2024 Newsletter Archive

Read every issue of our weekly newsletter from 2024 here.

In many ways, this has been a dispiriting year in the struggle for a more equal society. Donald Trump’s election to a second term has all of us thinking defense. We now face a massive charge to lock in tax cuts for the wealthy and privatize our most essential public services. We’ll need to mobilize, on an equally massive scale, taking care, as we go, to soberly analyze our political landscape.

At the same time, an overly dour look at the year ahead can obscure the big wins that working people made against our billionaire class. For this, our last issue of the year, we’d like to remind everyone about the victories we’ve all achieved over this past year. The battles we’ve fought haven’t been easy, but we’ve been able — by uniting across communities — to move forward.

With 2024 drawing to a close, our Inequality.org team has been reflecting on the year’s strides toward a more just society. Amid the year’s severe setbacks, highlighting wins — and, even more importantly, investigating what made those wins possible — is more important than ever. But just talking among ourselves doesn't cut it! We want to hear from you, our readers, about your successes in 2024.

Your successes this past year may have been purely local or incremental. Doesn’t matter! We can all learn from your steps to a more equal world, be they city council resolutions or victories at a union bargaining table. Please share your stories by replying directly to this email!

In next week’s Inequality.org issue, this year’s last, we'll be adding your victories to our own list of the top inequality advances of 2024. Hopefully it'll be a reminder of the progress that is being made in the face of an unfriendly political landscape.

This week marked our nation’s annual Giving Tuesday, a key fundraising day for nonprofits originally launched a dozen years ago as a counter to the exorbitant consumption we see every Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But a new report just released by our Charity Reform Initiative has just revealed that our ultra-rich are actively exploiting Giving Tuesday to hide and grow their grand fortunes.

So how can we be sure, given this new reality, that money flowing into the charitable sector is going for good? Our charity reform team has proposed a few common-sense solutions that range from closing existing tax loopholes to adopting new regulations on how long money can sit in donor-controlled intermediaries that generate generous fees for money managers.

We are very happy to share that our research got a primetime slot over the Thanksgiving weekend in CBS's report on greenwashing in the aviation sector. We highly recommend watching the segment yourself to get a peek at our own Chuck Collins' garlic growing process, but the TL;DW is that efforts by the jet industry to sell "sustainable" aviation fuels as a fix to the climate crisis are at best misguided and at worst actively undermining the kind of reforms we need.

Lawmakers in Congress are now trying to ram through legislation that would give the Treasury Department broad power to strip nonprofit status from organizations deemed to be “terrorist-supporting.” This bill, H.R. 9495, could have a disastrous and chilling effect on our nonprofit sector, especially with an incoming administration holding on tight to deep-seated grudges.

A number of groups are mobilizing to stop this dangerous legislation. Take a look and get involved in what may be Battle One of the new Trump era.

We do have, on the international front, some more encouraging news. The just-concluded conclave of the G20 nations has agreed to “engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” This could be the first step to realizing the landmark 2 percent annual minimum tax on billionaire wealth that Brazil has proposed. More on this in our next issue.

A week out from the presidential election, with votes still getting counted, the tally for Donald Trump now stands at over 75 million, about 3 million more than Kamala Harris's total. The far less publicized stat: Almost 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote.

Why did so many Americans choose to sit this year's White House contest out? Some clearly didn’t feel the candidates were adequately addressing the issues they care about. And what might those issues be? A new analysis of polling data from our friends at the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, just published on our website, puts taxing the rich at higher levels squarely on that list.

But poll results can’t set public policy. To beat plutocrats, we need a mass movement committed to a brighter future for all Americans. And we can create that movement if we join together and present a consistent vision of what a better society can look like. For us here at Inequality.org, the road to that future starts with taking on our nation’s wealthiest to help create quality lives for us all.

Like many of you, we were taken aback by last night’s election results. Not by Donald Trump winning again — we saw that possibility as always present — but by how much he won by. Republicans also took the Senate and likely have kept control in the House as well. We’ll save you our postmortem on the campaign and stick to what we know: Inequality’s tendrils wrapped all over this election.

Decades of widening wealth gaps have created two mutually reinforcing realities. The first: We have a billionaire problem. Our ultra-rich have amassed a level of wealth that gives them unparalleled political influence. From their unconstrained election spending to their direct control over much of our media, our wealthiest have never had an environment more conducive for concentrating their power.

Inequality has also created the conditions that have millions of Americans quite rightfully feeling that our political system is failing them. Trump’s policies aren’t going to help the working-class and poor — they’re far more likely to hurt them — but voters have clearly decided that the status quo badly needed upending.

We believe that an anti-inequality agenda focused on limiting wealth concentration and improving conditions for those our top-heavy capitalism tosses aside still remains deeply popular. Now comes the hard part: building a movement that can fight for significantly greater equality amid a looming fascist threat.

By the time the next edition of this newsletter appears in your inbox, we may well know who’ll be the next president of the United States. But, given our archaic voting arrangements and the growing share of mail-in ballots, we more likely won’t have a conclusive result until hours or even days later.

What will we be able to say conclusively about the election next Wednesday? Billionaires once again have had an outsized role in our democratic process.

Just this past week, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have both intervened in the editorial process of their papers to spike endorsements for Kamala Harris. And, in Pennsylvania, Elon Musk — in what is more likely than not an illegal vote-buying scheme — is offering residents entry into a $1 million daily lottery if they have registered to vote.

