January 14, 2026                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Renee Good's murder at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer is a national tragedy. The ICE agent shot the 37-year-old mother of three three times for little more than trying to protect her community. This horrifying incident — and the 32 individuals who died in ICE custody in 2025 — remind us once again just how fundamentally violent ICE is.

Trump's ICE deployments haven't just bolstered his racist anti-immigrant agenda. They’re also weakening the labor power of migrant workers and enriching enterprises like the GEO Group. This private prison outfit received a $39 million contract from ICE last year to cage detainees in Colorado for six months. GEO’s BI Group subsidiary is now helping ICE track down and detain immigrants in a deal that could be worth up to $121 million.

The Trump gang and its allied corporate partners are working — across issues — in incredibly close collaboration. The challenge for our progressive movements: to band together to confront those connections more effectively.

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

An Unusually Up-Close Look at Amazon's Worker-Free Future

As part of its continuing campaign to slash labor costs, Amazon has begun automating more and more of its warehouse operations. The journalist Lenny Flatley recently wrote about his experiences working at an Amazon warehouse outside Pittsburgh that’s embraced automation. Inequality.org hopped on the phone with Flatley to ask some follow-up questions about his experience.

Inequality.org: What is a “next-generation” warehouse?

LF: Everything seems to be geared towards making the individual as unnecessary as possible.

There was this moment where I was standing on a mezzanine over a conveyor belt with a big stick, and my manager said "just stand here and if any packages get stuck, just poke them with the stick." And I thought to myself, this is literally the last thing they need people for. Once they figure out how to make robots poke packages with sticks we're all out of a job.

I: What does this mean for the future of labor?

LF: More robots, less people. The warehouse I wrote about in my piece is pretty interesting in that they had tried automating, but it initially didn't work out. So they had to start relying on people again. But it's only a matter of time before they fix the bugs. I'm sure going forward they're not building anything with humans in mind.

You can read Flatley's full analysis in TruthDig at the link below.

The Alternative To Waging War: Let’s Try Funding Critical Social Services

Americans are struggling mightily to pay for basic necessities that range from groceries to health care and housing. The Trump administration clearly doesn’t see addressing the cost-of-living crisis as a priority. The Trump crew has invested far more time in slashing social services and cutting taxes on the wealthy. And now the Trump administration is contemplating a full-scale foreign invasion.

Engaging in a ground war in Venezuela would be enormously costly. The most recent U.S. efforts to take over a country with force — think Iraq and Afghanistan — cost trillions of dollars. Setting aside the obvious illegality of removing a sovereign ruler from power, invading Venezuela would do absolutely nothing for Trump's own constituents. Why not spend the money on helping them instead?

As of January 1, 2026, the collective net worth of America’s top 12 billionaires surpassed $2.7 trillion. Their combined wealth has more than quadrupled, up from $608 billion on March 18, 2020, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes real-time billionaire data.

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

A New Motto for the Google ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Man: Don’t Be Taxed

This week’s dour deep pocket: the world’s second-richest man, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. Page’s personal fortune has soared from $50 billion in 2019 — the year he stepped away from his Alphabet empire’s daily operations — to about $260 billion today.

What has Page petulant: a proposed one-time, 5 percent tax on California deep-pocket wealth over $1 billion that unions are now organizing to place on the state’s November ballot. Some 90 percent of the revenue from the tax will go toward providing health care services.

One Silicon Valley mega-billionaire, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, has already declared himself “perfectly fine” with the proposed new levy. A younger Page might have echoed that. His mantra in Google’s early days: “Don’t be evil.”

But the present-day Page spent last month furiously moving himself and his assets out of California before the new year began. The reason: If California’s billionaire tax wins voter approval this November, the 5 percent levy will apply retroactively to all billionaires in the state as of January 1, 2026.

The last word: Trump’s federal budget cuts — the spark behind California’s new tax-the-rich bid — “were designed to shield billionaires from contributing while pushing the consequences onto patients and workers,” notes former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich. That reality makes an “emergency tax on the ultra-wealthy,” he adds, “a practical way to keep the health care system functioning.”

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