November 19, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Earlier this week, Donald Trump welcomed to the White House Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman — the widely reported moving force behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi seven years ago — with an extravagant black-tie dinner. In attendance for this feting of the Saudi crown prince: some of the billionaires who appear regularly in Inequality.org.

Billionaires like Elon Musk, fresh off the approval of his new $1-trillion pay package. Another: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. His company, until this week, has been almost single-handedly driving the U.S. stock market’s speculative fever.

The morning after Trump’s over-the-top dinner for Mohammed bin Salman, Musk's xAI announced a deal with the Saudi company Humain to build a new data center in the gulf country using Nvidia’s computing chips. Trump’s White House extravaganzas, in other words, don’t just show who has Trump's ear. They also facilitate fundamentally anti-democratic global greed grabs.

One housekeeping note: We'll be taking a break from the newsletter next week. Our entire team is wishing everyone a restful and restorative Thanksgiving!

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

Working To Fill in the Gaps That Federal Aid Cutbacks Create

This week’s frontline face: Krystal Barrett, a mother of two in Alabama.

What she's doing to help create a more equal world: Hundreds of thousands of Alabama residents rely on the federal government to help their families, with food, health care, and other supports. Some lawmakers, like Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, regularly criticize that reliance and do whatever they can to keep the federal government from adequately investing in people and services.

Barrett relies on SNAP benefits to feed her two children on the autism spectrum. The federal government shutdown put her family at risk, and she’s been working to put in place a plan to feed hungry families over the holiday season.

What makes this fight so important: “Change is going to have to come from us. I’m proud of having rallied our community to gather resources so we can all make it through this winter,” Barrett recently noted for Inequality.org. “But as long as our government keeps working for the rich at the expense of the rest of us, things are only going to get worse.”

An Equitable Tax Structure for All: The Key To Closing Our Social Divides 

The shift among Latino voters in the 2024 election toward Donald Trump gathered considerable media attention. The president, many post-election analyses noted, had tapped into a deep frustration that Americans across race, class, and gender lines have with our deteriorating economic conditions. 

But the Trump “caring” facade appears to be rapidly fading. Trump's immigration and tax policies have been disastrous for Latinos, notes William Rice of Americans for Tax Fairness. Immigration raids have precipitously dropped hiring in Latino-heavy industries, while new Trump administration tax rules largely benefit the whiter-than-average upper classes.

Working toward racial equity, Rice stresses, will require far more egalitarian tax structures as well as an end to carceral approaches to immigration.

South Africa will become the first African nation to host the G20 summit of world leaders this weekend. High on the host country’s priority list: combating the growing debt crisis among many low-income countries. Globally, 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on interest payments to wealthy creditors than on either public health or education. 

On a Mission To Get Government Out of Education and Billionaires In

This week’s dour deep pocket: Jeff Yass, the billionaire who earlier this month handed a whopping $100 million to the University of Austin, an anti-woke — and unaccredited — Texas institution launched four years ago to counter the “rising tide” of “censoriousness” in America’s universities.

What has Yass sour: American higher education. U.S. universities, Yass charges, have drifted “away from delivering results for graduates.”

The maverick University of Austin that Yass prefers owes its founding to billionaire Trump donor Joe Lonsdale and Bari Weiss, a former New York Times writer who earlier this fall sold a right-leaning publication she founded for $150 million and now serves as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, an outlet the new Paramount Skydance media colossus currently owns.

The 67-year-old Yass has also been this year’s largest contributor to MAGA Inc., a PAC that’s already spent $1.8 million against GOP Rep. Thomas Massie for daring to oppose parts of the Trump agenda.

The last word: Yass has educational interests beyond higher ed. He’s pumped big bucks into “school choice” campaigns for private K-12 school tuition tax credits. He sees “no possible way a government monopoly could be a better approach to schools than market competition.”

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