September 10, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

You may have heard that Donald Trump’s Department of Energy  — at great cost to ratepayers and our Earth’s atmosphere — is keeping open “zombie” coal plants scheduled for closure. Trump’s motive? He’s paying back the fossil-fuel oligarchs who’ve been so generous to him. They’re now writing U.S. energy policy. 

My new “Oligarch Watch” column at The Nation profiles one of these oligarchs, “Coal-i-garch” Jim Grech, CEO of Peabody Energy. In this new column, just like in our Inequality.org “Petulant Plutocrat” feature, I’ll be naming the names of rising oligarchs using their wealth, power, and position to raise our cost of living, block popular policies, and run out the clock on keeping our planet livable.  

Looking for an antidote to oligarchy? I’m proud to announce the upcoming publication of my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.

I wrote Burned by Billionaires to connect the dots between the daily aggravations we face — in everything from housing and health to pollution and grocery prices — and the growing concentration of wealth and power that confronts us all. An economy that funnels ever-greater fortune to the billionaire class will never be an economy friendly to working people.

The New Press, my new book’s publisher, has generously offered a 30 percent pre-order discount until October 1. More on that at our Institute for Policy Studies book page. Please stay tuned for info on events about the book and let me know if you would like to host an in-person or virtual book discussion. Thanks!

Chuck Collins
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Mastering an Inside-Outside Strategy To Help Safeguard Worker Rights

This week’s frontline face: Elizabeth Wilkins, formerly a top Federal Trade Commission official and now president of the Roosevelt Institute. 

What she's doing to help create a more equal world: At the FTC, the federal watchdog agency tasked with enforcing antitrust laws and protecting consumers, Wilkins helped ban “non-compete clauses,” the increasingly common rules in worker contracts that bar them from taking jobs with a competitor. These clauses are regularly trapping workers in distinctly suboptimal situations.

Banning the clauses, FTC research has shown, would raise average earnings and help boost innovation. But the new Trump FTC leadership is threatening to reverse the non-compete ban and welcome back anti-competitive policies.

Wilkins, now at the Roosevelt Institute, is working to push policies like the ban on non-compete clauses and, in the process, help transform the economy from one that works for the few to one that works for the many.

Why the fight matters: “Failing to defend the non-compete ban would fall into this administration’s broader pattern of protecting corporate power while leaving working people behind,” Wilkins wrote recently. “We’ve seen the same story with efforts to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gut banking safeguards, and dismantle regulatory agencies under the guise of ‘efficiency.’”

How Can We Reach Persuadable Voters on Issues Around Inequality? 

Americans largely agree that the wealthiest among us should pay more in taxes. But this strong majority sentiment often doesn’t translate into victories for candidates championing egalitarian economics. How can we bridge that gap?

The Executive Wealth Disorder Institute was working to address that question before recently shuttering down. Several of the Institute's researchers, fortunately, are continuing to explore how we can better reach persuadable voters. In a new article for Inequality.org, these researchers note that reaching these voters will require more active engagement with their communities.

“It is our collective job to serve as gardeners, creating a more fertile environment for the seeds of discontent to grow into real policy change,” they write in this new reflection. “We played our part in this incredible journey — we hope the community will carry it forward!” 

The United States has more wealth than any other nation. But the top-heavy distribution of that wealth leaves typical American adults with far less wealth than their counterparts in other industrial nations, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report. For an interactive version of this chart and more on global inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

A Huge Trump Campaign Donor Finds Still Another Way To Help

This week’s dour deep pocket: Bill Pulte, the 37-year-old Donald Trump appointed to direct the Federal Housing Financial Authority, the agency with regulatory authority over the mortgage industry. Pulte’s grandfather, William Pulte, became a billionaire running a giant housing construction company.

What has Pulte sour: The growing outrage over what Georgetown Law’s Adam Levitin is calling Pulte’s “terrifyingly inappropriate” behavior, his “serving as the attack dog for Trump's attempts to gain control over the independent Federal Reserve Board.” Even the Wall Street Journal is acknowledging that Pulte “appears to be digging through the mortgage records” of Trump’s enemies.

Pulte, a private equity CEO, reported a personal net worth in the vicinity of $200 million before his confirmation as FHFA director. But a Politico analysis concludes he currently holds a fortune “likely worth more.” In 2024, Pulte donated a hefty slice of that fortune to the Trump campaign.

The last word: The American people, notes economist Dean Baker, are paying Bill Pulte to run the agency “that oversees the processing of tens of millions of mortgages,” not “to rifle through mortgage documents to find and disclose dirt that Trump can use against his political opponents.”

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