Portside

While most Americans predominantly live off the income they earn from a job—income that is taxed all year, every year—the very richest households live lavishly off capital gains that may never be taxed.

The only way to steer American democracy to safety is to wrest money out of the claws of the wealthiest elites, who now control finances rivaling the economies of whole nations.

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California’s tech industry cannot escape its original sins.

Congress hiked the nation’s top-bracket tax rate to around 90% for two decades to see the emergence in the United States of the world’s first mass middle class.

I see a nation where 63 percent of workers live paycheck to paycheck — paycheck to paycheck. What does that mean? It means that every day you are living under incredible stress — scared to death that if your car breaks down, if your kid gets sick, if your landlord raises the rent, if you get divorced or separated, if you become pregnant, if for whatever reason you lose your job, you will find yourself in the midst of a financial catastrophe.

One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class. It is a commendable sacrifice, because they exist only because we embrace certain myths about them.

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.