I had some ancestors who lived in Newport, Rhode Island during the British occupation of that city 250 years ago. I recently went back there for a visit to learn a bit about the “no kings” movement of that era. 

You know what I found? That within about a century after the hard-fought victory against the monarchy, “royal” forces had essentially re-occupied Newport. The heirs of railroad king Cornelius Vanderbilt and other aristocrats spared no expense in erecting oceanfront mansions modeled after European palaces. From these imposing edifices, they projected their dominance over all America.

But even those robber barons of that first Gilded Age might have balked at the price tag for the White House ballroom now under construction during this, our nation’s second Gilded Age. Trump had initially insisted that private donors would cover all his ballroom’s costs. But Republicans are now proposing that taxpayers cough up a $1 billion allocation for Trump’s Versailles-inspired party space.  

On the 250th anniversary of our revolt against a lavish British monarchy, will Congress actually approve taxpayer funds for a ballroom where King George III would have felt right at home? Stay tuned for this week’s classic budget battle. 

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

Fighting Together To Extract Wins from Private Developers

This week’s frontline face: Vonda McDaniel, president of the Central Labor Council of Nashville and Middle Tennessee.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Big corporate investments in the South have been following a predictable pattern for years now. Companies loudly proclaim that their new operations will bring prosperity and jobs to the region, and then, inevitably, the companies deliver insufficient wages and rely heavily on tax breaks and public subsidies.

Labor organizers in the South are now changing that historic pattern. McDaniel and her allies have been negotiating “community benefits agreements” — CBAs — with firms entering their region. These legally enforceable pacts, arranged without government intervention, help labor and community groups ensure that new investments come with good jobs with strong labor standards and environmental protections and meet other community priorities as well.

What makes this fight so important: “By forging the coalitions needed to secure community benefits agreements,” McDaniel writes in a new Inequality.org analysis, “we can build the power necessary to upend the failed Southern economic development model and create truly shared prosperity in the South.” 

Resisting Private Equity’s Profiteering March into Nursing Homes

The private equity industry’s steady expansion into every sector of our lives has left a trail of destruction in its wake. The private equity business model — buy up distressed businesses, radically slash needed spending, and then sell off whatever value remains for a big profit — has made its way into nursing care over the last few years, resulting in reduced staffing and higher mortality rates.

But nothing about this march has been inevitable. Lawmakers could have been fully funding nursing homes instead of leaving them to the whims of the private market. That change still can happen, note community activists like Scott Doerr. We can make our voices heard.

Doerr and his community allies fought tirelessly to keep the Pine Crest nursing home in Wisconsin public. They ultimately lost that battle, but with more of us in the fight, Doerr believes, we can stop and reverse the privatization of senior care.

A new analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation is making clear that the ongoing scandal of ever-widening gaps between U.S. workers and highly paid corporate executives has gone global.

Between 2019 and 2025, workers worldwide experienced a 12 percent decline in real wages, $2,326 in dollar terms. By contrast, pay for the world’s 1,500 highest-paid CEOs jumped 54 percent over the same period to an average $8.4 million. 

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

Have You Thanked a Billionaire Yet Today? Get to It Already!

This week’s dour deep pocket: Steven Roth, the billionaire CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, one of the nation’s largest commercial landlords.

What has Roth sour: anyone who spouts the slogan “tax the rich.” In an official earnings call last week with Wall Street investors, the eighty-four-year-old exec deemed that tax maxim inherently “dangerous.”

“I must say,” Roth told his potential investors, “that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich,’ when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.”

Among the pols that Roth sees as hate-mongers: Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor who strongly supports a proposed new tax on second homes in his city worth over $5 million. That levy on palaces like billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238-million New York penthouse, charges Roth, would amount to an assault on “the American dream.”

The last word: “Roth says the wealthy should be ‘praised and thanked,’” notes the New York actor and commentator Alfred Tom, but their “towers were built on the backs” of workers who “cannot even afford to live in the city they are building.”

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