Skip to main content

Profiting from Pain


Wealth has no heart; it has much greed. This is the central message of the latest Oxfam Report. Titled Profiting from Pain, the report says bluntly, right in the beginning itself, that during the two years of the Covid pandemic, “the mountain of wealth” of the billionaires in the world reached “unprecedented and dizzying heights.” While the pandemic was a long and horrible nightmare for most of humanity, it has been “one of the best times in recorded history for the billionaire class.”

The ordinary people of the world were affected immensely by price rise. From New York to New Delhi, says the report, no one except the privileged billionaires escaped this evil. The cost-of-living shot through the ceiling. The pandemic period witnessed the biggest increase in extreme poverty in over 20 years.

The report is particularly worried about inequality in wealth distribution. The sort of inequality belched out during the pandemic period killed one person every 4 seconds. While this glaring inequality pushed the poor to death, the rich profited more than ever. Those engaged in the food, energy, pharmaceutical and technology sectors benefited the most, according to the research. The following extracts from the Report speak for themselves.

The brutal irony is that governments (including the Indian one) gave tax concessions and loan waivers to the affluent though they were already doing too well for themselves. Worse, the ordinary people were made to pay for those concessions by the increasing taxes imposed on fuel, cooking gas, and a whole lot of other essential things. It is going to get worse, according to the Oxfam study. “Worldwide, poorest households will be hit hardest by soaring energy prices,” says the Report.

One of the cruel paradoxes pointed out by this Report is that the pandemic has created 40 new pharma billionaires who profited from the monopolies their companied hold over vaccines, treatments, tests and personal protection equipment. Any humane system would have cut those profits so that suffering and impoverished patients would benefit. Not our kind of capitalism.

What is the way ahead? The study suggests that taxing the super-rich is the only real solution. 

It is not that all the super-rich are heartless. In Jan this year, there were reports that a group of more than 100 of the world’s richest people have called on governments to make them pay more tax. [Interestingly, there were no Indians on that list.] When capitalism acquires a heart, a large share of the world’s problems will vanish into thin air. Even the religious stirrings in countries like India are likely to disappear. Wealth is more enchanting than gods. Try it out for once, I dare say.

PS. All the three extracts above are taken from the Oxfam Report.

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Revealing, though not unexpected as one observed all that was going on. To see it in black and white does chill, though. The thing is this is nothing new... and nothing new has properly ever been tried because those who can implement the change are the very folk who will have to surrender their loot... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Profit before People. Unless this policy changes, it's going to get bleaker. The ray of hope is that some billionaires are asking to be taxed more.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation