January 22, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

The freezing cold in Washington, D.C. earlier this week forced some difficult decisions. The cold moved Donald Trump's second inaugural inside the Capitol Rotunda, leaving limited spots for all the guests Trump had invited to watch his swearing in. Notables like governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and social media influencers Jake and Logan Paul found themselves relegated to the Capitol's visitor center. So who did make the cut? America's richest!

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — the three wealthiest individuals in the world — all sat close by Trump during the ceremony, with the latter two even getting plus-one invites. The Big Tech presence didn't end there.  Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook sat just a row back. 

Our tech oligarchy has, of course, been flexing its clout long before this week. And that clout comes from more than just Republican leadership. President Obama, after all, gave Musk’s Tesla nearly half a billion dollars in his 2009 stimulus, and Biden bailed out the troubled Silicon Valley Bank just last year. But Monday’s Inaugural seating stands as the clearest proof yet that a handful of billionaires, enriched by a roaring tech market, now enjoy enormous political heft.

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

Exposing the Greed and Grasping of America’s Health Insurance Giants

This week’s frontline face: Jenn Coffey, a retired EMT and an advocate for a national healthcare program.

What she's done to help create a more equal world: Coffey developed a series of rare debilitating conditions — including complex regional pain syndrome and small fiber neuropathy — after battling breast cancer. Her experiences trying to get UnitedHealthcare to cover the infusions she needs to live without overwhelming pain have radicalized this former Republican lawmaker. 

Coffey has channeled her pain into activism through People’s Action’s Care Over Costs campaign, an effort that’s pressuring private health insurers to end denials and onerous prior authorization requirements. 

What makes equality so important to her: “UnitedHealthcare would rather leave me in torture than grant me the peace my infusions bring,” Coffey noted at a protest in New York last week. “I’m asking for a life worth dignity. I’m left begging for a life worth living.”

How Can Anyone Accept the Trump Tax Agenda as 'Populist'?

Most of Donald Trump's populist bona fides rest on his campaign promises to lower taxes for average Americans. But his 2017 tax legislation — set to expire at the end of this year — overwhelmingly benefited America’s richest. They gained massive tax breaks at the expense of working-class Americans. Now extending — and expanding — those cuts has become a prime Trump priority.

But just pointing out the hypocrisy of Trump's populist messaging and pro-billionaire policies is never going to be enough. We need to be organizing to call out the Trump charade and challenge how the new administration operates. We also need to be offering an alternate vision for America’s tax future. What would an American society with fair taxes look like? A glance at our options below.

The racial wealth divide has narrowed slightly since 1989, but remains extremely wide. The median Black family has a net worth, including cars and other durable goods, of $44,100, just 15.5 percent of the $282,310 median white wealth. The typical Latino family, with $62,120, owns just 21.8 percent of the wealth of the median white family. For an interactive version of this chart and more on racial economic inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

What Americans Now Need Most: A Farewell to Grand Fortune

Over three score years ago, President Eisenhower had a warning for America.

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower exhorted in his 1961 farewell address.

Eisenhower’s warning would, sadly, go almost totally unheeded. In the years since his farewell, the “military-industrial complex” he so feared has morphed into an even more worrisome concentration of wealth and power.

Last week, in his own farewell address, President Joe Biden gave that concentration a chilling label. An “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence,” Biden intoned, now “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

How can progressives meet that threat? Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Conspiracy-Mongering Billionaire Sees a Glimmer of Hope

This week’s dour deep pocket: the mega-billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and the host this past Saturday of a lavish D.C. party that vividly symbolized, the New York Times reports, “the tech industry’s new excitement” over Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

What has Thiel sour: Just about everything and everybody responsible for keeping the “truth” from the American people. Thiel’s list of truth-deniers includes, he makes plain in a just-published Financial Times op-ed, the “media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs” that drive what Thiel calls the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.”

Thiel now sees, with Trump back in the White House, an administration committed to exposing the truth on dark secrets ranging from whether U.S. tax dollars birthed Covid to the 2019 prison death of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a Trump-friendly financier over halfway to his first billion.

The last word: Thiel’s latest conspiratorial musings, notes American Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper, read “like an edited version of one of those lunatic emails journalists get sometimes with like 8 different fonts in 9 different colors.”

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