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THIS WEEK
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Pundits are giving credit for last week’s stunning defeat of the kill-Obamacare push to the three Republican senators who opposed the final repeal bill gasp. But the real heroes happen to be the countless activists nationwide who refused to be steamrolled and even put their bodies on the line. Bravo!
Unfortunately, the plutocrats aren’t stopping to lick their wounds. Next up on the Trump White House agenda: a tax cut for the wealthy that can only be described as a monumental cash grab by the ultra rich. Will the social movement that materialized to protect health care come out to block this latest attack? Inequality.org will be tracking that story.
Chuck Collins, for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team |
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INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
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FACES ON THE FRONTLINES
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| A NAFTA Rewrite Only Oligarchs Will Likely Love |
| The Trump administration recently unveiled its goals for renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite the President’s campaign promises, his new NAFTA gameplan would actually do little to help U.S. workers — and even less to reverse the trade pact’s harmful impact in Mexico, where the 1994 deal has destroyed the rural sector while creating huge economic opportunities for oligarchs like billionaire Carlos Slim. Mexican activist and writer Malú Huacuja del Toro is calling for a new agreement that puts the interests of ordinary people first. |
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WORDS OF WISDOM
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT
OF THE WEEK
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Why JPMorgan’s Chief Not Singing ‘Hail to the Chief’
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JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the world’s top-paid banker the last two years, earlier this month unleashed what one business media outlet is calling an “expletive-tinged rant” on the “embarrassment” he now feels as an American traveling abroad. What has Dimon so riled up? Not the antics of Donald Trump. Dimon is raging, as economist and former bank regulator William Black points out, “because Trump has been too slow in completing the destruction of those things that once made America great,” everything from federal regulations that protect consumers to progressive income tax rates. |
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MUST READS
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On Inequality.org this week, Sarah Anderson updates readers on the ongoing effort to block the CEO-worker pay ratio disclosure mandate put in place by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. America’s corporate honchos are going into hyperdrive in hopes the gap between their absurd compensation and what their typical workers make never goes public. Chuck Collins writes on a similar effort by the wealthy to protect themselves from public ire, this time over the estate tax, a levy they’re trying to repeal by erroneously claiming that the estate tax endangers the family farm and not their private jets.
Elsewhere on the web, Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First makes the case for ending the tax giveaways that this past week briefly helped make Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in the world. Billionaires like Bezos are exerting an outsized influence on public policy, not just business, David Callahan points out in a piercing look at how our philanthropic empires are undermining democracy.
You’ve heard about the glass ceiling. We now also, Abigail McKnight and Richard Reeves argue on the London School of Economics blog, have a “glass floor” that’s keeping those at the top in place and deepening inequality. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, meanwhile, reminds us that giving tax cuts to the wealthy serves no public benefit whatsoever.
So how can we organize to oppose tax cuts for the wealthy? Activists in the United States, Chuck Collins points in Yes! magazine, have a lot they can learn from their fellow egalitarians in the UK’s new Momentum network. |
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GREED AT A GLANCE
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TOO MUCH
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| Will the Democratic Party Go Bolder or Backwards? |
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Few Americans are lining up to actively oppose the policy prescriptions in the new “Better Deal” agenda that congressional Democrats unveiled last week. But few Americans are rushing to cheer this new agenda either. One big reason: The “Better Deal” never zeroes in on the greed grab of our corporate executive class that’s squeezing working Americans at every turn. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more on an agenda that’s less daring on one notable front than the agenda that candidate Bill Clinton ran on a quarter-century ago. |
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A FINAL FIGURE
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