2022 Inequality Weekly Newsletter Archive

Our indispensable guide to the latest on our unequal world, delivered every Monday to your inbox.

Amazon Prime members this week, says Amazon, will be treated to what the company describes as “two days of epic deals” on July 12 and 13. But just who, we wonder, is really going to get the epic deals “Prime Day” promises?

Surely not the Amazon warehouse and fulfillment center employees tasked with completing 10 hours of unrelenting physical labor with just two 30-minute breaks. Amazon workers have described Prime Day as a workday as busy as any December holiday rush, only with punishing heat.

Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, won’t have to sweat any to profit from Prime Day. Bezos, while no longer Amazon’s CEO, still holds an 11 percent share of the company. Making billions while sitting in boardrooms and megayachts while your workers make $16 per hour slaving away in warehouses — now that rates as the real epic deal!

Economist Richard Wolff is urging us this Prime Day to declare our independence from Amazon. Notes the veteran analyst: “Immense corporations like Amazon need a change.” The grand fortune of Jeff Bezos, he adds, simply “stands in too large a contrast with the difficult economic conditions imposed on his company’s employees.”

We agree! For more on our outrageously rich, stay tuned for new findings coming next week from our Charity Reform Initiative on how our nation’s wealthiest are thoroughly distorting American philanthropy.

Friday’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — after nearly 50 years of precedent — still hangs heavy over the nation this Monday.

As our Economic Policy Institute friends note, the first states now banning abortion just happen to be states with the lowest minimum wages and the most tight-fisted policies on Medicaid and other core family-support programs. Analysts often frame abortion as a social “culture-war” issue. But abortion rights actually go hand-in-hand with economic progress. Any loss of abortion rights means the loss of economic security and mobility for millions, as we lay out on our Inequality.org fact page.

The news today can feel bleak, but we do have some inspirational moments of light to share in this week’s issue, most notably a stunning political victory over inequality in Colombia and continuing good news on the burgeoning labor movement taking hold all across the United States.

Happy Juneteenth! Many of us helped celebrate our newest federal holiday this past weekend at the Poor People’s Campaign Moral Assembly in Washington, D.C. Around 100,000 people overall converged on the capital to demand an end to systemic racism, poverty and inequality, the war economy, and ecological devastation.

Rev. William Barber, the Poor People’s Campaign co-chair, invited our Institute for Policy Studies colleague Sarah Anderson and Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz on stage to thank our organizations for research support over the past several years.

“The worst thing you can do in a movement is be loud and wrong,” Barber told the assembly. “These people have committed resources so that when we ride, we ride deep. When we talk, we talk sure. When we speak, we speak clear. We promised them that if they keep researching and writing, we’d build you an army. And that army is here.”

We’re proud to be part of the inspiring Poor People’s Campaign movement — and see our research on our nation’s maldistribution wealth turn up on placards at events like Saturday’s assembly.

We have more below on Saturday’s rally and our latest billionaire wealth report, a close look at the ultra rich of Massachusetts, where a tax-the-rich measure will be on the ballot this November.

Our team has been in the middle of a media frenzy this past week, doing interviews with dozens of outlets ranging from the New York Times and Fortune to CNN and ABC News. Why all the media interest? The release of our latest annual Executive Excess report on corporate CEO pay.

Our 28th Executive Excess edition has clearly struck a nerve. With profits way up in 2021, corporations had an opportunity last year to make a big leap towards greater pay equity. They could have given their workers a fair reward for their heroic efforts during the pandemic. Instead, Corporate America continued to fixate on pumping up CEO pay.

One of our most shocking findings: Two-thirds of U.S. low-wage firms that cut worker pay last year spent tens of billions inflating CEO pay via stock buybacks. At Lowe’s, the millions blown on this stock manipulation maneuver would have been enough to give every one of their 325,000 workers a $40,000 raise! Instead, median pay at Lowe’s last year fell 7.6 percent to $22,697 while the CEO pocketed $18 million.

The good news in all this: President Biden has the power to crack down on runaway CEO pay, without waiting for Congress to act. Read more about what he — and you — can do below. Thanks!

Across the pond, UK workers last week enjoyed four days off to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, an extravaganza that marked 70 years of Elizabeth II’s reign. But after years of pandemic and deepening wealth inequality, a good chunk of the British public found this year’s celebrations — and their hefty pricetag — a bit too ironic to stomach.

British commentator Marina Purkiss captured that irony neatly in a retort to celebrity journalist Piers Morgan: “Government ministers are telling people they need to tighten their belts, to choose between heating and eating, and you’re saying it’s not at all tone deaf to force cash-strapped local governments to spend a fortune on these frivolities?”

