1,000 Billionaires: Humanity's Misfortune

The proposed US federal budget for 2007 amounts to $2.8 trillion. The sum devoted in that budget to Social Security, Medicare and education for a population of 300 million people is approximately one-third of the combined wealth of those 946 individuals. The European Union countries spend something more than half a trillion dollars annually on education. The Chinese government expended some $15 billion in 2005 on science and technology, education, health and culture for its population of more than one billion people. The co-editor of the lead Forbes piece on the billionaires, Luisa Kroll, explained that in 2006 the rich cashed in on globally strong equity markets, real estate and commodity prices. The Associated Press (AP) quoted Kroll, “It’s just been kind of an extraordinary year for markets worldwide.” Forbes editor and former candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination, Steve Forbes, crowed, “This is the richest year ever in human history. Never in history has there been such a notable advance.” For a relative handful, this is true. Meanwhile nearly one billion people go to sleep each night without food. The existence of the group of 946 and their enormous wealth speak to staggering levels of global social inequality. Who are these people? Microsoft’s Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett remain number one and two in the world in 2006, with $56 and $52 billion, respectively. The third man on the list, Mexico’s telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu, is now worth $49 billion. He gained $19 billion in a single year, the largest one-year gain over the past decade. The Forbes profile of Helu, whose holdings include telecom, banking, energy, tobacco and more, notes enthusiastically that he has “built unimaginable wealth in one of the poorer countries in the Western Hemisphere . . . Slim, 67, amassed his pile in a nation where per capita income is less than $6,800 a year and half the population lives in poverty. His wealth comes to 6.3 percent of Mexico’s annual economic output; if Gates had a similar chunk in the US, he’d be worth $784 billion. It’s enough to give any populist heartburn.” The piece notes that Helu is generally mistrusted and despised in Mexico. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/bill-m10.shtml

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