The EU′s 4 persistent problems still dogging the bloc

The findings of a recent Eurobarometer survey, commissioned by the European Union itself, are clear: Citizens in the bloc believe that the main issues it should be addressing are climate change, the COVID pandemic, health care, the economic situation and social inequality. These are thus the themes that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will broach in her second State of the Union address before the European Parliament this coming Wednesday as she takes stock of the achievements of the past year and announces new measures.

Read more at: The EU′s 4 persistent problems still dogging the bloc | Europe | News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 14.09.2021

The Rich and Poor Gap: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study

There’s a common thread tying together the most disruptive revolutions of human history, and it has some scientists worried about the United States. In those revolutions, conflict largely boiled down to pervasive economic inequality. On Wednesday, a study in Nature, showing how and when those first divisions between rich and poor began, suggests not only that history has always repeated itself but also that it’s bound to do so again — and perhaps sooner than we think.

In the largest study of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and 13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the Gini coefficient, which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not bode well for the state of the world today.

“We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically,” said Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a statement.

Currently, the United States Gini score is around .81, one of the highest in the world, according to the 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report.

Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data from 63 archaeological digs

Overall, they found that human societies started off fairly equal, with the hunter-gatherer societies consistently getting Gini scores around .17. The divide between rich and poor really began once humans started to domesticate plants and animals and switch to farming-based societies. Learning to till the land meant introducing the concept of land ownership, and inevitably, some people ended up as landless peasants. Furthermore, because these societies no longer lived as nomads, it became easier to accumulate wealth (like land) and pass it down from generation to generation.

The Gini scores got higher as farming societies got bigger. The small scale “horticultural” farmers had a median Gini of .27, and larger-scale “agricultural” societies moved up to .35. This pattern continued until, oddly, humans moved into the New World — the Americas. Then, over time, the researchers saw that Gini scores kept rising in Old World Eurasia but actually hit a plateau in the Americas. The researchers think this plateau happened because there were fewer draft animals, like horse and water buffalo, in the New World, making it harder for new agricultural societies to expand and cultivate more land.

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now.  

A global report from Credit Suisse showed that modern humans are continuing the trends set by our predecessors: Now, the report showed, half of the world’s wealth really does belong to a super-rich one percent, and the gap is only growing. Historically, Kohler says in his statement, there’s only so much inequality a society can sustain before it reaches a tipping point. Among the many known effects of inequality on a society are social unrest, a decrease in health, increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution.

Read more: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study | Inverse

Inequality: 10 US corporate welfare programs that will make your blood boil - by Tom Cahill

The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.

A small number of incredibly wealthy Americans are ridiculing Bernie Sanders’ base for wanting “free stuff” when the costliest programs are, by far, corporate welfare and entitlements for the top 1 percent. Fox News has been working hard to tear down Sanders’ proposals to provide Medicare for all, institute tuition-free public college, boost infrastructure spending, and expand Social Security.

“That’s not fiscally possible unless the federal government starts seizing private assets,” said Bill O’Reilly.

But O’Reilly is wrong. The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:

1. Tax Breaks for obscene CEO bonuses ($7 billion/year)
Currently, the biggest corporations are exploiting a 20-year-old loophole that allows them to write off inflated compensation packages for CEOs, billing stock options, and performance-based bonuses to taxpayers. In 2010, the Economic Policy Institute found out that the biggest corporations cost Americans $7 billion by writing off inflated executive pay. Between 2007 and 2010, this loophole accounted for more than $30 billion in corporate welfare. According to The Guardian, fast food industry CEOs cost taxpayers $64 million through this loophole.

That $7 billion could singlehandedly fund the annual budget for the National Science Foundation — which, as I recently reported for US Uncut, funds 11,000 scientific research projects each year and has funded 26 Nobel laureates in the last 5 years.