A valid question to ask at a time when British child poverty now ranks among the highest in Western Europe while CEO pay levels in the UK have returned to their much more than ample pre-pandemic levels.

In the United States, of course, we have our own inequality issues to work through, with CEO pay high up on our list, and no one has been working longer to expose our CEO pay outrages than Inequality.org’s Sarah Anderson. She’s been the lead on the Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess annual report that's been published ever since Bill Clinton sat in the White House. Sarah will be briefing the media tomorrow on the latest Executive Excess. The focus: CEO-worker pay gaps at the U.S. firms that report the lowest worker wages. We’ll have lots more on that next week!

“As a nation we must ask: When in God’s name will we stand up to the gun lobby?” asked President Biden hours after a gunman murdered 19 elementary school students and two teachers last week.

A valid question in a nation where a mega-billion-dollar gun industry has left the United States a society with more guns than people. The next few weeks will be crucial in deciding how we want to move forward as a nation. Will our elected leaders divorce themselves from the cash of the gun lobby? Or will we continue along on business as usual?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, we have millionaires protesting our stunningly unequal global status quo at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. This week’s issue has that story, plus a debunking of the myth of the millionaire tax exodus and plenty more.

And if you’re looking for a Memorial Day weekend read that can serve as an appetizer to our upcoming annual Executive Excess CEO pay report, check out our Sarah Anderson in the Washington Post.

“This pandemic has caused almost incomprehensible loss in our country,” argue Institute for Policy Studies executive director Tope Folarin and Rev. Dr. William J. Barber Il, co-chair for the Poor People’s Campaign, in the latest issue of Newsweek. “One thing we must never lose is our determination to treat its pre-existing conditions.”

Those pre-existing conditions — greed, excess, and the political choices that perpetuate these two menaces — have left over 140 million of us living below the poverty line. This outcome has been a policy decision.

To address this policy decision, we need a multiracial, moral movement to make the voices of real people heard over the rustling of dollar bills. This coming June 18, to elevate these voices, the Poor People’s Campaign and thousands of supporters will rally on the National Mall for a Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. You’re invited. Hope to see you there!

This past week’s most sobering news: Less than two and a half years into the global pandemic, over one million U.S. lives have been lost to Covid-19, a staggering number roughly equal to how many Americans died in the Civil War and World War II combined.

More grim news: Frontline workers exempt from stay-at-home orders — Americans working in food service and health care, transportation and agriculture — turned out to be nearly twice as likely to die from Covid.

Meanwhile, our CEOs and other top corporate execs have spent the pandemic years becoming ever more comfortable. According to new Wall Street Journal analysis, the median CEO pay package at top US corporations reached $14.7 million in 2021, a sixth straight annual record. Here at the Institute for Policy Studies, we’re now finishing up our own annual report on CEO pay. So please keep your eyes peeled for that.

We close out this week’s intro with a request to help rein in global oligarchy: U.S. banks currently must follow rules designed to ferret out dirty money. Wealth hoarding enablers like investment advisors, art dealers, and accountants, on the other hand, can legally help kleptocrats launder dirty money. The ENABLERS Act now before Congress can plug this loophole. Please urge your member of Congress to support this bill, then forward this to two of your friends. Thanks!

The Mother’s Day we celebrated yesterday always shines a spotlight on the many, many injustices mothers and caregivers face in the United States. We remain, for example, the only industrialized country without a federal paid family and medical leave law on the books. And with the Supreme Court poised to kill Roe v. Wade, our cost of childcare is soaring, amid corporate greed grabs that are escalating core costs of living.

All of this can all feel unmanageable at times, but we do have solutions for the compounding crises that make care work so undervalued. For more info on ideas and resources, check out our Inequality.org fact pages on gender economic inequality and inequality and the care economy.

Meanwhile, in this issue, we take a look at climate change’s impact on the care economy and feature a take-down on last week’s “Gilded Glamour” Met Gala. Also this week: new data that reveal some fascinating insights on how CEO-worker pay gaps vary so widely from one nation to another.

Today's spot in the calendar might not mean much to a lot of us. But this month’s first Monday means everything for the elite deep pockets invited to tonight’s annual Met Gala extravaganza at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dozens of celebrities, philanthropists, and other powerbrokers will be descending upon the Met for tonight’s event. Tickets go for $35,000 each, with tables running up to $300,000. This year’s Met Gala theme: “Gilded Glamour,” a nod to that era of American history when wealth dynasties like the Astors, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts reigned supreme.

But we don’t need a Met gala to remind us about Gilded Age splendor. We’re living right now through another Gilded Age. Our richest 0.01 percent — around 18,000 U.S. families — have actually surpassed the historic wealth levels reached in the first Gilded Age.

