December 3, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

With 2026 inching ever nearer, millions of Americans remain at risk of losing the Affordable Care Act subsidies that help them pay for critically needed health care. Lawmakers currently stand no closer to a deal, and supporters of preserving access to treatment and medications have already expended the nuclear option of a government shutdown. No one really knows what they can do next.

This congressional failure to secure access to what ought to be a basic right amounts to a stunning indictment of our contemporary political scene. What billionaires don’t want, the rest of us don’t get.

But let’s borrow from the legendary songwriter and organizer Joe Hill: Now’s not the time to mourn! Millions of our neighbors are going to be facing new hardships in 2026. Let’s organize now to help them.

Mutual aid networks, union drives, and targeted campaigns can all help fill in where our government is failing. Let’s do our best to build them up!

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

An Inside Look at the Drive To Organize Starbucks Workers

This week’s frontline face: Jaz Brisack, union organizer, co-founder of Starbucks Workers United and of the Inside Organizer School, and author of Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World.

What Brisack is doing to help create a more equal world: Brisack has been a core activist in some of the most exciting union campaigns of recent years, efforts that have involved Nissan, Tesla, and, most notably, Starbucks.

Brisack details all that experience — from getting a job as a "salt" at a Buffalo-area Starbucks to winning representational elections at dozens of stores — in Get on the Job and Organize. But that book goes beyond recounting past experiences. Brisack’s pages expose both Corporate America’s new union-busting playbooks and the deficiencies of our current labor movement.

What makes this fight so important: “We are dying as a labor movement,” Brisack notes in a new Q&A with Inequality.org. 

“We need to be less worried about whether Tesla workers are organizing jurisdictionally with the right union, or whether Starbucks workers might somehow say the wrong thing at the bargaining table if they’re allowed to bargain at hundreds of stores simultaneously,” adds Brisack. “Let workers take autonomy in their own campaigns and see what works.”

Reversing Big Oil’s Tax Tricks: A Necessary and Achievable Task!

Big Oil’s massive investment in lobbying has paid huge dividends. Big Oil hasn’t just managed to avoid culpability for its role in the climate crisis. The industry is also pocketing enormous government giveaways. So, notes a new report from the FACT Coalition, that the top U.S. oil and gas giants now pay more in taxes to foreign governments than to the U.S. Treasury. 

But we can, the FACT Coalition emphasizes, reverse this damage — by eliminating fossil fuel tax preferences and subsidies, imposing closer oversight over multinationals, and improving country-by-country tax transparency.

For more information, read this analysis from Inequality.org’s Karina Smith’s and check the chart that appears below.

A deeply skewed tax system, details a new report from the FACT Coalition, is allowing major American fossil-fuel companies to avoid paying their fair tax share at home. The 11 firms studied extract over half their oil and gas domestically, yet only pay 18 percent of their total income taxes in the U.S. When rich and powerful corporations get away with dodging taxes, the rest of us get stuck with the bill. 

For an interactive version of this chart, click on our Inequality.org piece below.

Pro Football’s Worst Billionaire Owner Simply Can’t Stop Fumbling

This week’s dour deep pocket: Robert “Woody” Johnson, the great-grandson of the founder of Big Pharma giant Johnson & Johnson and the owner of the National Football League’s New York Jets franchise, currently worth over $8 billion. Johnson bought the team, in 2000, for $635 million.

What has Johnson sour: the annual survey of NFL players that the National Football League Players Association conducts on topics that range from locker-room quality to team ownership. The latest players survey, released last winter, graded only one NFL owner, the Jets’ Johnson, as an “F” overall.

The NFL owners, led by Johnson, have now filed a grievance charging that the NFLPA’s annual survey violates the league’s collective bargaining agreement. The players association’s “totally bogus” survey, Johnson charges, doesn’t rate as “balanced” or “even representative” of how players actually feel.

In fact, nearly all NFL active players — some 1,695 in 2025 — complete the NFLPA’s annual survey.

The last word: “When Dan Snyder sold the Washington Commanders” in 2023, observes sports journalist Tzvi Machlin, “someone had to step up and take the mantle of worst owner in the NFL. By every metric, the man that has stepped up is New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.”

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