Abstract
INEQUALITY IS A PROBLEM as old as the hills. As long as people have competed for resources and status, there have always been some who acquired more at the expense of others, whether through luck, skill, guile, or violence. With the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century came a new set of economic systems that served to benefit those with wealth and extract from those without. Among them was modern capitalism, the system adopted by most of the western world. In the United States in particular, capitalism was combined with a political system that compensated for only some of its inherited and created inequities (and that generally has done so unequally along racial lines).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 181. Readers are strongly encouraged to read this seminal book.
- 2.
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2012), 1.
- 3.
Klein, This Changes Everything, 310.
- 4.
See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010) and Chuck Collins et al., The Ever-Growing Gap: Without Change, African-American and Latino Families Won’t Match White Wealth for Centuries (Washington, DC: CFED and Institute for Policy Studies, 2016), http://www.ips-dc.org/report-ever-growing-gap/.
- 5.
Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, October 2015, http://gabriel-zucman.eu/uswealth/.
- 6.
Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies, December 5, 2015, www.ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza/.
- 7.
See Chuck Collins, “The Panama Papers Expose the Hidden Wealth of the World’s Super-Rich,” Nation, April 5, 2016. See also Robert S. McIntyre, Richard Phillips, and Phineas Baxandall, “Offshore Shell Games 2015: The Use of Offshore Tax Havens by U.S. Multinational Companies,” Citizens for Tax Justice and US PIRG, October 5, 2015, http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2015/10/offshore_shell_games_2015.php#.VpEOgBFl3kE; and Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 8.
Collins et al., “Ever-Growing Gap.”
- 9.
Klein, This Changes Everything, 409. The United States, 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for about 14 percent of all emissions.
- 10.
Gardiner Harris, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land: Facing Rising Seas, Bangladesh Confronts the Consequences of Climate Change,” New York Times, March 28, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/facing-rising-seas-bangladesh-confronts-the-consequences-of-climate-change.html.
- 11.
Chuck Collins, “To Billionaire Doomsday Preppers: Your Wealth Won’t Save You,” Yes! Magazine, February 21, 2017, http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/to-billionaire-doomsday-preppers-your-wealth-wont-save-you-20170221.
- 12.
Johan Rockström and Mattias Klum, Big World, Small Planet (Stockholm: Max Strom, 2015), 8.
- 13.
See the discussion of the wealthy’s stake in great inequality in Chuck Collins, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2016).
- 14.
Bryce Covert, “Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already,” New York Times, May 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/campaign-stops/make-america-great-again-for-the-people-it-was-great-for-already.html.
- 15.
Lisa Garcia, “Communities Near Oil Refineries Must Demand Cleaner Air,” Earthjustice, August 21, 2014, http://earthjustice.org/blog/2014-august/communities-near-oil-refineries-must-demand-cleaner-air.
- 16.
Klein, This Changes Everything, 310.
- 17.
Dave Jamieson, “Black Lung Disease Rates Skyrocket to Highest Levels since 1970s,” Huffington Post, September 15, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/black-lung-disease-levels-letter_n_5824470.html.
- 18.
Chris Hamby, “The New Face of Black Lung,” Mother Jones, July 9, 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/07/coal-mining-black-lung-return.
- 19.
Hamby, “The New Face of Black Lung.”
- 20.
For more information, see http://neweconomy.net/.
- 21.
A good example of just transition efforts in the Kentucky coal fields is profiled in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Beyond Coal: Imagining Appalachia’s Future,” New York Times, August 18, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/beyond-coal-imagining-appalachias-future.html?_r=2.
- 22.
Chuck Collins, “Can We Earn a Living on a Living Planet?,” American Prospect, October 13, 2014, http://prospect.org/article/must-environmentalists-and-labor-activists-find-themselves-odds-each-other.
- 23.
Anne Braden, “Finding the Other America,” Fellowship 72, no. 1/2 (2006), text online at http://november.org/BottomsUp/reading/america.html.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Post Carbon Institute
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Byrnes, S., Collins, C. (2017). The Equity Crisis: The True Costs of Extractive Capitalism. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_6
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-61091-930-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-861-9
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)