The Top 1% Now Own Over Half of the World’s Wealth

[portlander23]

Oxfam’s Crystal Ball Confirmed: The Top 1% Now Own Over Half of the World’s Wealth
Nick Galasso
Common Dreams

The world’s richest 1 percent now own more wealth than all of the bottom 99 percent combined. This finding comes from Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report for 2015, released last week. Last year, Credit Suisse found the richest 1 percent of adults owned 48 percent of global wealth. According to the new report, the top 1 percent now hold 50.4 percent of all the world’s household wealth.

Credit Suisse’s findings are in line with Oxfam’s prediction that global wealth inequality is only becoming greater. Last January, we predicted that the richest 1 percent would capture more than half of all household wealth by 2016. It looks like our prediction was right, but that we were too conservative, since it has happened a year early. Alas, our forecast was confirmed, but it’s nothing to celebrate.



In this respect, the real challenge is how average people can take back political power from wealthy elites who have the resources to rig the economic game in their favor. The rigging is evident in the ways elites are able to undermine democracy and equal representation by infusing huge amounts of cash into the political process. It’s also clear in the influence elites use to ‘capture’ the marketplace of ideas, perpetuating myths like trickle-down policies helping the poor and austerity measures are “responsible” – both which have been consistently disproven.

What’s encouraging is that citizens from rich and poor countries are pushing back. There seems to be a global zeitgeist that capitalism has descended from being about competition and innovation to monopoly and corporatism. The latter are responsible for the massive inequalities we are grappling with today, especially the unfathomable concentration of the world’s wealth among an incredibly small number of people. The Credit Suisse figures empower citizens to hold governments to account for today’s inequalities with the cold, hard data to back up the injustices of poverty and power we see every day.

[Rex]

1. 80 people own half the worlds wealth. 80.

But hey, this is what we wanted right? That 'greed is good' garbage from the 80s is really paying off! Yeah greed!

[portlander23]

2. I think the good news is

We've been here before at various points in history and we've bounced back. Without Occupy and a general awareness of the problem, it's unlikely we'd have a candidate Sanders and unlikely we'd have an election season where even Republicans felt as though they had to say something about inequality, even if it's just to refute that it's a problem.

[hifiguy]

4. But the world has never seen

anything like the 'murkan 24/7/365 propaganda machine. Goebbels or Stalin could not have begun to imagine the sophistication of modern media mind-control techniques developed by the corporate reichwing. They would stand in mute awe. This time they just might win, and it may take planetary catastrophe - which IS inevitably coming - to topple them.

And speaking of Goebbels, let me quote that "distinguished" founder of the modern Republican party:

[hifiguy]

3. Yet it STILL is not enough.

The rest of us are still alive. And that is not in their long-range plan.

[A HERETIC I AM]

5. Here's where it goes, among other things;

A boat like that runs well in excess of twenty million dollars.

Nice, huh?

That is something the average person rarely gets to even look at, much less board, much less sail on her, .......

(184' (56 meters) Perini Navi "Riela")

[DJ13]

6. Hillary 2016!

More of the same please!

[Initech]

7. Absolutely fucking disgusting.

And I'm surprised this isn't on the front page.