Our friends at Americans for Tax Fairness have more to add along this line. Just 150 billionaire families, their new report details, have contributed a record breaking $1.9 billion in support of this election cycle’s presidential and congressional races. Our democratic system remains warped. We’ve allowed some in our electorate to have a resoundingly louder voice than the rest of us.

Candidates at all levels this election season are finally talking about the severe housing crisis that’s impacting Americans the nation over. But these candidates are not talking nearly enough about a driving force that’s depriving millions of us of the right to stable living situations. That force: billionaire investors.

We’re simply not going to break the grip on housing billionaires now hold until we begin taxing luxury mansion sales and using the funds that step raises to expand the social housing sector. My Institute for Policy Studies colleague Omar Ocampo and I, together with our fellow activist Amee Chee at Popular Democracy, make that point in our just-released new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing.

Bringing together some 50 grassroots organizations, Popular Democracy is working at the frontlines of bringing transformational change to Black, brown, and low-income communities. In our joint report, we detail how billionaires have been disrupting local housing markets by acquiring huge swaths of housing.

These billionaires are using their new massive housing presence to drive up the cost of land and shelter by any means necessary, doing everything from expanding short-term rentals and supercharging gentrification to holding properties vacant and engaging in assorted other predatory practices.

We have more on this crisis — and how to end it — in this week’s issue.

The 2024 Nobel prize in economics was awarded this week to three economists who have traced how colonialism and its aftermath have shaped today’s global inequities.

The work of these three scholars, notes the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, helps us understand why “societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better.”

This marks the second straight year that the prestigious Nobel award has gone to economists studying inequality. And let’s not forget that the 2019 Nobel winner in economics, Esther Duflo, earlier this year called on our world’s richest nations to raise taxes on our globe’s super rich and move the proceeds raised directly to those the climate crisis is hurting the most.

How can the work of economists like these better inform policy making? How can we turn their ideas into action? These have become questions for all of us committed to tackling inequality.

Less than a month remains until this year’s general election. Voters won’t just be filling out ballots to pick the next president and shape the next Congress. They’ll also be voting on dozens of state-level initiatives that will help determine how unequal our nation will continue to be.

Voters in at least three states — California, Missouri, and Alaska — have the opportunity to raise the minimum wage to something more closely resembling a living wage. In Arizona, on the flip side, a Republican-led initiative would actually lower the floor for tipped-wage workers.

Trying to make progress at the federal level, with its warped facsimile of democracy, can sometimes feel like we’re bashing our heads into a wall. State and local politics, by contrast, can sometimes offer an arena where meaningful change faces fewer roadblocks.

So if you're feeling frustrated with how things are going federally, take a close look at the initiatives on your state ballot — and get out there and get involved with people fighting for a more just society in your local community!

For nerdy number-crunchers like me, it’s always exciting when activists and elected officials make strategic use of our data. So I was thrilled this past week when I found that lawmakers were using our Institute for Policy Studies research to name and shame 35 corporations now paying their top execs more than they’re paying in federal taxes.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Greg Casar, and 14 other members of Congress sent CEOs of this “shameful 35” letters demanding that these execs cough up info about their tax avoidance practices and lobbying expenditures.

“For decades, big businesses and the wealthy have skirted their responsibility to pay federal income taxes, leaving hardworking Americans to foot the bill,” the lawmakers wrote. “As Congress considers what to do when some provisions of the 2017 law expire next year, it is critical that we ensure that large, profitable businesses are paying their fair share.”

Which corporations rank in the “shameful 35”? A certain electric car company comes in at #1. Check out the full list and my thoughts on how we can crack down on corporate tax dodging and excessive CEO pay here.

The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams this week after he spent more than two decades on death row for a murder that DNA testing indicates he did not commit. Several last-minutes efforts — including one by the family of the murder victim Lisha Gayle — did not prove enough to persuade lawmakers or judges from sparing a potentially innocent man’s life.

The United States remains one of the only OECD countries to allow capital punishment. And that may not be changing anytime soon. Republican lawmakers have long supported continuing executions, and Democrats quietly erased opposition to the practice in their 2024 party platform.

The death penalty doesn’t just frequently take innocent lives caught up in inherently imperfect legal systems. The penalty also reflects our world’s class biases — especially against the poor. We regularly see capital punishment, as the United Nations notes, deployed as a “class-based form of discrimination.”

To address inequality meaningfully, the death of Marcellus Williams reminds us, we need to tackle that inequality in every aspect of our societies, with the criminal justice system being no exception.

Who’s bankrolling the climate change disinformation that’s stalling the action we need to save our planet? Our just-released report — Fossil Fuel Philanthropy, a collaboration with the Climate Accountability and Research Project — shines a light on the big-money donors blasting cash into the hands of climate deniers.

The total amount spent on climate disinformation? That could range anywhere from a few hundred million dollars into the billions. Lax reporting standards make more accurate estimates impossible.

These hundreds of millions are underwriting well over 130 shadowy groups, including many of the disinformation actors tied into the billionaire Charles Koch’s Stand Together network.

Fossil fuel philanthropy epitomizes the egregious inequality between the political influence of our rich and all the rest of us. Moguls and heirs are using capital extracted from exploiting our Earth to shape the world in their own image. But we can stem the bleeding of tax-exempt donations toward destructive causes. Check our report here to see just how.

Presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Donald Trump participated in what could be the first and last debate of this election cycle last night. From our Inequality.org perspective, we found some aspects of the debate encouraging. Tax cuts for the wealthy came under fire three times and the poverty-reducing child tax credit got a welcome prime-time mention.

But much of the debate focused on immigration, with both candidates pledging hard-line approaches to border security unlikely to do anything about the root causes driving millions to leave their homes in search of a better life.

And both Harris and Trump left an important undercurrent to the immigration debate unsaid: Millions of Americans are worrying about immigrants because they’ve been convinced that our economy is a zero-sum game where they lose if immigrants get jobs.

The reality? We have more than enough resources to go around in this country. Our main problem: The ultra-wealthy are hoarding those resources. As AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler put it last night: “An immigrant doesn’t stand between you and a good job. A billionaire does.”

We hope you had a restful Labor Day. May you be returning re-energized for the fight to end extreme inequality!

Our just-released 30th annual Executive Excess CEO pay report offers plenty of fighting fodder. This latest edition zeroes 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: These 100 corporations have blown over half a trillion dollars over the past five years on a financial scam to inflate CEO pay at the same time their workers were struggling to put food on the table.

Just how perverse have the priorities of these low-wage firms become? Nearly half of these major corporations have been spending more on stock buybacks than they’ve been spending on technology upgrades, property improvements, and all other long-term investments combined.

“The data in this report reveals,” as I told the Guardian last week, “how CEOs are focused on their own personal short-term windfalls rather than long-term prosperity for their workers or even for their own companies.”

Much more data — and signs of hope — from our new report below.

Hard to believe that this summer is already nearing an end! We hope that all of our readers will be able to get some rest this coming holiday weekend — and take a moment to celebrate the progress that the American labor movement has been making over the last few years in everything from reenergizing major union to organizing entire new economic sectors.

In this week’s issue, we’re highlighting a new study on working conditions in semiconductor manufacturing. With the Biden-Harris administration about to disburse billions of public dollars into semiconductors, those of us who worked on this new report are calling for strong guardrails to help ensure that all the new CHIPS Act jobs turn out to be good jobs.

My favorite part of the time I spent working on this new report: speaking with semiconductor workers. In every discussion we had, I felt their excitement about organizing in what has been an overwhelmingly unorganized industry. When we organize together, they reminded me, we can transform our workplaces and, in time, our entire country. Happy Labor Day!

On the opening night of the Democratic National Convention this week organized labor took the center stage. The presidents of our nation’s largest unions addressed the thousands gathered in Chicago directly.

The labor leaders gathered on stage put some real heat on an ongoing reality TV viewers seldom get to see addressed. They highlighted many of our key issues, including corporate wealth concentration.

“Corporate greed turns blue-collar blood, sweat, and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and CEO jackpots,” UAW President Shawn Fain told the crowd. “It causes inflation. It hurts workers. It hurts consumers. And it hurts America.”

Seriously tackling wealth concentration — and making sure workers get a fair share of the wealth they create — requires an energized labor movement, regardless of which party is in charge of the government.

In a landmark case brought by federal antitrust regulators, a U.S. district court judge has ruled that Google has established an illegal monopoly in online search. Google, judge Amit Mehta found last week, shelled out billions to cut deals that have made it the default search on web browsers and smartphones.

Google’s monopoly status, the court found, has artificially crowded out potential competitors and let the Silicon Valley giant dictate higher ad prices.

The solution for this situation? The Justice Department is reportedly considering an excellent one: break up Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Steps like spinning off AdWords, Google's search ad program, or forcing Google to divest from its Chrome web browser would weaken the search giant’s iron grip on the internet and let new and probably cheaper alternatives flourish.

Judge Mehta still has to okay any remedy for ending Google’s monopoly. But the mere consideration of a step as bold as breaking up Alphabet represents a major shift back to a time when breaking up trusts to weaken corporate profiteering — and undermine plutocratic fortunes — amounted to just what regulators did.

A particularly Inequality.org-y piece of news popped up this week. Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden revealed Monday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose even more of his private round-trip jet joy rides paid for by billionaire conservative donor Harlan Crow.

This latest disclosure failure underscores both the undue influence of the ultra-wealthy on American politics and the excessive use — by our wealthiest — of gas-guzzling private planes for travel.

Another issue we’ll bang the drum on at every opportunity: the democracy- distorting impact of “donor-advised funds.” A new Lever investigation details how shadowy “charity” groups have covertly funneled millions of dollars into the Heritage Foundation’s now notorious Project 2025, offering up, notes our colleague Bella DeVaan, a “poster child" example of the “threat to democracy” that donor-advised funds can pose.

And finally, we’d like to take a moment to thank this year’s Henry Wallace fellow on the Inequality.org team, Georgia Jensen. Georgia has written incisive articles on public libraries, solicited urgent pieces on anti-abortion clinics, and has generally been essential to operating our website. We wish her the best of luck as she gets started with her junior year at Rice University!

We’re back from our two-week newsletter break! Hope nothing important happened while we were gone. I took advantage of the time off to visit family in Spain. It was a beautiful trip full of time with loved ones and the best food in the world. But I found no escape from inequality. Spain's wealth gap has widened considerably since the pandemic, and I could see the stark difference in the wildly divergent lifestyles of the nation’s working people and its wealthy.

