Chuck Collins This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Discover Economics: Reviews of Economy related books

   www.discovereconomics.com/Econ - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/12/2001   Last Visited: 1/16/2002

   Book By Chuck Collins, et al About the Author: Chuck Collins is the Co-Director of United for a Fair Economy. He is a contributor to the forthcoming edition of The Field Guide to the U.S. Economy (The New Press, 1999). He was previously director of the Massachusetts H.O.M.E. Coalition and Director of Technical Assistance for the Institute for Community Economics. He has an MBA in Community Economic Development from New Hampshire College.

2. 2. UU World: From Riches to Responsibility: Defending the Estate Tax

   www.uuworld.org/2003/02/featur - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/28/2006   Last Visited: 7/28/2006

   From Riches to Responsibility Born to family wealth, Chuck Collins gave away his inheritance and has devoted his life to economic justice. Now he is taking on the repeal of the estate tax. /BY KIMBERLY FRENCH
   ...
   The year Chuck Collins turned 16, his father took him aside for a man-to-man talk.
   ...
   Chuck remembers feeling utter amazement. The great-grandson of Oscar Mayer and an heir to the wiener fortune, he had grown up living comfortably, but not lavishly, in suburban Detroit. Now, as his father spelled out, he realized he would not have to work for money unless he wanted to. His dad also stressed his hope that the money would not change his son or his life goals.
   
   It didn't. However, events took a very different course from the one the elder Collins had so carefully planned. Ten years later, in 1985, Chuck Collins gave away every penny of his inheritance, nearly half a million dollars, to foundations and groups that he knew needed funding , organizations working for the environment, peace, racial equality, and indigenous and gay people's rights.
   
   "Wealth that just creates more wealth seemed wrong," says Collins, whose book in support of preserving the estate tax, Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, written with William H. Gates Sr., has just been published by Beacon Press.
   ...
   Before cashing in the fund, Collins wrote a letter to his father, a libertarian conservative, explaining his plans.
   ...
   In their second man-to-man talk about the money, the elder Collins wanted to make sure Chuck was considering how he would support any children he might have: "What if you have a child who has Down syndrome? Think about the cost of the care," Chuck remembers his father asking.
   
   His father also asked if he considered himself a Marxist who had to renounce his class background. Chuck, a lifelong Unitarian Universalist, tried to reassure his dad, saying that he would feel comfortable with the label Gandhian or Christian, but he was not a Marxist.
   
   After two days together, Chuck remained unswayed. "The decision to give away my wealth felt like the first real decision I'd ever made," he wrote in We Gave Away a Fortune. "Life presents only a few crystal-clear opportunities to take risks for what you believe, and this was one."
   
   His father needn't have worried. Coming into his inheritance changed Chuck Collins not at all.
   
   Now 43, a father himself, and a cofounder of United for a Fair Economy (UFE) in Boston, a nonprofit organization widely praised for its creative ways of illuminating the growing wealth gap, Collins has always been a social activist. As a first grader, he raised $125 for guide dogs for the blind by organizing a backyard fair for his class. In fifth grade, he wrote and circulated in his neighborhood an environmental leaflet that began, "Don't throw this paper away-it will cause pollution."
   
   After college, he worked for the Institute for Community Economics in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was building a nationwide movement of land trusts, cooperatives, loan funds, and credit unions in poor communities. As he traveled to places like Appalachia and Maine, where most land is owned by absentee corporations, he formed a critique of a system that kept rich people rich and poor people poor. He began to see that inherited wealth , including his own trust fund , was a piece of the problem he was working to solve.
   
   "Giving away the money was a necessary step for me to move along in the work I do," he says. "Two decades later, I'm doing this work because that was part of my journey. It gave me insight into the way concentrations of wealth undermine equality and democracy."
   
   Collins has been coauthor of three previous books about economic inequality: Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change (2000), Economic Apartheid in America (2000), and Shifting Fortunes (1999). But when he finished the new manuscript defending the estate tax, he knew he wanted his father to read it.
   
