You know how apocryphal stuff ends up being more real than anything else. Well I think the apocryphal stuff is something that we want to believe, perhaps because it panders to some sub-conscious desire we hold. Me, I don't believe that a secret cabal of the extremely rich run the planet for their own ends. It just seems that way. So the other day I read that the 500 richest people on the planet have amassed more monetary value than the poorest half combined. Half? About 6.3 billion[1] divided by 2, about the same as the population was when I was born in the early Sixites. Now I thnk that statistic might be a bit amiss so lets round it down to 3 billion. Three billion people, can you imagine such a number? I can't conceive of more than the four quid it costs me to buy curry and coffee for breakfast, but to think of three billion people. Impossible! But, my paucity of imagination aside, what does this all mean.
Five hundred people, lets forget gender here and call them robber barons, have weaseled their way into possesing the collected wealth of half the population. Now thats how i read it. I suspect any decent economist could walk all over my argument and point out the importance of the billionaire as a driving force in the economy and. . . but you know what I'd have stopped listening because of those three billion, many can't afford decent water, or the ability to sustain a nutritious diet or access to appropriate healthcare, so a load of guff about this and that and the other really doesn't wash. This isn't about theory, it's about people who have only one thing we, and I mean 'we' because if you can read this then fukk me congratulations you actually had an education and fukk me again, you're in front of a computer, a huge luxury for most of our relatives, but I digress - and this is in my mercurial nature - 'they' have something we don't have: they are going to die a darn sight earlier than you and I. Now that may be statistically speaking, and in the words of Disraeli there are 'lies, damn lies and statistics' but get over it. They will die very much sooner than you or I because they are poor and what passes as their nation-state is fragmented and disorganised and most likely corrupt not becaue they are people who live in [enter your own sub-concious rascist thought here] but becaue our wealth is built on their poverty.
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Now this may be how you see the world. That makes you a master of 'real-politick', the belief that the nation-state is an organic, atomised creature surviving in some Darwinian jungle: kill or be killed. Get rich and fat at the expense of others becasue if you don't they will do it to you. Hmm. . . all very well but wake up mister, we are not animals, we did evolve and we evolved into creatures that can conceive of Gods and compassion and the Oneness of it all. We belong! Hard to turn away from this essential truth of existence. Nothing much else happens in our momentary lives. We live, we die. and the stuff in between? Means nothing without communtiy, belonging, love. Boil all those systems of thought that we call religeon down to their essence and that's what we end up with. We belong. God is love. Its a cliche but that's the great thing about cliches; they are true.
Okay, so I'm trying to bundle a complete sense of time and space into a couple of pithy paragraphs. In fact I'm trying to summon God to our battle against the extremely rich and the exceedingly powerful. Something the rich have been doing since we got us a priesthood!
All I can think of is the rich who occupy the background in William Gibson's future-to-be, start of it all, 'Neuromancer'. The world is arranged around the very rich. Their whims, their desires guide our planet. Oh and in case you didn't take a look recently, where are we going??? A rhetorical question of course, but for answer:
WE'RE GOING TO HELL IN A FUKKING HANDCART. . .
Fortunately for these corpulent plutocrats its extremely unlikely than any of the 3 billion have even the foggiest idea about this gob-smacking statistic. MORE
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