Look at how the 1% are doing right now, and tell me the system isn’t rigged

The Guardian

The world’s super-rich have amassed so much wealth since the pandemic that even a Tory minister can see something is amiss. (...)

The breakdown of these figures exposes how on a global basis, extreme wealth is accumulated not by innovating or increasing production, but by taking advantage of rising prices and exploiting labour. In this effort, wealthy people are enabled by lack of regulation and taxation. The result is a bonanza of plunder with no sheriff in town.

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This has been happening for a while, but the pandemic accelerated the trend. Rich people benefited from everything – every positive intervention from the state and negative impact of the crisis somehow still ended up increasing their wealth. (...)

The obscenity of the system is made possible by the dramatically diminished bargaining power of labour. Weak labour is cheap labour. More lucratively, the world’s workers can increasingly be mobilised according to employers’ precise needs, so not a penny is wasted. (...)

But it is successful tax avoidance that is the strongest pillar propping up global inequality, and its dismantling would be the quickest solution. There is little chance of that happening soon. Tax regimes, like much of the conventional economic wisdom about the benefits of wealth creation to all, are increasingly out of step with not only the needs of poor people, but with what is required for the health of our economies. (...)

None of this has happened by accident, according to Peter Goodman, the author of Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World. “It’s not an accident,” he tells me, “that our economies have concentrated greater wealth in fewer hands. Quite simply, wealthy people have used their wealth to purchase democracy, to warp democracy in their own interests. They’ve done that through a global template that involves lowering taxes, privatising formerly public attempts to deal with common problems, liquidating the spending that went into things like social services, and then putting that money into their own pockets.” (...)

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Tags: #rich #super-rich #inequality #poverty #tax_avoidance #democracy #lobby #privatisation #tax_regime #labour