How Did America's Wealth Inequality Reach This Level of Toxic?

We are just beginning to understand one further dimension of toxic inequality: a devastating emotional and physiological phenomenon we might call “toxic inequality syndrome.”

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, brought attention to a different kind of inequality with a focus on capital. Yet many popular and academic accounts of inequality, spurred by media coverage and the emerging national discourse, continued to focus on income disparities, economic class, and the mega-rich. A preoccupation with income led to an insufficient understanding of the new inequality that left wealth out of the picture. President Barack Obama provided perhaps the crowning moment in this new public attention to economic inequality when he proclaimed in a December 2014 speech that inequality “is the defining challenge of our time.” But the president’s speech referenced income inequality eleven times and wealth inequality once. Leaving wealth out of the conversation is a crucial mistake, giving fodder to those who would make personal poverty the result of personal failings.

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George Carlin Explains How the System is Rigged | Video

George Carlin was more than just a comedian - he was an insightful social/political commentator as is demonstrated here. In this monologue from eight years ago, no punches are pulled, no sacred cows are exempt when he reveals the truth about the America we presently live in.

The World on a Billionaire's Budget

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The Slippery Slope of Dehumanizing Language

Roseanne Barr had her sitcom canceled on May 29, after calling former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett the child of an ape. Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File By Allison Skinner , Northwestern University Comparing people to animals seems to increasingly be a part of our political discourse. When Roseanne Barr tweeted that former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was the child of an ape , it came only a couple of weeks after Donald Trump called immigrant gang members, “ animals .” Trump has been a target himself: On the cover of its April 2 issue, New York magazine depicted the president as a pig . As a psychologist who studies social attitudes and intergroup relations, I get a bit uneasy when I see these types of insults get normalized. At their core, they’re a way to dehumanize others – a practice that can have pernicious effects. In a range of studies, psychologists have been able to show how dehumanizing messages can ...

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