The Morbidly Rich Have Killed the American Dream

The promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead, or if you don’t, surely your children will, was broken long ago. But there’s a way to turn this around.


George, who is homeless, panhandles along a street in Lawrence  Massachusetts. Lawrence, once one of America’s great manufacturing cities with immigrants from around the world coming to work in its textile and wool processing mills, has struggled to find its economic base since the decline of manufacturing.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

John Miller
Dec 26, 2025

Dollars & Sense

If Americans’ hopes of getting ahead have dimmed, as the Wall Street Journal reports yet again, it could only be because the lid of the coffin in which the “American Dream” was long ago laid to rest has finally been sealed shut.

The promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead, or if you don’t, surely your children will, was broken long ago. And today’s economic hardships have left young adults distinctly worse off than their parents, and especially their grandparents.


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This long decline has stripped away much of what there was of U.S. social mobility, which never did measure up to its mythic renderings. Let’s look closely at what the economic evidence, compiled in many meticulous studies, tells us about what passed for the American Dream, its demise, and what it would take to make its promised social mobility a reality.

The Long Decline

For at least two decades now, the Wall Street Journal has reported the dimming prospects of Americans getting ahead, each time with apparent surprise. In 2005, David Wessell presented the mounting evidence that had punctured the myth that social mobility is what distinguishes the United States from other advanced capitalist societies. A study conducted by economist Miles Corak put the lie to that claim. Corak found that the United States and United Kingdom were “the least mobile” societies among the rich countries he studied. In those two countries, children’s income increased the least from that of their parents. By that measure, social mobility in Germany was 1.5 times greater than social mobility in the United States; Canadian social mobility was almost 2.5 times greater than U.S. social mobility; and in Denmark, social mobility was three times greater than in the United States.

That U.S. social mobility lagged far behind the myth of America as a land of opportunity was probably no surprise to those who populated the work-a-day world of the U.S. economy in 2005. Corrected for inflation, the weekly wages of nonsupervisory workers in 2006 stood at just 85% of what they had been in 1973, over three decades earlier. An unrelenting increase in inequality had plagued the U.S. economy since the late 1970s. A Brookings Institution study of economic mobility published in 2007 reported that from 1979 to 2004, corrected for inflation, the after-tax income of the richest 1% of households increased 176% and increased 69% for the top one-fifth of households—but just 9% for the poorest fifth of households.

The Economist also found this increasing inequality worrisome. But its 2006 article, “Inequality and the American Dream,” assured readers that while greater inequality lengthens the ladder that spans the distance from poor to rich, it was “fine” if it had “rungs.” That is, widening inequality can be tolerated as long as “everybody has an opportunity to climb up through the system.”

Definitive proof that increasing U.S. inequality had not provided the rungs necessary to sustain social mobility came a decade later.

The American Dream Is Down for the Count

In late 2016, economist Raj Chetty and his multiple coauthors published their study, “The Fading American Dream: Trends.” They documented a sharp decline in mobility in the U.S economy over nearly half a century. In 1970, the household income (corrected for inflation) of 92% of 30-year-olds (born in 1940) exceeded their parents’ income at the same age. By 1990, just three-fifths (60.1%) of 30-year-olds (born in 1960) lived in households with more income than their parents earned at age 30. By 2014, that figure had dropped to nearly one-half. Only 50.3% of children born in 1984 earned more than their parents at age 30. (The figure below depicts this unrelenting decline in social mobility. It shows the relationship between a cohort’s birth year, on the horizontal axis, and the share of the cohort whose income exceeded that of their parents at age 30.)

The study from Chetty and his co-authors also documented that the reported decline in social mobility was widespread. It had declined in all 50 states over the 44 years covered by the study. In addition, their finding of declining social mobility still held after accounting for the effect of taxes and government transfers (including cash payments and payments in kind) on household income. All in all, their study showed that, “Severe Inequality Is Incompatible With the American Dream,” to quote the title of an Atlantic magazine article published at the time. Since then, the Chetty group and others have continued their investigations of inequality and social mobility, which are available on the Opportunity Insights website (opportunityinsights.org).

The stunning results of the Chetty group’s study got the attention of the Wall Street Journal. The headline of Bob Davis’s December 2016 Journal article summed up their findings succinctly: “Barely Half of 30-Year-Olds Earn More Than Their Parents: As wages stagnate in the middle class, it becomes hard to reverse this trend.”

Davis was correct to point to the study’s emphasis on the difficulty of reversing the trend of declining mobility. The Chetty group was convinced “that increasing GDP [gross domestic product] growth rates alone” would not restore social mobility. They argued that restoring the more equal distribution of income experienced by the 1940s cohort would be far more effective. In their estimation, it would “reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility.”

Social Mobility Has Gotten Worse, Not Better

Since 2014, neither U.S. economic growth nor relative equality has recovered, let alone returned to the levels that undergirded the far greater social mobility of the 1940s cohort. Today, the economic position of young adults is no longer improving relative to that of their parents or their grandparents.

