd demand.

The story of greed-fueled militarism is not new. Stay tuned as we monitor — and denounce — this latest chapter.
This year’s most positive moves, as you might imagine, didn’t originate in Washington, D.C. But grassroots efforts to both resist the federal government’s onslaught and chart a better path forward did sprout all across the country.

We’ve just highlighted on the Inequality.org website ten of this year’s most encouraging developments, victories ranging from amazing local electoral success and big worker organizing advances to new taxes on the wealthy. Putting this list together has helped us come away from an otherwise bleak year with renewed hope. We hope our top-ten list will have the same impact on you.

This will be our final newsletter of 2025. Thank you all for reading our weekly dispatches! We hope to continue to provide you with valuable insights and analysis on the evolving world of inequality in the new year ahead.