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That's rich!

AND in news just in:

• In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – the bottom half of humanity.
• The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years since 2010 – that's an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542bn), to $1.76 trn.
• Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period – a drop of 41%.
• Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1%.
• The average annual income of the poorest 10% of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.

Yep. Trickle-down economics is REALLY working, folks.

READ: WEF 2016: 4th Industrial Revolution. 5mjobs, women in the firing line.

But seriously, now: this almost global system we have been so fully committed to for decades just isn’t doing its job – unless that job is to enable a few (mostly) men to amass unimaginable wealth, the kind where you’re using numbers to score because honestly, each new billion can hardly add anything to your quality of life.

Surely the job of an economy is to provide the realistic potential of prosperity and quality of life for all who live within it, and to minimise the occurrence of absolute and extreme poverty.

This is not just about airy-fairy notions of economic justice, people; this is about safety and security. Inequality and poverty create an excellent breeding ground for extremism, violence and all the other nasties we’d like to avoid.

Add to that the pressure of a changing climate, and waddaya got? A really insecure and uncomfortable place in which to see out your life – or the lives of your children. “Looking back, the causes of the 1789 French Revolution are not a mystery to historians; looking forward, the pressure cooker for increased radicalism, of all flavors, and conflict could get hotter along with the global temperature,” writes scientist Pier J Sellers, musing about the world’s future after being diagnosed with terminal cancer (do read it).

The reality of our historic drought (none like it since 1904) hit home when, on our recent holiday, we travelled through Free State farmland so parched and dry it looked like death. What will happen when the inevitable result of this disaster plays out among the bitterly poor, the workless and already desperate people crammed into the informal settlements that ring our major metropolises? Their food budgets are even now under immense pressure (a 150% increase in the cost of mealie meal already, so I hear); what will ensue when their food costs jump by 35%, as is predicted to happen later in 2016?

                 (Mandi Smallhorne)

Powder keg just ready to give off sparks

Winter has always been a time of discontent, the time of strikes and evictions into the cold and protest.

Add hunger to the already unstable mix and you’re “livin’ in a powder keg and givin’ off sparks”.

The ‘1%’ live in cocoon-world, sheltered from these realities by security barriers, the wealth to escape to blue lagoons and penthouses, the money that buys the best of healthcare, technology, and labour-saving everything. But despite my relative prosperity compared to my fellow South Africans, I am not part of that cocoon; I don’t live behind security walls with guards. I can look over the valley on my morning walk and see the distant trees which signal the beginning of poverty.

When their life becomes unbearable, it is likely to affect me directly.

Next year the rains will probably return… probably. La Niña will bring with her floods for Mozambique and other parts of the subcontinent, but at least there’ll be rain. No promises, though: we’re venturing into uncharted terrain here. But we know that more rainy seasons than not, the rain will be poor, too little to support the crops we need to feed our hungry people. In more and more summers, we in southern Africa will suffer through extended heat waves where temperatures climb beyond 35° and stay there for ten days or more.    

“The average [greenhouse gas emissions] footprint of the richest 1% globally could be as much as 175 times that of the poorest 10%,” Oxfam points out. Yet the poorest, the least resilient, are the ones suffering the droughts, the floods, the heatwaves, the hunger. No fair.

The least, the very, very least we could do is ensure that the rich don’t avoid tax, that they pay tax fairly, and don’t defraud countries of money that could be used to ameliorate the situation. “As Warren Buffett famously said, he pays a lower rate of tax than anyone in his office – including his cleaner and his secretary.” (Oxfam) About three-quarters of a trillion dollars annually is earned (looted, in effect) through fraudulent trade practices, apparently (see my article for more).

This is seriously unsustainable. I’d like to see active citizens, here and everywhere else in the world, dissecting political campaign promises and party policies through this lens, giving the electorate information that will enable them to leverage their 99% numbers through the ballot box. In the interests of a liveable world for all of us.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.


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