President Donald Trump was fond of claiming that he oversaw the “greatest economy in the history of our country,” during his first term (2017–2020). But even before the onset of the Covid-19-induced recession, his economy was neither the best nor good, especially when compared to the economic growth rates enjoyed by the 1940s cohorts who reached age 30 during the 1970s. During the 1950s and then again during the 1960s, U.S. economic growth averaged more than 4% a year corrected for inflation, and it was still growing at more than 3% a year during the 1970s. From 2015 to 2019, the U.S. economy grew a lackluster 2.6% a year and then just 2.4% a year during the 2020s (2020–2024).

Also, present-day inequality continues to be far worse than in earlier decades. In his book-length telling of the story of the American Dream, Ours Was the Shining Future, journalist David Leonhardt makes that clear. From 1980 to 2019, the household income of the richest 1% and the income of the richest 0.001% grew far faster than they had from 1946 to 1980, while the income of poorer households, from the 90th percentile on down, grew more slowly than they had during the 1946 to 1980 period. As a result, from 1980 to 2019, the income share of the richest 1% nearly doubled from 10.4% to 19%, while the income share of the bottom 50% fell from 25.6% to 19.2%, hardly more than what went to the top 1%. Beyond that, in 2019, the net worth (wealth minus debts) of median, or middle-income, households was less than it had been in 2001, which, as Leonhardt points out, was “the longest period of wealth stagnation since the Great Depression.”

No wonder the American Dream took such a beating in the July 2025 Wall Street Journal-NORC at the University of Chicago poll. Just 25% of people surveyed believed they “had a good chance of improving their standard of living,” the lowest figure since the survey began in 1987. And according to 70% of respondents, the American Dream no longer holds true or never did. That figure is the highest in 15 years.

In full carnival barker mode, Trump is once again claiming “we have the hottest economy on Earth.” But the respondents to the Wall Street Journal-NORC poll aren’t buying it. Just 17% agreed that the U.S. economy “stands above all other economies.” And more than twice that many, 39%, responded that “there are other economies better than the United States.” It’s a hard sell when the inflation-adjusted weekly wages of nonsupervisory workers are still lower than what they had been in 1973, now more than half a century ago.

And economic worries are pervasive. Three-fifths (59%) of respondents were concerned about their student loan debt, more than two-thirds (69%) were concerned about housing, and three-quarters (76%) were concerned about health care and prescription drug costs.

Rising housing costs have hit young adults especially hard. The median price of a home in 1990 was three times the median household income. In 2023, that figure had reached nearly five times the median household income. And the average age of a first-time homebuyer had increased from 29 in 1980 to 38 in 2024.

Finally, in their 2023 study, sociologists Rob J. Gruijters, Zachary Van Winkle, and Anette E. Fasang found that at age 35, less than half (48.8%) of millennials (born between 1980 and 1984) owned a home, well below the 61.6% of late baby boomers (born between 1957 and 1964) who had owned a home at the same age.
Dreaming Big

In their 2016 study, the Chetty group writes that, “These results imply that reviving the ‘American Dream’ of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.”

That’s a tall order. Fundamental changes are needed to confront today’s economic inequality and economic woes. A progressive income tax with a top tax rate that rivals the 90% rate in the 1950s and early 1960s would be welcomed. But unlike the top tax rate of that period, the income tax should tax all capital gains (gains in wealth from the increased value of financial assets such as stocks) and tax them as they are accumulated and not wait until they are realized (sold for a profit). Also, a robust, fully refundable child tax credit is needed to combat childhood poverty, as are publicly supported childcare, access to better schooling, and enhanced access to higher education. Just as important is enacting universal single-payer health care and increased support for first-time homebuyers.

The belief that “their kids could do better than they were able to,” was what Chetty told the Wall Street Journal motivated his parents to emigrate from India to the United States. These fundamental changes could make the American Dream the reality that it never was.

© 2023 Dollars & Sense


John Miller
John Miller is a member of the Dollars & Sense collective, is professor of economics at Wheaton College.
Full Bio >

Whatever Happened to Trump’s “Golden Age” for American Workers?

MORE LIKE A GOLDEN SHOWER

by Lawrence S. Wittner / December 26th, 2025

Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.

Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25 percent.

America’s farmworkers, too, many of them desperately poor, are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost U.S. farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year.

As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30 percent of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official U.S. government poverty level.

Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers.  Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by raising it to the federal minimum wage, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage.  In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.

Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it, thanks to inflation.  And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving them of key labor rights, including minimum wage and overtime pay.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025, that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8 percent.

Trump’s policies have also fostered unemployment.

Probably the best-known example of this is the Trump administration’s chaotic purge, led by billionaire Elon Musk, of 317,000 federal workers without any clear rationale or due process. On top of this, however, it has shut down massive construction projects, especially in the renewable energy industry. Trump’s recent order to halt the construction of the huge wind farms off the East Coast is expected to result in the firing of thousands of workers.

