OMNI

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY NEWSLETTER #2

February 7, 2022

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

Omnicenter.org/donate/

CONTENTS
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY NEWSLETTER #2

February 7, 2022

Eric Schutz. Inequality, Class, and Economics.

Sanjay Roy. “World Inequality Report 2022.”

Meagan Day. “The Rich Are Committing Crimes Against Nature.”

Vijay Prashad. “A Programme for a future society that we will build in
the present.” (2022)

Nicole Aschoff. “Smooth Criminals.” Jacobin (Fall 2021).

Martin Hart-Landsberg. “The dollar costs of inequality: they are greater
than you think.”

Tomgram: Liz Theoharis. “The Politics of the Poor in an America on
Edge.”

UN Wire. 75% of innoculations so far went to only 10 countries.

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of
Injustice.

TEXTS

Eric Schutz. Inequality, Class, and Economics.

Monthly Review Press press@monthlyreview.org via gmail.mcsv.net

1-21-22

)

...new from Monthly Review Press

Broaching that word hardly an economist dares utter...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society—and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. A mere nine months into the lockdown, the net worth of the infamous Forbes 400 increased by one trillion dollars; At the same time, mass unemployment imperiled or erased the fragile right to quality health care for a substantial number of people living in states without Medicaid.

In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illuminates the monstrous polarities which define our times— and reveals them as the very same structures of power at the foundations of the class system under today’s capitalism.

GET YOUR COPY OF Inequality, Class, and Economics HERE

From the Introduction:

The crisis underlying all other crises

The net worth of the 650 billionaires now in the United States increased by $1 trillion (from $3 to $4 trillion) during the nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic from March to December 2020. Meanwhile, working-class unemployment kept wages and benefits at rock bottom, imperiling or erasing for a significant number of people their fragile right to quality health care as well, based as it was partly on employment (in states without Medicaid). U. S. poverty rose by the largest rate in a single year since it began to be tracked sixty years ago, from 9.3 percent in June 2020 to 11.7 percent in November.....poverty in the United States increased substantially during the pandemic. There has been about a 20 percent increase in the official poverty rate. The latter rate has remained within a range of a few percentage points on either side of 12–13 percent since 1972...

Learn more

continued....

But has it not always been so?

Inequality such as seen in the United States today is not all that unusual historically. Greater inequality than ours today has come and gone in societies many times, including in our own past, and for reasons well appreciated. From that lofty perspective, what is happening today is just more of the same old same old, with human civilization merely returning to what would seem its primary business: class hierarchy that is structured more or less rigidly for the glory of privileged elites...

In the United States, the relatively egalitarian post–Second World War period up to the late 1970s was one in which all income groups’ living standards rose about equally. The rich did not get richer relative to the poor and the rest did not get poorer. Today that seems to have been an exception to the normal drift of our history. As the now increasing disparity between the rich and the rest progresses, it is difficult to sustain the pretense any longer that ours is a classless society. But in that more congenial time, not only did most of the world’s advanced market economies experience uninterrupted high rates of growth unlike anything seen before or since, in each country, growth was shared among its population. The social democracies of Europe worked to redistribute the gains from growth away from those who would normally have monopolized them and down to the middle- and lower-income classes. In the United States, all income classes participated roughly equally in the unprecedented material bounty. This was a consequence partly of extensions of the Social Security system, of the War on Poverty and the efforts to lessen racial disparities in the 1960s, of a historically exceptional balance in American labor-management relations, and of strong economic growth itself, which helped to keep unemployment low.

Looking at the steady growth of those times, many believed capitalist economic policymaking had finally matured into a mere management science. It appeared that economics had become, as J. M. Keynes had hoped, a kind of “humble and competent” trade peopled by trusted social engineers....

Class and Power

Since all boats were being lifted on the rising tide, mainstream economists found little of interest in the subject of income and wealth distribution. Few seemed to care much about why some boats were so enormous while most were pretty small, why some others were barely large enough to hold their passengers, and why some others failed even to float despite the apparently benign flow of things...

