5
#000000
#FFFFFF
inequality
Saying No to Kings and Yes to the Future
In the fight against Trump, against fascism, against the MAGA right, we need to show vision: Can we create a system that does not destroy the Earth and takes into account the needs of humans and animals on the planet?
Mar 27, 2026
Millions of Americans are currently hard at work doing whatever we can to resist the fascism that has quickly taken hold in the United States. For as long as I can remember, many Americans were discontented with many aspects of the government—both people like me, who have always worked for environmental, social, and economic justice, and the people who would devolve into Donald Trump’s supporters—the same racist, nativist misogynists who have always populated this settler colonial state.
For those of us who value kindness, learning, fairness, diversity, working for a future for the environment, and all the other values hated by the MAGA cult, this is a time that feels like a daily nightmare. Every value we hold is being smashed into the ground by this cult that often feels almost supernatural in its pure evil.
Many of the federal agencies that have been sledgehammered into pieces were funding important programs feeding, educating, vaccinating, researching, and regulating, although often imperfectly. The percentage of our taxes that went to pay for imperialist military interventions was always massive and immoral. Trump’s minions even list some “cuts to woke programs.” These include Minority Business Development, the Environmental Justice program of the Environmental Protection Agency, preschool development grants, and so much more. But, we are now paying more for Trump’s personal Gestapo than all the federal law enforcement agencies together, as well as the massive military budget, including the Iran debacle, while we watch the government defund our states, cities, and towns.
Donald Trump’s regime has ramped up killing the Earth through global heating, discharges of all sorts of poisons into our environment, and mining anything with value to capitalism. We are witnessing the systems that Americans have relied on, maybe even thought would always be part of our lives, disappear overnight. If we had a problem with Social Security, there were offices everywhere, workers being paid to assist. Did we ever think we would need to worry about polio raging back? That a very unwell man with zero medical training would be making health policy, so we are unable to trust any health data and advice being promoted? That the executive branch of the United States would devolve from bowing to large corporations, but largely following the law, to possibly the most corrupt “leadership” in the world? That in 14 months, the corruption would be so pervasive that there is no part of the Trump regime operating without bribery and no-bid contracts?
We will need to be holding serious discussions about how to move ahead as a community, as a town or city, as a state—because we need to model what we want in order to bury Project 2025 in the ground forever.
What are we working for when we resist all of the above? And how much of the old system that has been decimated should return, and how can we work for a new beginning if we are able to eliminate Trump, Project 2025, and the rest of the ghouls who currently hold power? If we are able to overcome the very credible threats to elections by the Trump regime, and move past a likely coup attempt if a major election goes sideways for the fascists, what then? Is our only alternative the Democratic Party of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)? A Democratic Party that stood idly by when then-President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland let Trump skate on all his crimes, including the insurrection of January 6? A Democratic Party that did not prosecute Richard Nixon for Watergate, nor Ronald Reagan for the Iran-Contra scheme?A Democratic Party that was fine with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza?
This is a question we should all be asking, and when we work for change at this time, we need to be very clear about what changes we are looking to enact. Both parties presided over the immense and growing wealth gap, outsourcing of well-paying jobs for working people, a starved education system that put testing above critical thinking, an overwhelmed healthcare system, ever increasing housing costs, an ever growing war budget—these and more are what drove many poor and working class people to believe Trump’s lies that he and the far-right care about their needs. And now, the tech billionaires want to replace millions of jobs with AI—and leave those workers behind.
In the fight against Trump, against fascism, against the MAGA right, we need to show vision: Can we create a system that does not destroy the Earth and takes into account the needs of humans and animals on the planet? Our states are going to have to be a model for the future. Our communities are coming together because we understand how much we need each other at this time of the larger system appearing to disintegrate. We will need to be holding serious discussions about how to move ahead as a community, as a town or city, as a state—because we need to model what we want in order to bury Project 2025 in the ground forever. Going back to 2020 is not possible and not desirable. Creating a vision of a future that can support life on our planet in peace and justice is what we need to strive for.
No Kings!
Keep Reading
Show Less
Yes, It's Time to Tax the Rich
A recent poll found that 80% of American respondents viewed wealth inequality as a problem, 80% said the rich had too much political power, and 78% said taxes on billionaires were too low.Social Scheduling
Mar 26, 2026
With the deadline for paying federal income taxes fast approaching, the thoughts of American taxpayers turn naturally toward the age-old question: Why isn’t there a fairer tax system?
Currently, in fact, campaigns for state tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia, and have already succeeded in getting such legislation adopted in Massachusetts and Washington. Similarly, in Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) have introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Wash.) are sponsoring the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. The tax-the-rich proposals range from increasing the tax rate for the very highest annual income earners, to instituting an annual wealth tax on the very richest Americans, to a combination of both.