Ironically, as two economic analysts reported in mid-December 2025, “key sectors of the economy that are central to Trump’s agenda have contracted, with payrolls in manufacturing, mining, logging and professional business services all falling over the last year.” Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be reviving U.S. manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.

Consequently, U.S. unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4 percent, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6 percent. This is the highest unemployment level in four years, leaving 7.8 million workers unemployed―700,000 more than a year before.

The Trump administration has also seriously undermined worker safety and health. According to the latest AFL-CIO study, workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year, with millions more injured or sickened. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to enforce health and safety standards, the Trump administration cut its workplace inspections by 30 percent, thereby reducing inspections of each site to one every 266 years.

Similarly, Trump has nearly destroyed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides research on workplace safety standards, by reducing its staffing from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80 percent.

Through executive action, the Trump administration eliminated specific measures taken to protect workers. This process included blocking a Biden rule to control heat conditions in workplaces, where 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 others are injured every year.  Moreover, in the spring of 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure and moved to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration district offices. Although a public uproar led to a reversal of the office closures, the administration then proposed weakening those offices’ ability to impose mine safety requirements and also weakening workplace safety penalties for businesses.

In addition, Trump appointed corporate executives to head relevant federal agencies, gutted Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines, and, in March 2025, issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government workers. This last measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for one out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States.

In a special AFL-CIO report, issued on December 22, 2025, the labor federation’s president, Liz Shuler, and secretary-treasurer, Fred Redmond, declared: “Since Inauguration Day . . . the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people,” and “every day has brought a new challenge and attack:  On federal workers.  On our unions and collective bargaining rights.  On the agencies that stand up for us and the essential services we rely on. . . .  On our democracy itself.”

Although Trump’s second term in office might have provided a “Golden Age” for the President and his fellow billionaires, it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.

rence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press). Read other articles by Lawrence, or visit Lawrence's website.

Backward American Capitalism (and Trump) Are Getting Electrical Vehicles All Wrong

The dirty fossil fuel industry keeping gas-powered vehicles on the road are like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it.


A BYD Birdsong L luxury EV sedan. “Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the world, is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, not an American,” writes Cole.
(Photo: BYD/promotional)

Juan Cole
Dec 26, 2025

Informed Comment

Euan Gregor at the Ember energy think tank makes a novel argument: The adoption of electric vehicles has spread in a major way to the Global South and is no longer only a Chinese, European and American phenomenon. By EVs Ember means both hybrid and pure battery electric cars.

But it certainly is a Chinese phenomenon, since in that country nearly half of new car sales were electric this year. That is an incredible statistic.


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Globally, Yale Climate Connections says, 25% of new car sales were electric of some sort. Road transportation, this site says, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions.

When we say that people in the Global South are buying EVs hand over fist, alas, we aren’t saying that they are buying Chevy Bolts or Nissan Leafs or Teslas. They are mostly buying BYDs, Geelys, BWMs and other Chinese makes, which are 65% the price of a Tesla. Since automobile transportation will be electrified over the next 30 years, the country that makes all those EVs will become the industrial powerhouse of the 21st Century. Most of the growth in Chinese EV exports, Ember says, has come in countries outside the relatively wealthy 38 nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Developmentnon (OECD).

Backward American capitalism has been captured by dirty petroleum interests and is like the horse-and-buggy companies of 1902, which laughed at Henry Ford’s Model T for a while before being put out of business by it. (They started by saying that automobiles were impractical because they would scare the horses).

The petroleum industry and the dirty oil countries are aware that China and Europe are electrifying transport, but they had pinned their hopes on a continued demand for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ember is saying that that hope is a pipe dream (pun intended). Exhibit A: Ethiopia has banned the importation of gasoline cars.

Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of BYD, the largest EV company in the world, is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, not an American. America is a sinking ship under the anti-science, anti-technology, anti-greeen Trump administration, which is more likely to kill off the population with preventable diseases by halting vaccinations than to dominate the world economically.

Ember says, “39 countries have reached an EV sales share larger than 10% in 2025, a third of which are outside Europe.” In 2019, all countries with substantial EV sales had been in Europe.

In particular, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has emerged in 2025 as a major adopter of EVs. Nearly 40% of new vehicle registrations in Vietnam were electric, more than in the European Union and more than the UK, and the electric vehicle industry could generate 6.5 million jobs there over the next 30 years. In Singapore 43% of new car sales were electric in the first nine months of this year. More than 20% of new cars bought in Thailand were electric this year, again more than in the EU or Britain. In Indonesia, about 18% of new vehicle registrations were electric this year, an increase of 49% over 2024. In Malaysia, EV sales were up 74%, and in the Philippines they increased a whopping 656%. Because they started from a low base, however, these two countries are still seeing only 5-6% of new car sales as electric.