GET YOUR COPY

More than merely a diagnosis

Schutz defines the five social structures of power at the foundations of the class system and capitalism today. Employers’ power is the linchpin of that system, but the power of professionals in all fields, the power exerted by some businesses over others, political power, and the power of cultural institutions, especially the mass media and education, are also critical for the class system today. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Schutz offers prescriptions that can genuinely address the steepening and hardening of class boundaries.

Inequality, Class, and Economics pushes past economists’ studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last.

"Eric Shutz acts as a Public Intellectual, much like Paul M. Sweezy, Paul Baran and C Wright Mills before him, in explaining the world’s greater concentrations of power and inequality that reduce the quality of life and standard of living of the vast majority of citizens—as well as the quality of the biosocial environment."

—Dr Phillip Anthony O’Hara, Global Political Economy Research Unit (GPERU) and winner of “Book of the Year” and “Research Article of the Year” from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE)

Sanjay Roy. “World Inequality Report: Class divide explains more than regional divisions.” Originally published: Peoples Democracy by | Global share of wealth by wealth group Credit Suisse 2021 | MR Online Global share of wealth by wealth group, Credit Suisse, 2021

“World Inequality Report: Class divide explains more than regional divisions.” Originally published: Peoples Democracy by Sanjay Roy (January 23, 2022 ). Posted Jan 25, 2022. Class, Imperialism, Inequality, Strategy Global, India Newswire World Inequality Report 2022.

WORLD Inequality Report 2022 underlines the sharp divide between the rich and the poor that occurred as a result of neoliberal policies pursued by global capital using the hegemonic and asymmetric architecture of global institutions. The report clearly shows how the class divide has become relatively more important than the regional divide in determining global inequality. This simply tells that in today’s world where one is born and brought up has relatively less impact than in which class the person belongs to in explaining relative earnings and wealth status. It however says further that even if inequality between countries shows a decline but still the difference continues to be high.

The difference in income of the rich 10 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent at the global level is similar to the level of inequality that existed in 1900-1910. The wealth inequality which measures the difference in ownership of land, buildings, assets, financial papers, cash and so on, that is stock of wealth is much sharper than the inequality in incomes. This rise in wealth and income inequality that peaked during the period 1980 to 2020 according to the report also coincides with the sharp rise in private wealth during this period and a decline in publicly owned wealth in various countries. This can also be linked with the financialisation of the economy and free movement of capital considered to be the hallmark of the current phase of globalisation. MORE https://mronline.org/2022/01/25/world-inequality-report-class-divide-explains-more-than-regional-divisions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=world-inequality-report-class-divide-explains-more-than-regional-divisions&mc_cid=fbea5909a4&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e

“The Rich Are Committing Crimes Against Nature” BY MEAGAN DAY

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/environment-rich-people-tesla-powerwall-super-yacht-private-jet

Mansions, superyachts, luxury cars, and private jets produce more carbon emissions than whole countries. Researchers are calling it “green crime.”

A superyacht, the Indian Empress, owned by Vijay Mallya, stands in the Grand Harbour on March 29, 2017 in Vittoriosa, Malta. Sean Gallup / Getty Images

Tesla makes a battery-powered product called a Powerwall that pairs with solar panels to meet your home energy needs. This “must-have item for any truly green home” goes for over five thousand dollars. Most people can’t afford that up front, so even though solar may save money and help the planet in the long run, use of the Powerwall is restricted to people with cash to burn.

If your understanding of sustainable consumption were limited to just this example, you’d come away thinking that rich people must be a much more eco-friendly bunch than poor people. But you’d be missing the forest for the trees. While the wealthy have an ever more dazzling array of green consumer products at their fingertips, the impact of those gadgets is nothing compared to the overall ecological destruction wrought by luxury consumption habits.

A new paper called “Measuring the Ecological Impact of the Wealthy: Excessive Consumption, Ecological Disorganization, Green Crime, and Justice,” published by researchers Michael J. Lynch, Michael A. Long, Paul B. Stretesky, and Kimberly L. Barrett, takes a long hard look at the role of the rich’s consumption habits in destabilizing the climate.

The researchers contend that when a person has vastly more money than they need to live, “acquiring property and consuming excessively become marks of distinction, and to earn those marks, the leisure class must consume.” This leads the rich to buy, build, and operate things like superyachts, super homes, luxury cars, and private jets. It would take an awful lot of Powerwalls to offset the damage done by the proliferation of these luxury consumables.

