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The good news: Paramount’s proposal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — a move that would have placed conservative mega-donor Larry Ellison’s son in a uniquely powerful perch — fell short last week. The bad news? Netflix now appears poised to gobble up the storied Warner and its film and television studios, HBO and HBO MAX, instead.

This corporate consolidation should be worrying to everyone. Sure, your Netflix subscription may soon grant you access to a deep catalogue of Warner Bros. classics — although we can't promise there won't be a higher monthly fee. But alarm bells are already going off for the future of movie theaters given Netflix’s penchant for only showing its new movies in theaters for a week or skipping theatrical releases entirely.

The drop in competition from the merger, the Directors Guild of America has warned, will likely put a hefty number of jobs in jeopardy.

The Netflix deal, of course, could still unravel. Regulators have to give their okay, and Paramount has already submitted a hostile takeover bid with the help of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. But imagining this administration rejecting some version of this mega acquisition is a considerable stretch.

With 2026 inching ever nearer, millions of Americans remain at risk of losing the Affordable Care Act subsidies that help them pay for critically needed health care. Lawmakers currently stand no closer to a deal, and supporters of preserving access to treatment and medications have already expended the nuclear option of a government shutdown. No one really knows what they can do next.

This congressional failure to secure access to what ought to be a basic right amounts to a stunning indictment of our contemporary political scene. What billionaires don’t want, the rest of us don’t get.

But let’s borrow from the legendary songwriter and organizer Joe Hill: Now’s not the time to mourn! Millions of our neighbors are going to be facing new hardships in 2026. Let’s organize now to help them.

Mutual aid networks, union drives, and targeted campaigns can all help fill in where our government is failing. Let’s do our best to build them up!

Earlier this week, Donald Trump welcomed to the White House Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman — the widely reported moving force behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi seven years ago — with an extravagant black-tie dinner. In attendance for this feting of the Saudi crown prince: some of the billionaires who appear regularly in Inequality.org.

Billionaires like Elon Musk, fresh off the approval of his new $1-trillion pay package. Another: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. His company, until this week, has been almost single-handedly driving the U.S. stock market’s speculative fever.

The morning after Trump’s over-the-top dinner for Mohammed bin Salman, Musk's xAI announced a deal with the Saudi company Humain to build a new data center in the gulf country using Nvidia’s computing chips. Trump’s White House extravaganzas, in other words, don’t just show who has Trump's ear. They also facilitate fundamentally anti-democratic global greed grabs.

One housekeeping note: We'll be taking a break from the newsletter next week. Our entire team is wishing everyone a restful and restorative Thanksgiving!

Finally, after a record-setting 42 days, we’re nearing an end to the government shutdown. The House of Representatives will soon be voting on a spending package that will restore federal operations. But that vote will not extend the critical Affordable Care Act subsidies that most Democrats were fighting for.

Eight “moderate” Senate Democrats defected from their party’s caucus to advance this package. But the real blame for the capitulation that will leave millions of Americans without access to critical care belongs to the summit of this ostensibly “liberal” party. Either minority leader Chuck Schumer couldn’t keep his caucus united or actively wanted this week’s deal to take place.

Making matters worse: This Senate deal comes right on the heels of a strong Democratic Party performance on Election Day last week. Those state and local victories should have emboldened Senate Democrats to keep united and fighting. They didn’t. Why? One key reason: The Democrats’ “big tent” includes executives as well as workers, landlords as well as tenants.

What does that mean for those of us trying to win a more egalitarian society? We need to keep organizing, and we do have reason for optimism. Progressives did well in this month’s elections, and the Senate cave-in on the shutdown has the grassroots fired up.

A self-described democratic socialist has just won a majority of the over two million votes cast in New York City’s mayoral election. To describe this as a sea change would be an understatement. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign explicitly rejected politics as usual. He embraced a mass movement committed to making our nation’s least affordable city a place where all working families can thrive.

Over a hundred thousand New Yorkers went further than just voting for Mamdani. They dedicated hours and hours to knocking on over three million doors. That people power soundly defeated a mega-million-dollar drive to prop up the political comeback bid of billionaire-friendly Andrew Cuomo.

The success of Mamdani’s victory — after a campaign unapologetically focused on delivering for the working class — will reverberate throughout our political system, and here at Inequality.org we’ll be covering his mayoralty closely. His vision? That could hardly be clearer. As Mamdani noted in his victory speech:

We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

Our federal and state government budgets have descended into a crisis mode that the current federal shutdown, now in its fifth week, has only complicated. Social services are teetering at risk of collapse. In such a situation, what can we do? Progressive economists and unions are showing the way.

Last week, in California, the powerful Service Employees International Union joined with UC-Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Robert Reich to unveil a ballot proposal that would tax billionaire fortunes to safeguard Medicaid access. The tax still has to qualify for the 2026 ballot, but, if passed, would go a long way to covering the massive healthcare shortfall Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has brought us.

