January 15, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Two of the catastrophic fires that have torn across Los Angeles remain out of control as of this Wednesday morning. The Eaton and Palisades fires — the most destructive in Southern California history — have now claimed at least 25 lives and destroyed entire communities. Our thoughts are with our readers in the area.

The California fires, like all disasters, have exposed our society’s stark inequalities. The damage has not discriminated between rich and poor neighborhoods. But those rich neighborhoods have the means to rebuild. Those poor now face the prospect of post-destruction gentrification.

The celebration of first responders, meanwhile, has overlooked how California continues to abuse prison labor. Over 1,000 incarcerated people have been fighting the deadly flames. They risk serious injury for less than $15 a day. 

At the same time, the fires have shown the power of community. Donations are flooding into families who’ve lost their homes, and robust mutual-aid networks are helping those affected stay afloat. The task ahead: to ensure that this ethos of communal care stays central once the fires flicker out and the rebuilding begins.

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

From Washington State, a Roadmap for Defending Progressive Taxes

This week’s frontline faces: Eli Taylor Goss, the executive director of the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, a research and policy organization that works to advance economic justice, and Treasure Mackley, the executive director of Invest in Washington Now, an organization working to build support for progressive revenue and remake the state’s tax code so it works for everyone

What they've done to help create a more equal world: This past November, Taylor Goss and Mackley played pivotal roles in the successful campaign to defend Washington state's still new capital gains tax on the ultra-wealthy.

The two focused their efforts on explaining how tax revenues directly facilitate popular initiatives in areas ranging from child care and education to parks and safety net protections. They exposed just how much tax codes in Washington state have historically favored the wealthy and shifted public opinion enough to defeat a repeal of the state’s capital gains tax, winning 64 percent of the vote.

What makes equality so important to them: "Our win — which many thought impossible a decade ago — was a bright spot nationally this fall," Taylor Goss and Mackley note. "We still have a long way to go towards a just tax code, but we hope you take heart that it’s possible to flip the script and build public support for progressive revenue. We hope your state is next in making that happen." 

For Greater Equality, Let's Start Taking the Minimum Wage Global

Inequality.org has told this story a thousand times: The exorbitantly wealthy are seeing their fortunes soar while the pay that goes to the workers who make their companies tick stagnates. How can we rectify that imbalance? A good place to start: raising the minimum wage that employees must be paid.

Most nations — some 90 percent — have domestic minimum wage laws. But the growth of multinational corporations, the historian Lawrence Wittner points out, has sped the exploitation of the gaps that exist between national pay floors. A global minimum wage could end that exploitation, raise living standards, and curb the wealth of the billionaire class. Read more on the case for a global minimum.

Public policies that favor white Americans and the wealthy have perpetuated both an extreme concentration of wealth and an extreme racial wealth divide. White households, Federal Reserve data show, held 84.2 percent of all U.S. wealth as of the fourth quarter of 2023. They made up only 66 percent of households.

By contrast, Black households held only 3.4 percent and Latinos held only 2.3 percent of national wealth. To achieve Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, closing the persistent racial wealth divide, already a matter of social justice, must become a higher economic policy priority.

For an interactive version of this chart and more on race inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

Of the Plutocrats, By the Plutocrats, and For the Plutocrats

“Every morning,” the billionaire Marc Andreessen smiled a few weeks after Donald Trump’s re-election this past November, “I wake up happier than the day before.”

The stoked Andreessen, with Trump’s re-entry into the White House only days away, must by now be sitting in seventh heaven. He no doubt has plenty of deep-pocket company. We’ve never before had an incoming president as openly committed to stocking his administration with the already super rich.

Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more. 

Still Another Billionaire Rushes to Curry Donald Trump’s Favor

This week’s dour deep pocket: Mark Zuckerberg, the 40-year-old chief exec of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

What has Zuckerberg sour: These days, just about anything that irritates Donald Trump seems to irritate Zuckerberg, the world’s third-richest man. Last week he announced that his online empire would be axing its fact-checking team to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on his platforms.

From now on, Zuckerberg pledged, Meta would “work with Donald Trump” and “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

Zuckerberg did his pledging in a video message that captured him wearing a Swiss hand-made watch that retails for $895,500. Zuckerberg’s net worth at the end of last week: $216 billion.

The last word: “Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work,” noted Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the international body that certifies fact-checkers, after Zuckerberg’s announcement. “That attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”

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