Facts & Figures
Quote Gallery
Contents
Health
The Overclass
Up Against It
Economics
Technology
Opinion
Book Reviews
Newswatch
Modest Proposals
Experts
Calendar
Resources
Links
What's New?
Who We Are
| Tell your friends about this page! |
The Age of Inequality
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
HERE'S THE LATEST
evidence of the startling growth of income and wealth inequality, in the United States
and around the world:
The Washington Post reports on the development of a new innovation in healthcare
delivery: "boutique" or "concierge" coverage for the
world's super-elite.
Leading medical providers like the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore are establishing special programs to give platinum service to
the well-heeled. Depending on the program, the super-rich customers may
receive massages and sauna time along with their physical, house calls,
and step-to-the-front-of-the-line service in testing facilities.
Using these services are a worldwide elite class of business executive and
royalty — the "winners" in a system of corporate globalization
that is generating morally repugnant economic disparities.
Here are some other measures of the gains of the wealthy:
Even in the United States — the nation that is supposed to be the biggest
winner from globalization — the average person has watched skyrocketing
executive compensation and wealth accumulation, but has not been able to
climb even a few steps up the economic ladder. Average real wages in the
United States are at or below the wage rate of 1973.
to 2000.
result of the tax bill enacted into law earlier this year. According to
Citizens for Tax Justice, corporate taxes will plummet to only 1.3 percent
of U.S. gross domestic product this year, the lowest since fiscal 1983,
and the second lowest level in the last 60 years.
Meanwhile, poverty remains pervasive in both the United States and around
the world.
The Institute for Policy Studies has sought to put these disparities into
perspective. The 497 billionaires in 2001 registered a combined wealth of
$1.54 trillion, according to IPS, well over the combined gross national
products of all the nations of sub-Saharan Africa ($929.3 billion) or those
of the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and North Africa ($1.34 trillion).
"This collective wealth of the 497 is also greater than the combined
incomes of the poorest half of humanity," IPS concludes.
poverty-level wages, according to the Economics Policy Institute.
because their parents are unable to afford school fees.
families lack access to clean drinking water.
It's not very easy to wrap one's mind around the inhumanity of these numbers.
That is why it is so important to highlight anecdotes that put the problem
in focus: the juxtaposition of concierge healthcare with the more than 40
million people in the United States who have no health insurance coverage
at all, the contrast between the boutique care and the more than a million
children dying each year because they don't have clean water to drink.
Sometimes, we need to recognize obscene social arrangements for what they
are, and demand something different.
###
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor.
They are co-authors of the book Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Common Courage Press, 1999).