That sort of proposal can be a model for moving forward. Poll after poll shows broad public support for reining in runaway concentrations of wealth and redirecting deep-pocket dollars into needed social services. If our politicians won't heed the demands of the people, ballot measures can be a good way to go.

With our U.S. government now in shutdown week four, federal employees — and all the people they serve — have our full attention here at Inequality.org. We’re worrying about those employees who can’t make their rent. We’re worrying about all those Americans who depend on benefits that federal programs deliver.

Democrats in Congress have made the shutdown a fight over health care. They’re demanding alternatives to the severe spikes in Affordable Care Act premiums — and the gutting of Medicaid — that the Trump-GOP tax bill enacted last January now has looming before us.

Those lawmakers refusing to negotiate a fair resolution to our country’s health care affordability crisis are showing clearly just where they stand on our national priorities. They care more about protecting tax cuts for billionaires, more about cascading endless streams of tax dollars into ICE and America’s military, than they care about health care for the rest of us.

Just how high are the stakes running in the current shutdown fight? Some of my colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies and I have just posted a new fact sheet that runs down the details. Check it out — and raise your voice!

As a co-editor of Inequality.org, I get a lot of fan mail mixed in with some chiding. Some of the latter came in recently. Noted a Greg B: “None of my problems exist as a result of someone else being a billionaire.”

An economy rigged to funnel so much wealth and power to the billionaire class, I wrote back, undermines all our lives in many major ways.

That theme runs through my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. In it, I break down how extremely concentrated wealth is impacting us all, by everything from limiting our political influence to poisoning our environment and weakening social services.

But Burned by Billionaires does more than criticize the richest among us. The book aims to be tool that all of us can use to educate our communities about the damage that inequality brings — and organize those same communities to fight back. Remember, there's more of us than there are of them.

During the White House’s initial wave of federal worker firings, Inequality.org published a piece by Paul Osadebe, a fair-housing lawyer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That article urged federal workers to fight for their jobs out of a duty to the millions of Americans they were helping daily.

Now Osadebe and his HUD colleague Palmer Heenan have been fired by the Trump administration for signing onto a whistleblower letter charging that cuts to the agency have made enforcing housing fairness impossible.

Repression has become the widespread norm at all levels of our society. Federal workers wanting the government to do good have felt that repression. So have folks ranging from protesting students to immigrants just trying to protect their children, like this issue's featured face on the frontlines.

Meanwhile, our nation’s richest continue to get even richer, as we highlight below with the latest Federal Reserve statistics on who holds America’s wealth.

The federal government has now formally shut down after an impasse in congressional budget negotiations. To be honest, the federal government has been shutting down for months now, the victim of Trump cutbacks that have cost tens of thousands of federal employees their jobs and hamstrung deeply essential day-to-day government services.

The new budget shutdown will only deepen the federal government’s already dilapidated state. Federal workers will be missing paychecks. Key federal initiatives like the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children will be at risk of running out of funding. America’s richest, meanwhile, will continue to enjoy their Trump tax cuts.

What’s going to happen next? Lawmakers might, of course, reach a quick agreement that allows the federal government to reopen. But solutions may have to come from off of Capitol Hill.

Remember the last federal shutdown deadlock at the end of 2018? The Association of Flight Attendants — a union of private-sector employees — brought flights across the Northeast to a standstill in solidarity with federal workers. Mere hours later, lawmakers reached a deal that reopened the federal government. Will workers save the day again?

The chip manufacturer Nvidia has just announced a new $100-billion investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The news has triggered a predictable big stock market bump. But should anyone concerned about the state of our economy actually be cheering on this latest AI mega-deal?

That $100 billion isn’t going to be flowing throughout our economy. We have here instead another typical high-tech circular financing scheme: OpenAI is going to turn around and spend those new billions on Nvidia chips. This is also another instance of high-tech speculation: OpenAI, despite its key product’s popularity, has never been able to turn a profit.

This latest speculative splurge has our S&P 500 stock index running at all-time highs. The problem? Nvidia accounts for a whopping 7 percent of the index. The soaring stock values of Nvidia and the rest of the “Magnificent 7” — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla — are propping up Wall Street’s record gains. The market, in other words, is floating on a wave of AI mystique.

Nearly three years out from the release of ChatGPT, heralded as a world-altering development, what transformative use cases have we really found for generative AI? Reports of chatbots “coaching” teens to commit suicide don’t inspire much confidence. Whether or not the AI bubble bursts, we need to be more skeptical of the deeply unequal economy riding on its back.

In his just-published first interview since becoming the world’s most visible religious leader, Pope Leo XIV responded to a question about the polarization now tearing societies apart all around the world. What’s driving that polarization? The “continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive,” he explained, has been a major factor.

Pope Leo would go on to share stats on the growing divide between CEO and worker pay that closely align with the stats we highlight in our latest annual Executive Excess report. We can’t be sure, of course, how Pope Leo happened upon those stats. But we like to imagine him sitting at his Vatican Palace desk scrolling through some of the extensive media coverage our report garnered.

Pope Leo appears to be particularly baffled — and appalled — by the huge new Tesla pay package that may well turn Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.

