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inequality
While Trump Posts Marble Bathrooms, Americans Go Hungry
Trump plasters his social media with a floor-to-ceiling marble bathroom remodel while families across America wonder how they can keep their children from starving.
Nov 08, 2025
I know what it means to be starved by those in power. As a little girl, if not for my grandparents' ancient walnut tree that fed us, and not for my grandma’s beloved chickens who laid eggs and now and then were a very special Sunday soup, if not for my sister—just a few years older than me—standing in line at dawn to fight adults for bread, I would have been significantly malnourished. I would watch my sister come home exhausted from those pre-dawn battles with full-grown adults, clutching a loaf of bread that meant we might be a little less hungry than we were the day before.
I never thought I'd see that kind of chosen starvation—the kind that Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was notorious for—in America. I was wrong.
Trump is Choosing to Starve Americans
On November 3, day 33 of a government shutdown, President Donald Trump's administration said it would provide only partial Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamp benefits for November. This has a devastating impact on millions of Americans. And, this is after two federal judges ordered the administration to tap into emergency funds to cover food assistance. What’s worse is this partial aid Trump is willing to concede to give might not reach these families for months.
And what was Trump doing as families wondered how they'd feed their children? Posting 24 photos on social media of his newly renovated Lincoln Bedroom bathroom—covered floor to ceiling in black and white marble with (surprise, surprise) gold fixtures—as he headed to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. He has already golfed multiple times during this shutdown and traveled internationally, something other presidents would have refused in order to focus on ending the shutdown that is devastating the country. Millions are unsure about what they’ll eat tonight, and Trump posts about the luxury renovations and packs his golf clubs while the government remains shut down.
Trump wants us to watch him build monuments to himself. Fine. We're watching. And we're remembering.
Ceauşescu was similarly fond of gold and glitz while the people starved. Like this Romanian dictator, Trump is demolishing the historic East Wing of the White House to build an over $300 million ballroom, removing commemorative magnolia trees planted in the 1940s for Presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to White House aides, Trump spends hours obsessing over marble choices and column styles, even fidgeting with 3D-printed models of the ballroom during tense moments. Watch me, he seems to say. Watch me build monuments to myself while you starve.
Ceauşescu built his lavish palaces that included a golden bathroom with gold plated fixtures while my sister, a child, stood in line to fight for a half a loaf of bread to feed her family. Trump plasters his social media with a floor-to-ceiling marble bathroom remodel while families across America wonder how they can keep their children from starving.
The Policy Behind the Cruelty
Yes, by now we know full well, the cruelty is the point, it's policy. The "big beautiful bill" Republicans passed earlier this year delivers massive tax breaks to the ultra wealthy: Starting in 2029, those making $30,000 or less would see a tax increase, while the top 0.1% would receive an average $309,000 tax cut annually, more than three times what a typical American household earns in an entire year. Sixty percent of the tax cuts go to the top 20% of earners, while the bill is coupled with cuts to Medicaid and SNAP that leave low-income Americans worse off on net.
The bill kicks more than 15 million people off health insurance, makes the largest cuts to nutrition assistance in history, and makes higher education less affordable. Congressional Budget Office analysis shows this bill adds over $4 trillion to the national debt while worsening inequality.
Masked Agents, Militarized Enforcement
Meanwhile, billions of dollars are being poured into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, with masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles conducting workplace sweeps and detaining our neighbors outside courthouses, with more than 75% of those booked into ICE custody in fiscal year 2025 having no criminal conviction other than immigration or traffic-related offenses. Trump is choosing to continue to fund, and even increase the funding, for the modern-day Gestapo, ensuring masked ICE agents can continue to brutalize our communities. But we do not have to look at other places to understand what is happening before our eyes. In the 1850s in the United States, the federal government enforced a policy to hunt down and “return” what the government dubbed to be “fugitive slaves,” people who were formerly and brutally enslaved and who had escaped captivity to flee north. No, we do not have to look at Nazi Germany to understand what ICE is doing, we have to look at our own history.
