Homeless tents are dwarfed by skyscrapers in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Threat to Democracy

UN Human Rights Panel to Discuss U.S. Income Inequality

Extreme income inequality poses a threat to the well-being of American democracy.

by Mark Gruenberg

Congressional Budget Office Report Reveals The Rich Are Once Again Outpacing Everyone Else

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the latest iteration of its U.S. household income distribution series, and this new research rates as the nonpartisan agency’s most comprehensive yet.

Congressional Budget Office Report Reveals The Rich Are Once Again Outpacing Everyone Else

Back in the 1980s, the decade that saw researchers start detailing America’s increasing concentration of income and wealth, flacks for the emerging Reagan economic order disdainfully dismissed the significance of the alarming new data. The United States isn’t getting more unequal, the Reaganites pronounced, and the middle class

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Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. Among his books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. His latest book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, will appear this spring. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online.

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Just How Bad Is Inequality at America’s Major Corporations?

Honeywell recently became the first corporation to report its CEO to worker pay ratio, an eye-popping 333 to 1.

Just How Bad Is Inequality at America’s Major Corporations?

That America’s income distribution has grown dramatically more unequal in the past 40 years is beyond debate. The share of the top 1 percent has doubled since 1980, to over 20 percent of all income. Could it get any worse? A look at America’s large, privately held corporations suggests it could. When Americans think of large

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Bob Lord

Bob Lord is a veteran tax lawyer and former congressional candidate, practices and blogs in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Study Finds Link Between Income Inequality, Consumerism and Size of Carbon Footprint

Countries with lower rates of wealth disparity tend to have happier citizens and offer a better quality of life. A more nearly equal distribution of wealth also has substantial environmental benefits, as less meat is consumed, less waste is produced, and citizens consume what they need rather than acquiring excess products.

Study Finds Link Between Income Inequality, Consumerism and Size of Carbon Footprint

As the rich get ever richer -- courtesy, in countries like the United States, of corporate-friendly deregulation and tax “reform” -- does the planet get ever warmer and dirtier? New research suggests economic balance is linked to environmentally-friendly practices. Countries with lower rates of economic disparity have citizens who

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Kate Harveston

Kate Harveston is a political journalist with an interest in human rights issues, foreign policy, and social change. You can read her work at MintPress News or on her blog, onlyslightlybiased.com.

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Trump’s Twenty-First-Century American Populism

Rajan Menon takes a clear-eyed look at the populism of the Trumpian moment, the growing inequality that is increasingly the heart and soul of this society, and what is(n’t) being done about it.

Trump’s Twenty-First-Century American Populism

Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was 

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Rajan Menon

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

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Late-Stage Capitalism: Denying the Imperium of Death

The tens of thousands of American deaths from drug overdoses are a measure of the hopeless desperation left behind by the soul-starving socio-economic system of late-stage capitalism.

Late-Stage Capitalism: Denying the Imperium of Death

Opinion -- According to a nationwide study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a greater number of U.S. Americans died (approximately 65,000) from drug overdoses last year than were killed during the course of the Vietnam

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The Racial Wealth Gap Is Leading To An Almost-Nonexistent Middle Class

With people of color projected to make up the majority of Americans by 2043, a new study warns against policies that keep many black and Latino households out of the middle class.

The Racial Wealth Gap Is Leading To An Almost-Nonexistent Middle Class

A new study finds that if the racial wealth divide is left unaddressed, the median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, with Latino Americans reaching the same median wealth two decades later. According to the report

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