September 18, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Who’s bankrolling the climate change disinformation that’s stalling the action we need to save our planet? Our just-released report — Fossil Fuel Philanthropy, a collaboration with the Climate Accountability and Research Project — shines a light on the big-money donors blasting cash into the hands of climate deniers.

The total amount spent on climate disinformation? That could range anywhere from a few hundred million dollars into the billions. Lax reporting standards make more accurate estimates impossible.

These hundreds of millions are underwriting well over 130 shadowy groups, including many of the disinformation actors tied into the billionaire Charles Koch’s Stand Together network. 

Fossil fuel philanthropy epitomizes the egregious inequality between the political influence of our rich and all the rest of us. Moguls and heirs are using capital extracted from exploiting our Earth to shape the world in their own image. But we can stem the bleeding of tax-exempt donations toward destructive causes. Check our report here to see just how.

Two quick housekeeping notes. We're hiring! Inequality.org is looking for a research and editorial associate to help support our team. More info at this link. And please join us tomorrow, September 19 at 7:00 ET, for a virtual event organized by campaign to Stop Private Jet Expansion, featuring Inequality.org’s Chuck Collins. You can sign-up here. Thanks!

Bella DeVaan
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Why We Need To Fight To Make America’s Child Care More Affordable

This week’s frontline face: Iletha Joynes, co-coordinator of the media and communications team with United Workers.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Joynes had her first personal exposure to the enormous inadequacies of our care-giving world when she had a daughter 14 years ago. She faced an impossible choice: either keep working but still not be able to afford child care or quit to care for her child herself while she struggled to make ends meet.

The national advocacy group Family Values @ Work recently shared the Joynes story at an event that highlighted the many deficits in America’s support systems. A paid-leave program for all Americans, Joynes notes in a new analysis on Inequality.org, would have made her situation infinitely more manageable.

What makes this fight so important: “Having a child should be a joyful event, not a deeply stressful one,” Joynes notes. “I have come to understand my experience as a failure of our elected leaders to provide basic needs like affordable, accessible child care and paid family and medical leave.”

Make the Economy Work for All of Us — By Taxing the Rich!

America’s care infrastructure remains grossly underfunded. One simple way to fix that: Fix our rich people-friendly tax code.

Raising the minimum corporate tax and closing loopholes that only benefit our wealthiest, as Citizens for Tax Justice executive director Amy Hanauer explains in a new Inequality.org piece, could help fund everything from family leave and affordable child care to caring for our disabled and aging and providing access to decent health care for all the rest of us.

The two candidates competing for the presidency this fall could hardly be farther apart on taxes. Kamala Harris has signaled support for higher taxes on the rich. Donald Trump wants to end the 2017 tax cut for America’s wealthiest that expires at the end of next year.

“Tax justice advocates,” says Hanauer, “should call on both the Harris and Trump campaigns to commit to a fairer tax system — and to use the money it would raise to invest in the child care, elder care, and health care our families need.” 

Last week’s Trump-Harris debate laid bare many distinct differences between the presidential contenders. We’ve tallied up the number of times each candidate mentioned key terms and positions related to our economic divide. Harris, for instance, slammed tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations three times while Trump remained mute on the subject. The former president’s most frequently uttered relevant word: “jobs.” In all but one of his seven “jobs” mentions, he was either attacking immigrants for stealing jobs from people of color or disputing the Biden-Harris administration’s job creation claims.  

Presidential Debates and Taxing the Rich, Then and Now

The first televised U.S. presidential debate flashed onto America’s TV screens in 1960. The topics discussed? A look back at the event’s transcript shows that the evening’s proceedings included not a single word about a stunning domestic transformation then in its third decade. That transformation? The United States had become a much more economically equal nation, with top-bracket income tax rates running as high as 91 percent.

But what if that debate’s panel of journalists had asked the candidates to comment on the tax policies that had so powerfully fostered a much more equal America? Would that more equal America have had a better shot at surviving? Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Distinctly Unhealthy Taste for the Finer Things in Life

This week’s dour deep pocket: Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of Steward Health Care, the for-profit hospital chain that filed for bankruptcy this past May amid charges from doctors and nurses that de la Torre and his private equity pals had been systematically shortchanging patient care.

What has de la Torre sour: a U.S. Senate health committee subpoena that required his presence at a September 12 hearing on Steward Health’s management decisions. De la Torre ignored that subpoena and had his lawyer blast the Senate inquiry as “a pseudo-criminal proceeding” designed “to convict Dr. de la Torre in the eyes of public opinion.”

Responded the chair of that Senate health panel, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders: Ralph de la Torre has become “the poster child” for the “outrageous corporate greed” permeating “our for-profit health care system.” He has become “obscenely wealthy” by loading up hospitals with billions in debt and selling the land underneath them to real estate execs who charge “unsustainably high rent.”

The last word: CEO de la Torre, observes the American Prospect, has siphoned out of Steward Health over a quarter-billion dollars and blown “most of it on an epic midlife crisis featuring a new wife 29 years his junior, a 500-acre ranch for her prizewinning racehorses, a $77,000-a-month detail for her security while traveling between the couple’s far-flung mansions,” and “not one but two yachts.”

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