“What does that mean and what’s that about?” the Pope asked. “If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”

We are indeed in big trouble. But we can fight back with real solutions to our growing economic divides. More below on a promising new approach that uses tax policy to take on and curb CEO greed.

You may have heard that Donald Trump’s Department of Energy — at great cost to ratepayers and our Earth’s atmosphere — is keeping open “zombie” coal plants scheduled for closure. Trump’s motive? He’s paying back the fossil-fuel oligarchs who’ve been so generous to him. They’re now writing U.S. energy policy.

My new “Oligarch Watch” column at The Nation profiles one of these oligarchs, “Coal-i-garch” Jim Grech, CEO of Peabody Energy. In this new column, just like in our Inequality.org “Petulant Plutocrat” feature, I’ll be naming the names of rising oligarchs using their wealth, power, and position to raise our cost of living, block popular policies, and run out the clock on keeping our planet livable.

Looking for an antidote to oligarchy? I’m proud to announce the upcoming publication of my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.

I wrote Burned by Billionaires to connect the dots between the daily aggravations we face — in everything from housing and health to pollution and grocery prices — and the growing concentration of wealth and power that confronts us all. An economy that funnels ever-greater fortune to the billionaire class will never be an economy friendly to working people.

The New Press, my new book’s publisher, has generously offered a 30 percent pre-order discount until October 1. More on that at our Institute for Policy Studies book page. Please stay tuned for info on events about the book and let me know if you would like to host an in-person or virtual book discussion. Thanks!

America's unions began 2025 in a perilous situation. Union density — the share of the workforce represented by a union — had dipped below 10 percent. Years of passive leadership from the majority of America's unions, paired with an unfavorable legal landscape, had left organized labor terribly weakened.

Then Donald Trump's second term began — and, with it, an unprecedented assault on public employees. Public-sector workers have dominated union ranks in recent decades. Some 30 percent of public employees have union contracts. Less than 6 percent of private-sector workers do. That reality makes the Trump administration's assault on federal worker unions all the more worrying.

Just last week, Trump issued an executive order stripping bargaining rights from workers at more than half a dozen federal agencies. This latest broadside follows an initial order back in March that revoked protections from over a million federal workers. And that's not even mentioning what Trump has done to hamstring the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that safeguards union rights.

With that context in mind, this year's Labor Day Weekend should have been decidedly less celebratory. Where does the labor movement go from here?

Last week we released our annual Executive Excess report exposing in stark detail just how much CEO pay has soared while worker pay has stalled.

Our report sent flacks for overpaid CEOs running for cover. Reporters for the Guardian and Barron’s reached out to Starbucks, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ulta Beauty for comment. Not one of them would respond.

That's not surprising, given the indefensible pay gap figures our report details. For the third year in a row, we zeroed in on the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.” Our blockbuster finding: The CEOs at these companies now earn 632 times more than their typical workers.

Average CEO pay at the Low-Wage 100, over the past six years, has jumped at over double the rate of median worker pay. In other words, at a time when U.S. workers are struggling with rising costs for groceries and housing, the nation’s largest low-wage employers are making their overpaid CEOs even richer.

Between 2019 and 2024, these firms spent $644 billion on stock buybacks, a scam that artificially inflates the value of a company’s stock — and CEO pay. Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar not spent on workers.

The tradeoffs can be downright staggering. At Lowe’s, for instance, every one of the retail giant’s 273,000 employees could have received an annual $28,456 bonus over the past six years with the money the retailer blew on stock buybacks. Half of Lowe’s workers made less than $31,000 last year.

Such disparities are not just bad for workers – they’re also bad for our democracy.

“This gap between CEO and worker pay,” I summed up for the Financial Times last week, is driving “rising inequality and the concentration of wealth at the top” and giving our ultra-wealthy “too much influence over our political system.”

Much more from our new Executive Excess report below.

Coming out of Union Station in Washington, D.C. last week, I was floored by the sight of bumper-to-bumper heavy-duty military vehicles. One of our capital’s most ornate buildings looked like a war zone.

By now, you’ve likely also seen images of hulking vehicles stationed with National Guard troops around various D.C. high-visibility sites. I later learned their technical name: mine-resistant, ambush-protected all-terrain vehicles, M-ATVs for short. The company that makes them, OshKosh, boasts of the trucks’ “integrated blast protection” and “performance-based battlefield technology.”

Donald Trump is now threatening to send National Guard troops to still more U.S. cities, and those threats could be great news for OshKosh’s bottom line. At least that’s what Wall Street seems to think. Investors have sent the company’s share price — along with the value of the CEO’s personal stock holdings — soaring.

The relationship between authoritarian power grabs and windfalls for Wall Streeters goes way back. Let this latest link-up serve as a trenchant reminder that the fight against fascism and the fight against oligarchy need to go hand in hand.

Last week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics figures on job growth did not offer up a pretty economic picture. The nation added only 73,000 jobs in July, and the BLS also sharply revised downward its May and June job figures.