Let’s end this week’s intro the only appropriate way we can: with a call to action! The World Economic Forum — another big-time rendezvous for the ridiculously rich — is coming up in Davos later this month, and our friends over at Fight Inequality are asking people to mobilize in support of taxing the wealthy. Why not take a moment to learn more about how you can organize a protest in your community? Thanks!

Depending on when you read this, the richest person in the world — Tesla CEO Elon Musk — may already own the popular and influential global social media platform Twitter. Musk has put together a $46.5 billion financing package to buy out Twitter. No single individual has ever advanced a larger corporate-takeover financing package.

So what does this all mean? Exactly how a potential Musk ownership will impact our everyday experience on an app with over 217 million daily users remains, of course, to be seen. But we can recognize one certainty: We need to keep a close eye on the new ways Musk and the rest of our wealthiest wield their fortunes for social and political influence.

“When billionaires talk about freedom, watch your wallets,” Robert Reichrecently warned. “Behind Elon Musk’s blather about free markets, free speech, and free choice is his goal to be free from accountability.”

On this day, Tax Day, households across the United States are scrambling to file — or extend — their taxes. Members of our billionaire class, on the other hand, are doing a great deal more smiling than scrambling.

Over one recent five-year period, a bombshell ProPublica investigation last week revealed, the 25 richest Americans paid a true tax rate of roughly 3.4 percent. That’s right, you most likely paid a bigger share of your income in taxes than America’s wealthiest.

Most Americans want to change that. According to a just-released survey from Data for Progress, two-thirds of likely voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, think billionaires should be paying more in taxes. What’s preventing those higher taxes? Our society still lacks the political will to take on our super-rich.

But crises, as oligarchy expert Jeffrey Winters details in today’s issue, can provide “real opportunities to restructure institutions and give setbacks to oligarchs and elites.” Let’s see our current moment of crisis, with global inequality at an all-time high, as just such an opportunity — to mobilize against a system that rewards wealth over work.

Off their names alone, you’d think the Patriotic Millionaires and the Poor People’s Campaign would share little in common, with each catering separately to our nation’s richest and poorest. But last Monday both groups gathered in Washington, D.C., and both boldly confronted inequality’s ravages.

Reverend William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign came to D.C. to unveil landmark new research. A Poor People’s Pandemic Report, their new paper, tracks the intersections of poverty, race, and Covid-19 via an interactive county-level map — and shows clearly that poverty has not been “tangential to the pandemic, but deeply embedded in its geography.”

A few blocks away, at the Patriotic Millionaires Oligarchs vs. All of Us conference, experts, movement leaders, and proud class traitors gathered to examine the unjust systems created by and for America’s richest. Extreme concentrations of wealth don’t just protect immoral systems and policies, argued keynoter Abigail Disney. These giant fortunes degrade wealthy people themselves, fostering greed, selfishness, and isolation.

All in all, a Monday for the books! Here at Inequality.org and the Institute for Policy Studies, we stand as proud partners of both organizations. Together, we’re fighting inequality and injustice from both extremes.

On Staten Island last week, workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse made history: By a solid 2,654-to-2,131 margin, these workers voted to form America’s first-ever labor union at an Amazon facility.

This victory represents no small feat. Amazon understands the threat of worker power to its high-speed, high-danger, high-turnover “business as usual.” The company fired on all cylinders to suppress the Staten Island union drive, spending millions at JFK8 proliferating anti-union propaganda and attempting to discredit union leader Chris Smalls, a former worker who the company fired after he walked out to protest unsafe working conditions at the warehouse early on in the pandemic.

But Amazon’s anti-union blitz proved no match for the rank-and-file union organizers’ considerate and thoughtful worker-to-worker approach.

“We’d like to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space,” Smalls quipped after the vote totals went public. “Because while he was up there, we were signing people up.”

Bezos and company vs. the fledgling new Amazon Labor Union offers up a classic example of the “oligarchy vs. all of us” clashes that Inequality.org has been covering for well over a decade. Two of our co-editors are talking today in greater depth on that oligarchy — and the ongoing struggle against it — at a major Patriotic Millionaires conference in Washington, D.C.

Catch the livestream of “Oligarchs vs. All of Us” here, from 2:30-5:30 Eastern, or watch it later at this link.

It’s Budget Day! The Biden administration has just released its annual plan for federal spending. That might not sound particularly exciting, but this year’s plan most definitely rates as a big deal. The new Biden budget includes historic proposals to tackle extreme economic inequality.

