November 5, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

A self-described democratic socialist has just won a majority of the over two million votes cast in New York City’s mayoral election. To describe this as a sea change would be an understatement. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign explicitly rejected politics as usual. He embraced a mass movement committed to making our nation’s least affordable city a place where all working families can thrive.

Over a hundred thousand New Yorkers went further than just voting for Mamdani. They dedicated hours and hours to knocking on over three million doors. That people power soundly defeated a mega-million-dollar drive to prop up the political comeback bid of billionaire-friendly Andrew Cuomo.

The success of Mamdani’s victory — after a campaign unapologetically focused on delivering for the working class — will reverberate throughout our political system, and here at Inequality.org we’ll be covering his mayoralty closely. His vision? That could hardly be clearer. As Mamdani noted in his victory speech:

We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

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

This Child Care Specialist Thinks Child Care Should be Free

This week’s frontline face: Rita Bee, a long-time child care teacher in Gallup, New Mexico.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Bee has for years been an advocate for making child care easily accessible in her home state of New Mexico. As of November 1, her goal of making costly child care services available to everyone has become a reality.

All families in the “Land of Enchantment” can now apply for no-cost child care. That could mean savings of $12,000 yearly, a true game-changer for New Mexico’s working-class families.

What makes this fight so important to her: “Taking care of our children and setting them up for success is the best thing we can do for our families, our communities, and our nation,” Bee recently noted. “My hope is that all states will follow New Mexico’s lead and enact a similar, no-cost universal child care program for all families.”

How We Can Harness Industrial Policy for a Just Green Transition

Contradictions between the short-term goals of the labor and environmental movements have for years fractured what could otherwise be a potent force for a successful green transition. In California, the United Auto Workers have a new proposal for how the two movements can work together to ensure we address climate change without risking union jobs.

UAW’s Region 6 is calling on the Golden State to reclaim the power to shape energy production and consumption away from corporations.

“California has the resources,” Inequality.org’s Karina Smith explains in a new analysis of the UAW initiative. “Now it needs the political capacity to build up economies that are mutually beneficial for workers, economic development, and our environment in the long-term.”

With the federal government shutdown entering its sixth week, the roughly 42 million Americans who rely on food stamps did not receive their November 1 SNAP benefits. But the threat to the nation’s primary nutrition assistance program won’t be over even when the shutdown ends. The “Big Beautiful Bill” enacted earlier this year includes the largest SNAP cuts in history, slashing our most important and effective anti-hunger program by roughly 20 percent.

A Cryptocurrency Kingpin’s Warped Approach to Sharing the Wealth

This week’s dour deep pocket: the crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao. Donald Trump pardoned Zhao last month after the Canadian mogul served four months in prison for criminal money laundering.

What has Zhao sour: Senator Elizabeth Warren’s reaction to the pardon. Zhao, Warren has pointed out, pled guilty to the money laundering charges and then, in his quest for a pardon, conveniently “financed President Trump’s stablecoin.”   

“If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption,” observes Warren, ”it owns it.”

Trump’s crypto wealth, now valued at over $3.4 billion, has become his personal fortune’s “most significant source.” The 48-year-old Zhao’s personal fortune last week sat just shy of $60 billion. Zhao is now threatening, Yahoo! Finance reports, to sue Warren for defamation.

The last word: The pardon for Zhao, Elizabeth Warren and six other U.S. senators wrote last week in a letter to attorney general Pamela Bondi and treasury secretary Scott Bessent, “signals to cryptocurrency executives and other white-collar criminals that they can commit crimes with impunity, so long as they enrich President Trump enough.”

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