None of these numbers came as huge surprises. The BLS regularly updates previously reported stats, and, given Trump’s tariffs and recent budget cuts, observers have been predicting more signs of a struggling economy.

But Donald Trump, predictably, didn’t see the new BLS numbers as any sign that his economic policies are backfiring. For Trump, instead, the new numbers suggested conspiracy. Last Friday, he tagged the BLS commissioner, the long-term government employee Erika McEntarfer, as part of that “conspiracy” and canned her.

The analysts who produce BLS job projections, long considered the labor data gold standard, will now inevitably be feeling the political pressure to bend their numbers more to Trump's liking or risk being fired — just like McEntarfer.

Comparisons between this latest Trumpian data coup and the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 do and will come easy. With a federal government hijacked by an authoritarian with a fear of bad press, after all, who can we trust?

Philanthropy will never be an adequate substitute for an effective tax system. Yet the media remains obsessed with the giving habits of our billionaires, especially those who’ve signed the Giving Pledge. Founded in 2010 by Melinda and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, this pledge encourages billionaires to give away at least half their wealth during their lifetimes and upon their passing.

The inspiration for the pledge came from Chuck Feeney, the reluctant billionaire who advocated “giving while living” and gave away over $8 billion during his lifetime, relinquishing his billionaire status along the way.

Over 250 billionaires have so far signed the Giving Pledge. How has all that pledging fared? Our new Institute for Policy Studies report, The Giving Pledge at 15, examines that question. Few billionaires, we found, are following in Feeney’s footsteps. If trends continue, the Giving Pledge will lead to massive trillion-dollar private foundations that wield the power and influence of small nation states.

The good news? In our current hot mess political moment, the fight back against oligarchy is burning bright. Check out my new Oligarch Watch column at The Nation profiling the pillaging health care oligarch Ralph de la Torre.

Donald Trump talked a big talk about helping working people during his 2024 campaign, and his recently enacted “Big Beautiful Bill” even includes a handful of pro-worker-sounding policies like an exemption from taxes on tips. But all his talk, once you look closer, is pure bluster.

This Trump administration has hobbled the National Labor Relations Board, slashed the social-service programs millions of working Americans rely on, and unleashed masked federal agents on immigrant-heavy workplaces. And that no-tax-on-tips piece? That turns out to be way less generous than first appears.

And now Trump and Republicans are busy rolling back some of our most basic workplace protections. The Department of Labor is rewriting or eliminating upwards of 60 so-called “obsolete” protections against worker abuse. Under the ax is everything from the home healthcare worker minimum wage to safety standards for lighting on construction sites.

Only our richest gain from this onslaught on worker rights. We need a revitalized labor movement to lead the fightback on behalf of us all!

The arm-twisting is not quite over but Congress appears close to approving what Senator Bernie Sanders has called the “most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.”

As we’ve extensively documented, this bill’s cruel cuts to vital services will throw millions of people off health care and leave millions of children hungry — all to pay for huge tax breaks for the rich. Our tasks now?

Expose: Most working-class families don’t yet know just how much lawmakers have sold them out.

Inspire: We need an alternate vision, one that has the government working for us, not vice versa. On July 17, we’re hosting a Bold Ideas for a New Progressive Majority symposium featuring Congressional Progressive Caucus members in dialogue in with social movement leaders. Please join us!

Organize: As Rev. William Barber told a crowd gathered for a rally/funeral on Capitol Hill earlier this week: “If they’re going to throw 17 million people off health insurance, we are going to organize those people.”

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers took to the ballot box this week to send a clear message: We need bold solutions to make our city affordable. Late Tuesday night, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded the New York City Democratic primary to State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani.

Pundits have already started crediting Mamdani’s victory to his unique charisma and his vivid social media presence. Be skeptical of these day-afters. Policies and people power, not charm and clever messaging, drove Mamdani’s upset victory.

Mamdani offered principles and plans that speak directly to our need to tackle inequality head-on. A rent freeze for stabilized tenants, fast and free buses for all, and universal childcare from six months to five years are all proposals that meet the moment. We can tax the rich, he pledges, to make New York liveable for all.

New Yorkers backed that vision. Over 50,000 volunteers knocked on north of 1.5 million doors after Mamdani’s campaign launched last October. Volunteers on one side, $25 million of billionaire and corporate cash on the other.

Mamdani’s campaign has provided a blueprint. Can the rest of the nation follow?

With the assassination of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark this past weekend, we haven’t just lost a pair of loving parents and active community residents. We’ve lost a champion of egalitarian policies.

Melissa Hortman helped drive the “Minnesota Miracle” of 2023. Under her speakership, the Minnesota House of Representatives ushered into law pro-labor reforms ranging from minimum pay and benefits for nursing home staff to wage-theft protections for construction workers.

Hortman also helped secure the right of teachers to negotiate over class sizes, and her legislative activism has given nurses a greater say in staffing levels. The bills she championed to ban employer-friendly “non-compete” pacts and “captive audience” meetings will no doubt boost many future union campaigns.