What exactly has us excited? We’ve been closely tracking the huge spike in billionaire wealth over the past two years. President Biden has noticed that spike too. We’re excited to see his new budget call for a minimum income tax on our richest 0.01 percent, a move that would squash the scandal of billionaires paying next to nothing in taxes for years on end.

We’re also excited to see Biden pushing back on stock buybacks. This legal form of stock manipulation artificially inflates the value of a company’s shares — and the value of corporate executive stock-based pay. Biden’s plan would prevent CEOs from engineering buybacks that pump up their personal fortunes. More detail to come in upcoming issues!

We’ve now gone months without any real movement on President Biden’s agenda for a more equal America. We have had, to be sure, some recent Capitol Hill successes, most notably on the Postal Service Reform Act we so avidly champion. But the overall absence of transformative change at the federal level, despite growing progressive power, can feel defeating.

So let today’s issue serve as a reminder, for all of us, that we do indeed have many avenues for effectuating egalitarian-minded policy change.

We can be challenging corporate influence on state-elected officials. Or bypassing a gridlocked Congress through executive orders. Or working on common-sense reforms to our nation’s philanthropic system. We have options aplenty. And now spring has finally sprung — made even brighter by permanent daylight savings thanks to much-needed Senate action. 🌼

“Can anyone explain,” mused the always engaging Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price earlier this month, “why a billionaire who takes advantage of the system to exploit other people is called an 'oligarch' in Russia and a 'job creator' in America?”

A valid question to pose, given how our own economic arrangements so often encourage the same oligarchic behaviors we regularly denounce!

This week Chuck is down at the huge SXSW gathering in Austin, Texas, sharing new analysis that explores our domestic oligarchic connections.
Working with the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, we’ve just published new research on how Russian oligarchs are funneling funds to U.S. charities. These oligarchs, including several kleptocrats suspected of interfering in the politics of other nations, have donated hundreds of millions. Some even serve on U.S. charity boards.

Investigations like this highlight the urgent need for changing how our charitable institutions oversee their donations — and how our government oversees our charitable institutions. For more info on how we could accomplish all this, check out our Charitable Giving Reform Initiative.

Increasing taxes on the wealthy — a policy dedicated readers know we stalwartly support — only benefits society when we have mechanisms in place to keep tax-dodgers in check. The IRS has historically been that mechanism. But years of Republican budget cuts have left the agency chronically underfunded. Now the Biden adminmistration is planning a massive hiring spree to increase the IRS workforce by 14 percent.

Will this increase be enough to offset what we like to call the “wealth-defense industry,” that swarm of financial advisors, law firms, and lobbyists dedicated to protecting grand private fortunes? Not likely. Because of the relatively modest pay for civil servants, as we told the Washington Post last week, the IRS will likely continue to be "completely outgunned” by our nation’s enormously well-compensated professional wealth-hiders.

These wealth-hiders have become particularly adept at manipulating philanthropy. In this week’s issue, we’re highlighting our new research on philanthropy and global oligarchic power. Check out our new charts — and help us end the philanthropic perversion the wealth-defense industry has inflicted upon us!

Tomorrow evening, President Joe Biden will deliver his first State of the Union address. He faces a nation with a great deal on its mind, everything from the ongoing conflict in Ukraiane to the rising cost of consumer goods and an impending Supreme Court battle royale.

For our part, we’re hoping the president’s address will commit his administration to using every tool in its executive action toolbox to reduce inequality. The president could, for instance, cancel student debt. He could steer federal contracts to companies that share rewards with workers. He could employ the power of the public purse, as our co-editor Sarah Anderson explains, to reduce economic, gender, and racial inequality.

And just how unequal have we become as a nation? Take a look online at our comprehensive and regularly updated Inequality.org fact pages and draw your own conclusions!

With the inflation rate rising at levels unseen since 1982, corporate execs are saying out loud — to shareholders — something you’ll never hear them say in any widely viewed public forum.

“We want to make sure that we’re not leaving any pricing on the table,” Garth Hankinson, the chief financial officer at Constellation Brands, the company behind popular beers like Modelo and Corona, noted on a recent fourth-quarter earnings call. “We want to take as much as we can...we'll take as much pricing as we think the consumer can absorb.”

Constellation Brands hardly stands alone. Overall U.S. corporate profits are soaring as CEOs the nation over raise prices — far over their costs —to exploit the inflation “moment” that factors like supply-chain disruptions and pent-up consumer demand have created. We have much more than inflation here. We have soaring corporate greed.

The sooner our elected officials tune out the inflation-panic echo chamber — and start moving to rein in monopolies and their grasping corporate chiefs — the sooner we can start building an economy that works for everyone, not just the awesomely affluent at the top.

