The ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while one 99 % of humanity has seen its income fall, denounces a report published this Monday by the international organization for the fight against poverty Oxfam.
Oxfam , based in Nairobi (Kenya), has released the study on the occasion of the celebration between today and 15 of January of the Davos Agenda of the World Economic Forum, which takes place virtually before a possible face-to-face event in Switzerland next June.
The entity criticizes that the top ten fortunes went from 700,000 million dollars to add about 1.5 billion during the almost two years of pandemic, according to data obtained from various sources, including the World Bank.
According to “Forbes” magazine, people The richest they were, as of 30 November 2021, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffet, who saw their capital increase by more from 821,000 million dollars since March 2020.
The set of global millionaires has increased their fortune by about 5 billion dollars, the largest increase recorded, points out the NGO in its report “Inequality kills”.
At the same time that ” a millionaire was created every 26 hours”, a 99 % of humanity became impoverished and 160 millions more people fell into poverty, he points out.
Oxfam states that economic and social inequality contributes to the deaths of “at least 21,000 people each day, or one every four seconds”, due to lack of access to healthcare, being exposed to gender-based violence, hunger or the climate crisis.
Setback in equality
The NGO also specifies that the pandemic has caused women to lose some 800,000 million dollars in revenue in 2020, with 13 million fewer female employees. It is estimated that 252 alone earn more than a billion women in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, he maintains.
The organization led by the Colombian Gabriela Bucher recalls that the pandemic has harmed people from ethnic minorities more, such as citizens of Bangladeshi origin in the United Kingdom, who have a five times higher risk of dying of covid than their white neighbors.
Furthermore, blacks in Brazil have 1.5 times more risk of dying from the disease, while 3.4 million African-Americans “would be alive if their life expectancy were the same as that of whites”.
The NGO also denounces that, for the first time in years, the inequality gap between countries is expected to increase, due in part to the insufficient support that rich states provided to the poor during the pandemic.
Oxfam points out that, despite the high cost of combating the virus, the governments of developed countries have not raised taxes on high incomes and instead have kept public goods such as vaccine-related technology in the private sector and encouraged business monopolies.
Fiscal proposals
The organization, which recognizes positive signs from the United States and China in combating this inequality, asks the executives who “impose taxes on profits accumulated during the pandemic”.
Proposes that these tax revenues be invested in universal public health and social security, as well as in the fight against climate change and racism and the prevention of gender violence.
Oxfam also calls for the elimination of laws that undermine the right of workers to organize to defend their interests through unions and through strikes, as well as increasing their protection n.
Governments of rich countries must also relax intellectual property regulations so that more States can manufacture vaccines, he indicates.
“There is no shortage of money”, as has been seen with the millions released to fight the pandemic, Bucher declares in a statement.
“What there is is a shortage of the courage and imagination that are needed to be freed from the failed and deadly straitjacket of extreme neoliberalism”, maintained the activist, who urged the rulers to listen to the citizen movements that ask for justice and equality.
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