Posted on 12/05/2010 10:41:17 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Today global wealth is more highly concentrated in the hands of the elite than it ever has been at any other point in modern history. Once upon a time, the vast majority of the people in the world knew how to grow their own food, raise their own animals and take care of themselves. There weren't many that were fabulously wealthy, but there was a quiet dignity in having land you could call your own or in having a skill that you could turn into a business. Sadly, over the past several decades an increasingly growing percentage of agricultural land has been gobbled up by big corporations and by corrupt governments. Hundreds of millions of people have been pushed off their land and into highly concentrated urban areas. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly difficult to start a business of your own as monolithic global corporations have come to dominate nearly every sector of the world economy. So more people than ever around the world are forced to work for "the system" just to make a living. At the same time, those at the very top of the food chain (the elite) have spent decades rigging the system to ensure that increasing amounts of wealth will continue to flow into their pockets. So now in 2010 we have a global system where a few elitists at the top are insanely wealthy while about half the people living on earth are wretchedly poor.
There are very few nations around the world that have not been almost entirely plundered by the global elite. When the elite speak of "investing" in poor countries, what they really mean is taking control of the land, water, oil and other natural resources. In dozens of nations around the world today, big global corporations are stripping fabulous amounts of wealth out of the ground even as the vast majority of the citizens of those nations continue to live in abject poverty. Meanwhile, the top politicians in those nations are given huge bribes to go along with the plundering.
So what we have in 2010 is a world that is dominated by a very small handful of ultra-wealthy elitists that own an almost unbelievable amount of real assets, a larger group of "middle managers" that run the system for the global elite (and are rewarded very handsomely for doing so), hundreds of millions of people who actually do the work required by the system, and several billion "useless eaters" that the global elite don't really need and that they don't really have much use for.
The system was not ever designed to lift up the poor. Nor was it ever designed to promote "free enterprise" and "competition". Rather, the elite intend to funnel all wealth to themselves and to have the rest of us enslaved either to debt or to poverty.
The following are 20 statistics that prove that the wealth of the world is increasingly being funneled into the hands of the global elite, leaving most of the rest of the world wretchedly poor and miserable....
#1 According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the number of "least developed countries" has doubled over the past 40 years.
#2 "Least developed countries" spent 9 billion dollars on food imports in 2002. By 2008, that number had risen to 23 billion dollars.
#3 Average income per person in the poorest countries on the continent of Africa has fallen by one-fourth over the past twenty years.
#4 Bill Gates has a net worth of somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars. That means that there are approximately 140 different nations that have a yearly GDP which is smaller than the amount of money Bill Gates has.
#5 A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research discovered that the bottom half of the world population owns approximately 1 percent of all global wealth.
#6 Approximately 1 billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry each night.
#7 The wealthiest 2 percent own more than half of all global household assets.
#8 It is estimated that over 80 percent of the world's population lives in countries where the income gap between the rich and the poor is widening.
#9 Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death and three-quarters of them are children under the age of 5.
#10 According to Gallup, 33 percent of the people on the globe say that they do not have enough money for food.
#11 As you read this, there are 2.6 billion people around the world that lack basic sanitation.
#12 According to the most recent "Global Wealth Report" by Credit Suisse, the wealthiest 0.5% control over 35% of the wealth of the world.
#13 More than 3 billion people, close to half the world's population, live on less than 2 dollar a day.
#14 CNN founder Ted Turner is the largest private landowner in the United States. Today, Turner owns approximately two million acres. That is an amount greater than the land masses of the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Turner also advocates restricting U.S. couples to 2 or fewer children to control population growth.
#15 There are 400 million children in the world today that have no access to safe water.
#16 Approximately 28 percent of all children in developing countries are considered to be underweight or have had their growth stunted as a result of malnutrition.
#17 It is estimated that the United States owns approximately 25 percent of the total wealth of the world.
#18 It is estimated that the entire continent of Africa owns approximately 1 percent of the total wealth of the world.
#19 In 2008, approximately 9 million children died before they reached their fifth birthdays. Approximately a third of all of these deaths was due either directly or indirectly to lack of food.