All of us Americans, who love our neighbors, who care for our families, who love our cities and our country, should see Trump for who he is. He is making a choice. This is a choice about who gets to have resources and who gets to suffer. This is about billionaires running the government and watching the people who actually make this country run—the workers, the families, the communities—go hungry while they build their ballrooms.
When the wealthy choose to watch their neighbors starve, when they fund masked agents to terrorize communities while slashing food assistance, this isn't leadership. This is corruption masquerading as governance. Ceauşescu did it. Now Trump is doing it. Sending social media messages from his golden toilet while we the people go hungry.
The Walnut Tree Didn't Ask Permission
They want us to be too hungry, too tired, too scared to fight back. They want us watching marble-bathroom reveals while we worry about our own children's empty stomachs.
We won't give them that satisfaction.
Every community that's ever survived oppression has known this truth: We have to take care of our beloved communities. You share what you have. You build networks of care that the powerful can't dismantle because they're not built on their permission.
Start a community fridge in your neighborhood, like many of us did during the pandemic. Organize a weekly soup kitchen. Form a food co-op. Create a network of families who share meals and resources. This is how we survive, this is how we resist.
And then, fed and strong, we organize politically. We vote out every representative who voted to starve their constituents to feed the rich. We primary the ones who won't fight. We run our own people, people who remember what it's like to be hungry, to watch your sister fight for bread, to rely on a grandparent's walnut tree.
Trump wants us to watch him build monuments to himself. Fine. We're watching. And we're remembering. Every marble tile laid while children went hungry. Every gold fixture installed while families lost food assistance. Every historic symbol of American’s greatness lying in rubble while more Americans lost access to healthcare.
But we're not just watching. We need to be building too. Building the mutual aid networks, the political power, the community resilience that will outlast any administration's cruelty.
The walnut tree that saved my life didn't ask permission to grow. Neither will we.
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$70 Trillion in Inherited Wealth Shows Global 'Inequality Emergency' Spiraling Out of Control
"Inequality is a crisis in need of concerted action," said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Nov 04, 2025
A panel of experts convened by South Africa's president warned Tuesday that the world is facing an "inequality emergency" as the richest people on the planet capture a disproportionate share of new wealth and prepare to pass it down to their heirs—perpetuating the chasm between economic elites and everyone else.
The panel, led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, notes in a new report that over $70 trillion in wealth will be passed down to heirs over the next decade. In the next 30 years, the panel estimates, 1,000 billionaires will transfer more than $5.2 trillion to their heirs mostly untaxed.
"Inequality is one of the most urgent concerns in the world today, generating many other problems in economies, societies, polities and the environment," states the report, published ahead of the G20 meetings in Johannesburg at the end of the month.
Joining Stiglitz on the panel, formally called the Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality, were Adriana Abdenur of Brazil, Winnie Byanyima of Uganda, Jayati Ghosh of India, and Imraan Valodia and Wanga Zembe-Mkabile of South Africa.
"Inequality is not a given; combating it is necessary and possible," the experts wrote. "Inequality results from policy choices that reflect ethical attitudes and morals, as well as economic trade-offs. It is not just a matter of concern for individual countries, but a global concern that should be on the international agenda—and therefore the G20's."
Since 2000, the global 1% has captured more than 40% of all new wealth while the bottom half of humanity saw its wealth grow by just 1%, according to the new report. More than 80% of countries—accounting for roughly 90% of the global population—have high levels of income inequality, which undermines social cohesion, economic functioning, and democratic institutions nationally and worldwide.
The panel recommends a broad scope of policy changes to tackle runaway income and wealth inequality, from ensuring the fair taxation of multinational corporations and ultra-rich individuals, to antitrust policies that reduce corporate concentration, to major investments in public services.
The experts also called for the creation of an International Panel on Inequality—inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—"to support governments and multilateral agencies with authoritative assessments and analyses of inequality" that would "empower policymaking."
