All over the world, governments controlled by the plutocrats impose ever more painful austerity, cutting wages, slashing jobs, dismantling social programs, closing schools, gutting health care. In its effort to expand its personal wealth, it relentlessly attacks the living standards of the working class-the vast majority of the population. This social-or, to be more precise, anti-social-element is virulently hostile to the people, contemptuous of democratic rights, and militaristic. This global plutocracy-by definition, a society governed by the wealthy-generates a huge and ever-increasing portion of the ruling elite’s wealth not from the production of useful products and expansion of society’s productive capacities, but from the manipulation of money, speculation and outright swindling-essentially criminal activities that are destructive of the productive forces.Ī few hundred people, backed by an army of bribed politicians, academic apologists, intelligence spooks, experts of all sorts and the repressive force of the military and police, hold civilization by the throat and threaten to destroy it to satisfy their insatiable greed. There is no parallel in human history to the immense concentration of wealth that exists today, nor to the extremes of parasitism and decadence that constitute the “new normal.” Contemporary capitalism-what the ruling class and its political and media flunkies call the “free enterprise system”-has created a world in which every policy decision is dictated by the need to protect and increase the wealth of an infinitesimal portion of the world’s population. The ILO predicted that the ranks of the unemployed would continue to rise in 2014. The same day Oxfam issued its study, the International Labor Organization reported that the number of unemployed people worldwide grew by 5 million in 2013, to 202 million. While the wealth of the world’s billionaires has doubled, there are today over 1 billion people living on less than a dollar per day, and nearly half the world’s population, more than 3 billion people, subsist on less than $2.50 per day. The impoverishment of the working class on the one side and further enrichment of the financial elite on the other have accelerated since the Wall Street crash of that year. The report includes a chart showing that since 2008, the United States has had the largest increase in social inequality of any developed country. ![]() Oxfam writes: “The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion… 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.” ![]() On the eve of the annual spectacle of parasitic wealth and power that is the World Economic Forum in the Alpine resort town of Davos, Switzerland, the Oxfam charity has issued a report warning of the unprecedented growth of social inequality throughout the world.ĭescribing a planet in the malevolent grip of a handful of plutocrats, the report states that the richest 85 people in the world control as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the world's population- 3.5 billion people! It notes that the richest 1 percent today controls 46 percent of the world’s wealth.
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