   "Because of my relationship with my dad," he says, "I know how thoughtful conservatives think, and I respect them.
   ...
   For Chuck, it was the best review he'd ever gotten.
   
   "My former view had been that the estate tax was a confiscatory tax that should be done away with," the elder Collins says. "But Chuck's book definitely brought me right on board. My realization that came from the book is that the estate tax is critical to maintaining our democratic society."
   
   In December 2000, Chuck Collins got an e-mail from Bill Gates Sr. Collins works with plenty of rich and famous people through a UFE project called Responsible Wealth, which signs on people in the top 5 percent of wealth to work toward economic equality. Names like Paul Newman, Annie Dillard, Ben Cohen, Ted Turner, George Soros, various Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and other successful artists, executives, and heirs are apt to show up in Collins's in box.
   ...
   As the story has evolved through many public retellings, Collins fired back: "Yeah, and I'm Minnie Mouse."
   ...
   "We are now living in a second Gilded Age," Collins says.
   ...
   Collins, the organizer, didn't skip a beat: "Draft a public statement, get media coverage, testify before Congress, write letters, op-ed pieces."
   ...
   Stimulating a lively debate over the estate tax is no easy task, Collins is the first to admit.
   ...
   Contrary to what its opponents argue, the estate tax is a fundamentally American institution, Collins and Gates assert in Wealth and Our Commonwealth.
   ...
   A big myth put forth in support of repeal, Collins says, is the notion that "I made this money myself, so I don't owe anything."
   
   "But there's a whole other piece of the story," Collins says. "Let's do an accounting here. What about how other people's efforts , employees, teachers, parents , and a stable government and economy, privilege, God's grace, and luck all helped you?"
   
   In the book, Collins and Gates propose this scenario: Imagine that God is sitting in his (or her) office.
   ...
   Collins and Gates write.
   ...
   That was the question that Chuck Collins and some of his fellow organizers at the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts were puzzling over back in the early 1990s.
   ...
   Collins, who has a master's degree in community economic development, has taken that as a personal challenge. If there is to be any debate or change, he figures, ordinary people have to understand the wealth gap and what is wrong with it, just as the early patriots and Progressive Era reformers did.
   
   In 1995 Collins and Felice Yeskel, now director of the Stonewall Center for gay and lesbian students at the University of Massachusetts, put together a nuts-and-bolts workshop called The Growing Divide, combining user-friendly economic charts and concrete suggestions on how to take action.
   ...
   Building on the success of The Growing Divide, Collins, Yeskel, and Boston College sociology professor Mike Miller got seed money from the Little Sisters of the Assumption to cofound United for a Fair Economy.
   ...
   Collins became UFE's first employee, initially as a part-time second job. UFE now has eighteen employees and runs campaigns across the nation. Two years ago Collins hired an executive director to free him to do what he loves most , programs that inspire people and make them laugh.
   
   "Our forte is street theater-it's the most accessible, funny, engaging way we've found to connect with people," he says. "It's so spiritually uplifting and fun to get a message across with humor, rather than grimness. And it cracks open minds."
   
   When another attempt at permanent estate-tax repeal came up for a vote in Congress last summer, Collins and ten other UFE activists posed as Millionaires for Unlimited Inheritance.
   ...
   We love Susan Collins.' It was very embarrassing for her," says Chuck Collins, who is not related to the senator. "Only twenty-four people in Maine each year would benefit from the tax cut. It's so out of synch with Maine sensibilities." This spring UFE "millionaires" are continuing to stage actions in a handful of swing districts on estate-tax repeal across the country.
   
