Michael Parenti | Common Dreams
18 Feb 2014
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.
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