Although the most affluent Americans, like other Americans, have always paid taxes to fund public services, the dispute has been over how much they should pay. Sales taxes and property taxes place a heavy burden on people of modest means, but a much lighter burden on the wealthy. Therefore, the wealthy have tended to favor these generators of public revenue and to oppose a progressive income tax, under which the rich would pay at a higher rate than the poor. A lengthy political battle for a tax system based upon ability to pay led to passage of the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, which empowered Congress to levy an income tax.
Initially, the new income tax, though progressive, was rather small-scale. But as the federal government took on new and costly tasks―particularly funding US participation in two world wars and the Cold War―the federal income tax grew accordingly. By 1944, the official tax rate for the highest income earners stood at 94%―although, thanks to deductions, loopholes, and the rate’s confinement to the top increment of their income, the richest Americans actually paid at a much lower rate.
Increasingly, in politics, big money talks―and on behalf of Republicans.
Like their well-heeled predecessors, many wealthy Americans were outraged at funding public services that benefited people whom they often regarded as their inferiors. Why, they wondered, was their money being “wasted” on things like public schools, public housing, and public healthcare, when “the best people” went to private schools, lived in private mansions or gated communities, and employed private “concierge doctors”? While chatting with their friends over lunch on their yachts or at their tennis clubs, they complained of “welfare queens” and the “ungrateful poor.”
Consequently, Congress―badgered by the wealthy, their corporations, and conservative ideologues―cut the progressivity of the federal income tax. In 1964, the top marginal tax rate was reduced from 91% to 70%, in 1981 to 50%, and in 2018 to 37%.
Given these dramatic cuts in the federal income tax rate, plus preferential tax treatment for dividends and appreciation in the value of stock, bonds, and other investments―the wealthiest Americans managed to secure a much lower tax rate than most Americans. According to a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans, who had $401 billion in income from 2014 to 2018, paid taxes on it at a rate of just 3.4%. Indeed, during some years, the world’s top billionaires―including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Carl Icahn―paid no federal income taxes at all.
When it came to corporate income, the federal government slashed the corporate tax rate from 53% to 21% between 1969 and 2025. And this, too, produced enormous benefits for very affluent Americans, who own most stock market wealth. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 23 of the largest and most profitable US companies paid no federal corporate income taxes at all from 2018 to 2022. And 109 corporations paid no federal tax in at least one of those years.
The Trump administration’s tax policies lifted the fortunes of the wealthy to unprecedented heights. According to a September 2025 report by Americans for Tax Fairness, the wealth of the 15 richest US billionaires increased by over 300% after the passage of the first Trump-GOP tax cut in December 2017. The wealth of the very richest of them, Elon Musk, grew 20-fold. In the first year of Trump’s second term, marked by another huge tax cut for the rich, US billionaire wealth jumped from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion.
Not surprisingly, government taxation policy―coming on top of low-wage rates, corporate outsourcing, assaults on unions, and government subsidies for big business―has resulted in rising economic inequality in the United States. By late 2025, the richest 1% of Americans possessed some $55 trillion in assets―roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90%. “Household wealth is highly concentrated and becoming steadily more concentrated,” reported the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, a major financial research firm.
This rising economic inequality enhances the growing power of the wealthy in public affairs. Increasingly, in politics, big money talks―and on behalf of Republicans. Federal election contributions from the nation’s 100 richest Americans averaged $21 million between 2000 and 2010, but rose beyond $1 billion in 2024. In that year, contributions to Republicans surged from roughly $300 million to just under $1 billion, while donations to Democrats dropped from roughly $300 million to less than $200 million. A right-wing political party, led by a demagogic billionaire promising more tax cuts, proved irresistible.
By contrast, most Americans support proposals to raise taxes on the rich. According to a March 2025 Pew Research Center poll, large majorities of Americans surveyed favored increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations. In January 2026, an Economist/YouGov poll reported that 80% of American respondents viewed wealth inequality as a problem, 80% said the rich had too much political power, and 78% said taxes on billionaires were too low.
It’s time to tax the rich. Or, as Pete Seeger used to sing, “Take it easy, but take it.”
Keep Reading
Show Less
The Real Cause of US Polarization: Class War, Not Culture War
The real crisis is America is not the deep political cultural divisions among its citizens as much as the concerted efforts of both political parties to play on imagined differences, while orchestrating a massive shift in wealth from working people to the super-rich.
