Writer and economic inequality activist Chuck Collins discusses economic inequality in America and how it undermines our democracy, climate and everything we hold dear.
Chuck Collins, a nationally acclaimed, Guilford, Vermont based writer and economic inequality activist, shares the story of how 'the seeds were planted' for his lifelong interest in uprooting the growing economic inequality that is subverting American democracy. The piece includes an overview of his family history. He details the books he's written, organizations he's formed such as Inequality.org and his program at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Collins describes how the Covid pandemic 'supercharged' the wealth gap and how climate change and inequality are 'webbed together.' He speaks of his early work helping mobile home owners in Western Mass buy the land under their homes and the fruits of these housing efforts. He also discusses his ties to the southern Vermont and western Massachusetts area and shares a bit of life on Springs Farm along with its history as a 'water-cure' and water bottling facility in the past. He discusses the need to 'rewire the economy toward shared prosperity' and how 'wealth dynasties' are increasingly undermining everything we care about.
Collins has published his first novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, Green Writers Press, in May 2023.
CHUCK COLLINS: WRITER AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ACTIVIST
Aired May 28, 2023
Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
I grew up in a kind of affluent suburb of Detroit, and when I was seven years old, that was the year of the 1967 uprising or riots in Detroit. And I was pestering my parents. What's going on? What's going on? And, you know, my mother basically said, well, this has to do with inequality. This has to do with the unfairness, the gap between city and suburb, white and black, rich and poor. And that really planted a seed in my consciousness.
Later I worked in Central America, in El Salvador and Mexico, in a refugee camp in El Salvador, and being part of an earthquake relief effort in Mexico. And that gave me kind of a global picture of the extreme inequalities in our society. So between Detroit and Central America, I, by my mid-twenties, was steeped in the sort of economic divide that has only grown since my childhood.
I'm Chuck Collins, and I direct the program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edit a website Inequality.org. And I'm an author of a number of books on issues of economic inequality.
Both my parents had German and Irish heritage on both sides of my family, on my father's side of the family. I came from a successful, wealthy meatpacking family and then another branch of my family was rooted very much in Ireland. The Collins's were part of a sort of revolutionary independence effort in Ireland. So I have this funny upbringing of both growing up with what I considered a considerable advantage, but also having family members who fought for Irish independence and equality.
After working on affordable housing for about ten years, I became really intensely concerned about growing economic inequality. By the mid 1980s, it was clear that we were just pulling apart as a society. And I helped to start a group called the United for a Fair Economy that did work on inequality issues still does. And since 2006, I've been at the Institute for Policy Studies, where I've directed this program on Inequality in the Common Good. And we have a website called Inequality.org, which is kind of the premier kind of research portal on these issues.
So in the context of that, I've written several books, including ‘Economic Apartheid in America’. I wrote a book about charitable giving called ‘Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change’. And in the last four or five years, I've written a couple of books on the growing income and wealth gap.
And one book I wrote is called ‘Born on Third Base’, where I reflect on my own advantaged upbringing and kind of lessons for other people who, you know, won the lottery at birth, if you will. That book has opened a lot of doors and interesting conversations. I've been invited to speak to various wealthy donors in different parts of the world about what are the possibilities and potential for how they redeploy their wealth.
In recent years, I've been writing more about the machinery of inequality, how wealthy people use the tax code or hide their wealth, use trusts and shell companies and the like to sort of hide and sequester wealth.
In the late nineties, I was working on an effort to keep the estate tax from being abolished. This is, you know, essentially our inheritance tax, it's a tax on the transfer of wealth at a very high level, people who are multi-millionaires pay the tax and transfer money to their children. And in the context of that, I got a call one day from Bill Gates. And I thought it was a prank call, you know, but it was actually Bill Gates’ father Bill Gates senior, the father of the founder of Microsoft. And he said, I also think the estate tax is a great all-American tax. How can I help your effort?
And so I teamed-up with the father of the wealthiest man at the time and we wrote a book together called ‘Wealth and our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes’.
It was a great experience because we were just out in public doing interviews, doing talks. One of the things that we were just up against was this powerful myth that wealthy people shouldn't pay taxes because they deserve the money that they got. And who was a better messenger than Bill Gates senior to say, well, you know, my son it's great that he worked hard, but so do a lot of people work hard, and my son’ts made a lot of wealth but actually he got a lot of help along the way. He didn't do it all by himself.
