Trump Infrastructure Plan and Inequality: A Culture’s Road Ahead

Trump’s stingy infrastructure plan will merely deepen decay-promoting austerity policies by further shifting the responsibility for road and bridge repair from the federal government to the profit-driven private sector, and already-strapped state and local jurisdictions.

Jon Jeter
بواسطة Jon Jeter
President Donald Trump arrives to speak about infrastructure at the Department of Transportation, Friday, June 9, 2017, in Washington. (AP/Andrew Harnik)

INDIANAPOLIS – The morning commute in this landlocked Midwestern city is an obstacle course of potholes, buckled pavement, and shards of fugitive cement. Like infantrymen navigating a minefield, motorists swerve and stop, and zig and zag in rush hour traffic to avoid the peril from below. Drive east on Kessler Boulevard, however, and just past

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Cryptocurrency: With Inequality Rising, Citizens Seek Alternative Economies

Cryptocurrencies are helping recipients of foreign aid by allowing them to exchange peer-to-peer, rather than having to transact through corruption-prone bureaucrats.

Elizabeth Stephens
بواسطة Elizabeth Stephens
In this Friday, Dec. 8, 2017, file photo, a man uses a Bitcoin ATM in Hong Kong. Bitcoin is the world's most popular virtual currency, but multitudes of alternatives are springing up around the world. (AP/Kin Cheung)

The year 2017 will go down as a particularly tough one for ordinary citizens, particularly in the global South. A sharp rise in government restrictions on fundamental freedoms across regions, as well as in levels of inequality, played a big part in that negative review. According to a recent Oxfam report, 1% of the world’s richest elites now own

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Poverty: American Style

“The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.”

Kenneth Surin
بواسطة Kenneth Surin
Homeless tents are dwarfed by skyscrapers in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the U.S.’s poorest neighborhoods.   Alston, the author of the quoted phrase in the excerpt, is an Australian who is a professor of law at New York University.  During

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Since 1978 CEO Pay Soared 937%, Worker Wages Remained Flat

New analysis shows how corporate bosses rake in huge salaries and bonuses as inequality continues to soar.

Jake Johnson
بواسطة Jake Johnson
McDonald's

Wages for most American workers have remained basically stagnant for decades, but a new report published on Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that the CEOs of America's largest firms have seen their pay soar at a consistent and "outrageous" clip. Between 1978 and 2016, CEO pay rose by 937 percent, EPI's Lawrence Mishel and

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America’s Oligarchs Will Control 70% Of National Wealth By 2021

A new study by the Boston Consulting Group has found that while wealth inequality is growing on a global scale, it has kicked into overdrive in the United States – where America’s 1% are expected to control 70 percent of the nation’s private wealth by the year 2021.

Whitney Webb
بواسطة Whitney Webb
A pedestrian exits a subway station as a homeless man sleeps covered in cardboard packaging, outside the main railway station in Bucharest, Romania, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015. The sewers around the railway station are a popular shelter for the town's many homeless, especially in the bitter Balkan winter weather. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

America’s rich just won’t quit getting richer, according to a new study released in mid-June by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm. The study, which seeks to analyze the global wealth management industry, as well as the evolution of private wealth, uncovered some startling statistics that suggest that global

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Study: Americans Dying From Preventable Causes At Shocking Rates

The U.S. was tied with Estonia and Montenegro, far below other wealthy nations such as Norway, Canada, and Australia, in the study’s ranking of 195 countries.

Nika Knight
بواسطة Nika Knight
Doctor

Americans are dying at a shockingly high rate from preventable causes, found a first-of-its-kind global health study published late Thursday. The new research demonstrates that despite the fact that the U.S. has the largest economy in the world, healthcare for many of its residents is woefully inadequate. The U.S. was tied with Estonia and

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