The membership in this elite club has surpassed pre 2007 levels the report says and confirms how Rahm Emmanuel's advice, that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste has been taken to heart. The global population of HNWI’s increased 8.3% to 10.9 million with their combined wealth also increasing 9.3% from 2009 to 2010. The total wealth of the HNWI’s now stands at $42.7 trillion. The global population of what the report refers to as Ultra-HNWIs grew by “10.2% in 2010 and its wealth by 11.5%.”
Three countries the U.S., Japan and Germany, accounted for 53.0% of the world’s HNWIs. Most of these parasitical characters live in the US as it is the safest place to stash wealth; 3.1 million of them, 28.6% of the global total reside there.
Reflecting the global changes that have occurred over the last 25 years, the Asia-Pacific HNWIs’ wealth at $10.8 trillion, now exceeds the $10.2 trillion of their European counterparts. “Asia-Pacific is now the second largest region for both HNWI wealth and population, second only to North America.” The report adds.
The report defines HNWI’s as those having investable assets of $1 million or more excluding “primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables.” And Ultra HNWI’s as having investable assets of $30 million or more excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables.
Imagine having $30 million in spare cash outside of your home and other necessities; money you can simply play with. There is no need to make a comparison here to the miserable conditions that billions of people throughout the world live in. This blog has numerous examples of it. A prerequisite for the increase in wealth of these social wasters is the increasing poverty of the vast majority of the rest of us. Another by-product of this rapacious struggle for capital accumulation is the destruction of the natural world, the environmental destruction we see and hear about on a daily basis.
It is a confirmation of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist system of production and its inherently destructive nature. As a blog pointed out earlier with regards to Greece; all the pre-conditions for a revolutionary situation are emerging. The capitalist class is finding that it cannot continue to rule in the old way, the working class cannot continue to be ruled in the same way and the class polarization is increasing. We see also that significant divisions are opening up within the capitalist class themselves. The dominant European bourgeois are divided over the bombing of Libya and its attempts to install a pliant client regime in that country.
And tensions between the EU and the US have also increased as the US tongue lashing of the EU for not getting its act together by strengthening NATO and placing more emphasis on its own defense reveals. Forced to increase attacks on its own working class, the US bourgeois recognizes the potential for social explosion at home and is stretched to the limits internationally. The US is mired in debt throughout all sectors of the economy, both its economic and political systems are dysfunctional. Fully 28% of the registered voters refuse to identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats, members of the two capitalist parties that have a monopoly over US political life. Millions more have simply opted out of electoral politics altogether.
This global dynamic that is emerging and and various stages cannot exist forever. Just as general strike after general strike must at some point come to a head. A general strike of any significance inevitably places the question of state power on the table and this is the crux of the matter; which class rules.
What an indictment of capitalism that alongside this increased concentration of wealth 50 percent of the world’s children live in poverty and Six million of them die of hunger every year. The emphasis on the "War on Terror" and the "War on Drugs" is simply to obscure the fact that what is need is a "War on Capitalism" a "War on the Market". The capitalist system of production is the greatest terror of all.
This is the crisis that faces the working classes of the world today, the question of political leadership. At some point the bourgeois will exert its right to govern, in some cases with a vengeance. If there is a certain equilibrium between the classes, the working class unable to take power due to its lack of political leadership and the capitalist class too weak to rule through its preferred “democratic” means then the military will be called on to make things right. Capital must have "equilibrium" to survive.
The building of a global workers’ movement with a leadership that possesses the will, program and strategy to take the movement that one important step further-----the elimination of the rotten system that perpetuates this violence-----is not only the historical task that is before us it is what is necessary for the future of this planet and life as we know it.
1 comment:
I'll enlarge a little. 3.1 million millionaires make up 2.5% of the nation's households, and they probably own about $25 to $30 trillion. The top one percent own 37% of all U.S. wealth, or $20 trillion, the top 10% own 70% of everything, or $38 trillion. This is the U.S. So, if the report says the total wealth, financial assets of this group, HNWI people, is $42 trillion, then most of it resides in the U.S.A. Safe to say around 2/3rds in the U.S. All these numbers just make the head swim. Take the poorest 2 out of 8 Americans -- you'll have two people with no wealth, no savings at all. Take the next 1 out of 8 and you have a person with access to less than $12,000 in savings. Take the wealth of the top 400, the Forbes 400, you have equal to the wealth of the bottom half of the U.S. families, and their income is on average $334 million a year, their average wealth is something like $1.3 billion each. It just goes on and on, it makes me sick. Rick Wolfe wrote about these HNWI last year in Dollars and Sense magazine. We could tax their wealth, make public jobs, employ everyone who wants to work, increase the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit -- you should read my blog, on the first paragraph I reference an essay that spells out all these proposals, http://benL8.blogspot.com -- Thanks for the news, the rich get reichier, the reich gets richer.and those who have no job can lament, or organize the next stage of the reformation - tax wealth.
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