InterContinental Davos luxury hotel in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. Oxfam report found people in countries around the world believe that the rich have too much influence over the direction their country is heading. Photograph: Arnd Wiegmann/REUTERS
An excerpt from a posting by Graeme Wearden at The Guardian
As World Economic Forum starts in Davos, development charity claims growing inequality has been driven by ‘power grab’
The world’s wealthiest people aren’t known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker.
The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called ‘global elite’ is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £110tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world’s population….
Supposedly this conversation took place:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different from you and I.”
Ernst Hemingway, “yah, they’ve got money.”
Seems to me that as long as so many people/voters in our capitalist democracies believe what the rich want us to believe, then things carry on as they are. So how do we ‘poor but free serfs’ change perceptions when the rich own the media? Discuss. 500 words by Tuesday.