Mar 26, 2026
At this year’s National Football League Super Bowl, the Trump regime could not resist politicizing the event by attacking the halftime performance of Bad Bunny, a celebration of Puerto Rican musical culture conducted entirely in the Spanish language. President Donald Trump endorsed an alternative country western streamed halftime program of Kid Rock, which was dedicated to the conservative icon Charlie Kirk. It was the president and his party inciting the MAGA base to campaign for congressional Republicans.
The two shows represent two radically different cultural streams in America, roughly approximating the struggle over ethnic, gender, and racial representation in public life. On a more material level, however, the unfulfilled day to day needs of working people caught up in this ideological divide suggests that rhetorical claims about the culture wars are not grounded in the quotidian realities and material demands of most people.
The real crisis is America is not the deep political cultural divisions among its citizens as much as the concerted efforts of both political parties to play on imagined differences, while orchestrating a massive shift in wealth from working people to the super-rich class, which includes the congressional millionaire unrepresentatives. At least two-thirds of the Senate membership and more than half the House are millionaires, compared to 9% of Americans overall.
Diminishing access to basic human needs, a news topic that does not attract advertising revenue, except perhaps from Big Pharma, has a huge impact on the quality and very meaning of democracy. The real crisis of the working class is not on the MSM agenda.
True to its propaganda mission of creating legitimacy for the hegemonic state, the mainstream corporate media fails to help Americans understand that in their individual family struggles to survive or just about make ends meet, they are not alone.
In the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln referred to an ideal America as a country of, by, and for the people. Looking at the political and civic participation and well-being of people, all the people, as a proxy for democracy, it is clear that the legitimacy of the democratic state is at a dangerously low level and in inverse correspondence with the degree of American military or police aggression at home and abroad. The largest injuries of wars fall on the working class.
The lower the trust the public invests in the state, the more the ruling apparatuses are compelled to distract public attention. Trump apparently believes he can override constitutional restraints on his power mandate, ignore public opinion, and function as a quasi-autocrat. He also hopes to deflect attention from his failed economic policies by redirecting the public gaze toward a constructed enemy threat.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton melded her identity politics strategy to neoconservative, pro-Israeli, and Russophobic rhetoric bereft of any vision or coherence, in the process losing the working class, 52% to 44%, to a faux pro-labor campaigner. Her “basket of deplorables” gaffe directed at the white working class didn’t help her chances. The Democrats under the neoliberal Clinton wing of the party turned away from the New Deal and toward neoliberal, anti-welfare, corporate-friendly, austerity, and tough-on-crime policies.
In 2024, a disunited working class voted overwhelmingly in favor of Donald Trump, who was anything but a pro-labor politician. According to the Pew Research Center, 67% of Trump voters were without a college degree, a proxy for working class, compared with 51% for Harris. Clinton protégé Kamala Harris captured just 42% of working-class voters, while Trump carried 56%.
Clinton-Obama acolyte Joe Biden, often identified as progressive, cut federal food stamp and childcare benefits during his presidency and allowed child poverty to nearly triple, while millions of Americans lost Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) support. On the international front, as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden acted like an imperial proconsul in Ukraine, forsaking even token gestures of diplomacy in dealing with the Russian head of state, whom he publicly dismissed as “a thug.” His unconditional military assistance that enabled the Israeli genocide lost him and his stand-in much of the youth vote in 2024 prior to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.
The Democrats have followed the same militaristic, hegemonic foreign policy approach as Republicans. As secretary of state, Clinton, following John Foster Dulles’ style of “brinkmanship,” promised to confront Russia in Ukraine with a “no-fly zone” that she proposed would halt Russian aid to the rebellious Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Overall, her identity-based politics campaign strategy in 2016 lost out to a faux labor-friendly campaigner, who took 52% of the working class vote to Clinton’s 44%.
Perhaps the only thing worse than a party of the billionaire class led by a real estate tycoon is another party of the billionaire class pretending to be an alternative. In reality, the well-being of Americans has continually declined for nearly 50 years under neoliberal governments of both parties. As a result, public trust of governing institutions by 2024 had reached a near all-time low in the post-war period. Today, Democrat voters are only marginally more trusting of the federal government, 35%, than Republicans, 11%.
The purported polarization of Democrat versus Republican voters has been constructed as an ideological trope to hide the more substantive economic and class basis of the great divide, which is the public’s recognition of the corruption of the state on the one hand and the concentration of wealth and power that has hollowed out the democratic status of citizens, especially workers and urban minorities, on the other.
In November 2025, the Kettering Foundation found a new low, 24%, in its tracking of American adults who believe that democracy is working in the country. The relatively weak organic character of American democracy measured in terms of social distribution corresponds to the perception of diminished state legitimacy that is documented in several studies of public trust in state institutions. Of all public institutions in America surveyed by Gallup in 2024, the very lowest regard is held for the one body that constitutes the essence of a representative democracy, the legislature. Gallup found that trust in Congress registered a “great deal” or “quite a lot” for a total of a meager 9% of respondents.