2. Tax cuts for luxury corporate jets ($300 million/year)
Currently, corporations can claim a huge tax deduction every year by writing off purchases of corporate jets, lavish cars, and chauffeurs as “security” for their top executives. A Bloomberg analysis from 2011 showed that these tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans cost the rest of us $300 million each year. While that may not sound like much, that’s approximately 50 percent of the annual budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that protects Americans from the financial sector’s most predatory schemes.

3. Big oil subsidies ($37.5 billion/year)
According to Oil Change International (OCI), the U.S. government spends anywhere between $10 billion and $52 billion per year on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry — one of the wealthiest industries in the world. OCI estimated that total combined subsidies to big oil approached $37.5 billion in 2014, which includes $21 billion on production and exploration subsidies.

These subsidies alone cost more than what we currently spend on providing rental assistance for low-income families. In 2013, the department of Housing and Urban Development allocated a total of $34.3 billion toward tenant-based rental assistance ($19 billion), project-based rental assistance ($8.7 billion), and general public housing programs ($6.6 billion). These programs helped 4.5 million families — half of whom are elderly — keep a roof over their head.

4. Pharmaceutical subsidies ($270 billion/year)
As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma. This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare. This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.

This $270 billion annual subsidy could be virtually eliminated by passing Bernie Sanders’ bill to establish a government fund that buys up drug patents as soon as they become available for purchase. Then, the government would sell drugs at-cost to save money for those who need them. The money saved could pay for the annual $270 billion in insurance costs from Obamacare that would help more Americans get access to healthcare.

5. Capital gains tax breaks ($51 billion/year)
When anyone makes money from selling off investments, the IRS classifies that as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (20 percent as of 2012) than real, actual work (35 percent). Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don’t affect the incomes of most retirees. The Century Foundation found that the total amount of lost revenue by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages cost $256 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, or $51 billion a year over the last 5 years. According to the Tax Policy Center, if investment income was taxed at the same rate as wages, 75 percent of that new revenue would come from the richest 0.3 percent of Americans; 92 percent of that revenue would come from those making $200,000 or more per year. The chart below shows what percentage of income each tax bracket makes from capital gains — not surprisingly, the wealthiest Americans get most of the benefit from capital gains.

If we taxed wealth like work, the extra $51 billion per year in savings could fund two-thirds of the annual budget for food stamps.

6. Corporate tax subsidies from state and local governments ($80.4 billion/year)
In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state. Compare that cost with the cost of providing tuition-free public college to every student, which The Atlantic estimated would be a mere $62.6 billion. As the chart below shows, this is actually way cheaper than what we currently spend on federal student aid.

7. Handouts to Big Ag ($18 billion/year)
Crop insurance — a program originally intended to help farmers recover from the dust bowls of the 1930s — has become a slush fund for wealthy corporate farmers who have become experts at manipulating the system for their own means. As Bloomberg reported, the median income of commercial farm households (in which farming makes up more than 50 percent of a household’s income) was $84,649 in 2011 — 70 percent more than the average American household. Farmers have learned to exploit the program by growing crops on land they know will be unproductive, then making money from insurance claims rather than crops. In 2011, 26 farmers each got an annual subsidy of $1 million, including one tomato farmer in Florida who got a $1.9 million subsidy.

This $18 billion in corporate welfare is more than NASA’s annual budget, which has hovered around the $17 billion mark since 2009.

8. Welfare for Wall Street ($83 billion/year)
The biggest banks have grown even bigger than they were just before the 2008 financial meltdown. And due to their size, these banks are perceived as “too big to fail,” as their demise would spell doom for the US financial sector as a whole. So as these big banks grow bigger, the Federal Reserve allows them to borrow at lower interest rates than other big banks — essentially subsidizing the continued growth of the big banks. In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

If we were to force the big banks to borrow at the same interest rates as every other bank at a rate of $83 billion per year, that would be enough to double the current federal budgets for highway spending ($48.6 billion), Head Start ($10.1 billion), the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.89 billion), nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children ($6.2 billion), the National Parks Service ($3 billion), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ($2.39 billion), with $5 billion left over.