Watching last night’s Super Bowl, we couldn’t help be hit with an overwhelming sense of “haven’t I seen this before?”

Almost every ad break last night featured a commercial for some cryptocurrency venture. Companies like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX Trading pumped tens of millions of dollars into coveted 30-second ad spots hoping to lure in more customers.

This crypto frenzy bears much more than a passing resemblance to the infamous “Dot-Com” SuperBowl of 2000. Back then, trendy and hot tech companies bought up 20 percent of the big game’s advertising real estate. In just a few years, many of those same companies had either gone belly-up or been swallowed up by other firms.

Here at Inequality.org, we’re still getting up to speed on all things crypto, but our own Sam Pizzigati has a great intro piece below on how crypto hardly rates as the savior for democracy some billionaires tout it to be. Also this week, Valentine’s Day the ultra-rich way and a great deal more!

With U.S. union density at an all-time low, any good news these days on the labor front will always be welcome. Luckily, we don’t have to look too far this week for inspiration.

In Mexico, over 6,000 workers at a massive General Motors plant have just voted overwhelmingly to form an independent union. This gives workers real collective power to advocate for higher wages and improved health and safety standards. This vote also sets us on a path for greater equality on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Inequality.org’s Sam Pizzigati, in a dispatch from Mexico, has more below.

Also in this issue: a new report from our partners at Americans for Tax Fairness on how the already ultra-rich utilize family trusts to avoid taxation and keep their wealth dynasties intact for generations to come.

One of the billionaires we’re highlighting this week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, recently received a flashy write-up in the New York Times. In it, Benioff extolled the virtues of his fellow CEOs. During the pandemic, he proclaimed, chief execs proved “in many, many cases all over the world” to be the “heroes.”

“They’re the ones,” Benioff enthused, “who stepped forward with their financial resources, their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly — not for profit, but to save the world.”

We, of course, know that claim to be patently untrue. We find nothing heroic about big-time CEOs and their fellow ultra-wealthy personally reaping over $2.1 trillion over the course of a global pandemic.

The real heroes throughout this pandemic? Those on the frontlines who lack the privilege to work from the safety of their homes. Each day they show up to work — at sites that range from hospitals and schools to warehouses and restaurants — to keep us afloat. We owe it to them to fight for a country that works for everyone. More on that fight in today’s issue.

We write a lot about billionaires and their wealth here at Inequality.org. But what about the rest of our global ultra-high net worth class? Over 183,000 people worldwide now hold fortunes worth over $50 million. Their combined wealth: $36.4 trillion.

Those trillions lie at the heart of our latest bombshell report, a study conducted with our partners at Oxfam, Patriotic Millionaires, and the Fight Inequality Alliance. Even a relatively modest tax on the world’s richest, our new research finds, would raise $2.52 trillion a year. That revenue would be enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, make enough vaccines for the whole world, and deliver universal health care and social protection for all the citizens of low- and lower middle-income countries.

All this may seem like pure utopian thinking. We don’t, after all, currently have a central global tax authority that could enforce a worldwide tax on wealth. But nations have reached global tax accords before, and they have steps they can take to curb wealth hoarding and tax dodging. Our job? We need to beat the drum for those steps and start building a global economy that works for us all, not just the wealthiest among us.

“The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to our blunders but to our capacity to overcome them,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted in 1968, shortly before his death. “That’s why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us.”

With global inequality reaching unimaginable heights, the barriers we face today can certainly seem immovable. But if Dr. King could remain hopeful, as Dedrick Asante-Muhammad reflects below, so can we.

In this special MLK Day edition of our Inequality.org newsletter, we have more on Dr. King’s legacy as well as some new charts showing how student debt forgiveness can help close the racial wealth gap.

Stay tuned to Inequality.org in the weeks to come. We have a compelling new report on our global wealth divide in the pipeline. In the meantime, if you liked this issue, please consider forwarding it to someone you know and encourage them to subscribe. We always welcome new readers!

“I’m shocked and horrified,” lamented Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of the Blackstone group, shortly after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol one year ago last week.

Schwarzman and other CEOs proceeded to issue a rush of statements labeling the attack “a dark day for our democracy.” But those blasts have always rung chillingly hollow, given how many billionaires have funneled money to the insurrectionists’ most avid enablers. Here at Inequality.org, we called out these billionaires in one of the most read pieces we published in 2021: Expose the Insurrection Financiers.

In today’s issue, our first in 2022, we share insights from two watchdog groups on how we can start holding the insurrectionists and their billionaire enablers truly accountable, while also ensuring our democracy remains strong enough to prevent a second insurrection.