The researchers estimate that there are about three hundred superyachts in operation around the world. A person has to have individual wealth upward of $30 million in order to afford even the smallest one; the upper price is close to $1 billion. These things guzzle oil and spew pollution. Tally it up, and the world’s superyacht fleet uses over thirty-two million gallons of oil and produces 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year — all of it for the personal enjoyment of the extremely rich. The world’s superyachts consume and pollute more than entire nations.

Super homes, which the researchers define as homes greater than twenty-five thousand square feet, are similarly devastating for the environment. The average square footage of these homes is closer to forty thousand, and their average price is just under $28 million. The researchers couldn’t calculate the entire ecological footprint of these homes, so they just stuck with the impacts of wood sourcing, assuming it was all of standard wood stock (of course, many luxury homes use hard-to-source exotic materials, too).

The average home, they concluded, requires harvesting twenty trees, while a super home requires 380 trees. An average home results in 74,880 pounds of carbon sequestration loss, while a super home results in a loss of 1,422,720 pounds. The carbon footprint of super homes is astronomical — all so the rich can have some extra space to roam around in. The fact that a few of them now boast Powerwalls hardly puts the mind at ease.

Tesla doesn’t just make the Powerwall; it also, of course, makes luxury electric cars. But rich people have been buying expensive cars since long before Tesla’s rollout, and while a pricey electric car is becoming something of a status symbol in select circles, so far the vast majority of the wealthy are sticking with gasoline cars: as long as it costs a fortune and looks like it, sustainability is of little importance. These cars come with all sorts of gadgets and features, far beyond what is necessary for driving, and they tend to be larger than average cars. Their size and their frequent use of uncommon materials makes them far less sustainable to build, and their carbon footprints are larger, too.

The researchers focused solely on the efficiency of luxury cars, comparing them to popular cars that sell for a fraction of the price. They found that the latter category were over 60 percent more fuel efficient than luxury vehicles. “Compared to top 10 selling vehicles,” the researchers concluded, “a luxury vehicle produces, on average, 373.98 more pounds of CO2 emissions per 1,000 miles traveled.”

High-income groups also drive twice as many miles annually as low-income groups. The rich could certainly get by with a Hyundai Sonata or a Nissan Altima, but their desire to be seen driving a Jaguar or a Bentley means more pollution for everyone.

And, finally, there are private jets. There are only about fifteen thousand of them registered in the United States. The entire fleet is in operation a total of 17 million hours per year, burning roughly 345 gallons an hour. Jet fuel produces twenty-one pounds of carbon emissions per gallon. That means that the carbon footprint of the United States’ private jet fleet is about fifty-six tons per year. The entire nation of Burundi produces less than half the carbon emissions than the US elite does with its private jets alone — to say nothing of their luxury cars, their super homes, and their superyachts.

These rich people belong to the capitalist class, which means that together they own the vast majority of the world’s productive assets. Their luxury consumption habits constitute only a fraction of their contribution to the destabilization of the planet. They own mines and factories and fossil fuel companies, and banks that invest in harmful extractive practices, and shipping operations that guzzle more fuel than they could ever dream as individuals. Their consumption habits are only the tip of the iceberg.

Still, it’s astonishing that they can get away with all this conspicuous consumption without anyone batting an eyelash. As the seas rise, the temperatures soar, and the weather becomes more erratic and violent, these same elites will migrate to safe places — or, if worse comes to worst, retreat to doomsday bunkers — and be spared the worst effects of the chaos they’ve sown.

At the very least, the researchers conclude, society should develop policies to curb the conspicuous consumption of the rich. Perhaps building a home so big it requires the razing of a small forest should be considered a form of “green crime.”

In the end, however, there will be no true resolution to the climate crisis without a fundamental alteration in the economy. As long as we produce for profit — not for public well-being and the common good — the earth will be a casualty in the pursuit of money, and the poor will suffer.

“As a result of the inherent contradiction between capitalism and nature,” observed the researchers in a prior publication, “the capitalist system must be seen as a crime against nature.” And for this crime, the only real justice is socialism.