9. Export-Import bank subsidies ($112 billion)
This week, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations. In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals. If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.

According to the New York Times, the federal government spends roughly $105 billion on public K-12 schools. If we allow the Ex-Im bank to fade away, the money formerly set aside for corporate subsidies could instead double that investment in public education.

10. Federal contracts for the top 200 biggest companies ($880 billion/year)
The biggest 200 corporations have an excessively unfair advantage over their competitors due to their influence in Washington. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top 200 companies spent a combined $5.8 billion on lobbying Congress between 2007 and 2012. And in those same years, those companies received $4.4 trillion in federal contracts. That $4.4 trillion is $100 billion more than what the U.S. government spent on providing a basic income to the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients.

The combined cost of these 10 corporate welfare programs is $1.539 trillion per year. The three main programs needy families depend upon — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($17.3 billion), food stamps ($74 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit ($67.2 billion) — cost just $158.5 billion in total. This means we spend ten times as much on corporate welfare and handouts to the top 1 percent than we do on welfare for working families struggling to make ends meet.

Read more: 10 corporate welfare programs that will make your blood boil

Digital Revolution: What Impact Does The Digital Revolution Have On Work And Inequality? - by Michael A Osborne

The link below will take you to a transcript of a Social Europe podcast in which Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer discusses the impact of the Digital Revolution on the nature of work and inequality with Michael A. Osborne, Associate Professor in Machine Learning and Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment at the University of Oxford.

Read more: What Impact Does The Digital Revolution Have On Work And Inequality? » Social Europe

Solving poverty? The 1% Will Own Half of Global Wealth by 2016, but Oxfam Has a Plan to Even Things Out - by Laura Kiesel

Currently, the 80 wealthiest people in the world own a combined $1.9 trillion. Of this, the lion’s share is owned by U.S. citizens--as 35 of the top 80 are Americans--making the United States the most widely represented nation in the 1%.

“Our nation has long presented itself to the world as the model of successful, inclusive growth that lifts millions into the middle class,” Gawain Kripke, Policy Director at Oxfam America, told Main Street in an email. “[Yet] today, the U.S. ranks ten out 12 OECD countries in social mobility.”

According to Kripke, the current federal minimum wage is part of the problem contributing to the lack of social mobility among the lower and middle classes.

“Our country has the highest proportion of low-wage workers of any developed country, people who work hard but...are barely able to make ends meet,” says Kripke. “At least one in four Americans work at jobs that pay so little that they cannot sustain themselves and their families without turning to government programs or going into debt.”

At $7.25 per hour, a full-time worker makes $15,080 a year--almost $4,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. This rate has been stagnant for seven years, and according to Kripke, is more than 30% below what it was in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1968.

“Money buys political clout, which the richest and most powerful use to further entrench their influence and advantages,” says Kripke. “The preferences of the poorest people, however, demonstrate no statistical impact on the voting patterns of their elected officials.”

Paul S. Adams, associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, notes that this can have serious implications for the American middle and working classes.

“There are other consequences in the U.S. as well, ranging from the ability of the most affluent to unduly influence the political system, and even basic access to quality healthcare, education, housing, transportation and worker protections,” says Adams. “Too much concentration of wealth in the hands of a few seems inherently unstable as an economic order in modern political economic systems.”

To address these consequences and the other issues inherent in extreme income inequality, Oxfam International revealed a “Seven Point Plan,” as part of its Even It Up Campaign, which is as follows:
-- Clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and rich individual
-- Invest in universal, free public services such as health and education
-- Share the tax burden fairly, shifting taxation from labour and consumption toward capital and wealth
-- Introduce minimum wages and move towards a living wage for all workers
-- Introduce equal pay legislation and promote economic policies to give women a fair deal
-- Ensure adequate safety-nets for the poorest, including a minimum income guarantee
-- Agree to a global goal to tackle inequality.

