January 7, 2026                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

The first question that came to my mind after the U.S. attack and coup in Venezuela: Who’s gonna make big bucks off of all this? 

In the 2000s, I spent a lot of time tracking Iraq War profiteers. The most infamous would be Halliburton. This defense contracting giant faced a series of damning charges — from massive fraud to serving soldiers contaminated water — but none of those scandals stopped Halliburton’s CEO from becoming one of America’s highest-paid executives. 

Now the #1 Iraq War profiteer stands to profit from yet another U.S. war for oil. Just weeks before the invasion, Halliburton sued Venezuela over lost profits related to the U.S.-imposed sanctions that had halted their operations in that country five years ago. Suddenly, Halliburton decided to demand $200 million in compensation — not from the United States, but from Venezuela. A U.S.-backed puppet government might actually comply with that absurd demand. 

The story of greed-fueled militarism is not new. Stay tuned as we monitor — and denounce — this latest chapter.

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

Fighting Back Against a Techno-Fascist Desert Takeover

This week’s frontline faces: Ennedith Lopez and Feleecia Guillen with the New Mexico No False Solutions Coalition. Lopez is a former and Guillen is a current fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies.

What they're doing to help create a more equal world: The duo is part of a movement sounding the alarm on AI development projects in the New Mexico desert. Data center build up is threatening water and energy security for resident communities, but corporations are bulldozing right past those concerns.

The race to build in New Mexico's desert is part of a long history of using the land as a sacrifice zone — think the Trinity nuclear test — for "progress." Lopez and Guillen have been organizing to oppose this newest "techno-fascist takeover," fighting to ensure that everyday Americans can prevail over corporate greed.

What makes this fight so important to them: "AI is simply the newest chapter of New Mexico’s colonial legacy," they recently wrote in a piece for Albuquerque Journal linked below.

"The question now is whether policymakers will allow Wall Street and Silicon Valley to decide how our water and land are used — or whether our communities will finally be the leaders in shaping New Mexico’s future."

Direct Cash Payments Keep Working

Amid drastic cuts to our social safety net, one proposal to keep families afloat keeps rising to the top: direct cash payments. In Washington state, momentum has built for the policy intervention on the back of several successful tax credits and Guaranteed Income programs.

As part of the Working Families Tax Credit, in 2025 over $200 million went to around 300,000 low- and moderate-income households in Washington. This infusion gave families the freedom to solve their own problems and avoid financial crisis. As our contributors from the Washington State Budget and Policy Center argue in a piece linked below, direct cash payments can fill in the gaps left by our collapsing federal safety net.

The Trump administration is boasting about strong GDP growth. But much of that growth is driven by rich Americans, while lower-income families are struggling with wage stagnation and rising costs for basic goods. The top 10 percent of earners now account for nearly half (49.2 percent) of all U.S. consumer spending, up from 43.2 percent in 2020, according to Moody’s Analytics. 

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

Some Lessons in Life Only a For-Profit College Can Truly Teach

This week’s dour deep pocket: the for-profit college impresario Carl Barney.

What has Barney sour: Over recent years, state and federal probes have repeatedly found that for-profit colleges have regularly left their students “deeply in debt” without the wherewithal to pay that debt off. Those probes have left Barney fuming about a government campaign — led by people who “really think profit-making is wrong”— “deliberately designed” to “cripple, crush, and close” private colleges.

In the face of that state and federal scrutiny — and the resulting decline in for-profit enrollments — Barney tried transferring his profit-seeking schools to a nonprofit he controlled, in the process claiming a $180-million tax deduction. The IRS disallowed that claim. Barney subsequently brought suit against the IRS move. Last week, a Trump-appointed judge to the United States Tax Court gave Barney most of the relief he was seeking.

The last word: In 2024, a $924,600 political contribution made Barney, the Los Angeles Times has reported, the third-largest California-based donor to Donald Trump’s successful re-election campaign.

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