May Melissa and Mark’s memory be an inspiration for fighting everywhere for a more equitable distribution of the wealth that worker labor creates.

All eyes were on Los Angeles this weekend, as police, National Guard officers, and even Marines were deployed to violently quell demonstrations over the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched very public raids in America's second-largest city, targeting majority-immigrant workplaces. These are not only assaults on the rights of immigrants, but also the rights of workers.

That connection could not be clearer than in the administration's targeting of labor leaders. David Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union California, was arrested — and injured badly enough to require a hospital visit — by federal agents Friday while acting as a community observer during an ICE raid. Now released on bond, Huerta is still facing federal charges.

Farmworker organizing leader Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, meanwhile, has been held in detention since March. Machinist union member Maximo Londonio was arrested in May despite holding a green card.

How do we fight back against this Trump assault? By building coalitions that link the struggles of all those the Trump administration is targeting, from workers and immigrants to members of the LBTQIA+ community. Only plutocrats are gaining from this latest and most threatening Trump offensive.

Our country’s media ecosystem is not in good shape. Local newspapers are fading away, and digital ventures are folding faster than they can secure funding. America’s “news deserts” are multiplying, and communities are losing their capacity to keep local power players accountable.

Team Trump, naturally, is making this mess worse. Earlier this week, the president formally asked Congress to pull the $1.1 billion in funding already set aside for NPR and PBS over the next two years. Local public radio and television stations all across the country are now facing an existential crisis.

Trump sycophant Kari Lake, meanwhile, has completely decimated the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the federal operation that houses Voice of America. VOA staffing has reportedly dropped from 1,300 in March to just 80 people.

Losing journalism means losing independent oversight of our government — and our oligarchs. Trump II began with our media in crisis. Trump funding cuts are now threatening deep damage to our democracy.

How much does freedom cost? For former nursing home executive — and massive tax-fraud enjoyer — Paul Walzack, freedom has cost $1 million.

Walzack, found guilty in April of stealing $10 million from the paychecks of the nurses and doctors who worked for him, was supposed to spend 18 months in prison, with two more years of supervised release, and have to pay $4.4 million in restitution. Then his mother attended a dinner. But not just any dinner: a $1 million-per-person fundraising dinner at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago.

A few weeks later, Walzack found himself pardoned. Coincidence? You tell us.

We’re now living in a nation where fealty — and financial contributions — to the billionaire sitting in the White House can enable any deep pocket to skirt the law, evade any significant penalty, and proceed to enjoy plutocratic life to the fullest.

Want to see the influence of oligarchs in action? Amid the hubbub over Trump's “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill, House Republicans managed to insert a little-noticed dangerous amendment. If approved as written, the bill would now block states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next ten years.

Given the pitiful congressional track record on technology, that blocking would essentially mean no meaningful regulations on the rapidly growing AI industry for a decade.

Meanwhile, at the same time that GOP lawmakers were pulling off this policy coup, some of AI's wealthiest boosters — Elon Musk, Open AI's Sam Altman, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang — were flying to Saudi Arabia aboard Air Force One. The tech execs took advantage of the trip to cut billion-dollar sweetheart deals with the Gulf states and continue to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump.

The horrors in the House Republican budget go far beyond, of course, this AI policy freeze. A just-released analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found that the GOP budget would accelerate inequality by reducing the resources of households in America’s poorest 10 percent and increasing those resources for households sitting pretty in our most affluent tenth.

This week we’ve been pouring through the 432-page House Republican tax plan — and following the boring committee mark-up process — so you don’t have to. Trust me, this hasn’t been fun.

What President Trump is calling a “big, beautiful bill” would deliver more than $1 trillion in tax giveaways to our richest 1 percent while at the same time kicking millions of Americans off their health insurance and taking food away from hungry children. If enacted, this “big, beautiful bill” would become our nation’s largest single transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich ever.

But this budget battle still has a ways to go. Politically vulnerable Republican lawmakers are expressing discomfort about the severity of the pending cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs their constituents rely on. And the public outcry will only grow as more details come to light. As one of my friends puts it, “these bills age like milk.”

We’ll be keeping you up on all this as the budget debate rolls on.

One of the most pernicious myths used to discredit efforts to raise taxes on our wealthiest is that “they'll just go somewhere else” if we ever dare to make them pay more.

Proponents of this myth have never been able to furnish much evidence of mass tax-driven wealth flight. But that theory has had staying power anyway, maybe because many folks just see it as plain common sense. The reality? It takes a lot more than higher taxes to get millionaires to leave home.

The rich pick the places where they live for a variety of reasons — family, comfort, knowledge of local markets — that far outweigh a few thousand dollars more in tax burdens. And now we have some fresh evidence for that reality.

The Institute for Policy Studies researcher Omar Ocampo has teamed up with the State Revenue Alliance to analyze millionaire figures in two states — Massachusetts and Washington — that recently adopted higher taxes on high earners. Their prime finding? The number of millionaires in those two states actually increased after tax hikes on their highest-income taxpayers. More below.