#20 The most famous banking family in the world, the Rothschilds, has accumulated mountains of wealth while much of the rest of the world has been trapped in poverty. The following is what Wikipedia has to say about Rothschild family wealth....
It has been argued that during the 19th century, the family possessed by far the largest private fortune in the world, and by far the largest fortune in modern history.
Nobody seems to know exactly how much the Rothschilds are worth today. They dominate the banking establishments of England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other nations. It was estimated that they were worth billions back in the mid-1800s. What the total wealth of the family is today is surely an amount that is almost unimaginable, but nobody knows for sure.
Meanwhile, billions of people around the globe are wondering where their next meal is going to come from.
At this point, many readers will want to start arguing about how horrible capitalism is and about how wonderful socialism and communism are.
But capitalism is not the problem and as we have seen countless times over the past several decades, government ownership of business is not the solution to anything.
What we have in the world today is not capitalism. Rather, it more closely resembles "feudalism" than anything else. The elite are "monopoly men" who use their unbelievable wealth and power to dominate the rest of us. In fact, it was John D. Rockefeller who once said that "competition is sin".
It would be great if we lived in a world where those living in poverty were encouraged to start owning land, to create businesses and to build better lives for themselves.
But instead, things are going the other way. Wealth is becoming more concentrated in the hands of the elite, and the middle class is starting to be wiped out even in prosperous nations such as the United States.
It turns out that the global elite have decided that they don't really need so many expensive American "worker bees" after all and they have been moving thousands of factories and millions of jobs overseas. Meanwhile the American people are so distracted watching Dancing with the Stars, Lady Gaga and their favorite sports teams that they don't even realize what is going on.
There is no guarantee that America will be prosperous forever. Today, a record number of Americans are already living in poverty. Today, a record number of Americans are on food stamps. The median household income went down last year and it went down the year before that too.
So wake up. America is being integrated into a world economic system that is dominated and controlled by the insanely wealthy elite. They don't care that you have to pay the mortgage or that you intend to send your kids to college. Mostly what they care about is making as much money for themselves as they can.
Greed is running rampant around the globe, and the world is becoming a very cold place. Unfortunately, unless something really dramatic happens, the rich are just going to continue to get richer and the poor are just going to continue to get poorer.
“Today global wealth is more highly concentrated in the hands of the elite than it ever has been at any other point in modern history.”
False.
” Once upon a time, the vast majority of the people in the world knew how to grow their own food, raise their own animals and take care of themselves.”
Yeah, they were called peasants.
“There weren’t many that were fabulously wealthy, but there was a quiet dignity in having land you could call your own or in having a skill that you could turn into a business.”
Is there less ‘quiet dignity’ in having indoor plumbing, electricity and a nice home in suburbia?
“Nobody seems to know exactly how much the Rothschilds are worth today. They dominate the banking establishments of England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other nations. It was estimated that they were worth billions back in the mid-1800s. What the total wealth of the family is today is surely an amount that is almost unimaginable, but nobody knows for sure.”
Baloney. The Forbes 400 list is a good estimate of the world’s richest. Who cares about the Rothchilds, there are hundreds of other billioniares out there.
“The following are 20 statistics that prove that the wealth of the world is increasingly being funneled into the hands of the global elite, leaving most of the rest of the world wretchedly poor and miserable.... “
More baloney. Wealthy people do not create poverty, in fact the opposite is true.
“#5 A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research discovered that the bottom half of the world population owns approximately 1 percent of all global wealth. “
Actually, not very meaningful. A portion of the population has zero net savings and thus zero net wealth, so they have infinitely less saved than the rest of us. Only a few accumulate large wealth. This has not been different in the past.
And so it goes. Yes, there is a gap between rich and poor, but the increase in wealth does not by itself create poverty and so the amount of money Ted Turner or Bill Gates has is not very meaningful in discussions of the 2-3 billion in the world who are truly and abjectly in poverty.
And if it were true, what would we do about it? What HAVE we done yet?
One of the few things the author has to say that means anything worthwhile. So much of the article is the same class warfare the left engages in 100% of the time.