India, Mexico and Brazil, two of them BRICS countries, are also emerging as significant EV markets. In Brazil EVs made up 9-10% of new passenger car sales. Since Brazil has an exceptionally clean grid, EVs are almost carbon-free there. In Mexico 8-9% of new vehicle registrations were electric. I visited Mexico twice this year, and noticed the BYD dealerships. In India, about 5% of new passenger car sales were electric this year, a big increase over the past. Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but Indians buy about 4.5 million new cars every year, so that was 225,000 EVs this year. In Turkiye 17% of new car sales are EVs, most of them battery electric. That country makes its own EV, the Togg, but also has attracted Chinese investment for a BYD manufacturing plant.

© 2023 Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.
Full Bio >

Trump admin fudged the numbers to make faltering economy look better: economists


Adam Lynch

December 26, 2025 

ALTERNET

Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik writes that President Donald Trump and his helpers are cheering prematurely over some good economic numbers that came out this month.

On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7 percent in November, down from 3 percent in September. Then, on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had gone up by a surprising 4.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter of 2025.

“Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes seized on the figures to boast about Trump's economic policies,” Hiltzik writes in the Tribune National. “White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett proclaimed the inflation figure to be ‘an absolute blockbuster report,’ and described the GDP figure as ‘a great Christmas present for the American people.’

After being hounded by bad numbers for most of Trump’s first year, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) happily jumped aboard, announcing "America is winning again" after the GDP report. He even called it "the direct result” of congressional Republicans’ and President Trump’s policies.

“Um, not so fast,” said Hiltzik, pointing out that the 43-day government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation.

“You've got to take it with a grain of salt," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. "It's confusing and it doesn't quite square with prices that we've observed."

Swonk said Trump’s steep cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25 percent. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers in lieu of hard data.

"Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote, which lowers the bottom-line figure. In fact, a sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead. This conceals any price increases in subsequent months.

“A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the (Consumer Price Index),” Hiltzik reports. “Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0 percent in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.”

The delay in sampling, Swonk said, means some seasonal price phenomena, such as airfares, also went unreported. The originally scheduled sampling would have incorporated a pre-Thanksgiving run-up in fares, but by the time the data were collected fares had returned to a non-holiday level.

On top of this, Hiltzik says economists are warning “that some economic factors haven't yet fully played out.”

“That includes Trump's tariffs, which in their execution have been lower than they appeared on the surface, and higher healthcare premiums, which have been forecast or announced but won't actually become effective until 2026.”

Read the full report at this Kansas City Star link.

Trump is pointlessly trying to resurrect jobs that 'aren't coming back': Washington Post

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to deliver remarks on the U.S. economy and affordability at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, U.S. December 9, 2025. REUTERS Jonathan Ernst

Adam Lynch

December 25, 2025 

ALTERNET

Politicians and President Donald Trump sell the vision of a manufacturing renaissance, but the Washington Post Editorial Board argues their vision of “massive factories employing thousands of people” are not possible in real-life America.

“Some places have had manufacturing renaissances,” reports the Post, citing its coverage of Bridgeport, Connecticut, with an old manufacturing city allegedly sputtering “back to life,” according to the headline.


Once the home of Remington and divisions of General Electric, which filed for bankruptcy in 1991, the area is now serving vocational education programs that are helping workers without college degrees cultivate welding and technician skills, which almost guarantee careers.

It was a “feel-good story politicians want to hear,” writes the Post, though the paper observed that the hard truth of re-emerging factory jobs “barely registered” in the overall data on Bridgeport’s economy. Manufacturing employment in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury metropolitan statistical area saw only “a small bump” and remains near 30-year lows, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Real manufacturing output in the Bridgeport metro area has been rising but is also quite low compared to before the Great Recession, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis,” the Post reports. “The turnaround in the past few years is that manufacturing is no longer a drag on Bridgeport’s GDP growth, as it was during most years since the Great Recession. It flipped positive in 2021” — But is has remained “barely above zero” since then.

The problem, according the Post, is that the new jobs “are relatively few in number,” however high in compensation.

“These newer, successful manufacturing companies in Bridgeport don’t have assembly lines with workers performing repetitive tasks. They have high-skilled workers meeting exacting specifications for a relatively small number of picky customers,” said the Post. “That’s what most American manufacturing firms look like today. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. manufacturing firms employ fewer than 500 people, and 93 percent employ fewer than 100, according to 2022 data.”

The “manufacturing” jobs actually employ more robots than anything, per the Post's editorial. Automation makes them extremely productive, and more productive workers are paid more, but it still means fewer people work in manufacturing than in the past.

“Pro-manufacturing politicians face a choice,” says the Post. “They can applaud the success of places like Bridgeport while conceding that manufacturing isn’t a jobs juggernaut. Or they can continue to yearn for the mass-production plants of yesteryear, which aren’t coming back. Even if they did, they would yield worse, lower-paying jobs than the high-tech manufacturing plants of today.”

Read the Post's editorial at this link.

JD Vance Is Wrong: DEI Is Not What’s Dividing America—He Is

In the America that Vance envisions, people are only judged for “who they are”—unless they’re immigrants, transgender, women, Muslims, or people of color.