And one of the things I remember was we were up against this myth of what I would call, deserved-ness, that people who have a lot of wealth deserve it because they work hard and people who don't have a lot of wealth deserve to be where they are. That myth, that narrative, if you will, really holds inequality in place. A lot of my work has been, how do you disrupt this narrative by telling truth stories about how wealth comes about, because the reality is no one does it alone. And if you pull apart stories of great wealth, you'll find societies, public investments, you'll find other people's laborers, you'll find all kinds of help that enabled whether it's a Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever to gain that wealth.
So that's why society has a claim on it. That's why we should tax accumulated wealth, because it not only distorts society and democracy, distorting concentrations of wealth and power, but it's also a way to recycle opportunity. If you have the good fortune to have $50 million or more, you didn't do it alone and you should pay a tax, you should pay back some of that. And the form of taxes, not just charitable giving because charitable giving is kind of like the donor gets to choose, but taxes is where we, as a society say, pay back and we will invest it in a way that enables other people to have a good life and, and the same opportunities you had.
So over the last year, we've done a lot to look at what's happening within equality during the pandemic, during the COVID 19 pandemic and how kind of the pandemic has supercharged the existing income and wealth gap and why that matters,and how much the wealth of the billionaires has increased during the pandemic. It's staggering. You know, while 70% of the world's people have become poorer over two years, the wealthiest couple thousand people have seen their wealth surge.
We're learning more and more about how inequality and climate disruption interact, how for instance, the greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the number of private jets and the carbon emissions and the carbon footprint of the super wealthy is extremely large. We're not gonna really be able to address the climate crisis unless we address this polarized economy. We're not going to be able to address the polarized economy unless we kind of get at the underlying drivers in terms of the energy system and extraction of fossil fuel. So to me, climate change and inequality are webbed together, and we have to find the kind of pressure points and solutions that address both of these systemic crises that we're living through.
So more and more, I'm looking at all the ways in which inequality is held in place and what we can do about it.
In some ways, the economic inequalities that we're living through are now on autopilot, meaning the rules of the economy are generating greater and greater disparities. And if we don't intervene in that system, we will see inequality continue to grow.
So in a sense, we have to intervene, rewire the economy and rewire it for shared prosperity that will require redistribution. You know, wealthy people will have to pay taxes. Gift money away. Reduce the kind of intergenerational concentration of wealth. If we don't do that, we're essentially creating wealth dynasties that will undermine democracy. So we're actually at a point where extreme inequality is undermining everything we care about, whether it's democracy, civil, civic life, the environment, our ability or inability to solve big problems. All of those are affected by these extreme inequalities of wealth and power.
Early Work with Big Impact: Helping Mobile Home Owners
Pretty much all of my adult life. I've had a connection to Franklin County, Massachusetts, or Windham County, Vermont. I left the Detroit area when I was 17. I moved to Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn't go to college for several years. I worked and did odd jobs. And, you know, I eventually went to college and graduate school to learn about community economic development and economics. You know, try to understand the big picture.
In my early twenties, after I graduated from college at Hampshire College, I moved to Greenfield just down the road and used to come up swimming in the Green River and bicycling up and around the Green River. But my job was working with tenants and mobile home park residents to purchase their buildings and purchase their mobile home parks and own them as cooperatives. These are folks who own their home, but they don't own the land. And often the absentee owners could sell the land and evict everybody there. So folks were very, very vulnerable. And that was the case just down the road.
In Bernardston, Massachusetts, I worked with a group of thirty mobile home residents in Bernardston whose park was up for sale. And there were kind of absentee owners kind of swooping around because the land was, you know, valuable and it was in a good location. So we rallied to help the tenants there purchase their mobile home park. And it's still owned by the residents who live there. And actually, in New Hampshire, they just did the 130th resident buyout of a mobile home park. So all over New England, there are resident owned mobile home parks. But one of the first ones was in Bernardston.
And actually one of the early organizations I worked with was called the Brattleboro Area Community Land Trust, which today is the Windham Windsor Housing Trust. And I'm on the board of the Housing Trust now. So thirty years later, I got to come back to Brattleboro and be amazed at how much progress that organization had made and how important a role it plays.
You know, a lot of the work that I do on economic inequality is kind of three steps removed. It's very abstract. You know, it's hard to tell. In fact, you know, economic inequality has been growing steadily for 40 years, so we can't always see progress. But I can drive around New England and show you all these resident owned mobile home parks. And that's a very concrete thing, because I know that those folks control their land, they control their destiny. So in that way, it's very concrete and satisfying to know that these affordable housing groups like Windsor Windham Housing Trust and some of these mobile home parks are controlling land, expanding affordable housing. So on the days when it seems very like I'm not sure we're making an impact, at least, you know, these folks control the land under their houses.
