The richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half the world's wealth, according to a new study released by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University. The study's authors say their work is the most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken. They found the richest 1 percent of adults owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 percent of the world's total. In contrast, the assets of half of the world's adult population account for barely 1 percent of global wealth.These are powerful statistics, especially when viewed through the haze of how citizens in the US use the planet's natural resources to provide the infrastructure necessary to maintain such a dysfunctional unsustainable lifestyle. The nature of this economic disparity is rooted in the acceptance of three fundamental flaws in the basic philosophical principles that form the base for the US. Each of these alone would be sufficient to demonstrate the insanity of the attempts to keep it functioning, yet the irrational faith the public has in living these lies, further erodes the capacity of the earth to sustain life.
<>"It reflects the extreme nature of inequality around the world," one of the study's authors, New York University Professor Edward Wolff, told OneWorld. "Yes, we are richer than Africa and Latin America and most of Asia, but how much richer is what hadn't really been established until our study came out," Wolff added. According to the report, the average American's wealth amounted to $144,000 in the year 2000, more than 100 times higher than the average Indian or Indonesian, whose assets totaled $1,100 and $1,400, respectively. The study defined wealth as physical and financial assets--like personal savings and home, land, and stock ownership--less debts. Besides the United States, only Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Israel showed average personal wealth of more than $50,000.
The most egregious of these flaws is that the economy is predicated on forcing US citizens to pay for basic life sustaining resources. All human beings require earth resources to effectively function in the environment of the planet. The capitalistic system demands that these resources be marketed rather than provided, although the planet itself provides. In essence, some humans beings, who have no direct connection to the process of extracting the resources and the humans using them to nurture their physiological needs, have inserted themselves into the flow, diverting not only resources, but also increasing the destructive processes of waste, toxicity, and unsustainability, as well as forcing an economic rentier taking from this. It is the ultimate in selfish greed. And yet no one complains, because everyone has faith that this is the only way to do it. No one questions the authority of why this must be so. No one challenges the flawed principles that are used to frame the constructs that allow immense human suffering to be increase in direct proportion to the apparent virtual increase in non-existent values. No one can eat money, or gold, or houses, or cars; no one can drink oil, or vinegars, or alkalais, etc. No, only food and water are useful, and in most of the populations of the planet, access to these essentials for life are free. But not here in the US, nope, we can't have that, because otherwise our unnecessary and earth destroying economic system would collapse.
The second flaw is one that libertarians find particularly attractive to promote. At the core of their demands for hierarchical wealth accumulation and private property, is the idea that a human being owns their personhood. While this is attractive, and justifies an incredible array of behaviors, all of which lead to the destruction of the planet at the expense of selfish affluence, the flaw is in the necessary separation of humans from all other species of life. The ownership principle must accept a distinct qualitative and quantitative difference between human dna and that of all other species, so that the hierarchical construct provides the argument that human consciousness is something authoritative and deserving. This of course must deny the functional necessary dependence of humans on other species to survive, including the species within their own physical bodies, without which humans could not survive. We cannot casually toss of the mantle of dependent interconnectedness in order to justify extracting virtual value from exploiting the earth and even other humans. Yet onward it goes, demanding more and more obedience and subservience of the masses of all species, including humans, to satisfy the greed and selfish behavior of those who have the audacity to suggest they are superior to others and deserve the plentitude of resources they take from everything else.
Takings are part of the third flaw, in that profit is nothing other than taking something for nothing. It is a form of theft, stealing value from others, from the earth, using portions of that profit to purchase the labor of some for security to increase the takings. The staunchest advocates for private property (owning parts of the earth) must take from others to sustain their way of life. No matter how they disguise it, they are nothing other than theives of the wellbeing, despoilers of the common good, and damagers of the planet. Profit is theft of labor and utility, theft of resources, generated on the toxification of environments, and so far forth. Profit is a legal construct that protects this form of robbery within the system, in order to maintain the system, designed solely to protect itself even up to the point of destroying the earth rather than acknowledge its own flaws and failures. We citizens in the US must begin to reject the authority of a system that allows some to steal so much from us and from the earth. We must reject, condemn, deny, and throw out the infrastructural constructs that allow some to claim they are better than others in order to use more of the planet for their own desires, and therefore increase planet wide suffering.