"The committee's work showed us that inequality is a crisis in need of concerted action," Stiglitz said Tuesday. "The necessary step to taking this action is for policymakers, political leaders, the private sector, journalists and academia to have accurate and timely information and analysis of the inequality crisis. This is why our recommendation above all is for a new International Panel on Inequality."
"It would learn from the remarkable job the IPCC has done for climate change, bringing together technical expertise worldwide to track inequality and assess what is driving it," he added.
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Corporate America Accelerates Layoffs As Trump Economy Flashes Red Warning Signs
"We’re not just in a low hire, low fire environment anymore," said one economist. "We’re firing."
Nov 03, 2025
Several major US corporations in the last month have announced plans to cut thousands of workers as layoffs in the American economy have reached their highest level since 2020, when much of the global economy was shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As reported by Bloomberg on Monday, major firms including Target, Amazon, Paramount, and Molson Coors in October announced plans to lay off a combined total of more than 17,000 workers for a wide variety of reasons ranging from the impact of artificial intelligence to declining sales.
Taken together, these layoffs point to a significantly weakened labor market, which had already ground to a halt over the summer when the last jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed the economy created just 22,000 jobs in the month of August.
And while the BLS has stopped releasing monthly employment reports during the ongoing shutdown of the federal government, Bloomberg pointed to data collected by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showing that there have been "almost 950,000 US job cuts this year through September, the highest year-to-date total since 2020—and that was before the heavy October run of announcements."
Dan North, senior economist at Allianz Trade Americas, told Bloomberg that he has detected a definite shift in the jobs market in recent weeks.
"We’re not just in a low hire, low fire environment anymore," he explained. "We’re firing."
Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US, said in an interview with Reuters that he also expected the labor market to get worse in the coming months due to "adverse policy shocks emanating from Washington," as well as "the change in behavior among corporates who hoarded labor for the past four to five years," and were thus reluctant to carry out layoffs.
"That was never an indefinite behavior," he said. "We're going to see migration up in the unemployment rate."
John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told CBS News last week that he didn't think that the layoffs announced over the last month were just a blip.
"These are major layoffs, the kind of which we only see in periods of real change in the economy," he emphasized.
One challenge for economists in assessing the current state of the economy is the vast gulf between the experiences of America's highest-earning households and households at the bottom of the economic ladder.
According to a Monday report from CNBC, recent corporate earnings reports have shown signs of a so-called "K-shaped" economy in which well off consumers are maintaining or increasing their spending while low-income consumers are being forced to cut back.
"Last week, Chipotle reported it’s seeing consumers who make less than $100,000 a year, which represents roughly 40% of the company’s customer base, spending less frequently due to concerns about the economy and inflation," CNBC noted. "Coca-Cola said in its third-quarter earnings that pricier products like Topo Chico sparkling water and Fairlife protein shakes are driving its growth. Procter & Gamble reported similar results, saying wealthier customers are buying more from club retailers, which sell bigger pack sizes, while lower-income shoppers are significantly pulling back."
A Monday report from Fortune similarly picked up on evidence that the US is in the midst of a K-shaped economy, as it found that the percentage of Americans taking on subprime loans in the third quarter of 2025 reached its highest level since 2019.
This is significant, Fortune noted, because an increased reliance on subprime loans "adds to signs that many are facing increased financial pressure" to make ends meet. What's more, Fortune pointed to a recent analysis from Moody's showing that the top 20% of households in the US are now responsible for economic growth, while the bottom 80% have essentially been stagnant.
Lucia Dunn, an economist at Ohio State University, told Fortune that this economic disparity could increase instability if not addressed.
"We are losing the middle class," Dunn said. "And when you get to a society where there are a lot of people at the bottom and then a small group at the top, that's a prescription for real trouble."
The reports of the layoffs in corporate American come as a new analysis released Monday by Oxfam offered the latest look at extreme wealth inequality in the US, with the the 10 wealthiest Americans gaining nearly $700 billion so far this year—and as millions of people have lost crucial federal food assistance due to the government shutdown and the Trump administration's refusal to release full benefits.
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