When I was a farm kid in Minnesota, my mom helped me make candy-filled May Day baskets and then we’d drive around hanging them on my friends’ doorknobs.

I wouldn’t learn until college that millions of people all around the world have a much different take on May Day. They celebrate May 1 as International Workers’ Day. And this year, with American workers under increasing attack, that celebrating will be going big-time. Labor advocates nationwide have organized more than 1,000 May Day rallies. You can find an action near you right here.

Earlier this week, at a Capitol Hill rally with Bishop William J. Barber II, I shared this rundown of the Trump administration’s most harmful assaults on workers. This May Day, sharing solidarity seems a bit more important than sharing candy.

With the passing of Pope Francis the world has lost one of our most influential fighters against global economic inequality.

That inequality, as Francis noted in an apostolic exhortation early on in his papacy, rests at “the root of social ills.” We need, he preached, a “radical” resolution of the ills that poverty imposes. That would require more than just better welfare programs. That would require an outright rejection of the “absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation.”

Francis urged his fellow Catholics to join the fight against the “sickness” of economic injustice. Adherents to the faith, he argued, could not stand by while “the obsession with possessing and dominating excludes millions of people from primary goods.”

Our primary task? To deepen the struggle against that obsession.

To celebrate this year’s Tax Day, our colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project have just released a damning new comparison of where all our federal tax dollars are going.

One eye-opening stat from this new report: In 2024, the average U.S. taxpayer shelled out $3,707 for weapons and war. That sum included $388 for the top five Pentagon contractors. In contrast, only $149 of every average person’s tax dollars went to the National Institutes of Health and its life-saving medical research.

The lesson from numbers like these? We clearly need to be doing more, as a nation, to make sure our rich are paying their fair tax share. But ensuring that our collective resources are improving all our lives remains equally essential.

Millions of demonstrators took to the streets of America this past weekend to oppose the second Trump administration’s weaponization of White House power. Americans flocked to more than 1,300 rallies all across the country.

But demonstrating resistance in the streets will not be enough, by itself, to bring transformative change. Think back to the Women's March at the beginning of his first term. That protest brought a record-breaking 500,000 to D.C. and yet we've still seen a rollback of women's rights.

History, fortunately, doesn’t have to repeat itself. The “Hands Off” movement can build upon its incredibly solid start by going beyond that “Hands Off” slogan, by providing a positive vision beyond resistance. One useful frame for that vision? Confronting the growing economic chasm that America’s income inequality has created — and working toward a much more egalitarian future for us all.

Amid the ongoing onslaught from our billionaire class, a rare piece of good news has just broken through. In a closely watched Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the candidate actively backed by Donald Trump — and well over $20 million in campaign spending from Elon Musk — has lost!

And the race didn’t even end up close. As of this morning, the winner Susan Crawford was leading by almost double digits, buoyed by record-breaking turnout.

What can we take from this result? Trump carried Wisconsin last November. Many of the voters who believed in his promises to make America more affordable for working people are clearly starting to have second thoughts. And many folks in Wisconsin also clearly don’t like watching the world’s richest billionaire handing out million-dollar checks to buy their votes.

All those millions Musk spent on this race couldn’t defeat the will of the people. Sometimes all $20 million will buy you is just a cheesehead.

Imagine a young person from a future generation asking you this simple question: “Hey, what did you do during the oligarchic coup attempt back in 2025?”

Ready to do something you can tell the future all about? How about grabbing two neighbors and meeting up with us at one of the 400 Hands Off demonstrations set for Saturday, April 5. Need some inspiration? Watch one of the “Fight Oligarchy” rallies that have been uniting thousands of local activists with Bernie and AOC.

Some of you may recall the satirical Billionaires for Bush effort in 2001 and 2004 that lifted our spirits with comic relief in “celebration” of a billionaire-subservient president. Over 100 local groups engaged back then in creative street theater.

Good news: That effort is getting back together. At the April 5 demo, Trillionaires for Trump groups will be humorously protesting the protesters. If you’re theatrically inclined — or want to make others laugh — you can start your own local Trillionaires for Trump group. Check the website for DIY tools and come up with your own billionaire name. Philip DaValt, anyone?

With last week’s nasty fight over short-term government spending now behind us, Congress is turning to the far bigger battle over a federal tax and spending plan for the next decade. Prepare for an even uglier fight.

At a press conference today with Bishop William Barber II, Institute for Policy Studies executive director Tope Folarin shared stats from a dramatic new report on the high moral stakes in the budget debate.

One alarming stat from this study: The pending Senate proposal would add $86 billion in new spending each year for mass deportations and the war machine, funds that will line the pockets of military and private prison contractors. With that $86 billion, we could instead provide Head Start for 3.6 million children, health insurance for 4 million children — and public housing for 3.9 million families.

Back in February, my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Sarah Anderson and I met with Senator Bernie Sanders to strategize about his upcoming “stop oligarchy” tour. Bernie had been hesitant about hitting the road. Now 83, he had been hoping another opposition leader would step forward. None did, and, two weeks ago, the tour began.

