Billionaires
and the politicians who enable their wealth gathered for several days
at a luxury resort in Switzerland to offer their puzzled concerns
about why they keep getting richer at everyone else’s
expense.
The
World
Economic Forum
(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.
The forum calls
itself
an “independent international organization committed to
improving the state of the world.” WEF attendees are
representative of global elites who wield both political and economic
power, and, in superhero
fashion,
seem to have adopted a do-gooder attitude of, “with great power
comes great responsibility.”
The last time the group
of elites met was in January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic,
when Professor Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and executive
chairman, said,
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of
opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”
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’s problems:
profiteering and obscene wealth redistribution from the bottom of
society toward the top.
The advocacy organization Oxfam,
which every year is allowed to send representatives to the annual WEF
meetings, releases reports
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.
Irit
Tamir, director of the private sector department at Oxfam America,
shared with me in an interview
the results of this
year’s WEF-related report,
which proved that rather than using the pandemic as a way to reset
priorities—as Schwab had in 2020 claimed was his
intention—wealthy elites used it as a springboard to accumulate
heretofore-unimaginable levels of riches.
“Inequality,”
said Tamir, is “one of the top problems that they’re
looking to solve” at Davos, “which of course is rather
ironic because many of the reasons we have inequality today is
because of the influence of these very people.”
Still,
media outlets have portrayed the sentiment at Davos as one of deep
concern over the current situation. “Davos gathering
overshadowed by global economic worries,” said one Associated
Press
headline, while the Washington
Post
labeled its coverage with the words, “Economic uncertainty and
ongoing war cast a cloud over Davos.” But, according to Tamir,
“Those that are gathering in Davos this week have so much to
celebrate because they are doing very, very well.”
According
to Oxfam’s
report,
entitled “Profiting from Pain,” a million people around
the globe are being pushed into “extreme poverty” every
33 hours during the pandemic. And, in roughly that same time period,
“a new billionaire has been minted.”
“The
pandemic has been very good to the billionaire class,” said
Tamir. Oxfam concluded in its report that the world’s 10
richest men owned more wealth than the world’s poorest 40
percent of humanity. Such an absurd global arrangement of wealth
ought to be the nail in the coffin of our current economic
system.
The key areas of pandemic profiteering that Oxfam
highlights in its report are food, medicine, energy, and
technology—all basic human necessities.
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,
contributing to the Cargill family wealth.
Moderna, the
pharmaceutical company whose CEO Stéphane
Bancel
was on the speakers’ list at this year’s WEF, has,
according to Oxfam, been “immensely successful at converting
public funding into private wealth.” Additionally, “The
company has created four new vaccine billionaires who are worth a
combined $10bn.”
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, “Big oil’s
profit margins have doubled during the pandemic.”
And,
lastly, the technology sector has been a boon to billionaires. Oxfam
reports that “Seven of the 10 richest people in the world made
their money from technology,” including Elon Musk, who
surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the world’s
richest man.
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’s the former. Others, like Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders—famous for his claim that the economy is
“rigged” in favor of the rich—believe the latter.
Either way, the undeniable conclusion is that it’s time for a
new system.
There is no need for the sort of deep
introspective panels that WEF convenes as elites pretend to scratch
their heads, asking questions like, “How
can leaders make ethical decisions in times of crisis to maintain
social cohesion and the trust of citizens?”
or “How
can we include everyone in the conversation for gender
equality?”
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’s too much money at the top, it’s
time to redistribute that money to the bottom.
That’s
it.
In the United States, home to many of the world’s
wealthiest individuals and corporations, there are already
well-crafted pieces of legislation like President Biden’s
billionaire
minimum tax,
or tax provisions in the Build
Back Better bill—both
of which have failed to pass Congress.
“This is not
a new concept,” said Tamir of a tax on rich people in times of
crisis. “We’ve 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.”
WEF attendees did not convene any panels to
discuss how political leaders—with whom they rubbed shoulders
all week in Davos—could make tax legislation a reality. While
most agree that inequality is bad for the world, their solution,
according to Tamir, is philanthropy, not taxation.
“Philanthropy
is at the whim of the individual’s will. It’s whatever
they choose to donate to, and when they choose to donate, and how
they choose to donate.”
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.
“We need to change the
rules,” said Tamir. “We need governments to step in, and
we need them to do it immediately.”
This
commentary was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
