October 8, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

During the White House’s initial wave of federal worker firings, Inequality.org published a piece by Paul Osadebe, a fair-housing lawyer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That article urged federal workers to fight for their jobs out of a duty to the millions of Americans they were helping daily. 

Now Osadebe and his HUD colleague Palmer Heenan have been fired by the Trump administration for signing onto a whistleblower letter charging that cuts to the agency have made enforcing housing fairness impossible.

Repression has become the widespread norm at all levels of our society. Federal workers wanting the government to do good have felt that repression. So have folks ranging from protesting students to immigrants just trying to protect their children, like this issue's featured face on the frontlines.

Meanwhile, our nation’s richest continue to get even richer, as we highlight below with the latest Federal Reserve statistics on who holds America’s wealth.

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

Advocating for Our Nation’s Immigrants, Including Herself

This week’s frontline face: Jeanette Vizguerra, the founder of Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition who became a key figure in the fight for immigrant rights during the first Trump administration.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Vizguerra, a mother of four, is currently sitting in ICE detention despite having no criminal record. She’s fighting the case in court, rightfully arguing that she was targeted for her activism. Making her case specially salient: Immigrants without a criminal conviction now make up the largest group of people arrested and detained by ICE.

Vizguerra, while in detention, will be unable to see two of her children — and the immigrants right group Detention Watch Network — receive tomorrow the 49th annual Institute for Policy Studies Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

What makes this fight so important: "The immigrant rights movement continues to fight for the human right to move and stay — and for dignified lives for all," our colleague Alliyah Lusuegro writes. "And even with little support among mainstream politicians or the media, they’re making a huge impact in this dangerous time: Nearly 80 percent of Americans now say immigration is good for this country — a record high."

What's Stopping Our World’s Workers from Using Their Power?

Things are not going great for the labor movement these days. Domestically, millions of federal workers are being stripped of their union representation, making already dire union density numbers plummet even further. Authoritarians abroad, in the meantime, are gaining purchase on deeply xenophobic platforms that demonize immigrant labor.

What can workers do? One option: withhold their labor all at once.

In Italy, we've seen general strikes hamstring the whole economy in response to Israel blocking the Sumud Flotilla's delivery of aid to Gaza. Imagining a similar response from labor in America, A.J. Schumann writes in Inequality.org, can be difficult. Among the reasons: legal restrictions on solidarity strikes and a culture of individuality. But magical actions can and do happen all the time. More below.

Since 1989, the share of America’s wealth held by the nation’s wealthiest has risen steadily. The latest Federal Reserve data show that the richest 10 percent of American households now own over two-thirds of the nation's total wealth. The top 1 percent holds 31.0 percent of total wealth — just slightly less than the entire bottom 90 percent of U.S. households.

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

The High-Tech Billionaire Who Has Wall Streeters Lusting 

This week’s dour deep pocket: Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant that has just passed Elon Musk’s SpaceX to become the world’s most valuable startup.

What has Altman sour: the analyst unease over what Reuters has described as a wild investor class scramble to buy into OpenAI and get on board “an already overcrowded train.” That scramble, analysts fear, is pumping up a massive stock market bubble that will eventually burst — and take down, in its wake, the U.S. economy.

OpenAI, counters Altman, needs capital to “build AI that can do science,” with it also being “nice to show people cool new tech/products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money.”

Reactions to one of those “cool” products, the new Sora social media app, have not gone down well within the tech community. Altman, one widely shared social media posting taunts, has gone from claiming that OpenAI needs trillions in investment dollars to cure cancer to “launching AI slop videos.”

The last word: Sam Altman’s OpenAI, sums up tech analyst Brian Merchant, “has been on a desperate quest to build an AI monopoly.” Altman “has been following the playbook of his mentor Peter Thiel, who has long held that the best way to succeed in tech is to create a novel market — say, for digital chatbots — and then to move to monopolize that market.”

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