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The Only Real Shortcut to Long-Term Security: Greater Equality

Sam Pizzigati

 October 1, 2024
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Photograph Source: Eneas De Troya – CC BY 2.0

Have our world’s super rich become absolutely paranoid about the future? Or do they, deep down, understand that our exceedingly unequal global distribution of income and wealth has placed them — and everyone else — in ever-present danger?

The Robb Report, a news service that offers our most awesomely affluent the ultimate in consumption advice, has no interest in psychoanalyzing what the wealthiest among us believe. But Robb Report analysts certainly do enjoy chronicling how these rich behave.

“Forget Butlers,” a Robb Report headline has just pronounced. “Private Security” has now become “the Ultimate Service for the Ultra-Wealthy.”

The Samphire Risk insurance firm, the Robb coverage goes on to relate, specializes in policies that insure the rich against the dangers that our world visits only upon them. Say, for instance, two monied motorcyclist pals get involved in a crash that leaves one of them badly injured and the other kidnapped amid the accident’s chaos. Samphire prides itself on providing “the connective tissue between the problem and the expertise needed” to solve whatever dilemma the rich may encounter.

The AHNA Group run by a Dubai-based former military operative from South Africa last year provided top corporate execs protective services for over 500 trips into more than four dozen countries. AHNA, says its mover and shaker Mac Segal, always goes the extra mile and even takes the time to prep its operatives on how to make conversation with their rich clients.

“You should speak in short sentences,” Segal advises, “so the client can stop the conversation whenever they want to.”

Still another new security service available for the fretful rich offers “a bodyguard in your pocket,” an Artificial Intelligence-powered mobile phone app that can tell if a deep pocket’s limo is following its normal daily route.

Budding entrepreneurs worldwide, in short, are devoting their time and talents to making our Earth as safe as possible for our planet’s most comfortable, that top 1 percent that now holds more wealth, relates a just-released report from the global humanitarian group Oxfam, than the entire bottom 95 percent combined.

This “immense concentration of wealth,” notes Oxfam’s new Multilateralism in an Era of Global Oligarchy analysis, has allowed large corporations and the ultra-rich “who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else.”

How dramatic has this wealth concentration become? Since 1987, as economist Gabriel Zucman has detailed, the combined wealth of the world’s 3,000 richest households — in effect, our richest 0.0001 percent — now stands at about $14 trillion. Their share of the world’s wealth has over that timespan more than quadrupled.

About 46 percent of the world’s population, meanwhile, lives on less than the local equivalent of $6.85 per day.

Our contemporary wealth inequality, Oxfam’s research details, connects up neatly with growing global corporate concentration. Seven of the world’s 10 largest corporations now have a billionaire either as CEO or top shareholder. Our wealthiest, Oxfam shows, don’t just benefit passively from all the corporate stock they hold. They’re increasingly shaping — in sectors ranging from pharmaceuticals to global digital advertising — exactly how corporations exercise their market and political power.

The ultra-wealthy and the corporations they dominate, as Oxfam puts it, are using “their vast resources to pressure governments” — through everything from lobbying and campaign contributions to influence over the media and threats to withhold investment — to lower the taxes rich people pay, weaken labor protections, and privatize public services.

In 2022, Oxfam points out, 182 of America’s largest corporations, spent $746 million on lobbying alone. For every lobbying dollar the nation’s 50 largest publicly traded corporations spent, they averaged back $130 in tax breaks and over $4,000 in federal loans, loan guarantees, and bailouts.

One consequence of this ultra-rich political influence: The Covid pandemic, observes Oxfam, left in its wake at least 40 new billionaires.

The most dangerous long-term consequence of ultra-rich influence? That may well be environmental. The dollars of our global ultra-rich, notes Oxfam, continue to be “disproportionately invested in the companies driving climate breakdown.”

What can we do to break down this climate breakdown threat? Real progress on the environmental and every other major problematic front, the new Oxfam report sums up, “will require all countries — both in the Global North and Global South — to realize that they have a common interest in tackling extreme concentrations of wealth.”

“A more equitable international order,” as Oxfam’s latest research powerfully reminds us, “benefits everyone.”

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press).