A weekly newsletter from the Institute for Policy Studies |
|
|
‘Twas the morning after Giving Tuesday, when all through the nation… the people cried out for fairer taxation.
Sorry — had to! We’re still cheery from yesterday’s coverage of our new billionaire philanthropy report. In Mother Jones, Michael Mechanic bolstered our research by exploring the suspect “success” of the billionaire Giving Pledge, and Popular Information’s Judd Legum shared a brilliant summary of our findings that’s fast going viral. The way that ultra-wealthy people wield charitable tax deductions, he notes, “has become increasingly divorced from its purpose.”
Mechanic’s assessment of the tweenaged Giving Pledge is on the money. “A self-selected group of excessively wealthy people” who appear deeply opposed to paying their taxes fairly, writes Mechanic, are “burnishing their reputations even as they exercise undemocratic influence over matters of public interest.”
Most of the people who opted into the Giving Pledge, our research shows, have actually increased their wealth since making the commitment just over a dozen years ago.
Shep Searl, a Starbucks partner and union organizer, has no illusions about billionaires’ investment in the common good: “If anyone thinks someone with billions of dollars out on a yacht is going to care about the needs of a person living in a studio apartment they can’t afford,” Searl explained in an exclusive interview with us, “they need to wake up.”
Read on for more about Starbucks Workers United and a sharp take on Bayard Rustin’s legacy of practical radicalism. Chuck Collins and Bella DeVaan for the Institute for Policy Studies' Inequality.org team |
|
|
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS |
|
|
Starbucks Organizer Spills the Tea on the Red Cup Rebellion
On November 16, Starbucks Workers United members across the nation convened their second annual Red Cup Rebellion, a series of coordinated strikes and walkouts on the auspicious day that the coffee chain offers seasonally beloved red cups to incentivize holiday beverage sales.
Inequality.org’s Bella DeVaan caught up with Chicago-based Starbucks Workers United organizer Shep Searl for their take on the stakes of this year’s actions. We’ve excerpted their conversation below. Inequality.org: Was there a moment in particular that inspired you and your store to choose unionizing as the solution to your workplace’s problems?
Shep Searl: We’d been discussing unionizing, but not “for real,” because unionizing at Starbucks felt like an impossible task. But seeing Buffalo stores unionize turned our mindset from casual to serious. It woke us up. We saw that unionization is happening everywhere, and people are managing to pull it off — so now we can make it happen too.
A more negative thing served as an early lynchpin. When the season started to get slow a couple years ago, we were still going through the worst of Covid. Without alerting us, Starbucks changed its Covid policy from fourteen days off to five paid days off, then pulled this policy away from us altogether.
This was incredibly dangerous. We had multiple immunocompromised people at the store, myself included. And it was eye-opening. They didn’t actually care about our health and safety. They were basically forcing us to stay at work. The corporation made us see that unionizing is not only possible but necessary.
Inequality.org: How is union organizing going now? Can you tell us about your store’s second Red Cup Rebellion?
Searl: It’s cool to see the way that the Red Cup Rebellion has evolved at our store. Last year, it was our biggest action so far and the first time nationally our SBWU went on strike. Hundreds of stores across the nation did the same thing. The Red Cup Rebellion has now become our largest collective action ever — with almost 200 stores participating, not to mention the new stores filing for unionization.
We’re also shifting our focus to a nationwide call to action. Last year was more picket line-focused, and this year we’re more focused on community outreach, to get our community members involved and to let workers at not-yet-union stores know we’re here to protect and support them.
We’ve changed our metrics for success and vision of how we need to move forward: This isn’t going to be a standard unionizing campaign or process. It seems like Starbucks will relentlessly push down on us until we can give them enough to say, “Okay, we can’t keep fighting this.” And we’ve only seen that work with customer support and outreach. Inequality.org: How do you see your efforts in the broader labor context? Searl: Right now, we see a huge inter-union solidarity that has reinvigorated the labor movement. At first, after our big victories in 2022, SBWU felt alone in the spotlight after taking loss after loss in the micro context. It’s been very hard, enduring repeated retaliation that has made it feel like we’re never going to get a contract or see fruition for all our organizing.
But this year, joining the picket line with UAW folks, going to UPS practice pickets, we’ve let them know we have their backs and we hear from them that they have ours. If Teamsters and actors are standing behind us, we’re able to mobilize more effectively and we’re able to run a campaign that can actually win. Every day, we’ve been absorbing that information and utilizing it in our mobilization and escalation plan. If we stand together, there’s no mountain we cannot climb. |
|
|
We Need Bayard Rustin’s Practical Radicalism Today
Ask most Americans what they think of “radicals” and you’ll hear skepticism. Ask them about “practical radicals” and you might get a chuckle. Surely practical people don’t try to change society in dramatic ways? A new Netflix film and new books about Bayard Rustin, the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, are bringing needed attention to the crucial, hidden tradition of practical radicalism.
In this Inequality.org exclusive, professors Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce argue that practical radicals like Rustin are responsible for “much of the progress we have made over the centuries — and they are our best hope for addressing the growing crises of democracy, climate change, and inequality today.” |
|
|
Our Super Rich Are Fooling Themselves and Fouling Our Planet
The world’s wealthiest 1 percent, Oxfam’s just-released latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66 percent combined. The world’s bottom 99 percent, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year. But, even so, the political impact of our world’s super rich actually far and away outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Inequality.org’s Sam Pizzigati has more.
|
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK |
Making the World Safe for Rich People-Friendly Artificial Intelligence
This week’s dour deep pocket: Sam Altman, the near-billionaire co-founder of OpenAI, the world’s most pivotal artificial intelligence development enterprise.
