September 25, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams this week after he spent more than two decades on death row for a murder that DNA testing indicates he did not commit. Several last-minutes efforts — including one by the family of the murder victim Lisha Gayle — did not prove enough to persuade lawmakers or judges from sparing a potentially innocent man’s life. 

The United States remains one of the only OECD countries to allow capital punishment. And that may not be changing anytime soon. Republican lawmakers have long supported continuing executions, and Democrats quietly erased opposition to the practice in their 2024 party platform.

The death penalty doesn’t just frequently take innocent lives caught up in inherently imperfect legal systems. The penalty also reflects our world’s class biases — especially against the poor. We regularly see capital punishment, as the United Nations notes, deployed as a “class-based form of discrimination.”

To address inequality meaningfully, the death of Marcellus Williams reminds us, we need to tackle that inequality in every aspect of our societies, with the criminal justice system being no exception.

One final note: Bob Lord, a frequent Inequality.org contributor and an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, also serves as a tax policy advisor for Patriotic Millionaires, that energetic group of deep pockets advocating for higher taxes on our wealthiest. The group has just posted an appreciation of Bob's work that highlights his recent U.S. Senate Finance Committee testimony. Take a look.

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

Gunmen Assassinate a Courageous Honduran Anti-Mining Leader 

This week’s frontline face: Juan López, an outspoken critic of rapacious mining corporations whose extractive activities threaten public health and the environment in his native Honduras. On September 14, men on motorcycles shot and killed the father of two as he left a church service in the north of the country.  

What he did to help create a more equal world: López, an activist in a coalition fighting an environmentally destructive iron ore mining project in a Honduran national park, continued his activism despite numerous death threats. In 2019, López and other coalition activists received the Institute for Policy Studies’ Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award for their courageous work. 

“The people refuse to die under the extractive, corporate empire and the governmental regimes that promote and protect it,” López said as he accepted the award on behalf of the coalition. “Wake up humanity, there is no more time!”

What makes this fight so important: Juan López has become just the latest of many Latin American activists who’ve paid the ultimate price while trying to protect our planet from corporate greed. The Institute for Policy Studies has joined other human rights organizations to call on the Honduran president to bring López’s killers to justice and fulfill her campaign promises to end open-pit mining in the country.

Let’s Break Up Corporate America's Continuing Grip on Housing

A record number of renter households are now dedicating 30 percent or more of their incomes to housing costs, the numerical threshold typically set for defining housing stress. This obviously awful reality for renters has been bountifully rewarding for corporate landlords. They benefit immensely from the low housing availability that gives them ever more leverage to raise rents without justification.

One way to break up that continuing housing racket: build more housing, particularly housing not owned by corporate enterprises. New legislation from Democrats in Congress would do just that by setting aside $300 billion over 10 years to finance and develop permanently affordable housing.

Read more from Institute for Policy Studies researcher Omar Ocampo below.

Our current Hispanic Heritage Month offers us an opportunity to honor historic contributions to labor rights and equality from Latino and Hispanic communities while also recognizing the work that still needs to be done. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that Hispanic/Latino workers remain the lowest-paid of any U.S. racial or ethnic group. Hispanic/Latina women make just 52 cents for every dollar an Asian male and 65 cents for every dollar a white male earns. For an interactive version of this chart and more on income, gender, and race inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

Could 2025 End Up a Nightmare for Our Tax-Averse Rich?

Our current tax system in the United States has become an operation that essentially privileges the already privileged. But that may soon be changing, as early as next year. The stars may now be aligning for a new tax code that actually frowns on grand fortune.

What’s making 2025 so potentially pivotal? By the year’s end, most of the tax giveaways to the rich that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire. That reality will have rich people-friendly lawmakers entering next year absolutely desperate to renew those giveaways before that expiration takes place. What could happen next? Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

Save the Environment or Huge Inheritances? An Easy Choice!

This week’s dour deep pocket: Frederic Rochat, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker currently serving as the managing partner of the Swiss private banking giant Lombard Odier.

What has Rochat sour: an upcoming ballot initiative that, if passed, would levy a 50 percent tax on inheritances in Switzerland worth over 50 million Swiss francs, about $60 million. The Swiss Social Democrats’ youth wing, the Young Socialists, collected over 100,000 signatures to put the initiative before Swiss voters. The vote will take place in 2026.

Rochat has labeled this proposed new inheritance tax as “extremely dangerous,” a “nuclear bomb” for the Swiss economy that would rate as an “incredibly un-Swiss” move to make.

All the proceeds from the new levy would go to helping mitigate the climate crisis. That mitigation, says Rochat, will always be “very dear to us at Lombard Odier.” But he insists that “pure taxation” won’t create “the right incentives for companies to invest.”

The last word: Our “richest class benefits from the economic system that caused the climate crisis,” points out Mirjam Hostetmann, the president of the Swiss Young Socialists. “They should pay more to combat the consequences, not always society as a whole.”

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