Just Eight Men Own Same Wealth as Half of Humanity: Report
(COMMON DREAMS) Nika Knight, January 16, 2017 — The private jets of the world’s wealthiest men and women are swarming the Swiss Alps for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), which begins Monday in Davos, Switzerland, in the midst of an ongoing global inequality crisis.
“Across the world, people are being left behind[…] their voices are ignored as governments sing to the tune of big business and a wealthy elite.”
—Winnie Byanyima,
Oxfam InternationalAnd that crisis is accelerating, according to a new Oxfam report released Monday: today, only eight men own the same amount of wealth as the 3.6 billion people who comprise the poorest half of humanity. Those eight men are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.
The report, An Economy for the 99% (pdf), observes that “[f]ar from trickling down, income and wealth are being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.”
It goes on to describe how super-rich individuals and the massive corporations they run are fueling the inequality crisis by offshoring taxes, driving down wages, and influencing government to their advantage, and argues that the “very design of our economies and the principles of our economics have taken us to this extreme, unsustainable, and unjust point.”
“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when one in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day,” said Oxfam International director Winnie Byanyima in a statement. “Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty; it is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy.”