The first stop: Iowa City. Since then, 4,000 have gathered with Bernie in Kenosha, Wisconsin and 2,600 more in Altoona, Wisconsin, both swing districts that Republicans represent in Congress. On Saturday, my niece Jenny attended the senator’s rally along with 9,000 of her neighbors in Warren, Michigan.

“It rocked my world,” Jenny told me. “Who else is standing up to Trump so effectively and speaking to the fear and anger of the people who voted for him?”

UAW president Shawn Fain introduced Sanders in Warren. More Democrats, Fain noted, needed to follow Bernie’s lead, and Bernie promptly did plenty of leading.

“The people of this country will not allow us to move toward an oligarchy,” Sanders told the overflow crowd. “They will not allow Trump to take us into authoritarianism. We’re prepared to fight. And we’re going to win.”

Here at Inequality.org, we‘ll continue to keep a close eye on the Stop Oligarchy movement – and the disruptive impact of billionaires on our everyday lives. This week is looming particularly large, with the House opening its tax-writing work. For more, check out this terrific More Perfect Union video featuring Inequality.org contributor Bob Lord and me talking about “The Biggest Tax Dodge in History.”

No one can blame you for skipping President Trump's nearly 100-minute-long address to Congress Tuesday evening, a speech predictably riddled with lies and bloviation about the administration’s “accomplishments.” We don't need to repeat what you already know about the emptiness and cruelty of Trump and his DOGE.

But let’s not forget that so many who chose to vote for Trump did so because they believed he would actually be tackling our ongoing cost-of-living crisis. More than a month into Trump II, that has clearly not been the case. Aggressive tariffs on our allies now stand poised to spike grocery prices, and Trump’s proposed tax breaks for billionaires won't be trickling down.

The Democratic Party’s opposition to all this came across last night as typically disorganized. Some Democrats chose to skip the speech entirely. Others resisted in ways that looked a lot more like January 2016 than March 2025. The official Democratic Party response from Senator Elissa Slotkin even included some puzzling praise for Ronald Reagan.

The evening’s bright spots: Bernie Sanders delivered a clear-eyed indictment of Trump's billionaire-enriching, all while pulling in hundreds of thousands more viewers than the official party reply. And new Congressional Progressive Caucus head Greg Casar summed up Trump's address perfectly: "They want to steal our healthcare, steal from our veterans, and steal from you to give to billionaires."

On the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, at least 11 federal agencies were investigating Elon Musk’s six firms for everything from labor law violations and rocket safety failures to securities fraud. No coincidence then, I'd venture, that the Trump-Musk dyad has been busy hollowing out all 11 of these agencies.

Musk’s “DOGE” antics have never been about cutting costs. In fact, according to the Trump administration's own data, nearly 40 percent of the federal contracts cut so far are going to produce no savings whatsoever for the government.

So why all this cutting? To weaken oversight over our ultra-rich and concentrate even more power in their hands. The “savings” from firing hundreds of IRS employees? Those pale next to the assets the wealthy will now have an easier time of hiding. Illegally hamstringing the National Labor Relations Board gives employers carte-blanche to squeeze every last dollar out of their workers.

We have more on the Trump-Musk onslaught in this week’s issue. But first a quick announcement that points to a brighter future: Applications for the 2025 Henry Wallace Fellowship at the Institute for Policy Studies have just opened! If you’re a college student or young adult interested in honing your progressive movement skills, please do apply at the link right here.

Our nation’s plutocrats have never looked particularly kindly on federal employees. Many of these employees, after all, staff the agencies that safeguard the interests of average Americans against the greed grabs of our richest. And the cost of adequately staffing these agencies keeps up the pressure to make sure the richest among us are paying, not dodging, their fair tax share.

But we’ve never seen until Trump II an attack on federal workers as ferocious and enormous as what we’re seeing now. When I heard about the administration's plan to cut probationary federal employees, my first instinct was to assume that the term meant newly hired staff. That, unfortunately, is not the case. The new president's latest broadside against the federal workforce affects both new hires and longer-term employees who have either changed departments or gotten promotions — together that means hundreds of thousands of employees could be dismissed.

Firing 300 staffers at the Federal Aviation Administration sure isn't going to make flying safer. And dismissing 1,300 workers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention will leave us all more exposed to future pandemics. And firing 1,000 National Park Service employees will limit access to nature for millions of us.

Federal workers are fighting back against these dismissals. Several unions representing public servants have already sued to stop and even reverse firings, and federal employees have taken to the streets in protest. It's in all of our best interests to fight with them every step of the way.

Hey, readers, I’m popping in to write this week’s intro so I can tell you a bit about all the resistance rallies now swirling around in our nation’s capital.

Yesterday I joined a federal worker protest where union leaders called on Democrats in Congress to use the March debt ceiling deadline as leverage to block the massive Trump cutbacks.

The day before, I rallied at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that’s won $21 billion for fraud and discrimination victims. Elon Musk’s henchmen have shut down the CFPB and unions are suing to bring it back to life.