People are poor and starving and it's the fault of the wealthy elite - so much B.S. I don't owe the poor of the world a single cent except that which I choose to give of my own free will and I have a moral obligation to do that but I refuse to assign my moral obligations to any other living soul.
All part of the New World Order plan, our politicians make unfair trade agreements where the other countries can tax our products but we can’t tax theirs while making rules/regulations/taxes so bad companies want to leave and flood the country with illegal aliens. Next regulate the food/small farms. The middle class threat gets destroyed and it’s so much easier for them to bring about a global government.
I wonder if the unfair free trade globalist’s among us will one day regret the loss of our country for a few pieces of gold.
Wow.
Remember all this when you pay the new rate of 29.9% on your bank Visa card
a rate that used to be highly illegal
but is illegal no longer.
I wonder why ...
During the Reagan years, top CEO salaries were about 40 times that of their low level workers, and they were very comfortable. At the time of our recent collapse the ratio had skyrocketed to from 400 times to 1,000 times. Thus when Countrywide Financial collapsed, the CEO’s salary for 2007 and 2008 had been $142 million and $103 million. Lehman Brothers CEO in the same period was $52 million and increased to $72 million before being rejected for rescue. [Source: Forbes CEO Compensation, 5/3/07, and 4/30/08. If you go there check out what some of the others were earning, for example big Pharma companies.] McCain was right about greed.
And the #1 method being used to enable this is the whole “global warming” scam.
I believe that Al Gore was slated to become the first “Green” billionaire from “Cap and Trade.”
Mark
All I can think of is...God will take care of it...eventually.
Because in the 1980’s Democrats reinstated Usury that’s why.
RE: I don’t mean to be cavalier in saying this, but what you have posted describes an economic system called Capitalism.
Mark Levin, on his show last Friday, gave a distinction between Adam Smith’s description of MARKET BASED CAPITALISM and what we know today as CRONY CAPITALISM.
The latter is an allegedly capitalist economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between businesspeople and government officials. It may be exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, and so forth.
Crony capitalism is believed to arise when political cronyism spills over into the business world; self-serving friendships and family ties between businessmen and the government influence the economy and society to the extent that it corrupts public-serving economic and political ideals.
Which one of the two do you think we have that is the stronger force in the world today?
However, in at least one sense, some of the very wealthy ARE getting more wealthy at the expense of the poor and want to eliminate the middle class. Those people (liberals) are pushing cap and trade.
However, in at least one sense, some of the very wealthy ARE getting more wealthy at the expense of the poor and want to eliminate the middle class. Those people (liberals) are pushing cap and trade.
I hear what you are saying and I agree that the past couple years have been a huge blow to honest capitalism, but Bill Gates didn’t get rich off crony capitalism. He and most other very wealthy people (other than Al Gore) got rich off of innovation. Even GE, which is notorious for crony capitalism recently, completely retooled itself in the late 70s and 80s (remember “Neutron Jack”?).
Government meddling is causing crony capitalism. The answer is to get rid of government meddling and let the chips fall where they may.
Who was it who said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
You’re right; let me give you a few examples:
(A) Joe listens to the Glen Beck program and is concerned about the future of certain financial institutions. He decides a wise investment would be to short these institutions.
Beck’s forcast comes true, but instead of allowing the stocks to drop, Joe to become wealth, and Fred the CEO who holds millions of these shares to be wiped out the laws are changed to restrict shorting.
(B) Jim is the CEO of Localbank X. He competes head to head with a branch of Bank of USSA in his town of 50,000. Unlike Bank of USSA, Jim has never made a practice of making 80/20, zero down, or interest only mortgage loans in the inner city or the suburbs of California. Bank of USSA has. The storm hits and instead of letting the Bank of USSA fail and Localbank X to prosper, the government bails out Bank of USSA thereby protecting the personal wealth of it’s well connected PAC contributing executives.
And the reason is? GOVERNMENT. Example: All the starving people in Zimbabwe, formerly a food-growing paradise, now with a starving population directly attributable to its socialist president.
Like PJ says, people don't just starve, people are starved.
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