October 22, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

With our U.S. government now in shutdown week four, federal employees — and all the people they serve — have our full attention here at Inequality.org. We’re worrying about those employees who can’t make their rent. We’re worrying about all those Americans who depend on benefits that federal programs deliver.

Democrats in Congress have made the shutdown a fight over health care. They’re demanding alternatives to the severe spikes in Affordable Care Act premiums — and the gutting of Medicaid — that the Trump-GOP tax bill enacted last January now has looming before us.

Those lawmakers refusing to negotiate a fair resolution to our country’s health care affordability crisis are showing clearly just where they stand on our national priorities. They care more about protecting tax cuts for billionaires, more about cascading endless streams of tax dollars into ICE and America’s military, than they care about health care for the rest of us.

Just how high are the stakes running in the current shutdown fight? Some of my colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies and I have just posted a new fact sheet that runs down the details. Check it out — and raise your voice! 

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

A Long Struggle for a Dignified Retirement — and More — in Argentina

This week’s frontline faces: Julio Gambina, Marcos Wolman, and Manuel Gutiérrez of the National Coordinating Roundtable of Organizations of Retirees and Pensioners of the Republic of Argentina, pictured here with Cathy Feingold, the director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department.

What they're doing to help create a more equal world: The National Coordinating Roundtable has been protesting Argentina's treatment of retirees for literally years, holding over 1,750 weekly protests in Buenos Aires. 

Those protests have gained extra attention in recent years as the austerity agenda of Argentina’s current rich people-friendly president, Javier Milei, has ravaged ever broader sectors of Argentine society. The protestors aren’t just fighting for pensioners. They’re battling for their nation’s entire working class.

Earlier this month, Gambina, Wolman, and Gutiérrez won the annual Institute for Policy Studies Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award. At virtually the same exact time, the Trump administration was announcing a $20-billion bailout for Milei.

What makes this fight so important: The Trump White House, Gambina recently told Inequality.org’s Chris Mills Rodrigo, wants news of the bailout to “calm” Argentina’s economic crisis and help ensure the Milei government a “favorable result” in elections later this week. For more, check the analysis that Chris has just done for the Jacobin that you can read by clicking the link below.

The Government Needs To Actually Hold U.S. Companies Accountable

The Federal Trade Commission’s recent multi-billion dollar settlement with Amazon sounds good on the surface. Amazon — under Jeff Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest billionaire — had been tricking shoppers into signing up for Prime memberships without their consent, then making those memberships nearly impossible to cancel. The settlement ensures the cheated $1.5 billion.

But by not pursuing the case to its full completion, Ron Knox of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance argues in a new piece on Inequality.org, the Federal Trade Commission has missed a chance to set some valuable case-law precedents.

“Settling,” notes Knox, “sends a message to other wrongdoers: If a company like Amazon can get away with ripping off its customers, surely we can too." 

As of June 2025, the CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations included a mere 55 women. These women made up just 11 percent of an elite executive group that averaged $18.9 million in 2024 compensation. By contrast, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women make up 61.7 percent of workers earning the federal minimum wage, a rate stuck at $7.25 since 2009.

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

This American High-Finance Chief Exec Just Wanted To Have Fun

This week’s dour deep pocket: Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group, a trillion-dollar U.S. asset manager with a hand in everything from private equity to hedge funds.

What has Schwarzman sour: the British public outrage over his attempt to fill up his English estate’s new private lake with water in the middle of a severe drought.

Schwarzman bought his current estate west of London for $108 million three years ago and then set about digging out a hole on site for a three-acre lake. But he picked a bad time to start filling that hole. Record-dry weather this year has had local authorities banning non-essential water consumption.

This banning, conveniently for Schwarzman, had a loophole: an exemption for new “construction.” He used that loophole to truck in water, a move the local water authority chief blasted as “appalling” — and banned — after Schwarzman’s gambit surfaced.

The last word: Average families in the vicinity of Schwarzman’s estate, notes local resident Lawrence Leask, couldn’t use a garden hose to fill their kiddie pools once the drought hit. But a billionaire could dig out a lake and start filling it.

“It’s not fair, is it?” reflects Leask. “It’s one rule for him and one rule for us.”

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