Trust in the presidency registered 26%, the Supreme Court 30%, newspapers 18%, television news 12%, and internet news 16%. Big business was trusted by 16% and, crucially, the medical system by a minority 36%. Indeed, 80% of Americans, including 91% of Democrats, 82% of Independents, and 67% of Republicans, see the rich as wielding too much power in American politics, according to a January 2026 YouGov poll. It identified a broad public perception that the economic system works primarily on behalf of powerful interests and that members of Congress, governors, and federal officials, moreover, are likely to accept bribes.
The public is indeed very skeptical about the conduct of electoral politics: 87% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats believe the parties "are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” Per Max Weber, it was the charismatic and caudillo style of Trump that served as the last though shaky refuge of public confidence in government. That lasted about one year. In March 2026, enmeshed in a brutal war without real objectives in Iran, Trump’s approval rating reached an all-time low for presidents.
Neoliberalism and Social Polarization
A “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” to use Lincoln’s felicitous phrasing, captures the essence of democracy–over and above the right to vote, nominal free speech, or the existence of relatively independent news media, all of which in fact are under the threat or capture of partisan control. In this regard, the US has greatly declined as a democracy, even as measured by the conservative NGO Freedom House, and more closely resembles an oligarchy dominated by the billionaire class, with extremely wide income gaps and among the highest concentrations of wealth (Gini coefficient) among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Compared to the European welfare states (e.g., Nordic countries, France, Germany, and Netherlands), the US is more of a warfare state, drawing much of its wealth from military interventions, military aid (which is largely recycled back to the US), and alliances with repressive political leaders such as the Gulf autocrats.
Looking at the material and social status of working Americans as the true measure of democratic empowerment, one finds a depressed state of well-being and social economic freedom for most citizens.
A few of the indicators of social demise (a fuller list is found in my book cited, below) that has fed distrust and material polarization in America:
- Highest rate of homelessness among wealthy countries;
- One of the worst countries in the OECD in real retiree income;
- Share of adults living in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021;
- 44% of workers in 2024 were not earning a living wage;
- Some 50 million Americans are living with household incomes below 125% of poverty, including more than 15 million children;
- In 2023, Blacks in the US had more than double the poverty rate of whites, 17.9% to 7.7%;
- Infant mortality rate in 2017 was 5.8 per thousand live births, ranked 32nd (out of 36) among OECD countries, 55th worldwide;
- People with less than $15,000 in earnings died on average more than 10 years earlier than those with annual income above $50,000. US ranked 46th in life span. Comparing American pre-Covid-19 life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals, the gap was 14.6 years;
- 35% of millennials and 22% of all Americans fear becoming homeless;
- Covid-19 deaths are the highest in the world;
- Among the highest numbers and rates of incarceration in the West, with extremely high rates for people of color (in the US, three times the population share for Blacks);
- Blacks and Latinos make up 29% of the national population but nearly 60% of the prison population;
- More than 5 million Americans are under supervision by the criminal legal system, of whom about 2 million, disproportionately Black, are living in prisons and jails rather than in their communities;
- The weakest middle class and the largest low-income and high-income strata compared to Western Europe;
- Since the takeoff of neoliberalism, among the lowest rates of civic engagement and immigrant enfranchisement of any advanced economy;
- Ranked among the 10 loneliest national populations, measured by percentage of people living alone, 5th at 28%; and
- Press freedom: 57th in 2025 (45th in 2018), behind every country in Western Europe except Greece.
These are the actual data of polarization in the US, intensified in the era of neoliberalism. True to its propaganda mission of creating legitimacy for the hegemonic state, the mainstream corporate media fails to help Americans understand that in their individual family struggles to survive or just about make ends meet, they are not alone. The MSM instead misleads the public by portraying political conflict as cultural warfare rather than class warfare, thereby dividing the people and protecting the system’s class repression and small minority of billionaires controlling the most critical affairs of the state and its propaganda apparatuses.
Democracy here is defined by the equality of citizenship. In practice, this means universal access to healthcare; quality housing; higher education; clean environment; equitable income; union empowerment; racial, gender, and ethnic justice; cultural amenities for all; and other core objectives pushed by public advocacy groups. Indeed, in a more genuinely democratic society there would far less need for public advocacy, and electoral and political activities would no longer be controlled by corporate and other undemocratic institutions. The role of progressive intellectuals is to struggle for democracy along this understanding of a democratic and just society.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular