Pick a fair society, any fair society and they'll make it disappear

I'm afraid we now live in a world of political illusion where nothing is as it seems. A world where the rich can make money disappear for tax purposes, but reappear to buy assets.

Don’t worry, this piece is not about UK politics, but I thought it worthy of note to share that as our new Prime Minister settles in after his first night in 10 Downing Street, one thing is beyond clear. The right-wing media has already begun its assault on his premiership before the cabinet seats are even warm and junior ministers are named. It is, I’m afraid, a hallmark of what politics has become in a world of uncertainty where alternative facts dominate the narrative.

I don’t want to waste time on examining the minutiae of cabinet and ministerial appointments other than to be proud of the fact that a five-minute walk from my home and I can now knock on the constituency office door of the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey.

I said yesterday it will be an interesting exercise to periodically take a look at the progress our New Prime Minister is making in his promise to deliver hope and prosperity to every postcode in the UK. I believe there will be lessons to be learned by Democrats if they are serious about delivering transformative societal change in the US. While we are different countries, we are in many ways linked by the common values we share and are always better served by learning from our shared experience.

Illustration - Jeff Drew

In Trump’s fairytale narrative, America is now the ‘hottest’ country in the world, the affordability crisis is a hoax, and the US has won the Iran war. In the real world, the bottom 90% in America, while they may be poorer, are not stupid, despite the seeming assertion from Trump that dumb is the new smart.

The reason that the media is predicting a close election in November, is that Democrats are failing to make a compelling argument for why the American people should put their trust in them to do anything other than pay lip service to their concerns, while enjoying the concierge service on the gravy train. You can’t effect the required transformative change without listening to those whose welfare you claim to represent, I’m afraid. They have placed nothing on the table for voters to get excited about, yet when progressives do that, the Democratic establishment allies with the right to call them communists. It’s just a recipe for continued failure through mediocrity.

Let me be clear: I am NOT saying that all Democrats are the same, because that’s simply not true. There is a wealth of dynamic progressive talent lining up to deliver change; it’s just that the Democratic establishment wants to lock them in the basement. The problem they now face, however, is that the basement is overflowing and so they have a choice to make. Fight for healthcare for all, a living wage, affordable child care and housing and deliver the change America has been demanding for decades or face rejection AGAIN. This assumption that progressive policies are a step too far is the reason why 90 million Americans sat on their hands in 2024.

To deliver change, first you have to deliver hope. WHERE IS IT? I can’t see it; they don’t talk about it, and they certainly have no plans that would inspire it. I’ll get the same old comments about it being easy to trash talk without providing solutions, so for what it’s worth, here goes. First, the truth, based on the facts, is NOT trash talk; it's a simple reality check. In World War II, the Allied strategy was not to wait for Hitler to shoot himself in the head so they could walk into Berlin and grab lunch. They had to fight for every inch of ground to defeat fascism. Men and women gave their lives so that we might enjoy the freedoms this regime is now attempting to steal from us.

The Civil Rights Movement did not secure the Voting Rights Act by blaming voters for not supporting their cause, but that’s exactly what Democratic leadership did in 2024 when they smugly suggested that the voting public did not heed their warnings about Project 2025, a plan they only recognised was a threat themselves mere months before the election, despite people like me who were screaming about it months before they woke up to the threat. There was no apology, no recognition of failure; they just reactivated their mailing lists to drown Democratic supporters with begging emails, enabling more of the same lamentable lack of vision and ambition. Four months out, nothing has changed. Dem activists are left rudderless trying to make sense of it.

The primary problem the Democratic leadership has is, it would appear, an inability to read the room. Let’s take a moment to revisit current favourability polls as compiled by RealClear Polling:

As you can see, despite the affordability crisis, gas prices and the Iran war, the Democrats' favourability is almost identical to that of an out-of-control regime murdering immigrants on the street with impunity. At what point does someone in the Democratic Party cut the crap and say, ‘We have a popularity problem, to add to our credibility and messaging problem, which is cratering trust in the belief that we can deliver the American people from this tyrannical regime.’

