A New Jersey state senator wants the U.S. Coast Guard to send a message to the ultra wealthy: Stop parking your gargantuan mega yachts in front of our Statue of Liberty! Senator Richard Codey has a point. This past spring, one 370-foot yacht blocked the Statute of Liberty view for weeks. That view belongs to us all.

So should our political process. In this week’s issue, we sit down with Matt Bruenig, founder of the just-launched Peoples Policy Project, a new initiative that’s pushing back against the plutocratic strangle-hold on America’s ongoing public policy discourse. We also mark the annual back-to-school rush with a question we wish we didn’t have to ask: Should public school teachers have to panhandle to prep for a new school year?

Chuck Collins, for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

The prospects for passing progressive public policy at the federal level right now seem, um, rather remote. But that’s not stopping Matt Bruenig, the founder of the newly launched People’s Policy Project. Bruenig’s new venture is leveraging his massive personal Twitter following — an audience over a quarter-million strong and counting — with a fundraising strategy based on Bernie Sanders-style small-dollar contributions. Inequality.org co-editor John Hoxie had the opportunity recently to interview Bruenig about his new project — and about what gives him hope in these dismal political times.

On inequality.org this week freelance journalist and documentary-maker Marina Watson Pelaez offers an inside look into our rising global urban gentrification. In Portugal, officials in Lisbon are exploring real solutions.

Also this week, inequality.org is cross-posting the Chuck Collins analysis on the resurgence of “rent to own” housing scams that was originally published in the Guardian. A deeper investigative write-up on this growing practice appeared on Inequality.org last month.

Elsewhere on the web, Matt O’Brien at the Washington Post Wonkblog explains just how phony Trump’s populist claims have become. In Trump’s (feeble) defense, pushing policies to help working families can be hard in a White House flush with billionaire advisors. The richest of these advisors, Carl Icahn, has just joined the exodus from Trumpland after brilliant reporting by Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker exposed Icahn’s outlandish abuse of the public trust.

In the Jacobin, Peter Gowan and Mio Tastas Viktorsson offer us some diversion from the Trumpland dominance of the news cycle by pointing us to an overlooked page in the Swedish history books. They tell the fascinating story of the Meidner Plan, a bold 1970s-era Swedish labor movement move toward sharing corporate capital.

From the Roosevelt Institute, J.W. Mason argues for a more market-centric approach in a readable new report that calls on the Federal Reserve to take a bigger role in reducing inequality through a more expansionary policy.

One simple approach to reducing inequality: Executives can pay themselves less and their workers more.  The Harvard Business School’s Michael Wheeler updates the encouraging story of what happened when Seattle credit-card CEO Dan Price did just that — and raised his lowest employee pay to $70,000 per year

And finally, Ian Walsh really wants you to read The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, the 2009 instant classic by the British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. If you don’t have time for the book right now, don’t miss Walsh’s fine review.