Rich and powerful from across the globe gathering World Economic Forum, Davos – a self-styled international organization for public and private partnership, for its annual meeting after a two-year COVID gap.
@World Economic Forum billionaires celebrate the surge in their pandemic fortunes acquired with the steep increase in food and energy prices. During the pandemic, 573 people became new billionaires @one every 30 hours.
Decades of progress on extreme poverty is reversed. Millions are paying the cost for staying alive. This year 263 million more people will crash into extreme poverty @ a million every 33 hours.
Today’s wealth of the world’s billionaires is 13.9% of global GDP. In 2000 it was 4.4%. 3-fold increase! The system is rigged through privatization and monopolies, gutting regulation and workers’ rights while stashing cash in tax havens – with governmental help. World’s 2,668 billionaires own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion. The world’s ten richest men own more than the bottom 40% of humanity, 3.1 billion people!
One hunger death per minute. The starving millions are wondering what they can possibly do next to survive. This inequality has broken the human bonds. It is killing. (Oxfam International).
The corporations in the energy, food and pharmaceutical sectors – where monopolies are common – are posting record-high profits. Workers struggle with decades-high prices amid Covid-19. The fortunes of food and energy billionaires have risen by $453 billion in the last two years, equivalent to $1 billion every two days. Five of the largest energy companies (BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and Chevron) are together making $2,600 profit every second!
The Cargill family controls 70 percent of the global agricultural market. Last year Cargill made the biggest profit in its history ($5 billion in net income) and the company is expected to beat its record profit again in 2022. The Cargill family alone now has 12 billionaires!
From Sri Lanka to Sudan, record-high global food prices are sparking social and political upheaval. People in poor countries spend more than twice as much of their income on food than those in rich countries. A worker in the bottom 50% would have to work for 112 years to earn what a person in the top 1% gets in a single year.
The pandemic has created 40 new pharma billionaires. Pharmaceutical corporations like Moderna and Pfizer are making $1,000 profit every second just from their monopoly control of the COVID-19 vaccine! They are charging governments up to 24 times more than the potential cost of generic production. 87% of people in low-income countries are not fully vaccinated.
The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. Some have grown rich by denying billions of people access to vaccines, others by exploiting rising food and energy prices. They are paying out massive bonuses and dividends while paying as little tax as possible. This rising wealth and rising poverty are two sides of the same coin, proof that our defective economic system.
After more than 20 million estimated deaths from COVID-19 and widespread economic destruction, government leaders in Davos face a choice: act as proxies for the billionaire class who plunder their economies, or take bold steps to act in the interests of their great majorities. One common economic sense measure above all will put this to the test: whether governments will finally tax billionaire wealth.
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional.
What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
