Another year gone by and nothing has changed - the world’s top 1% percent saw their fortunes grow even bigger, while the bottom half did what they usually do - got poorer.
The figures in the latest Oxfam world report are staggering:
‘The 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.’
While written in plain English, I don’t think most of us are capable of really understanding its meaning. 26 people you could easily fit in a bus own more than the population of the Americas, Europe and Africa put together.
The wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.
I’ll spare you the other horrible figures - how many people die because of lack of health care, the starving, the children too poor to go to school. We all know the situation is dire and it needs to change, the question is how? Who’s going to spearhead the much-needed change? Certainly not us, the little people, because we have allowed the richest of the rich to put themselves at the forefront of the movement to change things. A sobering look at the world today and the reasons why nothing will change you can find in an excellent article posted by ‘The Guardian’:
The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything
Nothing has changed. The world’s movers and shakers are in Davos again for their annual gathering, where they presumably seek solutions to end the world’s inequities. You know, do something for us, the less fortunate. Very nice of them, you must admit.
It doesn’t even matter whether you’re a democrat or a republican, neither the Clinton Foundation, nor Donald Trump are going to come up with anything radical that would jeopardize their privileged position. If the likes of Goldman-Sachs set up some charity, that is all it is - charity for the poor. You cannot expect the world's elite to bring about a shake-up of the rotten system which makes them the elite.
‘The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.’
All we can hope to get are crumbs, just enough to keep us satisfied while the system doesn’t change one bit. Next year, the world’s elite will have grown richer, while the poor won’t even notice they’ve gone a little poorer.
I highly recommend the article from ‘The Guardian’ as besides general considerations about the state of the world it takes a close look at the United States, and the picture isn’t pretty. The decline in health care literacy, economic opportunity, even life expectancy of the average American should be a wake-up call for the people of the US, but also for the rest of the world used to look up to "the greatest democracy on earth". Much of the Western world follows the trends set in Washington, only the US is a dying empire and we risk following them into chaos and ruin.
