Six Weeks’ Paid Leave Opposed By People With Thirty-Three Weeks’ Paid Leave
By Andy Borowitz
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Obama’s proposal to give
workers six weeks of paid leave is meeting strong opposition from a
group of people who annually receive thirty-three weeks of paid leave.
Members of the group heard the President’s proposal on Tuesday
night, one of the few nights of the year when they are required to
report to their workplace.
The opponents of paid leave, who show up for work a hundred and
thirty-seven days per year and receive paid leave for the other two
hundred and twenty-eight, were baffled by other moments in the
President’s speech.
For example, they were confused by Obama’s challenge to try to
survive on a full-time job that pays fifteen thousand dollars, since
they all currently hold a part-time job that pays a hundred and
seventy-four thousand dollars.
Oxfam: Richest one percent set to control more wealth than the bottom 99 percent
By Andre Damon
The richest one percent of the world’s population will have more
wealth next year than the other 99 percent combined, according to a
report issued Monday by the Oxfam charity. The report shows that, far
from moderating or reversing, the pace at which the global financial
oligarchy is monopolizing society’s wealth is increasing.
The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest
people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of
the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it
was in 2009.
In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the
bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to
just 92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.
Oxfam timed the release of its report to coincide with the opening of
the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Some 1,700 private jets
are expected to descend on and around the resort town, bearing about
100 billionaires and over 2,000 corporate executives, celebrities,
central bankers and heads of state. They will be joined by a small army
of journalists.
US Secretary of State John Kerry will join French President François
Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, along with another 35 world
leaders.
Other participants will include Jack Ma, who made $25 billion in the
initial public offering of Alibaba last year, and Bill Gates, the
world’s richest man. Google’s Eric Schmidt, with a net worth of some $8
billion, will co-chair the forum. Some 4,500 Swiss military personnel
will be deployed to protect the 2,500 attendees.
The millionaires and billionaires assembled at Davos, to whom Oxfam
is appealing, constitute the very social layer whose obscene enrichment
is decried in the group’s report.
The growth of social inequality documented in the report is the
consequence of policies enacted by the ruling class in the aftermath of
the 2008 financial crisis, which a significant share of this year’s
Davos participants helped trigger. Governments responded to the collapse
of asset values and the insolvency of major banks by pumping some $12
trillion dollars into the financial markets by means of bank bailouts,
near-zero interest rates, and central bank money-printing (quantitative
easing).
This virtually free cash was used to drive up the world’s stock
markets and corporate profits to record highs. The same governments and
central banks pursued brutal austerity policies against the working
class, driving tens of millions into poverty.
The day the Oxfam report appeared, bankers and speculators around the
world were rubbing their hands in anticipation of an expansion of
quantitative easing by the European Central Bank at its policy-setting
meeting this week.
The Oxfam report notes that “2010 marks an inflection point in the
share of global wealth” going to the top one percent. This was also the
year that the US Federal Reserve’s money-printing operation was expanded
with the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing.
Oxfam also found, “In 2014, the richest 1 percent of people in the
world owned 48 percent of global wealth, leaving just 52 percent to be
shared between the other 99 percent of adults on the planet.” It added,
“Almost all of that 52 percent is owned by those included in the richest
20 percent, leaving just 5.5 percent for the remaining 80 percent of
people in the world”—some 5.6 billion people.
Oxfam, citing figures from
Forbes, noted that there were
1,645 billionaires in the world, nearly thirty percent of whom (492
people) live in the United States. “Billionaires from the US make up
approximately half of the total billionaires on the
Forbes list with interests in the financial sector,” the charity wrote.
In a reflection of the parasitism that has become embedded in the
world capitalist system, the financial and insurance sector minted more
billionaires than any other industry. The report states: “Since March
2013, there have been 37 new billionaires from these sectors, and six
have dropped off the list. The accumulated wealth of billionaires from
these sectors has increased from $1.01tn to $1.16tn in a single year, a
nominal increase of $150bn, or 15 percent.”
Oxfam Director Winnie Byanyima will be one of the co-chairs of the
Davos event, along with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and Google’s
Schmidt. The charity declared, “Byanyima will use her position at Davos
to call for urgent action to stem this rising tide of inequality,
starting with a crackdown on tax dodging by corporations.”
The attempt to present the gathering at Davos as a forum for
addressing social inequality takes on an absurd and grotesque character.
In the press release announcing its report, Oxfam quotes Lady Lynn
Forester de Rothschild, the chair of the Coalition for Inclusive
Capitalism, as saying: “All those gathering at Davos who want a stable
and prosperous world should make tackling inequality a top priority.”
Lady Rothschild is married to British financier Evelyn de Rothschild,
whose net worth is estimated at $20 billion. She spoke at an Oxfam
event Monday. The press release for the event declared, “Inequality is
spiraling out of control, but consensus on taking action against this
issue of our time is gathering pace. From…Barack Obama to Pope Francis,
there is clear agreement that extreme inequality is damaging societies,
governance and economic growth.”
These warnings about the growth of inequality are rooted in fears
within the financial aristocracy that the ever more obvious and
repulsive gap between the super-rich and everyone else will have
revolutionary consequences.
Richest One Per Cent Disappointed to Possess Only Half of World’s Wealth
By Andy Borowitz
DAVOS (The Borowitz Report)—A new Oxfam report indicating that
the wealthiest one per cent possesses about half of the world’s wealth
has left the richest people in the world “reeling with disappointment,” a
leading billionaire said on Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters in Davos, Switzerland, where he is
attending the World Economic Forum, the hedge-fund owner Harland
Dorrinson said, “I think I speak for a lot of my fellow billionaires
when I say I thought we were doing a good deal better than that.”
Calling the Oxfam findings “sobering,” he said that he hoped
they would serve “as a wake-up call to billionaires everywhere that it’s
time to up our game.”
“Quite frankly, a lot of us thought that by buying politicians,
rewriting tax laws, and hiding money overseas, we were getting it done,”
said Dorrinson, who owns the hedge fund Garrote Capital. “If, at the
end of the day, all we control is a measly half of the world’s wealth,
clearly we need to do more—much more.”
In Davos, Dorrinson is huddling with other billionaires in the
hopes of setting an ambitious goal for the top one per cent: to own the
other half of the world’s wealth by 2025.
While he considers this target “doable,” Dorrinson said that he
does not underestimate the challenge of wresting the other half from the
“vise-like grip” of the approximately seven billion people who comprise
the bottom ninety-nine per cent.
“Getting that other half is not going to be a walk in the park,”
he said. “But ten years from now, when Oxfam says that the top one per
cent owns everything in the world, it’ll all have been worth it.”