Rehabilitating Old Springs Farm in Guilford / History of Springs Farm
This place has always had a strong sense of roots to me. I remember bicycling up from Greenfield up the Green River Road and jumping in the water at the Green River, visiting some of the farms and Gilford and Putney. And this has always been a really culturally rich, artistically rich area. And there are people who I talked to at different stages about the work I was doing who lived here.
Since 2018, we've been here at the Springs Farm. The farmhouse and the barn were built in 1804, but in the 1860s a couple of families got together and organized and tapped into what was called the mineral springs, which, as I understand it, have kind of evaporated. But if you walk behind the farm here, there's a trail. It's a public trail called the Week's Trail. And it's a great walk. Fern dappled, beautiful walk along the Broad Brook, and you come to the place where the Mineral Springs Farm bottling plant was. And at that point, about a mile down the road, is where the carriages came.
So basically what happened is people from Boston and New York took the train to Brattleboro. They took a carriage to the mineral springs. They would stay here at the farmhouse. So the farmhouse and even the barn have rooms. They all have room numbers where guests used to stay. They would take the carriage down to a couple of gazebos that were built down at the spring site. And the idea was you would spend the day there, you would bathe in the water, you would drink the water, you would walk in the woods. And this is like in the 1860s and 1970s.
There was a whole global movement around what they called the water cure, the benefits of healthy water. It makes a lot of sense if you think about what it was like to live in Boston or New York, you know, at the time. But this is, you know, before there were sanitation laws, when the water was full of effluent and dyes and toxic chemicals, the air was terrible. So to come to Guilford and drink clean water and walk in the woods, you probably did feel better. You probably could feel the benefits of the water cure.
So, yeah, for probably years, this was a hopping spot. People came from all over New England. People visited from other countries in the drawers and furniture that has been left here at the Springs farmhouse. We found letters from people who visited from the Tunbridge Wells of England, where they also have mineral springs.
And of course in Brattleboro there's the west half spring sites where people also benefited from the water cures. And there are, of course, the Saratoga Springs. Some of those sites have continued on and, you know, are kind of recognized as retreat places and for the benefits of the water. There were tests done about them, the mineral qualities in the water, which totally still exist. I mean, I think there's high levels of magnesium and other positive mineral elements in the water. So the water is good.
We've kind of informally had a bunch of writing retreats here with three or four people coming and working for a couple of weeks in the summertime. And in the barn, there are these old hotel rooms. There's no heat out there or plumbing, but they make for good kind of writing and artistic workspaces. So we're sort of cleaning those up. And some people have used them in the last couple of summers to stay in the house, but they have a little studio out there. There's so many people in our community that have a claim on this place. Literally, they've worked it or they've trick or treat it here or they walk these lands or they have some connection to this place. So we feel like we're the current stewards, but it's a vibrant, interesting spot.
Final thoughts on writing and inequality
Writing books about economic inequality is really a small part of my work, but important because, even though unfortunately, people don't always read books, a book is a platform, it's an invitation and an opportunity to have a conversation to be on the radio or to be in a public space. I love that because prior to the pandemic, I spent a lot of time out on the road, whether it was on campuses or talking to business groups. I learned how to be a better storyteller. I got involved with the moth or, you know, in Boston, we have a group called the Mass Mouth, which was sort of a storytelling competition. And it just really changed how I do writing by being part of these storytelling efforts.
One of the challenges is that these are our system problems. You know, it's not something that I as an individual can do. Each of us has a responsibility to try to encourage certain kinds of direction here, but in the end, we're gonna have to join together. We're gonna have to form organizations, social movements, countervailing political power to the power of wealth and global corporations.
I think the pressure will keep building to fix this. I have hope that we will reverse these extreme inequalities, uh, that they're not sustainable, that they're not really in anyone's interests, even rich people. It's not in the interests of the wealthy, for society to keep pulling apart. It will undermine the quality of life for everyone.
We can't just do it alone in our homes. We have to find ways to come together. The good news is the awareness of these economic inequalities has dramatically increased from even five years ago. And there’s greater appetite for solutions that will fix this like abolishing student debt, taxing the very wealthiest people, the billionaires pay their fair share of taxes, investing in infrastructure and things that help other people, non wealthy people have a chance to have a decent life.
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CREDITS: This episode was produced by Jack Pombriant with help from Lissa Weinmann. Mixing and Mastering is by Alec Pombriant. Our theme song is by Ty Gibbons. You can find out more about the Brattleboro Words Trail, including how to get involved in telling a story for the Trail, at Brattleboro Words.org. Thanks for listening.
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