Portside

A century after violent efforts to suppress resistance to class exploitation, the nation has learned to think about people and the economy with a language that favors the wealthy and elides issues of power.

Piketty’s new book, “A Brief History of Equality,” is perhaps his most optimistic work. Piketty proposes a truly radical policy agenda — a universal minimum inheritance, worker control over the boards of corporations and “confiscatory” levels of wealth and income taxation — that he calls “participatory socialism.”

Musk’s desire in buying Twitter goes beyond a desire to shape public discourse. Today’s equivalent of the Gilded Age oligarchs, who are gobbling up increasing chunks of the media landscape, also have access to a trove of personal data of users.

A new report explains how inequality contributed to the death of 21,000 people each day of the pandemic while the wealthiest collectively got $1.2 billion richer every 24 hours.

“Negroes have benefited from a limited change that was emotionally satisfying but materially deficient... Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls.”

A year set for major upheavals all over

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