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Join us for...
A Community Forum on
Challenging Concentrated Wealth and Power
with Presenter Chuck Collins, senior
scholar at Institute for Policy
Studies, Washington D.C., co-founder of
United for a Fair Economy
and co-author with Bill Gates Sr. of Wealth and Our Commonwealth and,
with Felice Yeskel of, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on
Economic Inequality and Insecurity.
and Community Respondents:
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
6 to 8:30 pm
Jane Addams Hull House Museum
800 S. Halsted St.
Free event, open to the public.
Please R.S.V.P. to Kristen Cox at
econjustmidwest@gmail.com by May 22nd.
We have witnessed, over recent decades, the most colossal redistribution of
wealth in modern world history. We are now living in our nation's second
Gilded Age, a period of extreme inequality of wealth and power, the worst
since 1929. Such concentrations of private wealth, then as now, dominated —
and corrupted — our democracy and made for a politics more focused on
preserving privilege than helping average, working families. But our
progressive forbears changed all that. By the 1950s, the U.S. had become the
first mass middle class nation in world history thanks to steeply
progressive tax rates on the income and estates of America's wealthy. Those
tax revenues, in turn, helped fund the programs like the G.I. Bill that
ushered millions of American working families into middle class status, but
we've lost that forward momentum today.
Together, we can challenge concentrated wealth and power.
The Working Group on Extreme Inequality (WGEI), chaired by Chuck Collins at
the Institute for Policy Studies, is an emerging coalition of national
labor, religious, business and civic
organizations concerned about poverty, economic insecurity and organizing
around "raise the floor" policy campaigns. The Income Equity Act and a
Progressive Estate Tax bill are two polices that WGEI believes will help
address the concentration of wealth in America.
How unequal are we? How did it happen? Why is this issue not on the
political agenda? What policies would directly reverse these inequalities?
Please join us for a discussion about the dangers of grave accumulations of
income and wealth, its threat to our general well-being, and the
possibilities for building a network to address extreme inequality here in
Chicago.
Event co-sponsors:
Applied Research Center, Center
for Tax and Budget Accountability,
Crossroads Fund,
Global Initiatives Chicago,
Jane Addams Hull House
Museum, Jobs With
Justice, Program on Inequality and the Common Good at
Institute for Policy Studies,
and Sargent Shriver National
Center on Poverty Law.
Please R.S.V.P. to Kristen Cox at
econjustmidwest@gmail.com
by May 22nd. Refreshments will be served.
Presenter Bio
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy (IPS) and is
an expert on U.S. inequality and author of several books, including
Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality, Insecurity
(New Press, 2005) and co-author of Wealth and Our Commonwealth with
Bill Gates Sr. He coordinates a national effort to preserve the federal
estate tax, our nation's only tax on inherited wealth and co-edits the
website inequality.org.
In 1995, he co-founded United
for a Fair Economy (UFE) to raise the profile of the inequality
issue and support popular education and organizing efforts to address
inequality. While he was Executive Director of UFE from 1995-2001 and
Program Director until 2005, he brought together
Responsible Wealth members, business leaders and investors to
publicly speak out against economic policies and corporate practices that
worsen economic inequality.
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