American Inequality Today

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The “2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cited an unhoused population of “771,480 people -- or about twenty-three of every 10,000 people in the United States,” an increase of 18 per cent from the previous report. The United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in homelessness, driven by the nation’s affordability crisis.

But recent research reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the U.S., factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms, or doubled up with other people, might be as much as six times higher. From 2023 to 2024, families with children experienced the largest year-over-year increase in homelessness of any group. Among the 130,000 people homeless in New York each night, around three-quarters of those in shelters were in families, including some 45,000 children.

Today, there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. Yet America’s richest earn in hours what ordinary workers – not the homeless -- earn over lifetimes. The ten richest people in the country increased their wealth by $365 billion last year.

As Matt Egan writes for CNN, the 2024-2025 growth, from April to April, accounted for roughly a billion dollars a day in growth for the top ten. “By contrast,” he notes, “the typical American worker made just over $50,000 in 2023.” To put that in perspective: according to Oxfam, it “would take a staggering 726,000 years for 10 U.S. workers at median earnings to make that much money.” In fact, 60 per cent of Americans live pay cheque to pay cheque.

A 2022 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 10 per cent of Americans hold 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, with the top one per cent grabbing 27 per cent for themselves. America’s billionaires are now collectively worth a record six trillion dollars. Their wealth has more than doubled since the passage of the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.

The analysis comes from Americans for Tax Fairness, a left-leaning nonprofit that advocates for wealthy Americans to pay their fair share. Given such a situation, “inequality” no longer feels like a strong enough word for what we see.

Not surprisingly, U.S. households have been accumulating debt at a staggering rate.  Total household and nonprofit organization debt did not pass the two trillion-dollar mark until the mid-1980s, but now total U.S. household and nonprofit organization debt has surpassed the 20 trillion dollar mark.  Household debt alone accounts for approximately 18 trillion dollars of this total.

Yes, unemployment figures seem low. But much of this is simply definitional trickery. More than 100 million U.S. adults that do not have jobs are considered to be “not in the labour force.” When a U.S. adult is not working, they are put into one of two buckets.  For years, government bureaucrats have kept the number of Americans that are “officially unemployed” at a very low level, while the number of Americans that are dumped into the bucket labeled “not in the labour force” has just kept increasing.

During the Great Recession, the number of Americans that were considered to be “officially unemployed” plus the number of Americans that were considered to be “not in the labour force” never exceeded 100 million.  Today, the number of Americans that are considered to be “not in the labour force” alone exceeds 102 million.

The power of American plutocrats plays out on multiple levels. First and most obviously, American business magnates have direct power over the lives of vast numbers of employees. They can replace any particular worker far more easily than that worker can replace the source of their livelihood, and so these men run their businesses like miniature dictatorships. This economic power translates in turn into massively disproportionate political influence.

The relentless concentration of private wealth, and with it the political influence of the wealthy, has metastasised in recent decades under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. The oligarchs are not confined to the Republican side of the aisle. Former vice-president Kamala Harris had 83 billionaires donating to her 2024 campaign. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Harris received $143 million in billionaire donations, though this looks modest compared to Republican Donald Trump’s $450 million. Even so, those 83 billionaires would almost certainly have exercised real political influence in a Harris administration.

It is an act of moral evasion to insist on using morally neutral terms to describe “very rich” Americans while we call those in hostile nations like Russia “oligarchs.” Most people have heard Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase describing democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” in his famous 1863 Gettysburg Address. Has this been replaced by government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class?

The United States isn’t on the brink of revolt, but it’s far down the sort of path that has, historically, led to popular unrest, or something far greater. The state has thoroughly abandoned everyday Americans and let oligarchs write its laws and reap the rewards. The rise in right populism is a symptom of, and a response to, this reality.

 

Civil War Sudan Has No Inclusive National Identity

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Sudan has struggled to construct an inclusive national identity in the postcolonial era, but ethnic marginalization, uneven development, and authoritarian governance have fragmented the national project. It involves the lack of a cohesive postcolonial vision and the suppression of cultural diversity under Arab-Islamic narratives.