What has him sour: The OpenAI board majority’s sudden move, the Friday before Thanksgiving, to depose Altman from his CEO slot. That majority felt that Altman was turning OpenAI, a nonprofit created to responsibly spread the benefits of artificial intelligence, into a Microsoft-fueled money-making machine. Under Altman, OpenAI had even birthed an aggressive for-profit spinoff.
Microsoft — the “exclusive” cloud partner that services all OpenAI products and research — quickly responded to Altman’s ouster by naming him CEO of its own new advanced AI research team. In the meantime, tech investors who consider AI “a potential goldmine” moved equally as quickly to jettison the OpenAI board majority “alarmed” about OpenAI’s direction under Altman.
By late Tuesday, pressure from investors had helped put a new OpenAI board in place and reinstall Altman as Open AI’s CEO, a set of moves that left Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella “encouraged.”
The last word: “AI development should not be in the hands of ‘ambitious’ entrepreneurs like Altman or controlled by the mega tech giants like Microsoft,” notes economist Michael Roberts. “If anything requires public ownership and democratic control in the 21st century, it is AI.” |
|
|
This week on Inequality.org Chuck Collins, The Climate Justice Shot Heard ‘Round the World. Three miles away from battle sites of Lexington and Concord, at Hanscom Field, climate activists are fighting to halt new private jet infrastructure. Bob Lord, Patriotic Millionaires to High Court: Don’t Preempt Taxing Grand Fortune. A wrong decision in the Moore case could set back tax justice for years. Elsewhere on the Web
Michael Hartmann, Institute for Policy Studies’ The True Cost of Billionaire Philanthropy brings skepticism and scrutiny to ultra-wealthy’s giving, The Giving Review. A landmark new report details how the ultra-wealthy use charitable giving maximize tax savings while enhancing their already inordinate influence.
Steve Wamhoff, The Latest Convoluted Arguments in Favor of Rich People Not Paying Taxes, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The richest Americans are avoiding and evading taxes in ways that ordinary Americans can hardly imagine. Jennifer Szalai, Economists Ignored Inequality for Years. Now They Can’t Stop Talking About It, The New York Times. A flurry of new books highlights broad disagreements over how to address the problem. Karen Petrou, Bidenomics has a mortal enemy, and it isn’t Trump, Salt Lake Tribune. Yawning inequality in the American economy has Bidenomics falling flat with voters.
Guido Alfani, What Happens When the Super Rich Are This Selfish? (It Isn’t Pretty.), New York Times. Throughout much of Western history, our wealthiest have attempted to allay anti-rich sentiments by using their riches to support their societies in times of crises. Today’s rich no longer bother.
Liza Featherstone, Rich People in the US Have Been Allowed to Get Way Too Rich, Jacobin. Hiking taxes on the rich would complicate the ability of wealthy families to hire five nannies per child — and let us create a decent public school system for all children.
Andrew Van Dam, How inheritance data secretly explains U.S. inequality, Washington Post. Under current federal tax law, the estates of the recently deceased rich face taxes on only that part of their estates that exceed $25.84 million for couples. Chiara Putaturo, For equality and the climate, a European wealth tax, Social Europe. The 1 per cent face barely any taxes in today’s world, despite being the biggest polluters. Daniel Schulman, How Gilded Age Lawmakers Saved America From Plutocracy, Mother Jones. And how we could do the same today.
Sally Jenkins, Texas A&M football will pay any price, but winning can’t be bought, Washington Post. Wealthy boosters of this collegiate football powerhouse are paying their former coach $76 million not to coach anymore, another sign that college football has become just another rich man’s plaything.
Chauncey DeVega, Mike Johnson’s ‘biblical’ economics: Using Christian nationalism to ‘enhance plutocratic wealth,’ Salon. How the new House speaker is working to please his movement’s super-rich backers. |
Should we ban billionaires? BBC. Chuck Collins explains why we shouldn't allow structures that enable some people to amass huge amounts of money.
Sketching the World Elite Database, London School of Economics’ International Inequalities Institute. A presentation mapping how economic elites in unequal societies use their resources to influence collective outcomes. |
Carolyn Copeland, Amir Khafagy, Sara Lomax, and Laura Flanders, BIPOC Media on the Fight for Fair Wages — & Anti-Racist Unions, The Laura Flanders Show. Many are celebrating the recent revival of labor power, but what does it mean for workers of color — often hardest hit — and least well treated even by traditional labor organizations?
Ryan Cooper and Alexei the Greek, Corporate Bullsh*t, Left Anchor. Nick Hanauer and Joan Walsh explain how the professional rich lie to benefit themselves. |
|
|
The United States is home to twice as many adults with at least $50 million in assets as the next seven nations with the most super rich combined, according to Credit Suisse. China is rising rapidly up the ranks, with the number of individuals in this ultra-rich club jumping from 9,555 in 2017 to 32,910 in 2022. For an interactive version of this chart and other global inequality charts, check out the link below.
|
|
|
We're looking for an exceptional new managing editor for Inequality.org. Find out more about what we're looking for and how to apply here! Feel free to share widely. |
|
|
Inequality.org | www.inequality.org | inequality@ips-dc.org Managing Editor: Isabella DeVaan Co-Editors: Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, and Sam Pizzigati Production: Isabella DeVaan and Kufre McIver |
|
|
|