A society scarred by runaway inequality will divide in to two very unequal sectors.

For the super-rich, the world of for-hire private services will cater to their every need. They live on patrolled estates, commute by helicopter, travel by private jet, educate their children in elite private schools, receive high quality private health care, and be treated differentially by politicians as well as the criminal justice system. They are hermetically sealed from homelessness and crime. Student debt is a non-issue except as a financial market to exploit. Poverty and fair taxes are far, far away from their day to day realities.

When your are the richest of the rich, America looks damn good. Your employees and servants fawn over your. Politicians and the medi…

For much of American history, the incarceration rate was relatively low and steady, even during the turbulent 1960s. But as rising inequality took hold around 1980, so did the rise of our prison population.

Runaway inequality and the downward pressure on wages, especially for those at the bottom, create ideal conditions for a vast underground economy. Stiff sentencing laws and the War on Drugs colluded to fill our prison's and jails. For-profit private prison companies with Wall Street financing have pressed to keep the jails full and to expand them.

We lead the developed world in homelessness:
One of the most crushing outcomes of runaway inequality is homelessness. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, homelessness has multiple causes including foreclosures, poverty, decline of work opportunities, reductions in public assistance, lack of affordable health care, mental illness, addiction and domestic violence. Many of these causes are directly related to and exacerbated by rising inequality.

As the wealthy deploy tax shelters both here and abroad, the money for affordable housing, urban shelters and public assistance has declined. Gentrification of urban areas has further driven up housing costs and pushed low-income residents from single room hotels, boarding houses and shelters. The housing crash, …

We can find data that compares our country to others when it comes to student debt. That's because in most countries higher education is free. In fact, higher education once was virtually free here as well. After WWII, the GI Bill of Rights paid for more than 3 million veterans to return to school, tuition free. The bill also provided stipends for living costs as well. California and then New York also developed tuition-free state wide university systems. However, as runaway inequality set in, state and federal support for higher education did not keep up with tuition costs. The breach was filled by Wall Street, which profits mightily from the trillion dollar student debt market.

Our vision is so crippled by rising inequality that we consider student d…

The country is ruled by oligarchs and their enablers.
by Richard Kim for the Nation

It just so happened that during the week that Republicans rammed a $1.5 trillion tax bill through Congress without a single Democratic vote, Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, was finishing up a fact-finding mission to the United States.

Alston visited places like Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia, which voted for Donald Trump, but he also stopped in California, which went for Hillary Clinton, and Puerto Rico, which wasn't allowed to vote for president at all. 

A veteran diplomat with tours in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Albania, Alston was nonetheless shocked by what he saw here, in the richest country in the world. His devastating report …