Spain hardly rates as an outlier in that regard. A new report from Oxfam has found that the wealth of the world’s top 1 percent has grown by $42 trillion over the last decade. That unacceptably exorbitant concentration of wealth is coming at a time when millions of families worldwide are struggling to make ends meet.

Domestically, the combined wealth of America’s roughly 800 billionaires has crossed over $6 trillion. That $6 trillion amounts roughly to the combined GDP of the United Kingdom and France. That $6 trillion also equals the amount of money the federal government spent in 2023. That enormous sum — concentrated in so few hands — is skewing our democracy at the expense of average Americans.

Here at Inequality.org, we’ll continue to highlight that skewing and do our best to analyze and advance the interventions needed to create a more just world.

We lost a tremendous friend of workers and Inequality.org with the passing earlier this week of Jane McAlevey.

I first met Jane years ago when we were both in our 20s. Back then, she had already become a sparkplug of a campaigner on environmental justice issues. But Jane would go on to make her most lasting mark in the labor movement — as an apostle of “deep organizing,” going beyond superficial “mobilization campaigns” with a commitment to more meaningful relationship building.

Jane liked to talk about “whole worker organizing,” transcending the focus on wages and benefits to look at affordable housing and other broader workplace and community issues facing working people. Jane always had tenacity and a twinkle in her eye. We miss her already. For more, check this appreciation.

A quick housekeeping note: We'll be taking a break the next two weeks — July 17 and 24 — so please don’t panic if you don’t find us in your inbox. We wish everyone a restful summer, and we’ll be back with more inequality insights and inspiration at the end of the month.

This summer may well end up our hottest ever. We’ve already had multiple record-breaking heat events. And who’s suffering the most from these sweltering temperatures? Two groups stand out: the unhoused and manual laborers.

Despite growing concerns over the risks to workers in these conditions from dehydration to heat stroke — not to mention lost wages and working hours — conservative lawmakers across the country have been stripping away crucial protections against overheated workplaces.

In Florida, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation into law this past April that actually bars local governments from requiring employers to provide water breaks. Texas Governor Greg Abbott last summer approved a measure overturning city rules requiring break time for construction workers.

The bright spot amid all this? The White House has just proposed a new rule that creates a federal safety standard specific to excessive heat in the workplace. This new initiative will now face a comment period. Wealthy industrialist groups will no doubt be pushing hard over the months to come to weaken this proposed new regulation. We need to push just as hard to save it.

Defying all previously understood conceptions of time, the 2024 presidential campaign will kick off in earnest tomorrow with a nationally televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

If you can bring yourself to watch these two men duke it out again, we recommend paying particular attention to how the two approach our nation’s continuing maldistribution of income and wealth. Their policy differences here, particularly on taxing the rich, could end up making a huge difference.

Trump's 2017 tax cuts have ushered in a new era of wealth concentration — look no further than our chart on stock buybacks in this week's issue for an example — and Trump most likely will champion extending those cuts when they expire at the end of 2025. Biden most likely won’t and has called for a new billionaires tax, although he has yet to throw his full weight behind it. Let’s see if he makes the case for that tax in tomorrow’s debate.

Speaking of new taxes on billionaires, yesterday saw an exciting new global development on that front. We have more on that below and will be following up in much more detail next week. Stay tuned!

Some 159 years ago today, months after the Civil War ended, enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally learned they had been “freed.” Our Juneteenth holiday celebrates that end of slavery, but anyone with a basic grasp of American history knows that Black people hardly gained their freedom in 1865.

A look at wealth inequality today makes it plain to see that Black Americans still suffer from slavery's legacy. For every $100 white households held in 2022, Black households held just $15. Black Americans today face obstacles to accumulating wealth at every turn, from exclusionary housing practices to racist hiring regimes.

How do we redress this historic injustice? In this week’s issue, we're offering a look at a few specific targeted policy interventions that could make a real difference. But, in fact, any of the solutions to runaway wealth concentration that we bandy about on Inequality.org would represent a step in the right direction — so long as we always keep racial imbalances in mind.

Earlier today our Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson testified before the U.S. Senate on the need to make Wall Street’s movers and shakers pay their fair tax share and just how we could make that happen.

For far too long, Sarah told the Senate Budget Committee, Wall Street’s “excessive power” has shaped our tax code and let its firms and execs “continue practices that benefit the few while putting the rest of us at risk.”

The upcoming 2025 tax debate, Sarah added, offers “an opportunity to fix these problems, as part of a much-needed overhaul of our tax code to make our economy stronger and more equitable.”

The nation will be having that tax debate next year because most of the tax changes that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 will be expiring by the end of 2025. With Sarah’s continuing help, we'll be closely covering this crucial debate — and doing our best to help all of you make a positive impact on it!

Runaway wealth inequality can sometimes become disturbingly difficult to conceptualize. At moments like that, nothing helps more than the release of the latest stats on corporate CEO compensation, and this week we have some tangible — and enlightening — new figures from the Associated Press.

In 2023, these figures show, average compensation for our big-time chief execs soared 12.6 percent to $16.3 million. Median workers? They saw their wages grow just 4.1 percent. Half the CEOs the AP examined are making at least 196 times more than their median employee.