US Vice President JD Vance arrives at the Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference, in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025.
(Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)

Jordan Liz
Dec 26, 2025

Common Dreams


On December 21, at Turning Point USA’s annual national conference, Vice President JD Vance took to the stage to denounce the evils of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

He told the crowd:
We don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex, so we have relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it had belonged. In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore. And if you’re an Asian, you don’t have to talk around your skin color when you’re applying for college. Because we judge people based on who they are, not on ethnicity and things they can’t control. We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot. And if you’re that, you’re very much on our team.

For Vance, DEI and affirmative action policies are so vile that it “pisses [him] off a million times more” than racial slurs aimed at his own children by an actual white supremacist.

This is because DEI policies, in his view, are specifically designed to harm white men. On December 17, Vance posted on Twitter that, “A lot of people think ‘DEI’ is lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games. In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination against white men. This is an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.”

The “incredible piece” is an article by Jacob Savage entitled “The Lost Generation.” Savage argues that “DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.” A redistribution that, Savage argues, harmed “white male millennials” who saw opportunities that would have ordinarily gone to people like him go to people of color and women instead. Savage’s grievance is premised on the assumption that the people who succeed in his place were less qualified—the type of people that he would have triumphed over if not for DEI.

Much of the article is typical anti-DEI rhetoric. But, toward the end, Savage makes the following—almost insightful—point:
It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.

Savage, like Vance and most anti-DEI advocates, champions “American meritocracy.” Yet, he is somehow upset and surprised that someone with “ordinary talent” failed to succeed. Isn’t this outcome exactly what true, unfettered meritocracy would produce? If everyone, regardless of race, sex, and gender, were able to compete equally, then those who are not “extraordinary” would always struggle to find financial security and success.

The actual problem that Savage is unknowingly pointing to is not DEI. It’s capitalism. Within a capitalist system that prioritizes maximizing profits over people’s well-being, and a political system that offers little to no protection for those capitalism leaves behind, most people will struggle to survive. That is by design.

Capitalism will always, by its very nature, produce “winners” and “losers.” The more people there are competing for a steadily decreasing number of jobs, the more “losers” there will be. A problem that AI—aided by the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate any regulations against it—will likely worsen in the coming years. The only real “winners” in this dynamic are the ultra-wealthy class who continue to succeed regardless of their own individual talents.

He is evoking racial animosity to distract his supporters from the real problems that capitalism is generating and that the Trump administration is ignoring.

If Vance really cared about treating people equally and with dignity, then he would concern himself with tackling the affordability crisis, increasing wages, lowering healthcare costs, building more social safety nets—all issues that the Trump administration is currently failing to address. Worse even, this administration is actively working to undermine many of the programs that would help people like Savage who are struggling to get by.

No matter what Vance says, being “a great American patriot” will never be enough to succeed within the current capitalist system. And Vance knows this. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance discusses the significance of “social capital,” or leveraging the networks of people and institutions around us to “connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information.” For Vance, his social capital, which included Yale professors, tech billionaires, and former presidential speechwriters, was critical to his success. However, that capital is reserved for the upper class. As he writes, “Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me.”

Ultimately, Vance is not concerned with equality or discrimination. His attacks on DEI are nothing more than a smokescreen. He is evoking racial animosity to distract his supporters from the real problems that capitalism is generating and that the Trump administration is ignoring. He is hoping to exploit people’s genuine frustrations with the status quo to become president in 2028.

Vance preaches inclusivity, but his entire social and political ideology is divisive. He claims that, “We all got wrapped up over the last few years in zero sum thinking. This was because the people who think they rule the world pit us against one another.” But the reality is that Vance’s pro-capitalist, Christian nationalist, and ethnonationalist values are all zero sum ways of thinking that function precisely to divide people.

Vance says that “in the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” Yet, white people have never had to apologize for being white. This is performative anger. Vance is using the same rhetoric still used by the KKK—“Never! Never! Apologize for Being White!—to fuel hatred and contempt for his own political gain.

In the America that Vance envisions, people are only judged for “who they are”—unless they’re immigrants, transgender, women, Muslims, or people of color. Within the very same speech that Vance champions equality for all, he attacks Somali Americans. He tells the audience that “Democrats are not sending their best. Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar’s candidate for mayor of Mogadishu. Wait, I mean Minneapolis. Little Freudian slip there”—smiling as the crowd laughed along.

As one of his former friends puts it, Vance is a “chameleon. Someone who is able to change their positions and their values depending on what will amass them political power and wealth. And I think that’s really unfortunate, because it reflects a lack of integrity.” His drastic change of heart about Trump is proof of how easily he can change his colors. Vance went from Trump is “America’s Hitler” to now serving as his vice president within the span of a few years. His anti-DEI rhetoric is just another political maneuver meant to serve his own interest.

