There is little doubt that if Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today--and he would be 85 years old--he would be at the forefront of decrying the class warfare that has reached levels that even he could not have imagined during his short lifetime. He once said that what we "are saying that something is wrong ... with capitalism.... There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children."
And he would have woken up to this startling fact: the richest 1% of people throughout the globe control 48% of the planet's wealth, leaving the other 52% for the other 99% of humanity.
Or put another way: 80 people worth had a total net worth of 1.9 trillion dollar, which is equal to the wealth of 3.5 billion people at the bottom 50 percent of the world's population.
Oxfam lays out these facts in a report today. Oxfam uses data compiled by Credit Suisse in updated reports from the one I wrote about in 2011.
If this trend continues:
...the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years,...
with the wealth share of the top 1% exceeding 50% by 2016.
The most interesting this in the report, from my point of view, was an analysis of the extreme wealth made by a few people profiting from drugs and healthcare--profits that were enhanced by the Affordable Care Act, which handed to the insurance and drug industries tens of billions of dollars in new profits:
Between 2013 and 2014 billionaires listed as having interests and activities in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors saw the biggest increase in their collective wealth. Twenty-nine individuals joined the ranks of the billionaires between March 2013 and March 2014 (five dropped off the list), increasing the total number from 66 billionaires to 90, in 2014 making up 5% of the total billionaires on the list. The collective wealth of billionaires with interests in this sector increased from $170bn to $250bn, a 47% increase and the largest percentage increase in wealth of the different sectors on the Forbes list.
There is little doubt in my mind that if King were alive during the recent healthcare debate he would have lent his voice to the movement to enact "Medicare for All", understanding that anything short of a single-payer system would simply enrich a few people and force more people to pay immoral prices for the right to health care.