Vijay Prashad. A Programme for a future society that we will build in the present: The Second Newsletter (2022)

Mronline.org (1-15-22)

In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: 'the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021', notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender.

Nicole Aschoff. “Smooth Criminals.” Jacobin (Fall 2021). “From the Wolf of Wall Street in New York to Jho Low in Malaysia, globalization unleashed a world of well-connected and superrich con artists.”

Martin Hart-Landsberg. “The dollar costs of inequality: they are greater than you think.” . Mronline.org (12-3-21)

Income distribution

Pretty much everyone accepts that inequality is a big problem in the U.S. But it is doubtful that most people truly grasp how successfully U.S. elites have captured the benefits of economic growth and, as a result, how much the resulting inequality has cost them.

Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Politics of the Poor in an America on Edge 11-7-21

TomDispatch via gmail.mcsv.net

4:23 PM (2 hours ago)

to me

Liz Theoharis, The Politics of the Poor in an America on Edge

November 7, 2021

Consider it strange indeed that Congress won't even blink when asked to fund the military -- anything military whatsoever. In fact, when the Biden administration suggested a Pentagon budget of a staggering $715 billion for fiscal year 2022, both parties in the House of Representatives responded by insisting on raising that sum by another $25 billion and the Senate is sure to concur. The sky, in other words, is the limit (if there's any limit at all), and it doesn't matter if some of the weaponry slated to fill that sky doesn't even work.

On the other hand, when it comes to something like paid family leave that might help actual Americans in need, it goes without saying that every Republican in Congress will vote no (hands down, so to speak) and just enough Democrats (hey there, Joe Manchin!) will join the crowd to ensure that aiding those who truly could use a hand in this country is simply a no-go. Put another way, as columnist Arwa Mahdavi did recently at the Guardian, Republicans are increasingly eager to support a return to the good old days (of things like child labor) or to cancel any programs like federal extended unemployment benefits that actually help the neediest in this society. Think of it as an impulse to Build Back(ward) Better. Similarly, in September the Trump version of the Supreme Court rejected a Biden administration moratorium on evictions, endangering millions of poor Americans in a period when, amid a devastating pandemic, the billionaire class, growing by the week, saw its wealth surge by $1.8 trillion.

It's this very world that TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, takes on again today while considering what this country might look like if its politics were so much less top-down and so much more bottom-up. Tom

A Project for Survival in These United States

Lifting from the Bottom So Everyone Can Rise

By Liz Theoharis

When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that “trickle-down economics have never worked” and that it was time to build the economy “from the bottom-up.” This came after the first reconciliation bill of the pandemic included the child tax credit that -- combined with an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other emergency programs -- reduced the poverty rate from 13.9% in 2018 to 7.7% in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1%.) All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments.

For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasn't been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health-care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. By now, the originally proposed 10-year, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which a majority of Americans support, has been slowly chiseled down to half that size. For that you can largely thank two Democratic senators, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, unanimously backed by Donald Trump's Republican Party, which would, of course, cut everything.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

UN WIRE (9-3-21).

African target at risk as rich countries hoard vaccines

Inequalities in the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines mean African countries will fall short of the worldwide goal of vaccinating at least 10% of their populations by the end of this month, warns World Health Organization regional director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti. WHO data indicates that 75% of the more than five billion COVID-19 inoculations administered so far went to residents of just 10 countries.

Full Story: CNBC (9/1), Voice of America (9/2)

‘Inflamed’ shows how an unjust world is making us sick

Editor. Mronline.org (8-27-21).

"Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice," published this month. MACMILLAN

A new book from UT Austin research professor Raj Patel and UC San Francisco physician Rupa Marya argues that our bodies, our society, and our planet are inflamed.

OMNI ECONOMIC INEQUALITY NEWSLETTER #2, February 7, 2022

“The Rich Are Committing Crimes Against Nature” BY MEAGAN DAY

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Global Innocence Project

Review of 101 Changemakers For Young Students

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Gutierrez, Essays on Social Justice

Bending Toward Justice? Poems Against WarBooks from Haymarket P

Food Not Bombs

Trending Articles

Bending Toward Justice? Poems Against War
Books from Haymarket P