Portside

We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. And it’s not just income and wealth inequality that is plaguing our nation. It is the maldistribution of economic and political power.

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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