Oxfam report highlights how billionaires rig politics |
Oxfam’s latest global inequality report, released during the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 19, reveals how billionaires use their extreme wealth to keep profiteering and maintain an infrastructure of sympathetic politicians, media and bureaucracies in place.
Resisting the Rule of the Rich. Protecting freedom from billionaire power found that, globally, billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year — reaching a record $18.3 trillion.
One the report’s more alarming statistics is that, last year, “billionaire wealth increased three times faster than the average annual rate over the previous five years”.
Since 2020, Oxfam said, billionaire wealth has grown by a whopping 81%. “Billionaires fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024.”
How the super-rich use their extreme wealth to stay rich is important to understand, the report said, if civil society is going to be able to break the pattern. While the gap between........