Byanyima has expressed that if nothing is done to address the issue, it’s not just people on the bottom who will suffer, but the entire global economy.

Read more: The 1% Will Own Half of Global Wealth by 2016, but Oxfam Has a Plan to Even Things Out

US Economy: "It's the Inequality, Stupid" - by Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot

Eleven charts that explain what's wrong with America's economy..

Read more: It's the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones

US Economy: A look at poverty in America, from the inside - by Michael Hiltzik

One little-recognized reality of poverty in America is how closely it lurks beneath the surface of even a successful professional life. A bad career turn, a couple of financial missteps, and -- here comes the dizzying plunge from middle class to underclass.

In unbashful detail, McPherson charts his descent from the comfortable middle class to life on Social Security, a meager pension and government antipoverty subsidies. He's not seeking the reader's sympathy, and he's not denying personal responsibility. "I got where I am today through my own efforts," he writes. "I can’t blame anyone else."

It all started in 1987, when he gave up a 25-year career at the Post (interrupted by some leaves of absence and a stint as a book editor), to take up an offer of early retirement at 53. "I was under the illusion — perhaps delusion is the more accurate word — that I could make a living as a writer and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap," he recounts. But by the time his company pension kicked in 12 years later, inflation had reduced its value by nearly a third.

Read more: A look at poverty in America, from the inside - LA Times

Inequality: 7 cities that are playgrounds for the rich and nightmares for the poor - by Aaron Cantú

Seven years after Wall Street’s near total collapse, housing markets in the world’s major cities are surging once again, driven by megadevelopers and superrich individuals flush with cash. Financial Times reports that investors spent $1.2 trillion on “high-end commercial properties in 2013,” an 80 percent increase from 2010.

The seeds of the buying boom was planted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and pumped commercial banks with cash in exchange for toxic assets (known as quantitative easing), relieving affluent buyers of risk in global property markets.

In many of the world’s major metropolitan areas, private capital investment in real estate has become a central component of urban planning, and following market logic, these cities compete with each other for developers’ money. That means that urban planners in a global capitalist hub, like New York, will bend over backwards to accommodate developers and investors so that their money doesn’t go to London instead.

This jousting for capital in real estate is having an increasingly obvious side effect: Diverting attention from the growing ranks of the desperately poor. Ironically, in nearly all global cities where housing markets are booming, there is also a concurrent rise or entrenchment of homelessness.

Using a recent survey from Knight Frank on global property markets, we can glimpse at this grotesque urban duality. If anything, it captures the essence of our gilded age. Here’s a list of just 7 cities in the US and abroad that best illustrate this phenomenon.

Read more: 7 cities that are playgrounds for the rich and nightmares for the poor - Salon.com

Banking Industry - USA: Credit scores drive America’s growing inequality — Megan McArdle

The other day, I got to wondering something: What is the effect of automated payments on credit scores? Automated payments, I reasoned, reduce late payments among the people who are basically responsible budgeters but terrible at remembering to mail their bills on time every month. Those people should see their credit scores increase as they rack up fewer late payments to creditors.

Alas, the Internet seems to be silent on this point, or at least my Google-Fu was not good enough to discover any research that could shed light on my theory. But I did stumble across an interesting paper put out by RAND Corp. last year on the impact that credit scores have on auto lending.

Even though I lived through it, I find it a bit hard to realize how new the credit-scoring revolution actually is. Credit scoring has been around for a while — the Fair Isaac Corp. was founded in the late ’50s — but it wasn’t until the information technology revolution of the 1990s that companies got enough data storage and computing power to start slicing and dicing their loan portfolios by credit score. The auto-financing company RAND studied used uniform pricing and traditional interviews for loan issuance as late as 2000.
Here’s what happened when it shifted to a more sophisticated credit-scoring model: higher interest rates and down-payment rates for risky borrowers, better rates for those with better scores.

