November 20, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Lawmakers in Congress are now trying to ram through legislation that would give the Treasury Department broad power to strip nonprofit status from organizations deemed to be “terrorist-supporting.” This bill, H.R. 9495, could have a disastrous and chilling effect on our nonprofit sector, especially with an incoming administration holding on tight to deep-seated grudges.

A number of groups are mobilizing to stop this dangerous legislation. Take a look and get involved in what may be Battle One of the new Trump era.

We do have, on the international front, some more encouraging news. The just-concluded conclave of the G20 nations has agreed to “engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” This could be the first step to realizing the landmark 2 percent annual minimum tax on billionaire wealth that Brazil has proposed. More on this in our next issue.

That next issue will appear week after next. We’ll be taking a Thanksgiving break next week. Please enjoy the holiday. We hope that family and community can help bring comfort in these difficult times.

In the meantime, we’ll be sharing inequality updates via our new Bluesky social media site. You can find us right here. Thanks!

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

A Documentarian and His Father Tell a Troubled Tale of Taxes

Director Justin Schein is taking on the most pernicious anti-taxation myths of our time in his new film, Death and Taxes. Schein’s new work tells the story of his father Harvey’s ascendance into America’s top tax bracket and his obsession with minimizing its burden on his estate. It’s a remarkable portrait of how defending wealth can shortchange both personal happiness and our collective prosperity. 
 
Death and Taxes illustrates how our more redistributive mid-20th century tax system helped people like Schein’s father achieve their success — before trickle-down economics shuttered windows of opportunity for millions just like him. 

His new film’s combining of the personal and the political, Schein has told Inequality.org co-editor Bella DeVaan, “hopefully helps transcend the technicalities of tax policy to make the story more universal.”

“I’d love for people to see our film and start asking questions about what taxes are for. What do we owe society? What kind of society do we want our children to inherit?” Schein continues. “I want my two kids to inherit the dream of a democracy and a society where their neighbors are not struggling just to survive.”

Shareholders Fight to Make Corporate Lobbying Much More Transparent

Shareholders across a wide range of industries are increasingly putting forward proposals that would require companies to disclose more information about their corporate lobbying — and how that lobbying could affect investments.

These proposals, Public Citizen’s Jon Golinger argues in a new piece for Inequality.org, offer a new way to shine a light on lobbying’s grip on Washington. With a new White House practically hanging up a “For Sale” sign, direct action from shareholders can boost transparency if lawmakers won’t do it themselves.

Who didn’t vote in the November U.S. elections? Researchers are still sifting through the data. But, as in the past, low-income Americans appear to have participated at lower-than-average rates. The five states with the lowest turnout have average poverty rates of 15.3 percent, compared to 9.5 percent for the five states with the highest turnouts.

Low-income people face multiple challenges to voting. The number-one reason for nonvoting? The answer low-income Americans have given to a survey from the nonpartisan Poor People’s Campaign: “No one speaks to us.”

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.

The Latest Global Climate Confab Has Our Richest Smiling

The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change — COP29 for short — in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku.

But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport have just doubled — and nothing symbolizes wanton disregard for our Earth’s environment more dramatically than private jet travel. But the rich who do this traveling have no intention of stopping their jet jaunts — or their fossil-fuel profiteering — anytime soon. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Coal Magnate Who’s Finally Seeing Brighter Days Ahead  

This week’s dour deep pocket: Joseph W. Craft III, the billionaire chairman, president, and CEO of the coal powerhouse Alliance Resource Partners LP.

What has Craft sour: climate groups like the Sierra Club that he claims are waging “more of a money grab” than an honest “environmental effort.” If “you take politics out” of the decision-making process, says Craft, coal becomes the “cheapest power” source for consumers.

Craft has been a big-time Donald Trump contributor over the past decade, a generosity that Trump rewarded in 2019 by selecting Craft’s wife Kelly, a climate change skeptic, to succeed Nikki Haley as the U.S. ambassador to the UN.

Craft has of late also become close with Elon Musk. The two share, notes the climate journalist Arielle Samuelson, “an ambitious vision to eliminate environmental regulations.”

The last word: Kentucky, Craft’s home base, currently gets over two-thirds of its power from coal and has at various times, notes the environmental justice writer Austyn Gaffney, rated “first in the nation for toxic air pollution from power plants.”

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