Wealthiest One Percent, Come Home!

December 16, 2015

Chuck Collins believes that extreme wealth inequality and our global ecological crisis are bad for everyone, including those with great wealth. He invites all of us — but especially the wealthy of the United States — to come home, deepening a stake in the common good and deploying time, social networks, and wealth to fixing the future.

Chuck Collins is an organizer, storyteller and writer based at the Institute for Policy Studies where he coordinates the Program on Inequality and the Common Good (see www.inequality.org). Raised in the 1 percent, he is co-founding board member of the Patriotic Millionaires (www.patrioticmillionaires.org) and Class Action (www.classism.org), and author of several books including, with Bill Gates Sr., ‘Wealth and Our Commonwealth’ and ‘The Moral Measure of the Economy.’

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx 

Chuck Collins

Chuck Collins is the Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits Inequality.org. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and the racial wealth divide and author of over ten books and dozens of reports about inequality, climate disruption, philanthropy, the racial wealth divide, affordable housing, and billionaire wealth dynasties. His newest book is a novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun (Green Writers Press), a near-future story of one community facing climate disruption in the critical decade ahead. See more at www.chuckcollinswrites.com. His 2021 book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Spend Millions to Hide Trillions (Polity Books), unmasks the industry of professional enablers that assist the ultra-wealthy to hide wealth and dodge taxes.  He is also author of the popular book, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good (Chelsea Green); He is co-author, with the late Bill Gates Sr. of Wealth and Our Commonwealth, (Beacon Press, 2003), a case for taxing inherited fortunes.  See more at www.chuckcollinswrites.com

Tags: building resilient economies, economic inequality, local investing, the 1%