In the fight for a balanced economy and healthier democracy, the increasing power of the ultra-rich is a calamity we cannot afford<\/p>\n
To celebrate the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Oxfam releases a study of how much of the world\u2019s wealth the ultra-rich own. This year\u2019s was a doozy. The five richest men in the world were revealed to have doubled their wealth<\/a> in the years since 2020. Seven of the 10 biggest corporations in the world have a billionaire as their CEO or principal shareholder. Combined, the value of these companies \u2013 which include Apple, Microsoft and Saudi Aramco \u2013 exceeds the GDP of every single country in Africa and Latin America combined. That\u2019s 87 countries: virtually everything bought, sold, consumed produced and dreamed up by two billion people in a whole year.<\/p>\n The charity also reported that, within a decade, the world will probably see its first trillionaire. A trillion is a number (it\u2019s one followed by 12 zeros) to numb the mind. Even Ronald Reagan \u2013 a friend and ally to the ultra-rich if there ever was one \u2013 could not wrap his head around it. \u201cA few weeks ago I called such a figure, a trillion dollars, incomprehensible, and I\u2019ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is,\u201d he said in 1981 when talking about the US national debt. \u201cAnd the best I could come up with is that if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only four inches high, you\u2019d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the fight for a balanced economy and healthier democracy, the increasing power of the ultra-rich is a calamity we cannot afford To celebrate the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Oxfam releases a study of how much of the world\u2019s wealth the ultra-rich own. This year\u2019s was a doozy. The five richest men … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}