Sudan’s 50 million people are mainly Sudanese Arabs, who are one of 19 major ethnic groups and over 597 ethnic subgroups, speaking more than 100 languages and dialects. There are elements within Sudanese society that view Black people with disfavor. The country is dominated by an Arab elite, while sub-Saharan Africans often face oppression and marginalization. It is common for newspapers to publish racial slurs, including the word “slave.”  

This is the background to the civil war Sudan was plunged into back in April 2023, after a vicious struggle for power broke out between its army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The latter are the military descendants of the Janjaweed militias that terrorized non-Arab African peoples in Darfur in the early 2000s. That led to a famine and claims of a genocide in the western Darfur region. The group committed brutal crimes, including mass displacement, sexual violence, and kidnapping. The loosely coordinated Janjaweed was then formally organized under the RSF banner in 2013.

The current war started with a coup in October 2021, staged by the two men at the centre of today’s conflict: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the armed forces and in effect the country’s president, and his then deputy, RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

The main sticking points were plans to incorporate the 100,000-strong RSF into the army, and who would then lead the new force. The suspicions were that both generals wanted to hang on to their positions of power, unwilling to lose wealth and influence.

Shooting between the two sides began on April 15, 2023, following days of tension as members of the RSF were redeployed around the country in a move that the army saw as a threat.

In early June 2025, the RSF achieved a major victory when it took control of territory along Sudan's border with Libya and Egypt. This was followed by the capture of the city of el-Fasher in late October that year, meaning the RSF controls almost all of Darfur and much of neighbouring Kordofan. The military controls most of the north and the east, including the capital, Khartoum.

The RSF has denied committing genocide in Darfur in this civil war, but United Nations investigators said they had received testimony that RSF fighters have taunted non-Arab women during sex attacks with racist slurs, saying they will be forced to have “Arab babies.” Director General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has stated that “I think race is in play here.”

More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country, and about 14 million have fled their homes in what the UN has called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. With no end in sight, tens of millions of Sudanese people are facing an historic humanitarian crisis of “industrial proportions.”

Food has also been weaponized. Both sides have blocked aid convoys, destroyed food supplies, and restricted access to fertile farmland in areas already facing drought and economic collapse. The RSF intentionally razed rural farming communities near el-Fasher. Their attacks substantially reduced these communities’ agricultural output, contributing to an already severe humanitarian situation in which more than twenty-one million people across the country are acutely food insecure.

Richard Data, the International Rescue Committee’s Sudan director, emphasized that “This is not just a conflict, it is a collapse of an entire country and a crisis that is rapidly engulfing the region.” The incalculable violence, atrocities, and depth of the humanitarian crisis facing Sudan’s population continue to accelerate. 

“Three years of war have already cost Sudan immeasurably,” warned Amande Bazerolle, Sudan lead for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). “Allowing this trajectory to continue risks condemning an entire generation.” Yet despite the humanitarian toll of Sudan’s Civil War, the conflict has received remarkably little international media coverage.

Mediation efforts have stalled as top officials in both warring camps refuse to halt their violence, and regional and international actors continue to fund and arm both belligerents. Sudan has accused Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of playing a role in the recent drone attacks on the country, warning that the aggression will not be “met with silence.”

In early May, the Sudanese government recalled its ambassador from Ethiopia, accusing Addis Ababa and the UAE of being behind an attack on Khartoum International Airport that forced authorities to suspend operations for three days. The RSF has also received support from an armed group in Libya tied to eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar.

Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has accused “mercenaries and traitors” of seeking to hijack the Sudanese state. Alan Boswell, the Horn of Africa director at the International Crisis Group (ICG), warned that Sudan’s accusation against Ethiopia marks a dangerous new phase in a conflict already destabilising the region.

Clearly, a viable Sudanese identity would require a commitment to equitable development and inclusive governance. Can an Arab elite serve as a foundation for a more inclusive national identity? It’s very doubtful.