   Collins's favorite kind of theater action is what he calls media hijacking. In 1998, Collins noticed a Wall Street Journal item announcing that U.S. Representatives Dick Armey and Billy Tauzin were planning to dump a copy of the multivolume federal tax code off the Boston Tea Party Ship as an April 15 publicity stunt.
   ...
   Collins was passing out press releases on a nearby bridge. With their media advisers running amok, the flustered congressmen heaved the trunk of papers overboard , and the lifeboat capsized. The event got plenty of publici

3. 3. UU World: From Riches to Responsibility: Defending the Estate Tax

   uuworld.org/2003/02/feature2.h - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/2/2004   Last Visited: 4/2/2004

   “From Riches to Responsibility,” | From Riches to Responsibility Born to family wealth, Chuck Collins gave away his inheritance and has devoted his life to economic justice. Now he is taking on the repeal of the estate tax. /BY KIMBERLY FRENCH
   ...
   The year Chuck Collins turned 16, his father took him aside for a man-to-man talk.
   ...
   Chuck remembers feeling utter amazement.
   ...
   Ten years later, in 1985, Chuck Collins gave away every penny of his inheritance, nearly half a million dollars, to foundations and groups that he knew needed funding - organizations working for the environment, peace, racial equality, and indigenous and gay people's rights.
   
   "Wealth that just creates more wealth seemed wrong," says Collins, whose book in support of preserving the estate tax, Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, written with William H. Gates Sr., has just been published by Beacon Press.
   ...
   Before cashing in the fund, Collins wrote a letter to his father, a libertarian conservative, explaining his plans.
   ...
   In their second man-to-man talk about the money, the elder Collins wanted to make sure Chuck was considering how he would support any children he might have: "What if you have a child who has Down syndrome? Think about the cost of the care," Chuck remembers his father asking.
   
   His father also asked if he considered himself a Marxist who had to renounce his class background. Chuck, a lifelong Unitarian Universalist, tried to reassure his dad, saying that he would feel comfortable with the label Gandhian or Christian, but he was not a Marxist.
   
   After two days together, Chuck remained unswayed. "The decision to give away my wealth felt like the first real decision I'd ever made," he wrote in We Gave Away a Fortune. "Life presents only a few crystal-clear opportunities to take risks for what you believe, and this was one."
   
   His father needn't have worried. Coming into his inheritance changed Chuck Collins not at all.
   
   Now 43, a father himself, and a cofounder of United for a Fair Economy (UFE) in Boston, a nonprofit organization widely praised for its creative ways of illuminating the growing wealth gap, Collins has always been a social activist. As a first grader, he raised $125 for guide dogs for the blind by organizing a backyard fair for his class. In fifth grade, he wrote and circulated in his neighborhood an environmental leaflet that began, "Don't throw this paper away-it will cause pollution."
   
   After college, he worked for the Institute for Community Economics in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was building a nationwide movement of land trusts, cooperatives, loan funds, and credit unions in poor communities. As he traveled to places like Appalachia and Maine, where most land is owned by absentee corporations, he formed a critique of a system that kept rich people rich and poor people poor. He began to see that inherited wealth - including his own trust fund - was a piece of the problem he was working to solve.
   
   "Giving away the money was a necessary step for me to move along in the work I do," he says. "Two decades later, I'm doing this work because that was part of my journey. It gave me insight into the way concentrations of wealth undermine equality and democracy."
   
   Collins has been coauthor of three previous books about economic inequality: Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change (2000), Economic Apartheid in America (2000), and Shifting Fortunes (1999).
   ...
   For Chuck, it was the best review he'd ever gotten.
   
   "My former view had been that the estate tax was a confiscatory tax that should be done away with," the elder Collins says. "But Chuck's book definitely brought me right on board. My realization that came from the book is that the estate tax is critical to maintaining our democratic society."
   
   In December 2000, Chuck Collins got an e-mail from Bill Gates Sr. Collins works with plenty of rich and famous people through a UFE project called Responsible Wealth, which signs on people in the top 5 percent of wealth to work toward economic equality. Names like Paul Newman, Annie Dillard, Ben Cohen, Ted Turner, George Soros, various Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and other successful artists, executives, and heirs are apt to show up in Collins's in box.
   ...
   As the story has evolved through many public retellings, Collins fired back: "Yeah, and I'm Minnie Mouse." Turns out, it really was Bill Gates's dad, who is a founding partner of a Seattle business-law firm and now director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds projects to improve health in the developing world. And he couldn't have been more serious.
   
   Like Collins, Gates considered the estate tax a moral issue and was deeply disturbed by the movement to repeal the tax - which President George W. Bush had made a top domestic priority when he took office. Especially troubling to both men was that, while repeal of the tax was not popular in polls, no one was arguing why it should be preserved. "We are now living in a second Gilded Age," Collins says.
   ...
   Collins, the organizer, didn't skip a beat: "Draft a public statement, get media coverage, testify before Congress, write letters, op-ed pieces."
   ...
   Stimulating a lively debate over the estate tax is no easy task, Collins is the first to admit.
   ...
   Contrary to what its opponents argue, the estate tax is a fundamentally American institution, Collins and Gates assert in Wealth and Our Commonwealth.
   ...
   A big myth put forth in support of repeal, Collins says, is the notion that "I made this money myself, so I don't owe anything."
   
   "But there's a whole other piece of the story," Collins says. "Let's do an accounting here. What about how other people's efforts - employees, teachers, parents - and a stable government and economy, privilege, God's grace, and luck all helped you?"
   
   In the book, Collins and Gates propose this scenario: Imagine that God is sitting in his (or her) office.
   ...
   Collins and Gates write.
   ...
   That was the question that Chuck Collins and some of his fellow organizers at the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts were puzzling over back in the early 1990s.
   ...
   Collins, who has a master's degree in community economic development, has taken that as a personal challenge. If there is to be any debate or change, he figures, ordinary people have to understand the wealth gap and what is wrong with it, just as the early patriots and Progressive Era reformers did.
   
   In 1995 Collins and Felice Yeskel, now director of the Stonewall Center for gay and lesbian students at the University of Massachusetts, put together a nuts-and-bolts workshop called The Growing Divide, combining user-friendly economic charts and concrete suggestions on how to take action.
   ...
   Building on the success of The Growing Divide, Collins, Yeskel, and Boston College sociology professor Mike Miller got seed money from the Little Sisters of the Assumption to cofound United for a Fair Economy.
   ...
   Collins became UFE's first employee, initially as a part-time second job. UFE now has eighteen employees and runs campaigns across the nation. Two years ago Collins hired an executive director to free him to do what he loves most - programs that inspire people and make them laugh.
   
   "Our forte is street theater-it's the most accessible, funny, engaging way we've found to connect with people," he says. "It's so spiritually uplifting and fun to get a message across with humor, rather than grimness. And it cracks open minds."
   
   When another attempt at permanent estate-tax repeal came up for a vote in Congress last summer, Collins and ten other UFE activists posed as Millionaires for Unlimited Inheritance.
   ...
   We love Susan Collins.' It was very embarrassing for her," says Chuck Collins, who is not related to the senator. "Only twenty-four people in Maine each year would benefit from the tax cut. It's so out of synch with Maine sensibilities." This spring UFE "millionaires" are continuing to stage actions in a handful of swing districts on estate-tax repeal across the country.
   
   Collins's favorite kind of theater action is what he calls media hijacking. In 1998, Collins noticed a Wall Street Journal item announcing that U.S. Representatives Dick Armey and Billy Tauzin were planning to dump a copy of the multivolume federal tax code off the Boston Tea Party Ship as an April 15 publicity stunt.
   ...
   Collins was passing out press releases on a nearby bridge. With their media advisers running amok, the flustered congressmen heaved the trunk of papers overboard - and the lifeboat capsized. The event got plenty of publicity all right, but not the kind the congressmen had planned. "All it took," Collins says, "was a $7 raft, good timing, discipline, and creativity."
   
   United