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THIS WEEK
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Welcome to the new Inequality.org weekly! We have, as you’ve probably noticed, a totally new look. But we’ve made much more than cosmetic changes. We’ve rethought our entire Inequality.org online presence. Our goal: to outfit you with the information you need to better understand our deeply unequal world — and help change it!
Many of you have asked us to make it easier to share the facts and stats that appear each week in Inequality.org. The new graphics you’ll find in this week’s newsletter, all optimized for Facebook sharing, move us in that direction.
We’ll also be continuing to highlight each week the inequality-related work of our world’s most insightful analysts and activists. A good bit of that will be appearing on our new Inequality.org website. Take a look — and let us know what you think.
Thanks!
Chuck Collins, for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org editorial team.
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INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
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FACES ON THE FRONTLINES
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At the NAACP, Making the Inequality-Climate Change Link
In Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, struggling oyster-fishing communities have no “fortified” levees. Five years ago, these communities all flooded when Hurricane Isaac hit. Why hadn’t the Army Corps of Engineers ever fortified their levees? Areas with low property values simply don’t qualify for full protection. The NAACP’s Jacqui Patterson has plenty of stories like Plaquemines, tragic tales that dramatize just how inequality and environmental degradation so deeply intersect. But Patterson does more than tell stories. She’s helping communities across the United States organize.
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WORDS OF WISDOM
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
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Why are so many folks in the 99 percent fuming? Has to be, says billionaire Mark Mobius of Templeton hedge fund fame, the “barriers” that “government” puts in the way of the “small guy” who wants “to come up and create something new.” This Mobius rant against government regulation at the hedge fund industry’s just-completed annual blowout in struck journalist Hamilton Nolan as wonderfully revealing:
“From a billionaire investor’s perspective, the thought process of the frustrated common man” turns out to be “remarkably similar to the thought process of a billionaire investor.” Forget corporate downsizing. Laid-off factory workers, Mobius seems certain, are actually raging at “government bureaucracy that is impeding business development!”
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MUST READS
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What could Melania’s husband learn — about inequality — from Melania’s homeland? Turns out quite a lot. Dr. Steven Bezruchka has that story on Inequality.org... Also new on Inequality.org: Stewart Lansley explores the inequality-busting potential of citizen wealth funds, and Oxford geographer Danny Dorling argues we need to focus more on the “equality effect,” the positive impact that greater equality makes on nearly every aspect of our lives... The negative effects of inequality, add British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, do extensive long-term psychological damage that we’re only beginning to understand.
Elsewhere online: Former CEO Steven Clifford joins with Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson in Fortune, America’s premiere business magazine, to urge new tax policies and government contracting rules that reward firms with reasonable executive pay levels...
In a plutocratic world, can a daringly egalitarian candidate win national office? The British Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn came surprisingly close last week, despite a relentlessly vile corporate media assault on his candidacy. The media watchdog group FAIR has chillingly detailed that attack...
Trickle-down workaholism? That’s how software developer David Hanson, in a new essay, tags the dominant culture of the venture capitalists who drive Silicon Valley. Their unspoken motto: “Make me rich or die tryin.’”
Chicagoland’s property tax system, the Chicago Tribune reports, has for decades systematically handed “huge financial breaks” to the area’s richest and punished “those who have the least, particularly people living in minority communities.”
What if public bodies had to take the goal of reducing inequality into account before they sign off on any key decision? In one nation, Lucy Shaddock and Koldo Casla point out, public bodies already have that responsibility...
China’s economy is becoming more like America’s, new wealth distribution research from Thomas Piketty and his colleagues shows, shows, and not in a good way.
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GREED AT A GLANCE
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TOO MUCH
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Fun at the Frontier: High-Tech Fanboys Have a New Narrative
The world has a hot new explanation for inequality that’s warming the hearts of the deep pockets who’ve benefited the most from the inequality we already have. Should we be worrying about this new explanation? Some top global trade union leaders certainly think so. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati explains why.
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A FINAL FIGURE
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