An
armed security guard outside the Davos Congress Centre. 'Even
Unilever’s chief executive is fretting about the capitalist threat to
capitalism' Photograph: REMY STEINEGGER/REUTERS
The billionaires and corporate oligarchs meeting in Davos
this week are getting worried about inequality. It might be hard to
stomach that the overlords of a system that has delivered the widest
global economic gulf in human history should be handwringing about the
consequences of their own actions.
But even the architects of the crisis-ridden international economic
order are starting to see the dangers. It’s not just the maverick
hedge-funder George Soros, who likes to describe himself as a class
traitor. Paul Polman, Unilever chief executive, frets about the “capitalist threat to capitalism”. Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director, fears capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s “seeds of its own destruction” and warns that something needs to be done.
The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam.
Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people –
half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48%
of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends,
the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together
next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share
of US income since the 1980s.
This is a wealth grab on a grotesque scale. For 30 years, under the
rule of what Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, calls “market
fundamentalism”, inequality in income and wealth has ballooned, both between and within the large majority of countries. In Africa, the absolute number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981 as the rollcall of billionaires has swelled.
In most of the world, labour’s share of national income has fallen
continuously and wages have stagnated under this regime of
privatisation, deregulation and low taxes on the rich. At the same time
finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a
small minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy. Now
the evidence has piled up that not only is such appropriation of wealth a
moral and social outrage, but it is fuelling social and climate
conflict, wars, mass migration and political corruption, stunting health
and life chances, increasing poverty, and widening gender and ethnic
divides.
READ MORE:http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/davos-oligarchs-fear-inequality-global-elite-resist
No comments:
Post a Comment