A brand new month-to-month column from The Nation takes on the plutocrats wielding their wealth and energy on the expense of the remainder of us.
Contact: Caitlin Graf, The Nation, press [at] thenation.com, 212-209-5400
New York, NY—The Nation, America’s main supply of progressive politics and tradition, right now introduced the launch of “Oligarch Watch,” a brand new month-to-month column that could be a pure continuation of the journal’s lengthy and proud tradition of talking fact to energy to construct a extra simply society. In our one hundred and sixtieth anniversary 12 months and on this unprecedented period of rising inequality, advocating for a extra equitable world stays core to the journal’s mission.
Penned by longtime financial researcher and campaigner Chuck Collins, a number one thinker and author on inequality in America, “Oligarch Watch” will profile the plutocrats wielding their wealth and energy to additional enrich themselves on the expense of staff, our communities, and the environment. Crisscrossing industries and facilities of energy within the US, Collins will sort out oligarchy in motion to highlight the crushing monopoly energy billionaires yield, and showcase how these people disrupt each nook of our lives—from housing to healthcare, democracy to the local weather—holding this nation hostage and profiting the 1 % on the expense of the better public good.
Collins’s first installment, “Ralph de la Torre: The Making of a Healthcare Oligarch,” seems at one man’s rise to unaccountable energy and the value the remainder of us pay—in cash and in blood. His second, “Meet the ‘Coal-i-garch’ Jim Grech, CEO of Peabody Energy,” studies on Trump’s extraordinary and unprecedented payback schemes to additional enrich the fossil gas oligarchs who helped get him elected.
“As somebody who has discovered an important deal from Chuck Collins’s work over time, and as an enormous fan of The Wealth Hoarders particularly, I can’t consider anybody higher geared up to information Nation readers by the byzantine byways of America’s ruling oligarchy,” stated The Nation’s particular correspondent and outgoing editor, D.D. Guttenplan.
“We’re witnessing the seize and corruption of our political system by the billionaire oligarch class,” added Collins. “I’m excited to shine a highlight on a number of the lesser-known oligarchs and rising plutocrats who’re deploying their wealth, energy, and place to extract extra wealth from the remainder of us and society. At 160 years outdated, The Nation has weathered historic gilded ages and is the right platform to analyze the harms attributable to oligarchy and their employed brokers.”
For interview requests or additional data, please see contact data above.
ABOUT: Chuck Collins pens the month-to-month column “Oligarch Watch” for The Nation. He’s the director of the Program on Inequality and the Widespread Good on the Institute for Coverage Research, the place he co-edits Inequality.org. An skilled on US inequality, writer of over 10 books and dozens of studies overlaying local weather disruption, philanthropy, the racial wealth divide, inexpensive housing, and billionaire wealth dynasties, his forthcoming ebook is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet (New Press, October 2025). Earlier books embrace The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Tens of millions to Conceal Trillions, Born on Third Base, and, with Invoice Gates Sr., Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Ought to Tax Gathered Fortunes. Collins lives in Guilford, Vermont.
Based by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a essential, unbiased, and progressive voice in American journalism.