Viewpoint by Sonali Kolhatkar<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This article was produced by Economy for All<\/a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of \u201cRising Up With Sonali<\/a>,\u201d a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n LOS ANGELES (IDN) \u2014 The World Economic Forum<\/a> (WEF), which took place this year from May 22 through 26 in Davos, Switzerland, brought together elected officials and corporate executives from all over the world to tackle global problems. The annual meeting was delayed, first by two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then by five more months due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The forum calls itself<\/a> an \u201cindependent international organization committed to improving the state of the world.\u201d WEF attendees are representative of global elites who wield both political and economic power, and, in superhero fashion<\/a>, seem to have adopted a do-gooder attitude of, \u201cwith great power comes great responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last time the group of elites met was in January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, when Professor Klaus Schwab, WEF\u2019s founder and executive chairman, said<\/a>, \u201cThe pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like most of the words emerging from WEF speakers, such a sentiment, reflecting the deep concerns of civil society, was worn as a cloak to disguise the source of many of the world\u2019s problems: profiteering and obscene wealth redistribution from the bottom of society toward the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The advocacy organization Oxfam, which every year is allowed to send representatives to the annual WEF meetings, releases reports<\/a> regularly highlighting these obscenities and reflecting back to attendees the culpability that politicians and CEOs bear for inequality as they routinely conspire to fleece the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Irit Tamir, director of the private sector department at Oxfam America, shared with me in an interview<\/a> the results of this year\u2019s WEF-related report<\/a>, which proved that rather than using the pandemic as a way to reset priorities\u2014as Schwab had in 2020 claimed was his intention\u2014wealthy elites used it as a springboard to accumulate heretofore-unimaginable levels of riches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cInequality,\u201d said Tamir, is \u201cone of the top problems that they\u2019re looking to solve\u201d at Davos, \u201cwhich of course is rather ironic because many of the reasons we have inequality today is because of the influence of these very people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, media outlets have portrayed the sentiment at Davos as one of deep concern over the current situation. \u201cDavos gathering overshadowed by global economic worries,\u201d said one Associated Press<\/a> headline, while the Washington Post<\/a> labeled its coverage with the words, \u201cEconomic uncertainty and ongoing war cast a cloud over Davos.\u201d But, according to Tamir, \u201cThose that are gathering in Davos this week have so much to celebrate because they are doing very, very well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Oxfam\u2019s report<\/a>, entitled \u201cProfiting from Pain,\u201d a million people around the globe are being pushed into \u201cextreme poverty\u201d every 33 hours during the pandemic. And, in roughly that same time period, \u201ca new billionaire has been minted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe pandemic has been very good to the billionaire class,\u201d said Tamir. Oxfam concluded in its report that the world\u2019s 10 richest men owned more wealth than the world\u2019s poorest 40 per cent of humanity. Such an absurd global arrangement of wealth ought to be the nail in the coffin of our current economic system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key areas of pandemic profiteering that Oxfam highlights in its report are food, medicine, energy, and technology\u2014all basic human necessities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, take James Cargill II and his family, who are majority stakeholders in a global food trading business that bears their family name and made nearly $5 billion in pure income last year alone. Food prices around the world have sharply risen<\/a>, contributing to the Cargill family’s wealth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moderna, the pharmaceutical company whose CEO St\u00e9phane Bancel<\/a> was on the speakers\u2019 list at this year\u2019s WEF, has, according to Oxfam, been \u201cimmensely successful at converting public funding into private wealth.\u201d Additionally, \u201cThe company has created four new vaccine billionaires who are worth a combined $10bn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the energy sector, we see a similar level of unbridled greed as the costs of energy have gone up, which in turn has meant that, as per Oxfam, \u201cBig oil\u2019s profit margins have doubled during the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, lastly, the technology sector has been a boon to billionaires. Oxfam reports that \u201cSeven of the 10 richest people in the world made their money from technology,\u201d including Elon Musk, who surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the world\u2019s richest man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If market capitalism has reorganized wealth so that it flows from the bottom half of humanity into the hands of increasingly richer individuals, there is either a critical design flaw in a system that was supposed to be fair or the system is working precisely as it was designed to work. WEF attendees have convinced themselves it\u2019s the former. Others, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders\u2014famous for his claim that the economy is \u201crigged\u201d in favour of the rich\u2014believe the latter. Either way, the undeniable conclusion is that it\u2019s time for a new system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no need for the sort of deep introspective panels that WEF convenes as elites pretend to scratch their heads, asking questions like, \u201cHow can leaders make ethical decisions in times of crisis to maintain social cohesion and the trust of citizens?<\/a>\u201d or \u201cHow can we include everyone in the conversation for gender equality?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oxfam points out that the no-brainer solution to obscene global inequality, one that requires no complex analysis or discussions between thought leaders, is this: If there\u2019s too much money at the top, it\u2019s time to redistribute that money to the bottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the United States, home to many of the world\u2019s wealthiest individuals and corporations, there are already well-crafted pieces of legislation like President Biden\u2019s billionaire minimum tax<\/a>, or tax provisions in the Build Back Better bill<\/a>\u2014both of which have failed to pass Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is not a new concept,\u201d said Tamir of a tax on rich people in times of crisis. \u201cWe\u2019ve done this before in wartime. Other countries have also done it with great success. It is time that we get revenue from the excess profits that are being made from crises.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n WEF attendees did not convene any panels to discuss how political leaders\u2014with whom they rubbed shoulders all week in Davos\u2014could make tax legislation a reality. While most agree that inequality is bad for the world, their solution, according to Tamir, is philanthropy, not taxation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPhilanthropy is at the whim of the individual\u2019s will. It\u2019s whatever they choose to donate to, and when they choose to donate, and how they choose to donate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, billionaire philanthropists have not only more money than the rest of us can imagine having, but they also have the power to decide what should or should not receive funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe need to change the rules,\u201d said Tamir. \u201cWe need governments to step in, and we need them to do it immediately.\u201d [IDN-InDepthNews \u2013 26 May 2022]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: \u2018Profiting from pain\u2019: Covid-19 pandemic creates new billionaire every 30 hours, says Oxfam WEF 2022 report. Image source: DNA India<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Viewpoint by Sonali Kolhatkar This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of \u201cRising Up With Sonali,\u201d a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. LOS ANGELES (IDN) \u2014 The World Economic Forum (WEF), which took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3010,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,42,16,32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3008","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy-finance-trade","8":"category-europe","9":"category-news","10":"category-regions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3009,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3008\/revisions\/3009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}