November 12, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Finally, after a record-setting 42 days, we’re nearing an end to the government shutdown. The House of Representatives will soon be voting on a spending package that will restore federal operations. But that vote will not extend the critical Affordable Care Act subsidies that most Democrats were fighting for.

Eight “moderate” Senate Democrats defected from their party’s caucus to advance this package. But the real blame for the capitulation that will leave millions of Americans without access to critical care belongs to the summit of this ostensibly “liberal” party. Either minority leader Chuck Schumer couldn’t keep his caucus united or actively wanted this week’s deal to take place.

Making matters worse: This Senate deal comes right on the heels of a strong Democratic Party performance on Election Day last week. Those state and local victories should have emboldened Senate Democrats to keep united and fighting. They didn’t. Why? One key reason: The Democrats’ “big tent” includes executives as well as workers, landlords as well as tenants.

What does that mean for those of us trying to win a more egalitarian society? We need to keep organizing, and we do have reason for optimism. Progressives did well in this month’s elections, and the Senate cave-in on the shutdown has the  grassroots fired up. 

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

Flexing Labor Power at the Nation’s Largest and Richest Coffee Chain  

This week’s frontline faces: Baristas unionized with Starbucks Workers United.

What they're doing to help create a more equal world: Unionized Starbucks workers voted earlier this month to go on an open-ended strike starting November 13 — the coffee giant’s annual “Red Cup” day — unless the company finalizes a fair contract after years of delays.

The walkout, currently scheduled for 25 cities, would be the third major strike since Starbucks Workers United launched four years ago. The union now represents employees at over 600 stores across the country, but the company has consistently refused to come to the bargaining table in good faith. 

This week has brought a boost for workers. Over 100 lawmakers, led by Senator Bernie Sanders, have sent two letters demanding Starbucks resume negotiations.

Starbucks currently boasts the widest CEO-worker pay gap in the United States.

“Finalizing a fair union contract,” the Starbucks union points out, “would cost Starbucks less than one average day’s sales and less than Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s nearly $98 million compensation for just four months of work in 2024.” 

What makes this fight so important: “Our fight is about actually making Starbucks jobs the best jobs in retail,” notes Jasmine Leli, a Starbucks barista and strike captain in Buffalo, New York. “Things have only gone backwards at Starbucks under Niccol’s leadership.”

Donald Trump Is Boycotting the G20. Should We Care? 

President Trump clearly prefers negotiating head-to-head with world leaders. After each of those one-on-one sessions, after all, he often comes home with some awesome personal gifts. In recent bilateral talks in Asia, the American president scored a gold golf ball, a gold crown, and a gold-flecked brownie. 

But at the upcoming G20 summit in South Africa, poor Trump would have had to sit around a table, sharing the limelight with 19 other world leaders. 

The Institute for Policy Studies and partner groups from South Africa, Brazil, and the UK have just come out with a new report calling on G20 leaders to keep a firm multilateral focus on today’s greatest global threats: everything from skyrocketing inequality and the climate crisis to forced migration and the lack of decent jobs.  

“The collapse of multilateralism makes it even more likely that the most powerful players — the largest economies and the wealthiest corporations and individuals — will score the best deals,” points out Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson. “Small countries and ordinary people, from Iowa soybean farmers to Mexican factory workers, are even more likely to get the shaft.”

More below on the G20 summit stakes. 

World leaders are now gathering in Brazil’s Belém for the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference. At this COP30, cutting emissions will be sitting at the heart of the global agenda. But tackling climate change raises more than environmental issues. Climate change has become a prime inequality concern.

New Oxfam research shows that the average top 0.1 percenter emits 298 tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared with just 0.8 tons for someone in the bottom half of the income distribution. For an interactive version of this chart, click below.

Billionaire Wisdom: Let’s Only Tax the Wealth of People Without Much of It!

This week’s dour deep pocket: Mark Cuban, the billionaire who likes to see himself as part of the enlightened rich who “don’t take what we have for granted and don’t and haven’t exploited people.”

What has Cuban sour: those critics of concentrated wealth who would like to see the United States go billionaire-free. Contends Cuban: “Billionaires will exist as long as stock markets exist.”

And, Cuban insists, any attempt to tax the annual gains in the value of wealthy people’s investment assets — the simplest approach to taxing the wealth of America’s wealthiest — would be an “economy killer.”

What Cuban conveniently ignores: America’s middle-income households, unlike the rich, already pay an annual tax on the current value of their most valuable asset: their home. The typical American family’s property taxes, note Chuck Marr and Samantha Jacoby of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “rise as the value of their home rises.” 

The last word: “It is a simple fact,” sums up the University of Southern California’s Edward McCaffery, “that billionaires in America can live very extraordinarily well completely tax-free off their wealth.”

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