Poverty won’t be eradicated for another 299 years?

By S R Ranjan: What is the world fighting for if it cannot fight against age-long human crisis like poverty, hunger, inequality and human rights? Power and wealth is still being concentrated and monopolized in few hands across countries around the world and the people are celebrating them as being “The World’s Richest” and “The World’s Powerful People”, while the rest still struggle to fight for livelihood. People need to awake to the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor, have and the have-nots. Because, it is the people who have made them powerful and have relentlessly worked to make them richer. Alas, the people have been betrayed and .made to live in servitude for centuries. This narrative has been manifested in the latest report “Inequality Inc.” by Oxfam, as the world gathers together at the World Economic Forum.

Inequality Inc. – the new Oxfam report – reveals that “if current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty won’t be eradicated for another 229 years”. The report further states that “the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 — at a rate of $14 million per hour — while nearly five billion people have been made poorer”. Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar said, “We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom. This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else”. “Runaway corporate and monopoly power is an inequality-generating machine: through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state, and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are funneling endless wealth to their ultra-rich owners. But they’re also funneling power, undermining our democracies and our rights. No corporation or individual should have this much power over our economies and our lives —to be clear, nobody should have a billion dollars”.

According the report, the past three years’ supercharged surge in extreme wealth has solidified while global poverty remains mired at pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, billionaires are $3.3 trillion richer than in 2020, and their wealth has grown three times faster than the rate of inflation, reveals the Oxfam report on inequality and global corporate power.

The report says worldwide people are working harder and longer hours, often for poverty wages in precarious and unsafe jobs. The wages of nearly 800 million workers have failed to keep up with inflation and they have lost $1.5 trillion over the last two years. Additionally, a new Oxfam analysis of world benchmarking alliance data on more than 1,600 of the largest corporations worldwide shows that 0.4%  of them are publicly committed to paying workers a living wage and support a living wage in their value chains. “Monopolies harm innovation and crush workers and smaller businesses. The world hasn’t forgotten how pharma monopolies deprived millions of people of COVID-19 vaccines, creating a racist vaccine apartheid, while minting a new club of billionaires,” said Behar.

Oxfam is calling on governments to rapidly and radically reduce the gap between the super-rich and the rest of society. The report shows how a "war on taxation" by corporations has seen the effective corporate tax rate fall by roughly a third in recent decades, while they have relentlessly privatized the public sector and segregated services like education and water. “We have the evidence. We know the history. Public power can rein in runaway corporate power and inequality — shaping the market to be fairer and free from billionaire control. Governments must intervene to break up monopolies, empower workers, tax these massive corporate profits and, crucially, invest in a new era of public goods and services,” said Behar.

Singh Rakesh Ranjan

Freelance Journalist

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(representational images: sources)