© Flickr/United Nations/Creative CommonsAn urban slum in Hanoi, Viet Nam.
The world's 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world's population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have
far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world's private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?
Hundreds of millions live in debt even in "affluent" countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes - and don't live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans - are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.
Comment: This 'poor people's protest movement' has its own TV channel and is led by this man:
Does he look like a 'working man of the people' to you?! Thaugsuban has a long history of corrupt and unethical behaviour.
He doesn't want to reform the government in the people's favor: he wants to 'reform' it back to the way things were before his kind lost out in the revolution.
This is not a 'people's revolution': it's a mob backed (and armed) by the military regime and the country's billionaires who detest Thaksin because he actually used his power and wealth to help ordinary Thais.
See also:
Strategy of Tension: Five injured by organized mob armed with guns and bombs trying to prevent election taking place in Thailand
A little history regarding Thailand: who is Abhisit Vejjajiva, the man behind the color revolution?