The global elite have become the most wealthy and powerful they have ever been in history, all thanks to the pandemic and ongoing restrictions, according to a report released Monday.
As supply chain issues leave some industries on the brink of collapse, the world’s ten richest men have increased their fortunes at a whopping rate of $1.6 billion a day.
According to a confederation of charities, Oxfam said elites’ wealth grew more throughout the pandemic than the last 14 years combined.
Oxfam’s report, Inequality Kills, was released as the ‘New World Order’ elite met virtually this week for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
“We have a situation where ten men hold more wealth than that of two-thirds of humanity,” Chief executive of Oxfam Australia, Lyn Morgain, told Australia’s ABC.
“Not only that, but that bottom 40 percent are hanging on by a thread,” she warned.
Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher pointed out, “the pandemic has been a billionaire bonanza.”
“When governments did the rescue packages and pumped trillions into the economy and to financial markets in order to support the economy for all, what happened is a lot of it went into the pockets of the billionaires,” Bucher said.
Btimesonline.com reports: Meanwhile, the report claims that the top 10 richest people – all of whom are men – have grown their collective wealth from $700 billion in March 2020 to now more than $1.5 trillion. The 10 richest men, according to the latest tally by Forbes, are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, and Warren Buffet.
While their collective wealth may have more than doubled, there is a significant variation between each individual. Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, grew his fortune by more than 1,000% since the start of the pandemic, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates also saw his fortune rise by a relatively modest 30%.
Oxfam GB’s chief executive, Danny Sriskandarajah, said in the report that the wealth gap this year is “off the scale.” He added that while there are a growing number of billionaires around the world, more than 99% of the population is suffering because of the lockdowns, disruptions in trade, and movement restrictions. Sriskandarajah said the current economic system is “deeply flawed.”
The report claims that because of the pandemic, the lack of access to healthcare, diminishing incomes, violence, and climate change, about one death occurs every four seconds around the world.
Apart from reporting on the growing wealth gap, the report also claims that the prolonged pandemic has forced developing countries to cut down on social spending. It also claims that gender equality has been greatly set back, with 13 million fewer women now having work. The report claims that more than 20 million women are now at risk of never returning to school.
The report calls on leaders to enact changes immediately and impose bolder economic strategies. This includes more progressive tax laws, which place more emphasis on capital and wealth. The report also called on countries and corporations to provide more access to COVID-19 vaccine intellectual property rights to increase global production and distribution.