All those millions cascading into corporate corner offices are causing real harm to the rest of us, as our Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson points out in the AP’s new CEO pay coverage. Average Americans, Sarah notes, are “feeling the pain of inflation more because they’re not seeing their wages go up enough.”

And those wages are not going up fast enough because chief execs are making decisions that prioritize their own paychecks. We’ve had, as the congressional progressive Ro Khanna puts it, “40+ years of broken economic policy that put profits ahead of working people.”

We hope you all enjoyed your — hopefully — long holiday weekend. Now we’re swinging into that just-before-summer stretch that can feel like a relative lull. But here at Inequality.org we have a lot of exciting projects in the works that we’re looking forward to sharing with you in the weeks and months ahead.

In the meantime, we are always curious about what aspects of — and issues around — economic inequality resonate most powerfully with you. Are you, for instance, most interested in tracking what our world’s wealthiest are doing to lock in their vast fortunes or more eager to get the scoop on how working people worldwide are fighting to claw back the profits that their labor is generating?

The maldistribution of our world’s wealth will always be an incredibly broad issue. We welcome your insights on new angles our Inequality.org ought to be exploring!

So if you see something we’ve been missing in our coverage of our ongoing era-defining inequality crisis, please let us know. Just respond to one of these weekly emails. Thanks so much!

If we're going to celebrate the labor movement's wins, we also have to acknowledge labor’s losses. Last week, 2,642 workers at a Mercedes plant in Alabama voted not to make the United Auto Workers their bargaining agent. That vote came just a month after workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee gave labor its biggest organizing victory in the South in years.

Welcome to the reality of organizing. The deck in the South remains horribly stacked against labor. In Alabama, as veteran organizer Jane McAlevey noted in The Nation, “top business, political, and community leadership” followed “every nefarious tactic” in the anti-union book to beat back the UAW. In the drive for union workplaces — and a more equal America — wins will never come easy.

The silver lining in the Alabama vote? Despite the fierce anti-union pressure from on high, 2,054 workers at the Mercedes facility voted for unionization, a showing that would have been unthinkable until recently.

“I’ve worked at Mercedes for nearly 25 years and have been part of multiple efforts over those years to build a union,” Mercedes worker Jeremy Kimbrell wrote. “This was the first time we got to a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election on whether to unionize.”

What’s become most important now: to keep fighting — for better workplaces and, ultimately, a more just economy for us all.

Not so long ago, our planet’s wealthiest did most all their grand touring via cruise ships and private rail cars. Today’s rich zip around on their own private jets.

Our Inequality.org team has been closely tracking just how much this luxury private jet travel has been costing the rest of us, and we’ve just released a new report — Greenwashing the Skies: How the Private Jet Lobby Uses ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuels’ as a Marketing Ploy — on our work.

This new research comes as Congress is considering a reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration budget that could well allocate significant tax-dollar funding to developing new alternate private jet fuels. Our report’s take on that prospect: Any new moves to subsidize private jet travel on a warming planet would be absolutely indefensible.

“We should bring a high level of skepticism,” as the report notes, “to the claims that alternative fuels will be a timely substitute for kerosene-based jet fuels.”

Hopes for “sustainable” jet fuel, highlights the Guardian coverage of our report, will always be “magical thinking.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the wealth spectrum, we're closely watching the union election at Mercedes in Alabama this week. For more on that pivotal campaign, read the joint IPS-Alabama Arise op-ed we've published in newspapers across the country over the past week.

This week we’re sharing a new report on worker injuries at Amazon, an issue I used to report on closely.

I've spoken to dozens of Amazon workers about their experiences at warehouses where they repeat the same rote operations hundreds and hundreds of times to make sure that Americans can get their packages ever more quickly.

Some of those workers have told me about how Amazon keeps track of any “time off task,” a measure often used to discipline or even fire workers. Almost all of the workers I’ve interviewed have mentioned, unprompted, the fears they have that they could be permanently damaging their bodies on the job.

How do these issues tie into our focus on inequality? Well, for starters, Amazon’s workers — despite making so little working full-time that some have had to resort to living in cars — are making their execs outrageously wealthy. Amazon has become our nation’s second-largest private employer. Amazon’s workers could hardly be more central to our labor movement’s struggle for a fairer society.

As always, if you have any thoughts, criticisms, or compliments, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me by responding directly to this email.

May Day greetings from the Bay! We’re wrapping up our visit to the West Coast to attend the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute’s first-ever Fixing Philanthropy Summit.

This Summit has brought together thoughtful people from every corner of the philanthropic sector, from the heads of established foundations boldly experimenting with new tactics to directors of scrappy nonprofits and resourceful-yet-fairly-exasperated grantees. We all stand committed to making meaningful change in charitable giving’s status quo — and leveraging our collective power.

The need for charitable change has now become more urgent than ever. With inequality peaking, overextended working charities are doing their best to patch our disinvested social safety net. Meanwhile, 41 cents out of every dollar donated to charity is landing in private foundations or donor-advised funds, the poorly regulated go-betweens shortchanging working charities and our nation’s tax base.

We’ve launched the Donor Revolt for Charity Reform to change all this, to boost payouts and transparency and democratize giving. Is it morally justifiable, as former long-time Wallace Global Fund director Ellen Dorsey asked during the Summit, for foundations to disburse just 5 percent of their assets annually when their endowment returns far surpass that rate? What are we squirreling our acorns away for?