Last week, I joined thousands outside the Treasury demanding that Musk’s thugs stop meddling in the system that handles Social Security checks and tax refunds. I also joined a Labor Department protest to block a Musk invasion of that agency.

I live in D.C. and — unlike millions of immigrants, federal employees, and other targets — I don’t have to fear retaliation for attending protests. I know, of course, that rallying alone isn’t going to end the Trump onslaught. But strong protests do send a powerful message to pols and judges that we’re not going to just stand by while unelected billionaires destroy our democracy for their personal gain.

To receive rally alerts, sign up with Indivisible — or DC Jobs With Justice if you’re local. Hope to see you in the streets!

I'm happy to eat crow on this one: Since last week's edition of the newsletter, several major protests against the Trump administration have begun shredding that post-election apathy that so many of us have been decrying. In Los Angeles, for instance, thousands of protestors demanding an end to forced deportations stopped traffic on a major highway for a full five hours.

And in the nation’s capital, as you'll read below in a dispatch from our own Sarah Anderson, lawmakers and the public alike rallied outside of the Treasury Department to call out what some observers are labeling Elon Musk's naked attempt at a coup. Expect more protest actions to come.

Of course, just protesting will never be enough. The Democrats are still failing to operate as an effective opposition party. They’re not even showing a united front against the billionaires and their flunkies that Donald Trump has nominated for our highest federal offices. But a sense of outrage is now building nationwide. We need to focus that outrage to where it belongs: against our ultra-wealthy.

The new Trump administration’s first week has felt like a full frontal assault: aggressive spending cuts and the dismantling of federal agencies, with a limp reaction from our “opposition” party. And the general public reaction has seemed equally limp, in a stark contrast to the giant public protests like the Women’s March that greeted Trump his first time around in 2017.

But a deeper look tells a different story. Over the past few weeks, I've been canvassing for an organizing effort to lower living costs. I’ve also joined a lobbying drive to reform parole boards and protested a private health insurance provider's record profits.

What have all of these actions had in common? They’ve involved record-breaking numbers of volunteers willing to put in the work to improve society in the midst of a bleak national political climate.

I'm obviously lucky to have the time and energy to dedicate to a variety of different progressive causes — that's not a privilege that everyone shares. But even if you can’t physically be there, you can take solace in knowing that people are still fighting back. Together, we can build a more equal nation.

The freezing cold in Washington, D.C. earlier this week forced some difficult decisions. The cold moved Donald Trump's second inaugural inside the Capitol Rotunda, leaving limited spots for all the guests Trump had invited to watch his swearing in. Notables like governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and social media influencers Jake and Logan Paul found themselves relegated to the Capitol's visitor center. So who did make the cut? America's richest!

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — the three wealthiest individuals in the world — all sat close by Trump during the ceremony, with the latter two even getting plus-one invites. The Big Tech presence didn't end there. Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook sat just a row back.

Our tech oligarchy has, of course, been flexing its clout long before this week. And that clout comes from more than just Republican leadership. President Obama, after all, gave Musk’s Tesla nearly half a billion dollars in his 2009 stimulus, and Biden bailed out the troubled Silicon Valley Bank just last year. But Monday’s Inaugural seating stands as the clearest proof yet that a handful of billionaires, enriched by a roaring tech market, now enjoy enormous political heft.

Two of the catastrophic fires that have torn across Los Angeles remain out of control as of this Wednesday morning. The Eaton and Palisades fires — the most destructive in Southern California history — have now claimed at least 25 lives and destroyed entire communities. Our thoughts are with our readers in the area.

The California fires, like all disasters, have exposed our society’s stark inequalities. The damage has not discriminated between rich and poor neighborhoods. But those rich neighborhoods have the means to rebuild. Those poor now face the prospect of post-destruction gentrification.

The celebration of first responders, meanwhile, has overlooked how California continues to abuse prison labor. Over 1,000 incarcerated people have been fighting the deadly flames. They risk serious injury for less than $15 a day.

At the same time, the fires have shown the power of community. Donations are flooding into families who’ve lost their homes, and robust mutual-aid networks are helping those affected stay afloat. The task ahead: to ensure that this ethos of communal care stays central once the fires flicker out and the rebuilding begins.

Last year turned out to be a huge year for billionaires. America’s nine-figure club didn’t just collectively gain over $1 trillion in wealth in 2024. They also installed a president committed to expanding their already domineering political presence.

Yes, the situation certainly does look dire for those of us fighting for a more equal society. But we've been here before — and ended up winning. Back in the late 19th century, an unchecked industrialization brought a massive concentration of our nation’s wealth. Corporate titans saw their influence in culture and politics soar, putting them in a position much like the position our wealthiest enjoy today.

But then, as our co-editor Sam Pizzigati chronicles in his book The Rich Don't Always Win, average Americans organized and won the country back through mass movements that inspired broad policy reforms. Our task now: to take inspiration from that success and put an end to our second gilded age.