All that said, Vance is right about one thing—“The people who think they rule the world pit us against one another.” Those people include him. We can’t let him succeed.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Jordan Liz
Jordan Liz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San José State University. He specializes in issues of race, immigration and the politics of belonging.
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Instacart, Stop Using American Shoppers as Lab Rats During an Affordability Crisis

The grocery delivery app is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.

People shop for groceries during the grand opening of Stater Bros. Markets at the site of an old Kmart on Arlington Ave. and Van Buren Blvd. in Riverside on Wednesday, September 28, 2022.
(Photo by Watchara Phomicinda/MediaNews Group/The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)

Lindsay Owens
Dec 26, 2025

Inequality.org

Somewhere, a mom taps through her grocery app while waiting in the school pickup line, purchasing a box of Wheat Thins for $5.99. Across town, someone else scrolls through the same grocery app and adds the exact same box of Wheat Thins to their cart. For them, the crackers ring up at $6.99. It is the same item, from the same store, at the same time, but one unlucky shopper is stuck paying a higher price. Neither shopper has any idea this pricing game is even being played.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. Increasingly, it’s happening all over the country. Right now, grocery delivery app Instacart is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.



Report Exposes Instacart’s Hidden AI Price Experiments That Could Cost Families $1,200 Per Year



Watchdog Celebrates Victory Over Instacart Pricing Scheme—But Says Broader Corporate Abuse Remains

How do we know? Our team at Groundwork Collaborative had a feeling Instacart might be experimenting on shoppers, so we decided to run an experiment on them. Alongside our partners at Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union, we recruited over 400 volunteer secret shoppers to shop for the same basket of 20 items at the same grocery store at the same time. We ran the experiment in four different stores across the country.

The results were damning: At every store we tested, shoppers were charged different prices for an identical basket of groceries. Overall, Instacart basket totals varied by about 7%, with some items posting differences as high as 23%. For example: the exact same basket of groceries from a Safeway store in Seattle, Washington ran some shoppers $114.34, while other shoppers were charged $123.93. At a Target in North Canton, Ohio, prices varied by as much as $6, as some shoppers rang up a total of $84.43, while others were charged $87.91 or as much as $90.47.

Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction.

Based on the company’s own estimates, this “Instacart tax” could drain as much as $1,200 from American households’ pocketbooks each year.

Meanwhile, Instacart is gloating about their ability to use unaware shoppers as guinea pigs to pad their bottom line profits. On their website, the company notes that, “End shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment. For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop and only by a small margin; it’s negligible.” But we’re facing the greatest food affordability crisis in a generation. As grocery prices continue to rise and reliance on Buy Now, Pay Later is accelerating, it is painfully evident that an additional $1,200 a year is anything but negligible for many American families.

Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction. Enabled by corporate consolidation and artificial intelligence technologies, companies across industries now deploy a dizzying array of tactics designed to extract maximum profit from each individual. They tack on hidden fees; collude with their competitors on price increases; and individualize prices for consumers based on granular, personal data.

These predatory pricing strategies are not about managing scarcity or efficient markets. They’re corporations experimenting with your willingness to pay to see exactly how much they can squeeze out of you.

Since its release last week, our report has struck a national chord—earning front-page coverage in the New York Times, primetime coverage on broadcast news, and featuring in a video that has already amassed nearly 2 million views. Instacart’s own stock even dropped 6% the day after our report was published, which the Wall Street Journal attributed in part to our investigation.

This reaction is unsurprising: Americans dislike being surveilled, they resent being gouged, and they certainly don’t like being lab rats for profit-driven experimentation. Fair and honest markets are the bedrock of a healthy economy—and companies like Instacart jeopardize that trust by making prices opaque and unpredictable.

Our message to Instacart—and any corporation that would try to replicate their pricing experiment—is simple. Close the labs. American shoppers are not guinea pigs.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.


Lindsay Owens
Lindsay Owens is the Executive Director of Groundwork Collaborative.
Full Bio >

British Activist Blasts ‘Sociopathic Greed’ of Big Tech After US Judge Blocks His Detention

“I chose to take on the biggest companies in the world, to hold them accountable, to speak truth to power. There is a cost attached to that,” said Imran Ahmed, one of five Europeans targeted by the Trump administration.


Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is one of five Europeans targeted by the Trump administration with a travel ban.
(Photo: Imran Ahmed)

Jessica Corbett
Dec 26, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


After a US judge on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from detaining one of the European anti-disinformation advocates hit with a travel ban earlier this week, Imran Ahmed suggested that he is being targeted because artificial intelligence and social media companies “are increasingly under pressure as a result of organizations like mine.”

Ahmed is the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The 47-year-old Brit lives in Washington, DC with his wife and infant daughter, who are both US citizens. While the Trump administration on Tuesday also singled out Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of HateAid, and Thierry Breton, a former European commissioner who helped craft the Digital Services Act, Ahmed is reportedly the only one currently in the United States.