If you want to join the 270 — and counting! — signatories of the Donor Revolt for Charity Reform, we’d love to have you. Or if you, like the vast majority of us, don’t use charitable intermediaries but would like to see philanthropy take more equitable shape, you can join our call to Stop Hoarding Charity Dollars. In solidarity,

The mood at the Labor Notes conference — a once every two years meeting of union activists — was jubilant this weekend, and not only because it broke records by bringing together nearly 5,000 attendees (including me). The main cause for celebration in Chicago came from 600 miles to the south in Chattanooga, where workers at a Volkswagen facility overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers union.

This historic victory marks a major inroad to new organizing in the South, long a bastion of anti-union policies and low union density. The UAW has been reinvigorated since the union's leadership was replaced last year, orchestrating a successful strike and contract negotiation with the Big Three automakers and ramping up new plant organizing.

The union's new president, Shawn Fain, was elected into power by just the kind of democratic reform that Labor Notes and its attendees are best known for.

"It's not a CEO that's going to save us," Fain said to close out the three day conference. "It's not a president that's going to save us. It's not me and it's not you. It's us. It's a united working class is how we're going to win!"

Labor notched two other big wins this week that we'd be remiss not to mention. First, the Department of Labor expanded the field of workers eligible for guaranteed overtime. And then the Federal Trade Commission issued a rule banning non-compete clauses, a tool used by employers to artificially restrict the freedom of workers to switch jobs.

I started off last week watching the total eclipse from the "Northeast Kingdom" of Vermont — an unforgettable experience, despite a terrible traffic jam.

The next day I was in Washington, D.C. for a conference hosted by the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth individuals committed to reducing inequality by, among other things, paying their fair share in taxes.

I was a speaker at the conference, an event ambitiously titled “How to Fix Everything.” I also heard from advocates and experts at the forefront of issues ranging from taxing the rich and raising the wage floor to limiting the influence of our wealthiest on our democracy. A recording of the conference, which was live streamed by 1.7 million viewers, can be found here.

As Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne said: “It will be hard to fix America, but it’s not that complicated.” It all comes down to reversing the grotesque concentration of wealth and power that we attempt to chronicle for you everyday at Inequality.org and in this newsletter.

Here at Inequality.org we’re constantly advocating for raising tax rates on — and closing loopholes for — our nation's wealthiest. But increasing tax revenue from our richest won’t help us much unless those dollars are going to programs that make the lives of the vast majority of us significantly better and more secure.

The National Priorities Project, a venture of the same Institute for Policy Studies that hosts Inequality.org, recently released an analysis of where our tax dollars went in 2023. The results are concerning — the average tax payer payed over $5,000 toward militarism, including nearly $1,800 to private defense contractors.

Instead of funding already wealthy corporate execs and shareholders, that money could be going to programs like food stamps or child tax credits, underfunded efforts that keep Americans afloat in difficult times.

Making our tax system more equitable has to go hand-in-hand with reforming how our government chooses to use its vast resources. We can have a better future.

Welcome to April, also known as tax month. This time of year we pay particularly close attention to who’s pulling down the big bucks in the United States. The hottest new figure along that line out so far this month: 813, the number of American billionaires as per the latest annual figures from Forbes.

Our own Omar Ocampo has just taken a closer look at how that total stacks up against previous years. His read: Our rich just keep getting fabulously richer.

We're also keeping a close eye on this year’s corporate tax payments. Our recent report, co-published with Americans for Tax Fairness, identifies 35 U.S. corporations that actually pay their top execs more than they pay in federal taxes.

On the brighter side, this year may very well turn out to be the last one that many of us are compelled to use for-profit tax preparation systems like TurboTax. The IRS is piloting its own direct filing system in a dozen states and could be extending the service to more Americans in our next federal tax cycle.

One last note before your dive into the content of this week's newsletter: This Friday is the deadline for applying for one of the new Institute for Policy Studies Henry Wallace Fellowship grants. Interested in joining our team this summer? Learn more about the program and applying here.

This March marks four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid a global pandemic. Things have certainly changed since then. We rarely see masks anymore in crowded spaces, and those massive Covid-era investments in the American social safety net have all but expired. But one other pandemic-era dynamic — the concentration of America’s wealth — has just kept accelerating.

Our own Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo have been tracking that concentration closely over the last four years. The United States, they point out, now hosts 737 billionaires worth a combined $5.529 trillion. For those of you keeping score at home, that tidy sum falls just a few billion shy of the $6.1 trillion the entire United States government spent in 2023.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! One positive Covid-era change — the surge in labor organizing — has yet to fade. Union density remains far below its peak in the middle of the last century, but successful organizing campaigns at Starbucks, energetic strikes in Hollywood, and landmark new contracts for U.S. autoworkers show that today’s labor movement still has plenty of juice.

Major moments like pandemics remind us that social structures and trends that seem set in stone can be more pliable than we assume. Our challenge: to make sure that the changes that stick end up being the ones that lead us to a more equitable society, not the ones that deepen existing harms.

An important part of Inequality.org’s mission is to get information about ever growing wealth disparities in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Lately we’ve been having some major successes on that front.

