Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea
Corporate media—whose owners are overwhelmingly from the class that would be paying a wealth tax—are returning to throw cold water on the idea.
NYT Acknowledges Need for Economic Change—Without Crediting Those Who Would Bring It
A New York Times editorial delivers a blunt critique of neoliberal economics–not what Times readers have been used to seeing on its editorial pages.
News Flash: Billionaires Don’t Like Socialism
Big news, everyone! Billionaires don’t like socialism. In response to a rising progressive tide in the United States, a new genre of stories has emerged in corporate media: rich guys warning against taxing them, or really changing anything about the system at all. Just as the press are keen for you to know that […]
‘Poverty Is Not Just a Measure of How Much Cabbage and Potatoes You Need to Live On’
“For at least 35 years in this country, we have been exposed to politicians’ arguments that say the worst thing you can do about poverty is to help the poor, because it only worsens the character problems that are at root in accounting for their poverty.”
Sarah Aziza on Saudi Repression of Women, Dean Baker on Taxing the Rich
One would hope that reports that Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman is torturing women political prisoners would be sufficient to upset the narrative of a “young and brash” reformer.
Jeff Bezos’ Paper Tells You Not to Worry About Those Billionaires
Insofar as people get incredibly wealthy from being successful in earning rents at the expense of others in the economy, rather than generating wealth, they are very much like counterfeiters.
Journalism of, by and for the Elite
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal stand apart as the most rarefied of perches in our nation’s news ecosystem. It’s at these outlets that class distinctions are the most glaring—and most problematic. Just how elite these papers have become is the subject of a new study.
CEOs Get Paid a Lot? NYT Says ‘Well, Actually…’ to This ‘True but Misleading’ Fact
Statements about runaway inequality must be nuance-trolled to death, lest readers be “misled” by statements that the media outlets themselves agree are true.
Media Downplay Class Warfare as ‘GOP Victory’
The GOP bill, passed by the Senate in the early hours of December 2 and described by major media outlets as a “tax cut,” is in reality an explicit handout to large companies and the ultra-rich that will actually increase taxes on working-class Americans.
‘There’s All Kinds of People Who Have Their Snouts in the Trough Here’
“This industry is probably one of the most influential on the planet in terms of lobbying, political contributions. So it’s not so much that we lack the technical ideas to clean up the industry, but we have lacked the political will.”
James Henry on Paradise Papers, Soraya Chemaly on Domestic Violence and Mass Killings
The millions of leaked documents dubbed the Paradise Papers bring some sunlight to an arena where secrecy is the point: the world of “offshore financial centers,” where a melange of the world’s wealthiest stash money, bilk governments and generally betray any notion of a social compact.
WaPo Defends Its Owner Against Charges That He’s Very Wealthy
It almost sounds like the newspaper owned by the second-wealthiest person in the world doesn’t want people talking about how much the extremely rich own compared to the rest of us.
WaPo Defends Boss Against Sanders’ Charge That He’s Extremely Wealthy
The vaunted Washington Post factchecking team is once again applying its microscope to Sen. Bernie Sanders. The awkward thing is that the fact in question involves the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-wealthiest person.
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad on the Widening Racial Wealth Gap
If we don’t intervene to turn the racial wealth gap around, we are driving the country toward what a new report describes in no uncertain times as a “racial and economic apartheid state.”
Why the Revolution Will Not (but Must) Be Televised
Corporate media are really designed around preserving the status quo—unsurprisingly, because they are owned by the class of people who benefit from things staying the same.
‘1 Percent of Taxpayers Receive More Than the Bottom 80 Percent’
“When you think about what’s driving inequality, I would say a federal system that is subsidizing the income and expenses and wealth at the high end, at the expense of not investing at the low end, is really exacerbating that divide.”
NYT Lets $27 Million Man Brag About What He’s Doing for Income Inequality
Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, was given prime space on the New York Times’ op-ed page to declare that his bank was doing something about “wage stagnation” and “income inequality” by “giving thousands of employees a raise.”
Requiem for a News Channel
If Al Jazeera America gave us one thing in its brief life in the United States, it was a dedication to covering economic inequality and the growing opposition to it in the wake of Occupy Wall Street.
Borrowing a Climate Denial Trick to Erase Rising Inequality
New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt has a new column headlined “Inequality Has Actually Not Risen Since the Financial Crisis.” This is mostly, if not entirely, BS.
Obama, Inequality and Wall Street Donors
Is Obama’s decision to stop talking about inequality really about a debate within the Democratic Party? Or is it about not losing Wall Street donors?
