Class Ruins Everything Around Me: 10 Ways Billionaires Are Actively Harming Black and Marginalized Communities

While poor and working-class communities keep the world running, a handful of billionaires are profiting off our labor and pain. And one Black feminist-led organization is flipping the script. 

Dream Defenders, a national political formation founded in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, has been gearing up to launch Class Ruins Everything Around Me, a national campaign and narrative intervention against billionaires and big money corporations with a call-to-action for young Black and marginalized people to join the fight.

A nod to Wu-Tang’s 1994 landmark single “C.R.E.A.M.”—an indictment of capitalism’s chokehold on Black and working-class life, Dream Defenders are meticulously organizing a call-out of the destructive and criminal billionaire class while calling in a new generation of creative workers rising to take its place.

As a movement that has weathered political targeting, financial strangulation, and right-wing smear campaigns, Dream Defenders understand the stakes of this moment deeply: These billionaires aren’t just stealing, they are actively engineering the conditions of the crisis poor and working-class people live in. From housing and labor to surveillance and environmental degradation, they profit from our inability to lead a safe and good life.

Following a record number of Black women losing unemployment, Dream Defenders’ upcoming Class Ruins Everything Around Me campaign is naming names and building the power to radically create a more just and equitable world for the young Black, brown, trans, queer, poor, and chronically overworked. 

Here’s how the most powerful names in tech, finance, and real estate are fueling the suffering of marginalized communities in the U.S. and globally—all while hoarding wealth, dodging taxes, funding disinformation, and bankrolling war.