Eight rich men

Coinciding with the World Economic Forum in Davos – the annual confab of the obscenely wealthy – international charity Oxfam has released a report showing that the eight wealthiest individuals in the world together are richer than the poorest half of the world’s population. Unsurprisingly, all eight of these individuals are men and six of them are from the US. Collectively, these eight men – among them tech billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg as well as Mexican energy magnate Carlos Slim and financial behemoth Michael Bloomberg – are an embodiment of a rapacious worldwide capitalist system that facilitates growing inequality at a rate that far surpasses anything we have seen previously. These men so thoroughly own governments not just in their own country but all around the world that the rules of the game are massively rigged in their favour. One of the eight richest men, Warren Buffet, once revealed that he pays a lower rate of tax than his secretary. In the US, at least, it has become the norm to have a government that is of the millionaire class, by the millionaire class and for the millionaire class. The incoming Donald Trump cabinet, packed to the rafters with alumnus of Goldman Sachs and oil companies, is estimated to be the richest in the country’s history.

The US, as the primary player in the global capitalist system, is not content with having inequality at home. Inequality, it seems, has become one of those American values we hear about so much that the US keeps exporting around the world. For decades, it has used the IMF and the World Bank to impose structural adjustment programmes around the world, with structural adjustment being a sanitised term for destroying social safety nets, removing subsidies and privatising state-run enterprises by selling them to the already-wealthy. The US has also been at the forefront of the World Trade Organisation, which facilitates trade that benefits the elite in the West by allowing them to use virtual slave labour in poor countries even as the working class in their home countries is decimated. The ultra-rich now have more in common with each other than the people in their own countries. Resistance to this rapacious capitalism has been seen in Latin America and even the scary right-wing lurch in Europe and the US is attributed in part to anger against a rigged system, even though that anger is wrongly taken out on minorities. The only way to counter this global cabal is through grassroots politics that tries to build a new, fairer system.