October 15, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

As a co-editor of Inequality.org, I get a lot of fan mail mixed in with some chiding. Some of the latter came in recently. Noted a Greg B: “None of my problems exist as a result of someone else being a billionaire.” 

An economy rigged to funnel so much wealth and power to the billionaire class, I wrote back, undermines all our lives in many major ways.

That theme runs through my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. In it, I break down how extremely concentrated wealth is impacting us all, by everything from limiting our political influence to poisoning our environment and weakening social services.

But Burned by Billionaires does more than criticize the richest among us. The book aims to be tool that all of us can use to educate our communities about the damage that inequality brings — and organize those same communities to fight back. We have many more of us, always remember, than they have of them!

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

The Widening Struggle To Guarantee Timely Union Contracts

This week’s frontline faces: Sarah Johnson and Jason Fratangelo, registered nurses at Corewell Health East and members of Michigan Teamsters Local 2024.

What they're doing to help create a more equal world: Johnson and Fratangelo helped win a union recognition campaign at Corewell last November. Since then, their bosses have used every trick in the book to draw out negotiations and deny Corewell workers a union contract.

That's why the two nurses are fighting, with the Teamsters, for federal legislation that would require employers to begin negotiating no later than 10 days after workers have voted to form a union. It took the Corewell workers seven months to get Corewell to the bargaining table. The legislation the Corewell workers seek would have disputes go to mediation if no agreement is reached within 90 days. 

What makes this fight so important: “The Faster Labor Contracts Act would finally level the playing field,” Johnson and Fratangelo recently wrote for Inequality.org. “It would give working people across this country a fair chance at the contracts they’ve already earned and stop corporations from slow-walking negotiations into the ground.”

How Can Progressives Best Win Back America’s Working Class?

How best to answer that key question? A good start, suggests an analysis of a new Center for Working-Class Politics survey, would be to emphasize economic populism, to tap into the resentment and insecurity that decades of corporate excess and bipartisan neglect have burned into modern American life.

But in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that the Brooklyn-based Center surveyed, these economic populist ideas turn out to become much less popular when they come attached to a Democratic Party label. So what should those of us hoping to build an equal society via the ballot box do?

In purple districts, running as independents would likely split the vote and guarantee conservative success. In those cases, the new Center for Working-Class Politics survey analysis advises, a movement hoping to win back the working class should work to build a Democratic brand that centers on reducing the costs of everyday life, creating good jobs, and holding elites accountable.

In deep red or blue districts? The Center’s advice: Try running as independents.

A new study from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research finds that people across the world dramatically underestimate how much CEOs earn compared to regular workers and prefer far smaller gaps.

In the United States, CEOs earn about 269 times more than average workers. But the U.S. public estimates that gap at only 18 times — and would prefer that CEOs make no more than five times average worker pay. The same pattern appears worldwide. Even in Japan, where executive pay runs far more restrained, people still underestimate the CEO-worker pay gap and want to see it smaller.

For an interactive version of this chart, click the Inequality.org link below.

A Small-Time Billionaire with a Big-Time Pal in Trump’s Treasury

This week’s dour deep pocket: Robert Citrone, the founder of the Discovery Capital Management hedge fund, a finance-biz buddy of current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the possessor of a personal fortune never worth much more than a mere single billion.

What has Citrone sour: the embarrassing media coverage of the huge U.S. federal bailout that has gone to prop up the failing regime of Argentina’s “free-market” president, the libertarian Javier Milei. That bailout has just happened to also bail out Citrone, a huge investor in Argentinian bonds and equities after Milei took office in late 2024.

Citrone, notes Popular Information’s Judd Legum, had been sure that Milei’s governing emphasis on deregulating business and slashing public spending “would revitalize the Argentine economy.” Milei’s economy unraveled instead and left a third of Argentina’s population under the poverty line.

A desperate Citrone, Argentine media report, then turned to Bessent for a helping hand — and soon after invested more himself in Argentina’s shaky bonds, a move observers have linked to Citrone’s advance knowledge that the bailout he sought for Milei’s sinking economy would shortly be on its way.

The last word: “The Trump administration really hates giving foreign aid that serves any kind of humanitarian purpose,” observes the economist Paul Krugman. “But a $20 billion lifeline to the right-wing government of Argentina… No problem!”

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