Raffique Shah - The super rich vs. the wretched

[RussBLib]

from Trinidad-Tobago

Russia now has 25 billionaires, trailing only the USA and Germany in members of this ultra-exclusive club...

Russia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Or let me re-phrase that: it's a country with a large number of poor people, tens of millions of whom are literally starving. To compound the woes of the poor in Russia, that country's climate is brutal, more so to those who work to produce the oil-wealth that spawns its millionaires and billionaires. It's true that their lot was probably worse under communism and the existence of the Soviet Union. But it's also true that the mass of the people have not benefited one rouble from the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, only the innovative, the unscrupulous and the mafia have seen a better life after that vast country was supposed to have been delivered from the evils of communism.

...take the Waltons, five of whom own the mega-chain-retailer Wal-Mart, and are together worth US$100 billion, the true story of why the rich-poor gap is widening can be easily understood. That they (Alice, Helen, Jim, John and S Robson) are the focus of some attention in this year's presidential campaign, suggests all is not kosher with this giant-of-a-company. John Kerry has hammered Wal-Mart for paying "abysmally low wages" to its tens of thousands of employees. Dick Cheney has praised its "spirit of enterprise, fair dealing and integrity". What is the truth about this family built business that, by the year 2000, had overtaken General Motors in worth, and is richer than Switzerland?

Wal-Mart opens an average of two new stores every week somewhere in the world, and it buys up around US$1 billion in real estate at the same pace. Yet, in America, where the Waltons started out in the 1950s, and where it employs over 600,000 persons, the latter cannot afford to buy many products they sell because they are paid dog-low wages. More than half its staff cannot afford to be part of the company's health insurance plan. The bulk of them are paid minimum wages, there is nothing like "overtime", and the mighty Waltons are known for encouraging their employees to apply for food stamps and welfare. Most take a second job anyway, since they can barely afford to survive on their wages.

Skip halfway across the world to Dubai...

Any wonder that social scientists are predicting a global uprising by the dispossessed long before global warming takes its toll on humanity? And lest we think we are insulated, ours is not too different a society. Nebulous talk about social equity remains talk for those who seem to have been born to "ketch-arse" until they die. What the Forbes magazine list brings home to us in a way its editors never intended is that the opulence of the few at the expense of the abject poverty of the many can lead us in only one direction. Before we know it, the wretched of the earth, like the biblical Barbarians, will be battering the fortified walls of the super-rich, and even the not-so-rich, to wreak the kind of destruction that could take us back into the Dark Age long before we see signs of the Ice Age.

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=40033148