With sadness, I took off my Mexico jersey last week after my favorite team played valiantly but found itself eliminated from the World Cup.

But my disappointment with this summer's tourney goes deeper: The 2026 World Cup may well be the most polluting sports event ever, thanks to the thousands of luxury private jets that have been crisscrossing the three host countries of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

With the world’s finest players suffering in the extreme heat, the billionaire private jet class has been soaring above it all. For the July 10 match between Spain and Belgium, an incredible 2,077 private jets traveled to Inglewood, California!

Since 2007, our Institute for Policy Studies inequality program has been researching the economic and ecological costs of the private jets that the rest of us subsidize. This week, we’re formally launching a new Private Jet Accountability Project and an amazing tool that can track private jet emissions.

Tomorrow, we’ll be documenting surplus carbon emissions from the two World Cup semi-final matches in Dallas and Atlanta. Check out our “Red Card for Private Jets” at taxprivatejets.org for more. Next week, we’ll report on private jet activity from Sunday’s final match in New Jersey.

Our new tracker tool will eventually become an open-source sousveillance — surveillance from below — program that allows anyone to measure jumps in private jet-travel that accompany big-time annual events ranging from the Masters golf tournament and the Kentucky Derby to the Super Bowl. 

Stay tuned as we build a global movement to rein in private jet excess.

Chuck Collins
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

Sounding the Alarm on the Trump Administration’s Cuba Squeeze

This week’s frontline face: Liz Oliva Fernández, a Cuban journalist at the outlet Belly of the Beast.

What she's doing to help create a more equal world: Oliva Fernández and her colleagues have been sounding the alarm about the ongoing and escalating Trump administration pressure that’s impoverishing the people of Cuba. 

Since the beginning of the year, the United States has functionally cut off the island from oil — triggering rolling blackouts and hamstringing health services — and also moved to indict former president Raúl Castro.

What makes this fight so important: “The decision to indict Raúl Castro is a pretext that’s prompting fears of a Venezuela-like scenario via leadership decapitation,” Oliva Fernández recently told Inequality.org editor Chris Mills Rodrigo in an interview for In These Times.

Here in the United States, where working people face a soaring cost of living while Trump wages war in Iran and pushes for a massive Pentagon budget hike, opening another war front with Cuba would be devastating to working people on both sides of the Florida Strait. More from Oliva Fernández below.

Helping Families Access Healthy Food: Taking the Seattle Model National

In 2012, the city of Seattle launched an initiative to give food insecure families the money needed to afford healthier groceries. The Fresh Bucks program has now been a success for over a decade, with roughly 17,000 income-qualified households each month getting benefits to purchase fruits and vegetables.

Participating families have experienced a 31 percent higher rate of food security than comparable households without the benefit.

Now at the federal level, with cuts to critical programs like SNAP leaving more and more Americans without secure access to food, lawmakers are considering taking Seattle's model nationwide. The pending Fresh Bucks for Fresh Produce Act would provide households earning 80 percent or less of their area’s median income with $60 each month to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.

Read more from 2026 Henry A. Wallace Fellow Julian Villa at the link below.

Donald Trump frequently points to the stock market as proof of a strong economy. Last week, Trump even touted his own market gains, telling reporters, “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.” 

But not everybody is sharing in the market’s upside. According to the latest Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of Americans own about 50 percent of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares, while the bottom 90 percent collectively hold just 12.7 percent of that wealth. At the same time, those same 90 percent of households carry roughly three-quarters of the nation’s debt.

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

To Fast Track CEO Success, Make Friends at the White House!

This week’s dour deep pocket: Greg Foran, the CEO since February of Kroger’s, the nation’s largest supermarket chain. A former chief exec of Walmart’s U.S. operations, Foran stands to make $17 million or more this year.

What has Foran sour: the 2024 federal environmental rules aimed at cutting super-polluting hydrofluorocarbon leaks from supermarket refrigeration and air conditioning systems. This past May, Foran joined with Donald Trump to announce a six-year pause in putting the new rules into effect.

The reprieve, Foran told reporters, would let Kroger stores avoid “having to outlay more capital” to “change” their equipment. The result, Foran and Trump claimed, would be lower prices for consumers.

But the trade group for the cooling industry points out that the 2024 EPA standards don’t compel supermarkets to buy new equipment. They only compel chains “to buy more climate-friendly models when they made new purchases.”

The last word: Kroger earlier this month triumphantly announced a $1.65 billion purchase of the Giant Eagle supermarket chain, an outfit that rates even worse than Kroger in addressing climate emissions from refrigerants. Notes Green America: “If Kroger has $1.65 billion to buy a competitor, they have the money to move all their stores to natural refrigerants by 2030.”

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