Activist’s call to ‘abolish billionaires’

Rigged economies are funneling wealth to a rich elite who are riding out the pandemic in luxury, while those on the frontline of the pandemic… are struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table

The global Fight Inequality Alliance together with Swiss group Campax staged a video projection onto the empty conference center in Davos where the World Economic Forum (WEF) usually meets this week to call for billionaires to be abolished.

As the WEF moves online this week for its ‘Davos Agenda’ meetings, activists say that real solutions to inequality cannot come from the Davos elite, but are coming from frontline activists and protesters around the world.

“Davos is a symbol of a failed era,” said Jenny Ricks, of the Fight Inequality Alliance, which—along with the local Swiss group Campax—organized the isolated protest in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.

While the traditional, lavish summit in Davos is being conducted largely online this year due to Covid-19 health restrictions, critics said the gathering of global elites is not where the world should look for just solutions.

The weekend action, said Ricks, “shows us where real change will come from—people on the frontlines of inequality, not the 1% who benefit from the current system. It is time to abolish billionaires.

The projection rejected WEF’s ‘Great Reset of Capitalism’ and instead brandished the call to Abolish Billionaires on the conference center in response to reports that the richest Americans’ wealth has grown by over $1 trillion since the pandemic started, while millions of people experience crisis levels of hunger and unemployment.

The Great Reset of Capitalism is a proposal by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to rebuild the economy sustainably following the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was unveiled in May 2020 by the United Kingdom’s Prince Charles and WEF director Klaus Schwab, who say to improve capitalism by making investments more geared toward mutual progress and focusing more on environmental initiatives.

According to a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), the collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires increased by over $1 trillion since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The total net worth of the nation’s 651 billionaires rose from $2.95 trillion on March 18—the rough start of the pandemic shutdowns—to $4.01 trillion on Dec. 7, a leap of 36 percent. 

Combined, just the top 10 billionaires are now worth more than $1 trillion.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $192.3 billion; Elon Musk, who created PayPal, electric car maker Tesla and SpaceX, is worth $182.9 billion; Europe’s richest man Bernard Arnault is worth $148.4 billion; Microsoft founder Bill Gates is worth $122.0 billion; and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is worth $99.8 billion.

Chinese billionaire Zhong Shanshan is worth $89.2 billion; Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway owns over 60 companies including Geico insurance, Duracell, Dairy Queen Restaurant, and is worth $89.1 billion; Oracle founder Larry Ellison is worth $86.5 billion; Google co-founder Larry Page is worth 82.6 billion; and Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambaniis worth 81.8 billion.

The 26 richest people on earth in 2018 had the same net worth as the poorest half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people.

There are more than two thousand billionaires in the world today and they have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population, according to Oxfam.

The annual Global Protest to #FightInequality will see protests in over 30 countries from Mexico to India to the UK to South Africa. It will put forward people’s demands and vision for a post-Covid future, led by the people at the frontlines of inequality.

Members of the Alliance are mobilizing collectively to make the voices of people on the frontlines of inequality heard and demand structural changes to fight inequality.

“Discredited assumptions about deregulation and globalization have dictated policy over the last four decades,” said Lisa McCormick, a progressive Democrat who has challenged government officials to “Reverse Reaganomics.”

“Trickle down economics does not work,” said McCormick. “The only sensible action at this point is to recognize tax cuts for the rich have reduced government revenue and failed to stimulate the creation of better jobs, which simply do not exists after 40 years. There is ample empirical evidence showing that New Deal and Great Society programs resulted in a large, prosperous and growing middle class, for almost 50 years so we would be crazy not to reverse Reaganomics and get America back on track.”

“The Great Reset is merely the latest edition of this gilded tradition, barely distinguishable from earlier Davos Big Ideas,” said Naomi Klien, in remarks representative of the proposal’s contemptuous dismissal from the left.

Schwab argues that the world economy is in deep trouble and the situation is made a lot worse by such factors as the pandemic’s devastating effects on global society, the unfolding technological revolution, and the consequences of climate change.

Schwab demands that “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

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