Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy. By Christian H. Cooper.

Donald Trump has finally pivoted—right into a full embrace of Goldman Sachs economics. By David Dayen.

Corporations are now treating the middle class like they treat the poor. By Jeff Spross.

A reminder that people who possess great wealth in a time of poverty are directly causing that poverty… By A.Q. Smith

Mr. Rockefeller was influential in foreign affairs, helped resolve New York’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and was chairman of the Museum of Modern Art for many years. By Jonathan Kandell.

The most depressing aspect of the post-electoral period in the US is not the measures announced by the President-elect but the way the bulk of the Democratic Party is reacting… By Slavoj ŽIžek.

Let’s consider the health of two babies born into two different societies. Baby A is born in one of the richest countries in the world, the United States, home to more than half of the world’s billionaires. It is a country that spends somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the world’s total spending on health care, although it contains less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Spending on drug treatments and hightech scanning equipment is particularly high.

President Donald Trump Thursday got it wrong when he claimed dependence on government assistance for families on poverty is “out of control.” By John W. Schoen. [Autoplay]

Pay it forward or suffer the payback. Basic income has been a pretty hot button topic recently. Forbes says it could help our society’s productivity. The Guardian says it’s an absolute necessity. The New Economy calls it a socialist fairytale. I say it’s either basic income or total and utter, scorched earth, death match for drinking water, cannibalistic chaos.

A new report by Oxfam warns of the growing and dangerous concentration of wealth. By Larry Elliott.

In many countries, young people from wealthy and poor backgrounds spend roughly the same amount of time online. But it’s how they’re using the internet, not how long they’re using it that really matters. This is according to new research from the OECD, which found that richer teenagers were more likely to use the internet to search for information or to read news rather than to chat or play video games.

President Obama took on a topic yesterday that most Americans don’t like to talk about much: inequality. There are a lot of ways to measure economic inequality (and we’ll be discussing more on Fact Tank), but one basic approach is to look at how much income flows to groups at different steps on the economic ladder. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, has been doing just that for years. And according to his research, U.S. income inequality has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928.

“Big picture, the most concerning element for many experts is that its approach to make the program more solvent rest entirely on cuts, and does not raise revenues for the Social Security Trust Fund, as some bipartisan proposals have. Across the political spectrum, solutions for long term solvency range from cuts-only approaches like Johnson’s bill to plans that achieve 75-year solvency by raising the current income cap on social security taxes.” By Tierney Sneed.

The average income for the bottom 50 percent is the same as in 1980 — while the average income for the top one percent has more than tripled. By Eric Levitz.

A Journey to the President-Elect’s Private “Public” Park. By Nick Turse.

Born in Africa, raised near Baltimore, feeling stung by bias, she came away “empowered.” By Fern Shen. (Nov. 18, 2016)

A subversive urban agricultural group in San Francisco is turning ornamental trees into fruit-producing surprises for the local population but while technically breaking the law. A simple incision…

“It’s all part of a viciously circular self-fulfilling prophecy wherein – as Jill Stein told me last April – ‘the politics of fear delivers everything we are afraid of…The Lesser Evil paves the way for the Greater Evil.’” By Paul Street.

The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie used morality to assert class dominance — something elites still do today. By Jason Tebbe.

The government’s same-sex marriage plebiscite bill has been voted down in the Senate, with no last-minute deal emerging to save the non-binding poll. On Monday evening Labor, the Greens, Nick Xenophon Team and senator Derryn Hinch combined in the Senate to block the plebiscite by 33 votes to 29, as they had promised weeks before. Labor leader in the Senate, Penny Wong, used the debate on Monday to take aim at the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, saying the opposition did not trust him to stand up to prejudice.