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Common Dreams reports
The world's richest 1 percent now own more wealth than [the remaining] 99 percent combined. This finding comes from Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report for 2015, [redirects to a PDF] released last week. Last year, Credit Suisse found the richest 1 percent of adults owned 48 percent of global wealth. According to the new report, the [richest] 1 percent now hold 50.4 percent of all the world's household wealth.
Credit Suisse's findings are in line with Oxfam's prediction that global wealth inequality is only becoming greater. Last January, we predicted that the richest 1 percent would capture more than half of all household wealth by 2016. It looks like our prediction was right, but that we were too conservative, since it has happened a year early. Alas, our forecast was confirmed, but it's nothing to celebrate.
When you look at the very top of the global wealth pyramid, the situation is much more alarming. When we first calculated in January 2014, the 85 richest individuals own more wealth than the poorest half of the planet. This trend has also worsened since that time. Last January, it was down to 80 people.
The implications of rising extreme wealth inequality are greatly worrying. The highly unbalanced concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer and fewer people impacts social stability within countries and threatens security on a global scale. It makes poverty reduction harder, threatens political inclusion, and compounds other inequalities.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Sunday October 25 2015, @08:31AM
Just how much more benefit can they possibly get? There really is nothing more, once you own a dozen huge sprawling mansions, a couple yachts, and some private jets. What more is there?
You can become a god.
I wasn't going to reply, but since you asked: What you need next is a great disaster. Let's start with importing a bunch of cheap foreign labor to prop up the local debt-based currencies. Next create strife, promote infighting, etc. When the bubble pops the people will fight amongst themselves. Always rationalize this with the delusional "climate change" and "carbon pollution" narratives so the evils seem necessary to fix the "overpopulation problem".
When there's enough strain on the system, have another world war. For the first time in human history we have the capability to reduce the entire civilization back to the stone age (minus the very top elite). After just a few generations the technological wonders of today will be on par with legends of sorcery. The elites who survived and secreted away the means to rebuild and advance our modern society will then emerge with what seems like god like powers to the newly primitive peoples of Earth.
What's interesting to me is the re-purposing of not-so advanced water screen displays [youtu.be] into the not-so-secret [youtube.com] cloud-projection technology. [youtube.com] With which one could actually appear to the people as a larger than life deity from on high. [archive.is]
Through continued the use of planned disasters elites can then keep the population reduced to what they see as manageable, and keep the technological level of the populace at non threatening levels. After all, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Hey, if you don't want to know, you shouldn't ask.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 25 2015, @09:30AM
DING DING DING DING DING! We have another winnning post! VortexCortex wins the internet today. Power. How much power is enough? Well - some of us want to be gods.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by iwoloschin on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:02PM
Uh, it's pretty much all or nothing. Those few elite folks can't maintain their standard of living by themselves. Like it or not, a single "elite" family has an enormous supply chain that is literally impossible to maintain without significant middle class labor. If the middle class gets blasted back into the stone age there's no way the elite are going to survive unscathed, even if they have doomsday bunkers that are equipped to last for decades or centuries.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 25 2015, @02:27PM
The middle class is being replaced with automation.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday October 26 2015, @05:03AM
I think that the elite don't (for the most part) have the forethought to see that. Most of the elite didn't get that way through intelligence, they got that way because they are sociopaths.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday October 25 2015, @07:58PM
For some reason, it sounds like you described the end times of the Roman Empire, but described a modern Western Civilization instead. Weren't they the Western civilization of their era?
Perhaps they couldn't project a deity in the sky with the tools they had at the time, but their demise did come about around the same time as the importation of slave labor, reducing the value of their citizens, they had numerous wars that stretched them thin and served to reduce enlistable population otherwise out of a job, and it lastly was in a steep decline around the same time of the heralding of an important new religion.
Well, we just had an article a few days back about rich people digging vaults. I look forward to seeing which one emerges as a god, so I know who to worship until they can be brought down, provided I don't manage to succumb to the zombie infection prior to the great opening of the vaults of our deity overlords. If we do survive, I make a good macguyver, so any sane people left are welcome to team up with me to bring down the false gods of the new era. Although it'd be just our luck if zombie gods emerged.