Students at elite schools graduate into elite jobs. Their counterparts elsewhere in higher education graduate into decades of student debt.
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THIS WEEK
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Two years ago, a coalition of community groups launched a campaign called Corporate Backers of Hate, an attempt to name and shame the companies that profit off the many dehumanizing policies of the Trump administration. Last week, the campaign won a giant victory when JPMorgan Chase became the first major bank to stop financing private prison and immigrant detention companies.
This win comes thanks to tenacious immigrants-rights activists who’ve been confronting JPMorgan and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, at every opportunity to expose how banks are exploiting communities of color. Their work brings us one step closer to replacing our broken economic system with something that works for us all.
More on that broken system and the struggle against it in this week’s issue.
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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Why Are Widows Omitted from Commissions?
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| A high-profile report on women in post-conflict regions released last year had a glaring omission. The report authors intended to address gaps in our understanding of the gendered nature of conflict. But throughout its 101 pages, the report had not one single mention of widows, the largest single subset of women and girls that armed conflicts victimize. Roseline Orwa explains why the fight for economic justice must not exclude widows. |
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WORDS OF WISDOM
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT
OF THE WEEK
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| Trust His Fate to a Hail Mary? Not This Billionaire |
| The most powerful man in the world’s most profitable sports league — billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — will soon have his day in court. Prosecutors have charged Kraft with soliciting sex at a Florida massage parlor hooked into a human trafficking ring. If the charges hold up, notes sportswriter Jane McManus, “Kraft doesn’t belong in the league anymore.” Kraft is lawyering up to make sure that doesn’t happen. The 78-year-old has hired as one counsel the lawyer who kept the New York financier Jeffrey Epstein out of jail for trafficking underage girls for sex. His other key hire: a former White House attorney who helped Brett Kavanaugh get past sexual assault charges at his stormy Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Will Kraft’s fellow billionaire NFL owners make any serious move against him? Yeah, right, says McManus, who’s watched owners “tell players to stay out of politics while forking over millions for President Trump’s inauguration committee.” |
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GREED AT A GLANCE
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TOO MUCH
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| Did You Have Mahogany Windows in Your Dorm? |
| Three elite private universities — Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia — each received over $1 billion in new charitable contributions last year. The 20 universities with the year’s highest charitable hauls took in 28 percent of the contributions America’s colleges and universities pocketed in 2018. These 20 schools enroll just 1.6 percent of the nation’s college students. Students at these elite schools graduate into elite jobs. Their counterparts elsewhere in higher education graduate into decades of student debt. Sam Pizzigati, author of The Case for a Maximum Wage, has more. |
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MUST READS
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This week on Inequality.org
Sarah Anderson, What’s Worse Than Ticket Scalpers? Stock Scalpers. A new Wall Street Tax proposal would crack down on the high frequency traders that are cheating the rest of us.
Tula Connell, Women Farmworkers Achieve Justice on the Job in Morocco. Women made key gains in reducing gender discrimination and improving wages and working conditions in Morocco's first-ever agricultural collective bargaining contract.
Elsewhere on the web
Chris Dillow, The 1% vs the 0.1%, Stumbling and Mumbling. Someone “only” in the top 1 percent is much more like the average person than they are like someone in the top 0.1 percent.
Marie Patino and Laura Davison, How Democrats Want to Tax the Rich, Bloomberg. A good rundown of pending proposals.
Emily Gould, My Year of Living Like My Rich Friend, New York. Treating your mind and body with care shouldn’t be the province of a privileged few.
Paul Solman, How economic inequality might affect a society’s well-being, PBS. About 80 percent of Americans call their health great. But U.S. life expectancy ranks at the developed world bottom. What's going on here? People in unequal societies turn out to be much more likely to say that they're doing swell.
Roge Karma, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Myth of American Innovation, American Prospect. The intrepid New Yorker pulls back the curtain on how corporate execs profit from taxpayer-funded research.
Claude Fischer, Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity is Not the Answer, Made in America. The core problem with inequality isn’t making the race to the top fairer. It’s making the results of the race to the top fairer.
Shifting Narratives Around Poverty and Wealth, Project Twist-It. An interview with Chuck Collins on how the dominant stories about inequality serve the interests of powerful elites. |
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A FINAL FIGURE
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