Watch this, then we should talk…

Blows your mind eh. It’s obscene the amount of latitude, deference and aspirational support we give to this evil aspect of Capitalism. How is this level of outrageous greed possible when more than a billion humans live on less than $2 a day and at least another billion live in grinding poverty. It’s hard to imagine that any of the 1% have any ethical values when you know just how obese their wallets are.

I imagine this 1% also see terrorism emanating from the impoverished and uneducated 3rd world, as an attack on freedom or the Capitalist system (or maybe just an attack on western conspicuous gluttony to you and me); or perhaps more cynically, just the blowback cost of doing their egregious business. Oh, and they cleverly get taxpayers to pay the bill for this cost with huge increases in anti-terrorism budgets at the CIA, Homeland Security and the FBI, while slashing spending on prosecuting these same Wall Street criminals… Nice work, K Street.

Unfortunately, this video puts it more coherently than the well meaning but incomprehensibly disparate Occupy Movement ever did (apart from the ‘We are the 99%” slogan that is) … Pity… Had hopeful visions of another Bastille Day back then (with less pitchforks and muskets and more placards and bullhorns).

While Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner are divesting their huge wealth, doing great and much needed work in the 3rd world, what are the rest of the grotesquely wealthy doing? Oxfam recently reported that, “The world’s 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over.”. This group also represents only a minuscule number of the 1% worst wealth hoarders. The World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations, released a report in 2006 that indicated that the richest 1% of adults in the world owned a staggering 40% of the planet’s wealth, while the top 10% wallowed in a full 85% of global assets. On the other hand, the bottom 50% of the world’s adult population could only account for a tiny 1% of the world’s wealth. In the last 6 years, which included the GFC, this calamitous situation has got even worse. According to Oxfam’s 2012 report, “The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,”.

Here’s an idea for somewhere to start… Just shutting off tax havens that enable the wealthy (and corporations) to avoid their obligations to pay tax, would raise $189bn in additional tax revenues, according to Oxfam, and that’s more than enough to end extreme poverty in the world.

Thanks to Shaun C. for sharing the video (I know the video went viral a while back but…).

Learn more:
• World’s richest 1% own 40% of all wealth, UN report discovers.
By James Randerson (The Guardian, 6 December 2006)
• It’s the Inequality, Stupid!
By Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot (Mother Jones, March/April 2011 Issue)
• The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all.
(Oxfam Media Briefing, 18 January 2013)

Anyone got a problem with this?

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