{"id":41629,"date":"2018-12-13T20:11:52","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T01:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41629"},"modified":"2018-12-13T20:11:52","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T01:11:52","slug":"tomgram-nomi-prins-a-world-that-is-the-property-of-the-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41629","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Nomi Prins, A World That Is the Property of the 1%"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Nomi Prins, A World That Is the Property of the 1%<\/a><\/h3>\n
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This year, I simply couldn\u2019t get one fact out of my head: according to<\/a> a 2017 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three billionaires — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates — have amassed as much wealth as the bottom half of American society. That\u2019s 160 million people! (And unlike<\/a> our president, I don\u2019t use exclamation points lightly or often.) Or as Oxfam reported<\/a> in January of this year, the wealth of eight men — and yes, they were men (including the three mentioned above) — was equal to that of half the people on this planet in 2017. Yikes! And just to give you a sense of where we\u2019ve been heading at supersonic speed, an Oxfam report<\/a> a year earlier had 62 billionaires owning half the planet\u2019s wealth. Imagine that: 62 to eight in a single year.<\/p>\n

Then consider what we know about the rise of the billionaire class. Again, according to Oxfam, a new billionaire appeared every two days<\/a> in 2017, while 82% of the wealth being created on this planet already went to the top 1% and the bottom half of the global population saw no wealth gains at all. In 2017 (the last year for which we have such figures), the total wealth of the globe\u2019s billionaire class ballooned by almost 20%<\/a>. (And I want you to know that, unlike our president, I\u2019m fighting hard to restrain the urge to put one or more exclamation points after every one of those sentences.)<\/p>\n

Oxfam released its figures this January to coincide with the annual meeting of the world\u2019s top dogs at Davos in Switzerland. Assumedly, it will do so again in January 2019 and I shudder to think what the next set of stats are likely to be. In the meantime, consider what TomDispatch<\/em> regular<\/a> Nomi Prins, author most recently of Collusion:<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Nomi Prins, A World That Is the Property of the 1% This year, I simply couldn\u2019t get one fact out of my head: according to a 2017 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three billionaires — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates — have amassed as much wealth as the bottom half […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[1253,63,124,425,575,7413,860],"class_list":["post-41629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-1253","tag-banks","tag-central-banks","tag-inequality","tag-nomi-prins","tag-tomdispatch","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41630,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41629\/revisions\/41630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}