| THIS WEEK |
People across the United States are rising up. The Black Lives Matter mobilizations have become the broadest wave of protests the country has ever seen. And these actions have unfolded against a dramatic backdrop: The pandemic has fueled skyrocketing inequality as billionaires see their billions multiply while average Americans by the millions lose their jobs and by the tens of thousands — over 100,000 in all — lose their lives.
Out of all these protests has emerged a clear call to defund the police, and organizers in Minneapolis have scored the first big victory on this funding front. A city council majority has just announced its intent to disband the city’s police department and create a more effective and equitable approach to public safety.
Backed by the people in the streets the nation over, Black Lives Matter organizers are paving a path towards a society that truly values human life. We have more this week on one of their demands.
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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| Community Defense from Mining Profiteers |
| The mining industry has long understood how to exploit disaster and distraction to expand its lucrative operations in Latin America. That continues to be the case today. With entire populations remaining under lockdown and economies falling apart, mining companies have jumped at the chance to become pandemic profiteers. Indigenous communities have been, once again, the principle obstacle standing up against these mining corporations. We have more on the pandemic dimensions of their struggle. |
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| WORDS OF WISDOM |
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT
OF THE WEEK |
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| Free at Last and Hungry to Make Up for Lost Time |
| Twenty years ago, the Houston-based energy giant Enron was flying high, the seventh-largest U.S. corporation by revenue. No Enron exec was flying higher than Jeffrey Skilling. A former McKinsey consultant, Skilling had joined Enron in 1990 and worked his way into the company’s CEO suite. But then everything crashed amid “accounting irregularities.” Enron’s subsequent bankruptcy would be America’s largest corporate collapse ever. In 2006, a federal jury found Skilling guilty of fraud, conspiracy, and insider trading and sentenced him to 24 years. Skilling, CNBC reports, “has steadfastly maintained his innocence,” but did agree to drop his appeals in exchange for a shorter sentence. Now free after 12 years behind bars, a still unrepentant Skilling is starting up a new business to market “high-yield investments” in oil and gas wells to high-rollers. One of his convicted Enron fellow execs, former company CFO Andrew Fastow, has chosen a different path. He’s now lecturing on corporate ethics and working to develop software that can “help businesses root out fraud.”
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| BOLD SOLUTIONS |
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| The Growing National Call to Defund the Police |
| Over the last several weeks we’ve seen reminder after reminder about what federal, state, and local governments choose not to fund. Amid the spreading Covid-19 pandemic, we watched nurses use garbage bags to protect themselves from disease and city sanitation workers have to strike to demand basic protections and hazard pay. Now, over more recent days, we’ve also seen what those same public officials do fund: seemingly endless amounts of tear gas and riot gear for cops to brutalize protesters who demand an end to the killing of African Americans. As protests grow across the country, so too does the demand to defund police departments. We have more on that demand this week. |
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| GREED AT A GLANCE |
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| TOO MUCH |
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| A New Amityville Horror Only Billionaires Can Stop |
| Remember The Amityville Horror, the 1979 thriller that became one of America’s most popular scary movies ever? The horror may soon be returning, this time in real life. Amityville the movie revolves around an actual 1974 mass murder that took place in Amityville the village, a suburb east of New York City in Long Island’s Suffolk County. The perpetrator killed six family members and left behind, the movie relates, a house full of spooking spirits. That house still stands, and the folks living in it these days now have a real reason to feel spooked. Suffolk County, New York’s largest suburban political jurisdiction, appears on the verge of a massive meltdown in public services. What to do? Advocates have a compelling answer: Let’s seriously tax the ultra rich who frolic in the Hamptons, Suffolk County’s summertime hotspot for Wall Street’s finest. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more. |
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| MUST READS |
This week on Inequality.org
Shailly Gupta Barnes, Even Now, Our Leaders Are Still Putting Their Faith in the Rich. The continuing pandemic has revealed quite clearly that working people fuel the U.S. economy and bear the cost of its collapse.
Chuck Collins, As 42.6 Million Americans File for Unemployment, Billionaires Add Half a Trillion Dollars to Their Cumulative Wealth. U.S. billionaires have boosted their wealth by an additional $565 billion since March 18, a gain of over 19 percent, as the pandemic continues on.
Michael Kink and Kevin Connor, Governor Cuomo’s Pandemic Wealthcare Plan. The New York leader has prioritized the wealth and influence of billionaires — many of them his donors — over the physical well-being of his most vulnerable constituents.
Chuck Collins, Ipsos Poll: 72 Percent of Americans Support an Emergency Charity Stimulus. New research finds widespread public opposition to how private foundations and donor-advised funds currently operate.
Elsewhere on the Web
Susan Smith Richardson, George Floyd, coronavirus and the inequality stealing Black lives, Center for Public Integrity. Reflections on a pandemic that has seen African Americans die at almost double their population share and generations of police and white supremacist violence.
Liz Theoharis, Which America Will Be Ours After the Pandemic? CrossCurrents. The United States has long suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: We look to the rich for answers to the very problems they are often responsible for creating and from which they benefit.
Emily Badger, Beverly Hills, Buckhead, SoHo: The New Sites of Urban Unrest, New York Times. Rising urban economic inequality has become a prime source of rage, inseparable from race.
Nesrine Malik, The inequalities exposed by this pandemic are about to get even worse, Guardian. The lockdown has revealed the cracks that separate a privileged few from the majority. Those cracks will widen as the lockdown eases.
Sam Pizzigati, A Primer on Puncturing Plutocracy, Who.What.Why. We need to better understand why egalitarians could not sustain the greater economic equality the United States achieved in the mid 20th century.
Jane McAlevey, We Really Need to Tax the Rich, The Nation. In California, they’re making that happen.
Avram Alpert, No, you’re not ‘lucky’ to dodge the coronavirus. Our rigged society shields you, Washington Post. Why we need to distinguish momentary good fortune from getting affluent off inequity.
David Mirtz, Rich aren't going anywhere, it's time they pay fair share, Riverdale Press. New York needs a wealth tax to prevent more economic suffering, disease, and death.
Davide Furceri, Prakash Loungani, Jonathan Ostry, and Pietro Pizzuto, Covid-19 will raise inequality if past pandemics are a guide, Vox. Major epidemics this century have raised inequality, and Covid-19 will as well, unless government policies start raising boats more than yachts.
Lance Roberts, Riots Across America, Seeking Alpha. We have a great economic order if you are rich and have money to invest. Not so much if you happen to be anyone else.
Allan Sloan, The CARES Act Sent You a $1,200 Check but Gave Millionaires and Billionaires Far More, ProPublica. The rich are reading the fineprint of the relief legislation enacted since March. The rest of us should, too.
Steve Wamhoff, White House Incredibly Still Believes Tax Cuts Are the Answer to America’s Problems, Just Taxes. None of the tax changes the Trump administration seeks would provide help to those who most need it. |
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| A FINAL FIGURE |
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