Category Archives: history and consequences

James Petras, Making America Great Through Exploitation, Servitude and Abuse “The moral offenses are in essence economic and social crimes. Sexual abuse is only one aspect of the social dynamics facilitating the increase in inequality and concentration of wealth, which define the practices and values of the American political and economic system The problem is not merely corrupt and perverted individual miscreants: It is the hierarchy of inequality which produces and reproduces an endless supply of vulnerable workers to exploit and abuse.” read
Zach Carter, Everything You Should Know About The Stock Market read
Liz Posner, Republicans Have a Sinister New Way of Cutting Social Security read
Thomas B. Edsall, Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality? read
Paul Buchheit, Yes, Deniers, Millions of Americans are Among the Poorest People in the World read

Danielle Allen,, Equality and American Democracyread
Angus Deaton, The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problemread
Inequality, Stagnation, and Market Power, Joseph Stiglitz’s new book read

bloomberg.com, World’s Wealthiest Became $1 Trillion Richer in 2017 read
Jessica Corbett, CEO-Worker Income Gap Higher in U.S. Than Anywhere Else: Analysis read
Eli Day, The Number of Homeless People in America Increased for the First Time in 7 Years read
Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Inequality is not inevitable – but the US ‘experiment’ is a recipe for divergence read
Finian Cunningham, Capitalism Collapsing from Inequality… Blame Russia! read
Is This Why Productivity Has Tanked and Wealth Inequality Has Soared? read

Ed Pilkington, Why the UN is investigating extreme poverty … in America, the world’s richest nation read
Rep. Keith Ellison: GOP Tax Bill Would Reorder Society & Create “Hereditary Aristocracy” for Rich read
Jared Bernstein, Two Top Republican Tax Writers Reveal Their Prejudice and Their Strategy read
Paul Craig Roberts, What Washington’s “wars of liberation” have brought to its Swedish Puppet State read
Erik Swanson, Researchers chart rising wealth inequality across millennia – “The U.S. has probably the highest wealth inequality for any developed country right now” watch
Rachel M. Cohen,, Author of GOP Tax Plan Says Children’s Health Insurance Program Is Held Up “Because We Don’t Have Money Anymore” read
Dylan Scott and Alvin Chang, The Republican tax bill will exacerbate income inequality in America read
Dylan Scott and Alvin Chang, The Republican Tax Bill Will Exacerbate Income Inequality in America read

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, A World in Peril read
Christopher Glazek, THE SECRETIVE FAMILY MAKING BILLIONS FROM THE OPIOID CRISIS read
Global Research News, Selected Articles: Serving the Corporate Interests of the “One-Percenters” read
Conor Gaffey, The World’s Billionaires—the Richest in More Than 100 Years—Fear That the Poor Will Rise UP read
Richard D. Wolff,, Economic Update: Socialism of the Past, Present and Future listen
Miles Kampf-Lassin,, Rahm Emanuel’s Tribute to the World’s Richest Man Is Bad News for Chicago read

Robin Varghese, Massive Rise Of Top Incomes Is Mostly Driven By Capital read
Yves Smith, The Ludicrous Prepper Plans of the Super Rich read
Sarah Chayes,, Kleptocracy in America read
Robert B. Reich, How Inequality Erodes the Foundation of Modern Societies Rev. of ONE ANOTHER’S EQUALS The Basis of Human Equality By Jeremy Waldron and THE FATE OF THE WEST The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea By Bill Emmott “The greatest threat to Western liberal democracies in the future is more likely to come from extreme inequality than from Islamic extremism. This is because inequality erodes two foundation stones of modern society — openness to new ideas and opportunities, and a conviction that all citizens are morally equal…..But by the 1980s, the virtuous circle had stopped working. Economic and technological dynamism was upending jobs, convulsing communities and splintering families…. The banks that created the calamity got bailed out and no top executive went to jail, but millions of people lost their jobs, savings and homes. Waldron warns that wide inequalities of income and wealth can erode this moral imperative because they make it harder to make the mental leap it requires: The poor may come to seem so different from the privileged and prosperous that the well-off cannot understand a moral principle that assigns equal value to the living of a human life as such ..Viewed from either Emmott’s or Waldron’s point of departure — the necessity of preserving an open society or of respecting the moral equality of human beings — the surge toward widening inequality is endangering the West .read
inequality.org, new aggregating site read
Paul Buchheit, Five Men Own Almost As Much As Half the World’s Population read
Sarah Anderson, 4 Charts That May Make You Scream

