Today's Eat The Rich Item

Oxfam Report Calls Extreme Wealth a Sign of a Failing Economic System

“I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble,” former Vice President Joe Biden told an audience at the Brookings Institute in 2018. It was a few months before he’d officially declare his candidacy for president, but Biden’s position was clear: “The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

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Amid the evergreen insistence that the world’s richest deserve to stay that way, and just as the World Economic Forum—the annual gathering of political and economic elites—gets underway in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam, the global charity, has released its annual report on global wealth inequality. Its title could double as a demand to the likes of Biden and Zuckerberg: “Time to Care.”

“Extreme wealth,” the authors say, “is a sign of a failing economic system.”

Using data from Credit Suisse Research Institute’s “Global Wealth Databook (2019)” and the 2019 Forbes billionaire list, Oxfam found that just 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people combined. The report also focuses on how sexism and other forms of discrimination exacerbate inequality. For example, the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.

The authors also calculate that women and girls perform 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work, including caring for their families, “a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.”

As Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said in a statement ahead of the report’s release, “Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist.”

Many of us question why anything should exist. Or if anything does exist.

[truthdig]