On Wednesday, Ahmed, who is a legal permanent resident, sued top Trump officials including US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Rather than disguise its retaliatory motive, the federal government was clear that Mr. Ahmed is being ‘SANCTIONED’ as punishment for the research and public reporting carried out by the nonprofit organization that Mr. Ahmed founded and runs,” the complaint states. “In other words, Mr. Ahmed faces the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest, punitive detention, and expulsion for exercising his basic First Amendment rights.”

“The government’s actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny,” the filing continues. “Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation—may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”


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Just a day later, Judge Vernon Broderick, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the administration from arresting or detaining Ahmed. The judge also scheduled a conference for Monday afternoon.

The US Department of State said Thursday that “the Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: The United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here.”

Ahmed’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said that “the federal government can’t deport a green-card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say.”

In the complaint and interviews published Friday, Ahmed pointed to his group’s interactions with Elon Musk, a former member of the Trump and administration and the richest person on Earth. He also controls the social media platform X, which sued CCDH in 2023.

“We were sued by Elon Musk a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully; a court found that he was trying to impinge on our First Amendment rights to free speech by using law to try and silence our accountability work,” Ahmed told the BBC.

Months after a federal judge in California threw out that case last year, Musk publicly declared “war” on the watchdog.

“What it has been about is companies that simply do not want to be held accountable and, because of the influence of big money in Washington, are corrupting the system and trying to bend it to their will, and their will is to be unable to be held accountable,” Ahmed told the Guardian. “There is no other industry, that acts with such arrogance, indifference, and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”

Ahmed explained that he spent Christmas away from his wife and daughter because of the Trump administration’s track record of quickly sending targeted green-card holders far away from their families. He said: “I chose to take on the biggest companies in the world, to hold them accountable, to speak truth to power. There is a cost attached to that. My family understands that.”

The British newspaper noted that when asked whether he thought UK politicians should use X, the former Labour Party adviser told the Press Association, “Politicians have to make decisions for themselves, but every time they post on X, they are putting a buck in Mr. Musk’s pocket and I think they need to question their own consciences and ask themselves whether or not they think they can carry on doing that.”

Ahmed also said that it was “telling that Mr. Musk was one of the first and most vociferous in celebrating the press release” about the sanctions against him and the others.

“He said it was great, and it is great, but not for the reasons that he thinks,” the campaigner said. “Because what it has actually done is give a chance for the system to show that the advocacy that we do is both important and protected by the First Amendment.”

Sanctioning Fever: The United States, European Union, and Free Speech

by Binoy Kampmark / December 26th, 2025

At present, there is a pot-calling-the-kettle-black approach being taken by the European Union and the United States regarding the imposition of sanctions upon individuals deemed hostile to free speech. On December 23, the US State Department announced that it would bar five European citizens accused of spearheading efforts to pressure US tech giants to censor or suppress American opinions. This came after the European Union’s own tilt to sanctioning individuals accused of spreading Russian misinformation or disinformation, particularly about the Ukraine War.

Those caught in the State Department vice are former EU Commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton, a key figure behind the Digital Services Act (DSA), Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of the German legal aid organisation HateAid, British head of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Imran Ahmed, and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

Von Hodenberg and Ballon assisted Jewish college students sue the social network platform X over the dissemination of antisemitic content while Ahmed, in particular, has been praised for his work by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) on advancing social media hygiene. “He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and he will remain a valuable partner,” insisted the JFNA’s head of government relations, Dennis Bernard. Given that many a policy decision by the Trump administration to withdraw from international institutions – the UN Human Rights Council comes to mind – has been based on thinly justified accusations of antisemitism, this was side splittingly comic.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was suitably bolshie in making the announcement, calling the barred individuals “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex”. “For too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”

Sarah Rogers, the US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, had her share of stones to cast, lashing Breton for “ominously” reminding “[Elon] Musk of X’s legal obligations and ongoing ‘formal proceedings’ for alleged noncompliance with ‘illegal content’ and ‘disinformation’ requirements under the DSA.” Ahmed’s organisation was taken to task for its 2022 “Disinformation Dozen” report lacerating anti-vaccination advocates, among them the current US Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A spokesperson for GDI called the sanctions an “authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.” The Trump administration had yet again used “the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with.” The actions were “immoral, unlawful and un-American.” French President Emmanuel Macron saw matters in terms of autonomy, calling the decision intimidatory and coercive “aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty”.

The European Union can hardly claim to be saintly on the subject of protecting free speech either. When it comes to discussing Russian policies, tolerance for its exercise shrinks. (Consider, for instance, the imposition of EU sanctions on experts associated with the Russia-based international forum, the Valdai Club.) The recent, most troubling case of Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss colonel living in Brussels who finds himself the target of an executive sanctions listing, stands out. The listing was made as part of the Russia hybrid-threats framework adopted in October 2024 (Decision 2024/2643 and Regulation 2024/2642) covering such non-military actions as the dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, cyberattacks and interference in elections. Member States are directed to take measures against “natural persons” who are involved, for instance, in “planning, directing, engaging in, directly or indirectly, supporting or otherwise facilitating the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference” in favour of Russia.