The root of this problem is out-of-control wealth inequality; you will note I did not say income inequality, although that is true too. What we have seen since the Reagan years from Democrats is an unwillingness to address wealth inequality, and as a result, it has become a cancer that is destroying the social fabric not just of America, but other Western Democracies too.

Wealth inequality has become the primary third rail in US politics. It’s a premeditated economic heist designed by the rich, and facilitated by legislators on their payroll, to redistribute wealth from the bottom and the middle to the top. Until someone grasps that rail and blows the fuse, you can’t stem the arterial bleed that feeds the economic vampires at the top of the food chain. Politics is in desperate need of a 21st-century Van Helsing to drive a stake through the heart of this structural inequality that sucke the life out of hope of social mobility, and denies the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all people have unalienable rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The economic foundations are compromised, and for decades politicians have helped the rich cover up the structural economic damage that has resulted from their complicity. The answer is in the numbers: since 1970, the gap has grown exponentially to a point now where the top 10% own close to 70% of the nation’s wealth.

I always find it’s better to visualise the gap just to show the scale of wealth inequality. If you would like to dig into this at a more granular level, take a moment to look at this post from The Aspen Institute, which also breaks down the racial dynamics. The important consideration here, is not just that such a gap exists; it’s that those at the top have now insulated themselves from economic shocks that historically would hurt them. Take a look at this piece in Reuters by Mark John from December 7th 2021, with the headline: ‘Pandemic boosts super-rich share of global wealth’. The author makes the important point drawn from the Nobel Prize-winning work of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won the prize for their work on poverty in 2019.

"Since wealth is a major source of future economic gains, and increasingly, of power and influence, this presages further increases in inequality," they wrote of what they called an "extreme concentration of economic power in the hands of a very small minority of the super-rich".

If you want up-to-date information, you can view the executive summary and the full World Inequality Report 2026, because this is not just a US problem; it’s a global problem, and it goes to the very heart of my assertion that the oligarchy is committed to running the global economy as a corporation headquartered in the US.

You can’t frame solutions in soundbites like ‘Tax the Rich’ because the rich will argue that they already pay the lion’s share of tax and they have the data to prove it. It’s like some Las Vegas magic trick where misdirection is the whole ball game.

This is the kind of chart that the rich and their advocates will roll out when you make the claim ‘Tax the rich ’, and on the face of it, it seems a clear case of ‘game set and match’. However, as with all magic tricks, it is a deliberate act of misdirection.

We are all too familiar with victimhood statements like ‘lawfare’ and ‘two-tier justice’; let me assure you, in the most unambiguous way I can, that there has been a hidden two-tier tax system for as long as the rich have been avoiding paying their fair share. But, I hear you say, the above graph clearly shows they are paying more than their fair share.

Before we get to the heart of the problem, if the Average American were given a way to use artistic license as the rich do for selected participation in paying taxes, there are few people who would not avail themselves, without losing a wink of sleep over their participation in tax avoidance. So, let no one living in glass houses cast the first stone. It’s simple human nature. Nobody likes paying taxes, and that’s just who most of us are.

The rich, by virtue of their wealth, have access to accountancy firms that specialise in ‘tax efficiency’. This is an industry in its own right, which specialises in exploiting weaknesses and flaws in the tax system. It is estimated that close to a trillion dollars every year is avoided or evaded, largely by those at the top. They are able to do this because they buy politicians to legislate for their benefit, and there has been no administration that has embraced this more than the one currently operating a transnational extortion gang from the Oval Office.

What we’ll do in the next episode is take the hood off the evasion engine and take a look at why the graph shows that the rich pay the lion’s share of ‘income’ taxes as a front for what they avoid by diverting their income into assets, using the magic term ‘unrealised assets’ to avoid taxes that the average working American will never be able to do.

To add insult to injury, we’ll also examine how they have mastered the art of using corporate welfare to lower their costs while increasing their bottom line, which they then transfer into assets beyond the reach of the tax system. You couldn’t make it up, and yet they do it every single day, while you struggle to put food on the table and fill your car with gas.

For those who want to support my work but can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can now make a one-off donation by clicking on the image below. By donating, you help to keep this independent reporting free for all.