May 29, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

We hope you all enjoyed your — hopefully — long holiday weekend. Now we’re swinging into that just-before-summer stretch that can feel like a relative lull. But here at Inequality.org we have a lot of exciting projects in the works that we’re looking forward to sharing with you in the weeks and months ahead.

In the meantime, we are always curious about what aspects of — and issues around — economic inequality resonate most powerfully with you. Are you, for instance, most interested in tracking what our world’s wealthiest are doing to lock in their vast fortunes or more eager to get the scoop on how working people worldwide are fighting to claw back the profits that their labor is generating?

The maldistribution of our world’s wealth will always be an incredibly broad issue. We welcome your insights on new angles our Inequality.org ought to be exploring!

So if you see something we’ve been missing in our coverage of our ongoing era-defining inequality crisis, please let us know. Just respond to one of these weekly emails. Thanks so much!

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

Exposing Corporate America's Dependence on Forced Labor

This week’s frontline face: Jennifer Turner, a human rights researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Turner, the lead author on a groundbreaking 2022 report on prison labor in the United States, has been helping us understand just how much value U.S. prison labor is currently creating.

The latest estimates put that value — created by more than 800,000 prisoners — at roughly $10 billion a year. Some $2 billion of that is enriching private companies outside of the prison system.

Turner’s research is playing a pivotal role in a landmark class-action lawsuit that has 10 plaintiffs challenging what they see as an unconstitutional forced-labor system in Alabama prisons. Government officials, their lawsuit charges, are colluding to deny parole to prisoners — especially prisoners of color — in order to continue providing cheap labor to firms like KFC, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s. 

What makes equality so important to her: “The United States,” notes Turner, “has a long, problematic history of using incarcerated workers as a source of cheap labor and to subsidize the costs of our bloated prison system.”

"It’s past time we treat incarcerated workers with dignity,” Turner adds. “If states and the federal government can afford to incarcerate 1.2 million people in prisons, they can afford to pay them fairly for their work.”

Private Jets: A ‘Sustainable’ Transit Solution Only Our Richest Could Love

With our global climate crisis only growing, our world’s ultra wealthy, long accustomed to zipping around on private jets, have begun to pay lip service to the importance of going green. Developing bio-fuels, private jetsetters argue, could make their 45-minute private-jet jaunts totally sustainable.

New Institute for Policy Studies research is exposing how farcical that notion will always be. Just the land-use changes alone needed to produce that bio-fuel would make this “solution” a net-negative environmentally.

Instead of trying to make private jet travel “green,” argues IPS researcher Omar Ocampo, we should be working to limit private jet travel overall. And instead of investing in bio-fuels that make billionaires feel less guilty, we should be investing in tried-and-true transit solutions like expanded rail and bus options. More below. 

Between 1979 and 2020, the richest 0.01 percent of U.S. households had a cumulative income growth rate of 648 percent, more than five times the 126 percent growth rate for the bottom 20 percent of households. Tax cuts for the rich remain a key driver of this rising inequality. The top U.S. marginal tax rate in 1979 stood at 70 percent, compared to just 37 percent today. For an interactive version of this chart and more on income and inequality, check out the link below.

From Massachusetts, Some Serious Tax-the-Rich Inspiration

Living standards for average families, notes the UK High Pay Centre’s Luke Hildyard, only substantially improve when societies put in place mechanisms “to ensure that wealth doesn’t overwhelmingly flow to the people with all the economic and political power.” For starters, Hildyard posits in his newly published Enough: Why it’s Time to Abolish the Super Rich, our modern societies need to significantly tax our top 1 percenters. How best to accomplish that? Progressives in Massachusetts have put in place one new approach that’s now generating some highly encouraging results. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

How To Fix Miami? This Billionaire Insists He Has the Answer

This week’s dour deep pocket: Barry Sternlicht, the billionaire chair and CEO of the Starwood Capital Group, a Miami Beach-based real estate investment firm.

What has Sternlicht sour: If Miami is ever going to become a “Wall Street South,” Sternlicht insisted in a media interview earlier this month, the city is going to have to do something about its schools.

Does that mean that Sternlicht, a powerful Miami political presence, is now going to lead the charge to raise the Miami-Dade County “impact fees” developers must pay to offset the impact of their new developments on schools and other public services? These fees haven’t increased in nearly 30 years, and this failure to keep up with inflation is now annually costing local public schools mega-millions.

Sternlicht could care less. His concerns revolve only around Miami’s private schools. The city has so few elite private schools that deep pockets not used to hearing “no” have been having to offer “five-figure donations” to get their kiddies admitted — on top of tuitions that can run over $30,000 a year.

The last word: Sternlicht also has problems these days with private higher ed. His alma mater, Brown University, peacefully ended a pro-Palestine student encampment last month by agreeing to put divestment in firms that manufacture arms for Israel up for a vote this fall. Sternlicht has attacked that agreement as “unconscionable” and put his contributions to the university on hold.

More Perfect Union, McKinsey: The Group Secretly Running Every Company (And Government?) An investigation of how the consulting firm McKinsey is standing behind many of Corporate America’s worst practices.

Susan Kang, Stylianos Karolidis, Dylan Maraj, and Brendan Radtke, Organizing at Amazon with Amazonians United, Left on Red. A discussion with two Amazon  workers about the challenges of organizing an independent union.

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