Baud, according to the EU sanctions tracker, is described as “a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst [and] a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example, accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.” An odd curriculum vitae to warrant an executive listing that is punitive and lacking curial assessment.

For holding and promoting such views, an asset freeze has been placed upon him within the EU jurisdiction, along with an entry and transit ban across the EU. Stranger in this whole affair is the fact that Switzerland does not subscribe to this monochrome sanctions regime. A situation of the absurd has been created: a Swiss national residing in Brussels who is effectively incapable of returning to Switzerland for expressing views no good European should have.

Attacking a viewpoint deemed unsavoury and out of step with accepted, if not dictated opinion, is the very essence of censorship. The mood of the moment is that of a bouncy militarism in Europe, a reverie of warmongering committing Member States to ever increasing defence budgets against imaginary jackboots awaiting to make their way to Paris and Brussels. Those wishing to question the Ukraine narrative in terms of history and origin, or the need for the prolongation of war, have become targets.

These formulas deny debate, endorse a police version of history, and affirm fundamentalist scripts. Stick to the script, or else. It becomes chilling to then see various countries and political entities punish those with undesirable, even unsavoury opinions. This might be a good time for the EU to drop all pretence on the subject and admit that opinions are there to be policed by the stuffy mandarins of the day. And while there is much to be said that is problematic about such restrictive, babying instruments as the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s DSA, preventing activists and researchers from travelling to a country where free speech is protected seems similarly perverse.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

UK tech campaigner sues Trump administration over US sanctions


By AFP
 December 25, 2025


Imran Ahmed (right), pictured with Hari Sreenivasan, is a British national and US permanent resident - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File JP Yim

The chief of a prominent anti-disinformation watchdog has sued President Donald Trump’s administration over a US entry ban, calling it an “unconstitutional” attempt to expel the permanent American resident, court filings showed Wednesday.

Imran Ahmed, a British national who heads the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), was among five European figures involved in tech regulation whom the US State Department said Tuesday would be denied visas.

The department accused them of attempting to “coerce” US-based social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose. The European Union and several member states strongly condemned the move and vowed to defend Europe’s regulatory autonomy.

Ahmed holds US permanent residency, commonly known as a “green card.”

“I am proud to call the United States my home,” he said in a statement. “My wife and daughter are American, and instead of spending Christmas with them, I am fighting to prevent my unlawful deportation from my home country.”

The campaigner filed his complaint in a New York district court against Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Ahmed faces the “imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest, punitive detention, and expulsion” from the United States, the court filing said.

“My life’s work is to protect children from the dangers of unregulated social media and AI and fight the spread of antisemitism online. That mission has pitted me against big tech executives — and Elon Musk in particular — multiple times,” Ahmed said.

There was no immediate reaction from the State Department.

– Others targeted –

The visa ban also targeted former European commissioner Thierry Breton, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German nonprofit HateAid, and Clare Melford, who leads the UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

Condemning the move, the European Commission said that it was seeking clarification from US authorities, and if needed it “will respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures.”

Breton, the former top tech regulator at the European Commission, often clashed with tycoons including Musk — a Trump ally — over their obligations to follow EU rules.

The State Department has described him as the “mastermind” of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes content moderation and other standards on major social media platforms operating in Europe.

The DSA stipulates that major platforms must explain content-moderation decisions, provide transparency for users and ensure researchers can carry out essential work, such as understanding how much children are exposed to dangerous content.

But the act has become a bitter rallying point for US conservatives who see it as a weapon of censorship against right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, an accusation the EU furiously denies.

Ahmed’s CCDH also frequently clashed with Musk, reporting a spike in misinformation and hate speech on the social media platform X since the billionaire’s 2022 takeover. The site was previously called Twitter.

Last year, a California court dismissed X’s lawsuit against CCDH that accused the nonprofit of a smear campaign.

 

At least five killed in attack during evening prayers at mosque in Nigeria

Copyright Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

By Euronews with AP

Published on 25/12/2025 - 

Police believe the explosion was likely a suicide attack after finding fragments of a suspected suicide vest at the site.

At least five people were killed and 35 were injured after a bomb exploded during prayers at a mosque in the northeastern city of Maiduguri in Nigeria's Borno state on Wednesday night.

Police said the attack was likely a suicide attack, a police spokesperson said in a statement, fragments of a suspected suicide vest were found at the site of the blast.

Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum called the attack "utterly condemnable, barbaric and inhumane," several local media reported.

“Attacking a place of worship is a desecration of its sanctity at a time when Muslim faithful are performing acts of worship,” he added.

The explosion comes at a time of heightened security concerns in Nigeria's northern region, where the country is battling multiple armed extremist groups, including Boko Haram and its splinter group, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, although extremists have previously targeted mosques. The use of suicide bombers has also been linked to Boko Haram, which has claimed responsibility for similar attacks across the northeastern region in the past.