The United States is the richest society in human history. As is well-known by most of the people who live in it, it's also a country of deep and abiding inequality.
Just three billionaires own more wealth than the 160 million poorest Americans combined and the wealthiest of them — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — pockets more money every sixty seconds than the typical American household earns in a year and a half.
Disorientingly caught between rising skyscrapers, burgeoning technology giants, crumbling public infrastructure, and a steadily narrowing strata of plutocrats, some forty million people (many of them children) live in poverty as tens of millions more struggle to afford the basic necessities of life. While American workers across every sector are increasingly overworked and underpaid, thousands die from lack of health insurance or go broke trying to pay for treatment. Racial discrimination, meanwhile, remains a constitutive part of a criminal justice system that needlessly keeps more than two million people behind bars and routinely allows police to kill with impunity.
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