I just came
across an article saying that 82% of the total world’s wealth is controlled by
10% of the population and bottom 50% of the world’s population owns 1% of the world’s
wealth. I am not going to write numbers here, that all of you can get on the
internet.
Just this
one study reveals so much about the ‘economies’ we are living in.
This simply
means that its just money that now runs the globe completely. Money owns power,
money owns resources, money owns governments and money owns religions. And its not
that people do not know this, the only shocking thing is the rate with which
rich people are accumulating more money and poor people are getting poorer. We
now have companies having valuations of trillions of dollars. Consumerism is on
its peak. We are buying products we do not need at all. Our needs have been
created by the companies in such a way that we did not even come to know that
there’s a lot of stuff in our houses which we never needed in the first place.
Capitalism,
communism, socialism etc. have all have failed to curb the rise of money just
from being a medium of exchange to ‘own everything papers. Poverty alleviation
has actually not been on agenda at all especially in democracies across the
world in last few decades. Yes, a few dictator driven countries have made some
rapid progress in creating welfare models for their people but I see no major democracy
making any such progress in last dew decades.
The
question is what are rich people going to do with their wealth? This is hoarding
of wealth must stop. There must be some limit to which one can accumulate
wealth. On one hand we see poverty, unemployment, economic slowdowns, job
layoffs and even countries going bankrupt and on the other hand we are seeing a
clear trend of more and more wealth accumulation by the richest. The system is
designed by purpose to suck money from masses and accumulation by the rich and
poor are just accumulating loans. Where is this money going after all?
These rich men
and corporations now own so much money that they are bigger than their
countries in terms of controlling the resources and power. With companies
breaking into trillion-dollar clubs, what they are upto? How can so much wealth
be accumulated? How can at a point of time a single organization have cash
reserve more that the cash reserve of the largest economy of the world?
The way the
technology companies are growing, investing in new technologies and creating
products without which we were living anyways, is creating a huge non-sensical
ambition among the people to be able to consume their products and at hefty
prices.
I belong to
that generation which has seen fixed lines telephones, initial mobile phones
with high call rates, cheap mobile call rates, mobile revolution, smart phones,
data in the smart phones and now the super smart phones. I think the world
could live happier with fixed line phones as well! Most of the people reading
this will not agree with me on this today but in the following blogs, I will
try to write more on this explaining my perspective of how. The thing I want to
explain is we have created needs which never existed for humans to live happily
and comfortably. And with organisations growing so big, they are now looking
for ways and means to build more such ‘unwanted needs’ to suck more money out
of the common people and keep getting richer with god knows what to do with so
much hoarding of wealth. They are destroying the environment, they are
destroying the cultures, they are destroying the traditions and pushing for
more than ever which in turn is destroying our lives. We would not want to accept
it ever, but we are under a system of modern slavery. Slavery of the rich.
Do you believe
we can end poverty on this earth? Well, 100 richest people have so much wealth
that they can end poverty across the globe 4 times! Yes, you heard that right. I
am not saying take away wealth of these 100 (which nobody in the world can touch
any way as these people are far more powerful than the governments, rather they
are the ones who drive the governments across) and distribute to the poor. But
with so many Nobel laureate economists around, can someone please find out how
can this current pattern of distribution of wealth can change to develop
everyone financially and not only the top 10% (they can’t or won’t do it either
as they are controlled too). We may say that more and more people are coming
out of poverty each year, but these classifications are again a function of
corporatisation of governments and the way various governments are handling the
poverty lines in their countries. And along with the basic definition of poverty
and people crossing that, the way the consumerism is rising, we are further
falling in the trap of consumerism induced slavery resulting into disguised
poverty where a person has all that he needs to survive and live happily but
thinks he is poor enough to not afford what he thinks he should afford and that
keeps him working like slave all through his/her life.
The simple
example is a few decades ago, income of one of the 2 (husband or wife) was
sufficient to support the family and sustain and live happily, now one cannot
survive without the income of both. What disaster this has done to the society
is unimaginable. Very conveniently the rich world coined a term ‘middle class’
who are basically the white-collar slavery class and nothing more.
All of us
who believe in democracy across the globe are fooling ourselves as your
government is for the rich, by the rich and of the rich! Everything is so well systematized
that we don’t even think on these lines ever and even these couple of pages to
a lot would sound foolish.
I will keep
writing on this subject. Keep articulating thoughts and keep accumulating data and
also keep thinking how to get out of this mess where you are talking against
the rich and the governments they control. The only way currently I can think
of is knowing what you actually need than what you think you need to live happily.
Signing
off!
Siddharth