Essentially, we see a microcosm of what happened in the larger economy over the past few decades: People with steady payment histories and low levels of outstanding debt relative to their available credit got better loan terms, and were therefore able to borrow more money (because their interest rates went down). They got bigger, nicer cars, and auto lenders became more profitable.

The financially marginal, on the other hand, found that their financial lives got harder still. Their poor credit histories meant that they could no longer get loans, or they could get them only at painfully high rates of interest. They would have had to drive less car — or, possibly, only whatever they could afford to pay cash for.

Credit has long been thought of as a democratizing force. It enabled ordinary Americans to buy houses, cars and other amenities that had previously only been available to those with substantial capital. But over the last few decades, that process has been reversed.

Read more: Credit scores drive America’s growing inequality — Opinion — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine

The Have and the Have Nots: “Bloodiest thing the world has seen”: David Cay Johnston on inequality’s looming disaster - by Elias Isquith

Long before anyone knew the name Thomas Piketty, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston was plumbing the hidden depths of the American tax code, revealing the myriad ways it privileges the interests of corporations and the wealthy ahead of those of the 99 percent. Indeed, while it may sometimes feel as if economic inequality is the new trend, Johnston’s career reminds us that the great gulf that separates the rich from the rest in the contemporary United States didn’t happen overnight, but over a course of decades.

Despite coming out during the same year as “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” and “The Divide,” Johnston’s newest release, “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality,” is a different kind of inequality book. Rather than a sweeping overview of centuries of economic history, or an on-the-ground examination of how our justice system ignores the powerful while brutalizing the rest, Johnston’s book is a collection of essays, speeches and excerpts — a kind of inequality reader. Featuring insights from philosophers, economists, journalists, researchers and even politicians, “Divided” reminds us how inequality is one of those rare problems that truly matters to all of us, no matter what our interests or chosen field.

Earlier this week, Salon reached Johnston via telephone to discuss “Divided,” whether American democracy can survive such great economic disparities, and how returning to a more equal society is literally a matter of life and death. Our conversation follows, and has been slightly edited for clarity and length. In addition, Johnston followed up with further thoughts via email.

Read more: “Bloodiest thing the world has seen”: David Cay Johnston on inequality’s looming disaster - Salon.com

Economics: How Mainstream Economics Failed To Grasp The Importance Of Inequality - by Jon Wisman

The magnitude of exploding inequality since the mid-1970s is captured by the following: Between 1979 and 2007, inflation-adjusted income, including capital gains, increased $4.8 trillion — about $16,000 per person.

\Of this, 36 percent was captured by the richest 1 percent of income earners, representing a 232 percent increase in their per capita income. The richest 10 percent captured 64 percent, almost twice the amount collected by the 90 percent below. Between 1983 and 2007, total inflation-adjusted wealth in the U.S. increased by $27 trillion. 

 If divided equally, every man woman and child would be almost $90,000 richer. But of course it wasn’t divided equally. Almost half of the $27 trillion (49 percent) was claimed by the richest one percent — $11.7 million more for each of their households. The top 10 percent grabbed almost $29 trillion, or 106 percent, more than the total because the bottom 90 percent suffered an average decline of just over $16,000 per household as their indebtedness increased.

This soaring inequality generated three dynamics that set the conditions for a financial crisis. The first resulted from limited investment potential in the real economy due to weak consumer demand as those who consume most or all their incomes received proportionately much less. Not being capable of spending all their increased income and wealth, the elite sought profitable investments increasingly in financial markets, fueling first a stock market boom, and then after the high tech bubble burst in 2001, a real estate boom.

As financial markets were flooded with credit, the profits and size of the financial sector exploded, helping keep interest rates low and encouraging the creation of new high-risk credit instruments. This enabled more of the elite’s increased income and wealth to be recycled as loans to workers. Financial institutions were so flush with funds that they undertook ever more risky loans, the most infamous being the predatory subprime mortgages that often were racially targeted. As the elite became ever richer, those below became ever more indebted to them. When this debt burden became unsustainable, the financial system collapsed and was bailed out by taxpayers.