Over the past week, dozens of news outlets, from national media like USA Today and Fortune to local newspapers like the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Ohio Capital Journal, have covered our new report exposing companies that pay their top executives more than they pay in federal income taxes.

The impact of all these stories? Let’s just say that our nation’s PR flacks at corporations dodging taxes and overpaying CEOs did not have a great week.

Our charity reform work is also garnering major new media attention. The Boston Globe recently published a front-page “above the fold” investigation into “donor-advised funds” that relied heavily on our research.

Getting good media coverage obviously only gets us so far. The fight for greater equality takes much more than high-profile acknowledgements that things have gone wrong. That fight takes the inspired advocacy of egalitarians at every level, and this week, as always, we have plenty of examples to share.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Biden responded to widespread public outrage over wealth concentration by pledging to force big corporations pay their fair share of taxes. Today, we’re releasing a blockbuster report showing just how outrageously unfair our current tax system has become.

Our key finding: Dozens of large and profitable U.S. corporations are actually paying their top executives more than they’re paying in federal income taxes.

“Tax avoidance and excessive executive pay aren’t unrelated,” Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson explains in a Boston Globe story about the report. “Executives have incentives to push for tax cuts because they can reap the windfall.”

Issued jointly with Americans for Tax Fairness, our new report has also garnered coverage today in USA Today, CBS News, and The Guardian.

We have more from Anderson below on how to tackle the intertwined problems of corporate tax dodging and excessive CEO pay.

President Joe Biden will deliver his third State of the Union address tomorrow night, with political analysts expecting the president to use this prime-time opportunity to contrast what his administration has accomplished with the White House record of Donald Trump, his nearly certain opponent in next fall’s election.

Here at Inequality.org, we’re hoping Biden will reaffirm his commitment to policies that aim to rein in our runaway wealth concentration, measures like minimum tax rates on billionaire incomes and restrictions on stock-buyback profiteering.

We’d also like to see Biden use his State of the Union guest list to highlight those Americans fighting at the front lines of our inequality crisis. What a message the president could send by inviting into the First Lady’s box champions for economic justice like a worker from the organizing effort at Alabama’s non-union Mercedes plant or an activist involved in the landmark new Starbucks bargaining pact.

And how about adding to that guest list some of the advocates driving the wealth tax campaigns now underway in several states, creative efforts that mirror the president’s own billionaire tax proposal.

In this week’s issue, meanwhile, we have plenty more on ongoing creative efforts to narrow our nation’s maldistribution of income and wealth — and the latest about exciting new polling on the need to reform our charitable giving structure.

If talk of a government shutdown makes you feel like it’s Groundhog Day, you’re not alone. This Friday will mark the first in a new pair of deadlines for federal appropriations bills. Absent a deal, crucial agencies and programs will begin to go dark. What would even a partial shutdown mean for the average American?

The federal departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development, for starters, would all run out of funding. Shutting down these departments would shutter veteran outreach offices and bring travel delays, discontinue crucial food support programs and leave families missing housing loans.

And any shutdowns, of course, would leave massive numbers of federal workers and their families without paychecks.

None of this pain has to be — and wouldn’t be if we taxed our rich at meaningful rates. And if we did that taxing, we could as a nation start meeting all our public needs, including, as we note below, the need for a vibrant public media presence.

The giant bank holding company Capital One has just announced its intentions to acquire Discover Financial. The $35-billion deal, if approved, would create a new behemoth in the credit card industry.

Providing credit card services has proved extremely lucrative for Capital One and the other dozen largest companies in the field. A recent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report found that these firms consistently charge higher interest rates than smaller, local issuers.

Letting Capital One and Discover join up would further limit consumer choice in credit cards and increase already arduous interest burdens on American families.

But the pending deal can’t go through until government antitrust agencies give their approval. That provides a golden opportunity for the current crop of enforcers to make good on their promise to tackle corporate consolidation, especially in the financial sector. We’ll be watching this case closely.

In the meantime, this week we have coverage of the promising new tax-filing alternative to the for-profit tax-prep industry and a look at an imaginative struggle for a more promising public transit future.

This Valentine’s Day we’re hoping you can make a little more space in your heart for the workers fighting to be justly compensated for keeping this country running.

Case in point: the rideshare drivers who might have helped you get to your Super Bowl parties or might be delivering that special dinner for a Valentine’s date tonight. To protest the ever-growing slice that Uber and Lyft take from their transactions, these drivers organized a multi-city strike for today.

“This is the bubbling up of anger and complete degradation of drivers all over the country,” says Nicole Moore, a part-time Lyft worker and the president of Rideshare Drivers United, a Los Angeles based group helping lead the action.

Drivers in 44 cities across the United States and Canada are turning off their apps for the day and joining pickets calling for pay hikes.

“We have to build driver power to overcome this rampant business model that is designed to destroy labor rights and destroy drivers' lives,” Moore added.

In this week’s newsletter, we examine solutions to the stock buyback loophole that enriches top corporate execs and explore the critical importance of keeping a federal program for women with young kids adequately funded.

We don’t need to tell you that turnout will be absolutely key to our national election outcomes in 2024. But fewer people know that higher-income voting rates have always eclipsed lower-income participation, and when we factor in our campaign finance system that privileges the wealthy, it’s no surprise that politicians pay a lot more attention to their richest constituents.

The Poor People’s Campaign has just announced plans for an ambitious push to revamp this inequitable political landscape. Campaign activists are aiming to mobilize 15 million poor and low-income voters in the lead-up to Election Day, an effort to center the concerns of poor people in our political debate — and hike broad-based voter turnout at the polls this November.

For years, the Institute for Policy Studies has served as the research arm of the Poor People’s Campaign. To support this year’s mobilization, our colleagues produced detailed fact sheets — for the nation and all 50 states — that highlight the most pressing inequities America’s poor and low-income people face.

Congress has repeatedly blocked a raise in the minimum wage while greenlighting tax cuts that have helped make U.S. billionaires $2.2 trillion richer since 2017. Check out more about the Poor People’s Campaign below and find out online how you can participate.

Elon Musk and other overpaid CEOs probably didn’t sleep well last night, but our colleague Sarah Anderson is supremely well rested.

Sarah, one of our nation’s leading CEO pay critics, has faced countless attacks for her work denouncing a system that lets top execs channel unlimited sums into their own pockets. Apologists for these execs have called her “un-American.”

Late yesterday, a Delaware judge struck a powerful blow against those execs and their toadies. The judge voided the compensation contract that had made Tesla’s Elon Musk the richest man in the entire world.

The New York Times promptly highlighted Sarah’s reaction. This “incredibly important decision,” Sarah told the Times, “establishes that there is such a thing as excessive compensation.”

Musk’s now-voided 2018 contract — a stock-award package worth as much as $55.8 billion — launched a mega-grant wave at other major firms. With this landmark Delaware ruling, CEOs who rode that wave have to be wondering if they’ll become the target of the next lawsuit over excessive compensation.

Stay tuned for more from Inequality.org on this major breaking story in the battle to reverse our extreme inequality.

Hello readers! My name is Chris Mills Rodrigo, and I’m beyond excited to be taking over the reins as the new managing editor here at Inequality.org.

Fans of Bella DeVaan, this newsletter’s excellent steward, can rest easy. She’s going to continue pitching in on Inequality.org while she takes on a new Institute for Policy Studies role focused on charity reform.

A quick word about me: Before coming to IPS, I covered the tech industry for The Hill newspaper. That beat’s biggest story? The ongoing, staggering concentration of wealth and influence at the tippy-top of Silicon Valley, a wealth and influence essentially amassed at the expense of tech workers and users alike.

Thankfully, I had plenty of company challenging high tech’s most exploitative habits. I had the privilege of profiling myriad advocacy efforts to wrest a fair share of corporate earnings back from execs and reported on everything from union drives at Amazon to campaigns aiming to reclassify rideshare drivers.

Now on the Inequality.org team, I’m hoping to keep shining a spotlight on the worst excesses of our wealthiest — and keep elevating the activists so dedicated to ushering in a more just society for us all.

Need to reach me with a comment or a question? Just drop me an email at chris@ips-dc.org. Working together, we can forge a more equal world.

They’ve parked their private jets, whipped out their Loro Piana cashmere, and started pontificating about AI. Billionaires, political leaders, and corporate scions are convening once again this week high up in the Alps for the annual World Economic Forum.

But this year’s Davos gathering has an elephant in the room, and we don’t mean global geopolitical fears over the GOP’s presidential frontrunner.

That elephant: the dire global need to start redistributing wealth. At a forum that’s made “rebuilding trust” its central 2024 theme, writes our co-editor Sam Pizzigati in this week’s issue, redistribution shouldn’t remain a topic that Davos’ talking heads conspicuously neglect. Yet here we are.

Our affluent friends at the Patriotic Millionaires have been pleading to be properly taxed by the Davos set for years. Exasperated by the hold up, they have a simple message for their peers: “We’d be proud to pay more.”

New polling results show that strong majorities of the richest 5 percent in G20 countries would be proud to pay more, too. They’d support higher taxes on themselves if the revenue goes to spending for the common good.

How much money could our world’s richest spare at tax time? A new Oxfam report entitled Inequality Inc. shows just how starkly our economic systems have worsened inequality. Since 2020, our billionaires have become $3.3 trillion richer. We have more this week on how we can bust up extreme wealth concentration.

One final note: We have a new managing editor coming on board at Inequality.org, Chris Mills Rodrigo. I’m excited to introduce him to you all next week — and to tell you about my new role here on our Inequality.org team. Stay tuned!

Happy 2024! We hope you’ve had a wonderful start to the new year.

On our desks this week: the newly released Who Pays? report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a comprehensive state-by-state analysis that makes for a perfect incentive to get going on a year of tax justice advocacy.

In 44 states, this ITEP study finds, tax structures exacerbate inequality. In 41 of those states, the top 1 percent are even paying taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. And in most all of these states, the lower the income, the higher the overall effective state and local tax rate turns out to be. You can check out how your state is faring on ITEP’s website.

On the plus side: Six states — and the District of Columbia — are actually using their tax codes to reduce inequality. What can we learn from these states? Plenty. All these jurisdictions have in place highly progressive income tax brackets, offer targeted and refundable low-income tax credits, and rely much less on regressive consumption taxes.

“The wide variety of results seen across states in this study,” conclude the authors of the new Who Pays? report, “proves that regressive state and local taxation is not inevitable.”

We agree. How we tax at every level will always be, as Who Pays? notes, “a policy choice.” Here’s to making transformative egalitarian choices in 2024!