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, The richest US families own a startling proportion of America’s wealth m “The richest 10% of families are worth a combined $51 trillion, equal to 75% of total household wealth. “ read Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, The richest US families own a startling proportion of America’s wealth m “The richest 10% of families are worth a combined $51 trillion, equal to 75% of total household wealth. “ read
Sam Pizzigati, Who’s To Blame for Inequality? read
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Deloitte Audited the Fed for Eight Straight Years of the Financial Crash “The worst of the Wall Street crash occurred in 2008 and 2009. It’s now June of 2017 and the Fed’s balance sheet seems stuck at $4.5 trillion as the stock market sets record highs and the holdings of derivatives by the Wall Street mega banks remain astronomical. The public needs considerably more daylight on the Fed’s books and operations in order to understand if its monetary policy role has seriously mutated.” c read
It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The Mankota MN massacre read
Jon Schwarz, The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs read
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Why Wall Street Should Be Viewed as a Major National Threat read
Jon Schwarz, How to Love This Freaky Country read
Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster read
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Financial System of U.S. Rests on Health of Just Five Mega Banks read
Mike Kimel, Poverty, Crime and Causality “it isn’t so much that poverty drives people into crime, but that families whose members have a tendency toward criminal behavior have an increased likelihood of ending up poor.” read
What Happened to America’s Wealth? The Rich Hid It read
Shervin Assari, Why poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society read
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, After Passing Stress Tests, Wall Street Banks to Spend Like a Drunken Sailor – on their Own Stock Buybacks read
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, New York Times Runs Editorial Today on the Mega Banks: You Need to Pay Attention read
Paul Craig Roberts, Once Only Blacks Were Enslaved, Now We All Are “The 4th of July is upon us. We will hear all sorts of patriotic BS about how wonderful we are and how thankful we are to our brave military who defends our liberty…..The policy of the US government is easy to sum up. It consists of driving the American population into the ground and fomenting war abroad. This is what serves the money interests that control the government.” read
Chuck Collins, CEOs Now Make 300 Times More Than Their Workers. This City Is Putting a Stop to That read
The super-rich are different: they pay less tax read

Stacy Bannerman, Is This the ‘New Normal’ We Want?read
Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full? read
Engelhardt, The Making of a Pariah Nation read
Andrew Bacevich, “There Will Be Hell to Pay” read
Chris Hedges, The Dance of Death “The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death.” read
Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, Koch Brothers Orchestrate Grassroots Effort to Lower Corporate Taxes, Documents Show read
Jedediah Purdy, How Did We Become A Billionaires’ Republic? read
The Epic Failure of Labor Leadership in the United States, 1980-2017 and Continuing read
Dawn of the Dead: Why American Politics Can’t be Reformed read
Thom Hartmann, A 21st-Century Form of Indentured Servitude Has Already Penetrated Deep into the American Heartland read

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, How Did a Nation Crippled by Wall Street Billionaires End Up With Them Running the Country? read

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Has America Fallen? Krugman and Europeans Raise the Question. read
Lawrence Wittner, The Scandal of Vast Inequality in Retirement Pay read
Colin Gordon, The Triumph of the 1% read
Zsolt Darvas, Is Technological Progress Behind Growing Income Inequality? read
Sarah Anderson Inequality Gave Rise to Donald Trump’s Presidency read
Julie Chinitz, The Real Living Wage? $17.28 an Hour — at Least read
Jeremy Ashkenas, Nine New Findings About Inequality in the United States read
Drake Baer, Rich People Literally See the World Differently read
Sally Goerner, Why Extreme Inequality Causes Economic Collapse read
Jeremy Grantham, ‘Twas Capitalism That Killed Capitalism read
Max Ehrenfreund, Researchers have answered a big question about the decline of the middle class read
Matthew Desmond, How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality read
Andrea Louise Campbell, America the Undertaxed read
Nelson D. Schwartz, Middle Class Contracted in U.S. Over 2 Decades, Study Finds read

Peter Whiteford, Do 8 men really control the same wealth as the poorest half of the global population? read

Martin Hart-Landsberg, , Working People Are Hurt More by Rising Inequality Than Slow Economic Growth read

Landis Weaver, Naming and Shaming Overpaid CEOs read

George Lakey, Inequality is the real backstory to Sweden’s riots “What’s changed is that Sweden has been retreating in recent decades from its earlier commitment to economic equality. Although average living standards are still among the highest in Europe — and Sweden has nothing like the U.S. income gap — its economic inequality has grown faster than that of its Nordic cousins…..Sweden is light years ahead of the United States on immigration policy and equality of opportunity, and the other Nordic countries even more so. However, a study by Norwegian peace researchers revealed just how relative such assessments are. The researchers found that what counts most is the perspective on the ground — how people compare their own situation and that of people they can see who have it much better. Unemployed immigrant youths in the Stockholm region can see their age peers not far away spending freely. They feel left behind…..What economists call the Nordic model is the only one with a solid track record for minimizing absolute poverty. A living wage for all is fundamental — in Copenhagen the workers at McDonalds receive $20 per hour. Full employment and wealth redistribution reduce inequality…..By the 1980s the Reagan-Thatcher offensive, on behalf of neo-liberalism, was influencing Sweden as well.” read

Paul Buchheit, Five Conspirators in the Eradication of the Middle Class read

Tim Radford, Inequalities fuel human impacts on climate read

Paul Buchheit, Morbid inequality: Now just SIX men have as much wealth as half the world’s population read

Julia Belluz, Why the white middle class is dying faster, explained in 6 charts read

Paul Buchheit, New Evidence that Poor Americans Pay the Highest Taxes and Get Little of the Safety Net read

Shannon Jones, Wealth Of World’s Billionaires Soars Amid Stock Market Surge read

Angus Deaton, It’s Not Just Unfair: Inequality Is a Threat to Our Governance read

Claire Bernish, Federal Reserve Just Declared the American Dream is Dead for Most Americans read

Michael Hudson, The New Feudalism read

Engelhardt, Walled In read