February 7, 2024                                                              Home   Subscribe    Open in Browser

We don’t need to tell you that turnout will be absolutely key to our national election outcomes in 2024. But fewer people know that higher-income voting rates have always eclipsed lower-income participation, and when we factor in our campaign finance system that privileges the wealthy, it’s no surprise that politicians pay a lot more attention to their richest constituents. 

The Poor People’s Campaign has just announced plans for an ambitious push to revamp this inequitable political landscape. Campaign activists are aiming to mobilize 15 million poor and low-income voters in the lead-up to Election Day, an effort to center the concerns of poor people in our political debate — and hike broad-based voter turnout at the polls this November. 

For years, the Institute for Policy Studies has served as the research arm of the Poor People’s Campaign. To support this year’s mobilization, our colleagues produced detailed fact sheets — for the nation and all 50 states — that highlight the most pressing inequities America’s poor and low-income people face. 

Congress has repeatedly blocked a raise in the minimum wage while greenlighting tax cuts that have helped make U.S. billionaires $2.2 trillion richer since 2017. Check out more about the Poor People’s Campaign below and find out online how you can participate. 

Chuck Collins and Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Waking the Sleeping Giant of the Low-Income Voting Bloc 

Linda Burns spent three grueling years on the assembly line in the Alabama warehouse now famous as the site of the first U.S. union drive at Amazon. The retail giant used harsh intimidation tactics to squash that effort, but Burns is still organizing – now with a focus on building political power from the bottom up. 

Burns spoke at a recent Poor People’s Campaign press conference to announce plans for 42 weeks of voter mobilization in the lead-up to the November election. The target: the one-third of the U.S. electorate considered poor or low-income. If Americans in this bloc voted at the same rate as higher-income Americans, they could sway elections in every state.

“Organizing the union showed me how many people were in the same situation I was,” said Burns, who struggles to pay her bills despite now working 16 hours a day as a caregiver. “Poor people like me have to stand up for our rights.” 

Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson has more on the Poor People’s Campaign plan to change the political landscape in 2024.  

Why We Need to Crack Down on Corporate Price-Gouging

The price of everyday goods remains prohibitively high for many American families despite a steady decline in the cost of raw materials and supply chain volatility. Why? A new report from Groundwork Collaborative makes the case that corporate profiteering has become the main culprit. 

Corporate profits accounted for more than half of inflation over a six-month period last year, the report found, artificially raising the prices of goods and ensuring that top corporate executives took home even larger paychecks.

The straightforward solutions to this profiteering: raise corporate tax rates, reduce corporate concentration, and secure supply chains. Learn more from Lindsay Owens and Elizabeth Pancotti of Groundwork at the link below. 

The Penalty for Exposing How Plutocracy Works? Five Years Behind Bars

A U.S. federal district court has just sentenced Charles Littlejohn to five years in prison. What exactly did Littlejohn — a contractor for the IRS — do to earn the court’s wrath? He committed a public service. He revealed just how astoundingly little America’s richest are paying in federal taxes. From 2014 through 2018, we now know thanks to Littlejohn’s leaks to journalists at ProPublica, America’s 25 richest paid only 3.4 percent of the billions they added to their fortunes in federal tax. Inequality.org’s Sam Pizzigati has more.

Only the Dumb Can Fail To See the World the Way the Rich See It

This week’s dour deep pocket: John Catsimatidis, the billionaire founder and CEO of a New York supermarket chain that has morphed into a conglomerate that includes everything from mass media to fossil fuels.

What has him sour: Recent comments by Janet Yellen, the current U.S. treasury secretary, that described the nation’s economy as on a “very desirable path” despite the ongoing Middle East conflict. Yellen also promised a renewed push for a “tax fairness” that ups taxes on America’s rich and the corporations they run.

“I am disappointed in Janet Yellen,” Catsimatidis, a major GOP donor and Trump supporter, told Fox Business. “How stupid she could be?”

The Biden years, he added, have made the Iranians “zillionaires” and left America’s middle class and poor even “poorer.”

The last word : In fact, notes the business news site Moneywise, the U.S. economy “remains robust,” with annual growth last year “significantly” exceeding economists’ expectations and the nation’s unemployment rate reaching “near a multi-decade low.”

Marjorie Kelly on the Capitalism Crisis: “Wealth Supremacy” is Killing Us, The Laura Flanders Show. “Capital bias” prioritizes wealth over people and the planet. Addressing wealth supremacy can help us imagine better economic models.

Nima Shirazi, Adam Johnson, and Linsey McGoey, Benevolent Billionaire Despotism and U.S. Media’s Softball Treatment of ‘Effective Altruism,’ Citations Needed. The Effective Altruism doctrine gamifies wealth distribution and falsely portrays the rich as uniquely qualified to make decisions about public welfare.

Simon Jack and Zing Tsjeng, The Oracle of Omaha, BBC Sounds’ Good Bad Billionaire. How Warren Buffett became the richest investor in history, amassing a fortune of over $120 billion, without moving out of the home he bought in 1958.

The pandemic shutdown that sent unemployment levels skyrocketing in 2020 left Black and Latino workers much more likely to be jobless than white workers — even as people of color made up a disproportionate share of essential workers who had to remain on the job. The overall unemployment rate has dropped significantly since then, but racial disparities remain. In October 2023, the rate of unemployment for Black workers stood at 5.8 percent, compared to just 3.9 percent for U.S. workers overall.

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