November 6, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Like many of you, we were taken aback by last night’s election results. Not by Donald Trump winning again — we saw that possibility as always present — but by how much he won by. Republicans also took the Senate and likely have kept control in the House as well. We’ll save you our postmortem on the campaign and stick to what we know: Inequality’s tendrils wrapped all over this election.

Decades of widening wealth gaps have created two mutually reinforcing realities. The first: We have a billionaire problem. Our ultra-rich have amassed a level of wealth that gives them unparalleled political influence. From their unconstrained election spending to their direct control over much of our media, our wealthiest have never had an environment more conducive for concentrating their power.

Inequality has also created the conditions that have millions of Americans quite rightfully feeling that our political system is failing them. Trump’s policies aren’t going to help the working-class and poor — they’re far more likely to hurt them — but voters have clearly decided that the status quo badly needed upending.

We believe that an anti-inequality agenda focused on limiting wealth concentration and improving conditions for those our top-heavy capitalism tosses aside still remains deeply popular. Now comes the hard part: building a movement that can fight for significantly greater equality amid a looming fascist threat.

Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati, Chris Mills Rodrigo, Bella DeVaan, and Omar Ocampo 
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Amidst the Darkness, A Few Bright Spots on Taxing the Rich

In a landslide, Washington state voters rejected a ballot proposal to repeal the state’s path-breaking capital gains tax on the rich. They also beat back an effort to allow employees to opt out of a new payroll tax for long-term care insurance if they waive the benefit of that state-operated program. This measure would’ve gutted the insurance program. In Illinois, voters adopted a nonbinding measure expressing support for an extra 3 percent tax on income of over $1 million. Read more from Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson at the link below. 

Congressional Republicans continue to oppose a federal minimum wage increase and paid leave guarantees, but voters in the red states of Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska took markedly different positions on Election Day. All three states approved guaranteed paid leave, and Missouri and Alaska also passed state minimum wage hikes.

Blue state voters, for their part, rejected a minimum wage hike in California and a raise in the minimum wage for tipped workers in Massachusetts. For more inequality-related charts, click the link below to our Inequality.org Facts section.

One Person, One Vote, One Joke — on Our Democracy

The sort of billionaire muscle-flexing that Big Oil and now Big Tech have inflicted upon American politics has had an impact that stretches far beyond the electoral fates of individual politicians. That flexing, once again in 2024, has served to keep off the political table any serious discussion of America’s fiercely unequal distribution of income and wealth.

Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

Space, the Final Frontier for Cutting Billion-Dollar Deals

This week’s dour deep pocket: Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and biggest shareholder and owner of both Blue Origin, the private space exploration company that competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and the Washington Post.

What has Bezos sour: the immediately hostile public reaction to the Bezos move last month that killed an already written Post editorial endorsement of the Kamala Harris presidential bid. The Post has lost “at least 250,000 subscribers,” the Associated Press reports, since that Bezos assault on the paper’s editorial independence.  

What led Bezos to overrule the Post editorial board? Political analysts like Robert Reich see that overruling as a move “in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.” With Trump now returning to the White House, the ultimate decision over those contracts will be his.

The last word: Just hours after the Bezos axing of the Post endorsement, his top exec at Blue Origin met with Donald Trump. Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan —  who resigned after the Bezos move — is calling that timing evidence of a Bezos-Trump “quid pro quo.” Adds Kagan: “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do and then met with the Blue Origin people.”

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