Oxfam’s Global Wealth Report Indicates that 80 Percent of the Population Subsists on Only 5.5 Percent of the Planet’s Wealth — with 2016 Likely to See the Top One Percent of Richest People Owning More than Half

20 January 2015

Sitting on a powder keg

If Oxfam and Credit Suisse’s estimates are reasonably accurate, the planet’s grossly inequitable distribution of wealth is ultimately not going to end well for any demographic group:

In 2014, the richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet.

Almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world.

If this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years . . . with the wealth share of the top 1% exceeding 50% by 2016.

A moral absurdity

The wealth of [the richest] 80 individuals is now the same as that owned by the bottom 50% of the global population, such that 3.5 billion people share between them the same amount of wealth as that of these extremely wealthy 80 people.

This economic phenomenon is so extreme on its face, that it is difficult for me to see the slightest ethically valid justification for its existence.

One would have to be monumentally conceited to think that one’s superior worth, as a human being, merits such extraordinary economic separation.

Is a populist payback coming?

As insurgents have been demonstrating around the world, wealth is not a protection against the impoverished people that it finally pisses off.

The West calls resistance to its economic and military imperialism, terrorism. What is the counter reaction going to be called, when the tables finally flip and almost everyone has had enough of institutionalized Greed’s depredations?

Chris Hedges recently wrote something insightful about repression’s backlash:

The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam.

It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.

When you sink to despair, when you live trapped in Gaza [for example],

Israel’s vast open-air prison,

sleeping 10 to a floor in a concrete hovel,

walking every morning through the muddy streets of your refugee camp to get a bottle of water because the water that flows from your tap is toxic,

lining up at a U.N. office to get a little food because there is no work and your family is hungry,

suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by Israel that leaves hundreds of dead,

your religion is all you have left.

Muslim prayer, held five times a day, gives you your only sense of structure and meaning, and, most importantly, self-worth.

And when the privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with dignity, you react with inchoate fury.

Becoming a holy warrior, a jihadist, a champion of an absolute and pure ideal, is an intoxicating conversion, a kind of rebirth that brings a sense of power and importance.

“You want us to weep for the Americans when they bomb and kill Palestinians and Iraqis every day?” Mohaam Abak, a Moroccan immigrant . . . told me . . . . “We want more Americans to die so they can begin to see what it feels like.”

[T]his rage . . . . did not arise from the Quran or Islam. It arose from mass despair, from palpable conditions of poverty, along with the West’s imperial violence, capitalist exploitation and hubris.

The message the dispossessed send back . . . was delivered in Paris.

Gross inequity — and the strategic wisdom of effectively targeting adversaries

Strategically speaking, terrorism and payback are most effective, when their targets have an obvious relationship to the alleged wrongs committed. Precise targeting strategically elevated the Kouachi brothers’ Charlie Hebdo murders above terrorism’s usually randomly pursued violence.

When we are forced to become personally responsible for our alleged offenses against others, it can occasionally nudge us into more carefully considering the fairness, diplomacy, tact and wisdom of what we are doing.

In regard to economic inequity, once the bulk of humanity withdraws its implied approval of our Rigged System, the people who run it will become more closely connected (in the public mind) to the wrongs that they and it have perpetuated.

The moral? — The madder one makes subjugated people, the more likely that murder is going to become their answer

One cannot economically enslave, torture, or suck the soul out of spirited human beings, without eventually suffering some unpleasant consequences.

Dominance by the rich is (of course) not new in history. But the widely distributed supply of deadly weapons and the propensity to use them is.

Were I a Fat Cat, I would be devoting some thought to not lighting the fuse to the societal powder keg that I and my colleague Robber Barons have created. Causing 7 billion people to hate one’s guts is a bad idea, even when one controls the State’s tools of repression.

The Oxfam report is a warning.

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Oxfam’s Global Wealth Report Indicates that 80 Percent of the Population Subsists on Only 5.5 Percent of the Planet’s Wealth — with 2016 Likely to See the Top One Percent of Richest People Owning More than Half