Economists might have stood a better chance of foreseeing the developing financial crisis had they thrown their nets far wider to catch the insights that have been harvested by a wide range of so-called heterodox economists. From the underconsumptionist tradition of Keynes, Kalecki, and Minsky they could have developed an understanding of how inequality affects aggregate demand, investment, and financial stability.

From the institutionalist tradition of Thorstein Veblen they could have learned how consumption preferences are socially formed by humans who are as concerned with social status and respectability as with material well-being. And from the Marxist tradition they could have seen how economic power translates into political power. 

Economists have failed to grasp the wisdom of one of the foremost students of crises: “the economist who resorts to only one model is stunted. Economics is a toolbox from which the economist should select the appropriate tool or model for a particular problem.”

Read more: How Mainstream Economics Failed To Grasp The Importance Of Inequality

Switzerland: Inequality may spark unrest, Davos elites worry - by David Cay Johnston

Davos Economic Forum: the have's versus the have not's

There’s trouble coming as the chasm between the richest of the rich and everyone else continues to widen. So says a report prepared by the World Economic Forum, the nonprofit foundation that hosts its annual conference of business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, popular with the world’s billionaires.

The forum’s 14th annual assessment of risks, issued just ahead of the Davos gathering, makes clear that social instability, whether measured in mere riots or in bloody revolutions, is the likely outcome of increasing inequality.

The report speaks of a lost generation of young people worldwide who are finishing school only to find a paucity of jobs, which in turn creates pressure to lower wages.

“Widening gaps between the richest and poorest citizens threaten social and political stability as well as economic development,” the report said.

Three of the report sponsors are specialists in pricing risk, the American insurance broker and risk advisory firm Marsh & McLennan and the European insurers Swiss Re and Zurich Insurance Group.

The four-day Davos conference, which begins today, will draw six dozen or so billionaires this year as well as several hundred other people rich enough to have their own jets. Davos will also draw a far larger crowd of government officials, vendors of financial services and journalists.

That those at the apex of the global economy brought forth this report should end the debate over whether inequality poses a problem, but it won’t.

To those who deny inequality is a problem, or herald inequality as an economic good, the report can be dismissed as simply the claims of an interest group. And why trust what billionaires say any more than what a minority of economists, sociologists and writers (including me) has been pointing out for two decades?

Read more: Inequality may spark unrest, Davos elites worry | Al Jazeera America

Rich versus Poor: Inequality rises across the Globe: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

The world's wealthiest people aren't known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker bus.

The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' is exposed in a new report from Oxfam today January 20. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of Euro 1.22 trillion ( US $ 1.65 trillion), as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population.

The Oxfam report lists five key policies governments can adopt to reduce inequality and recommends that the mix of policies should be tailored to the national context. The five are: universal health and education; progressive taxation; removal of barriers to equal rights and opportunities for women; land reform and income support programs.

Read more: Inequality rises across the G20 as economic growth fails to trickle down to poorest — Oxfam America

EU-US Trade Negotiations: French senators strongly attack EU-US trade deal

During a debate in the French Senate, all political parties harshly criticized the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the French government defended the potential deal, EurActiv France reports.

The minister in charge of foreign trade, Nicole Bricq, admit with regret that France was the country where the mobilisation against what they call the 'transatlantic treaty', is the strongest.

A debate, which took place in the Senate on Thursday (9 January), showed bipartisan opposition to the agreement and the government found itself somewhat isolated on the topic after facing criticism from
speakers from all political sides.

he former French interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, reminded that the idea for a partnership was first and foremost an American idea, as the US wished to rebalance the trade surplus that the EU had with the country and bring back jobs to their continent.

“The companies’ interests are not always those of the states," warned  a politician, who considers that the currency issue should have been settled before signing a trade agreement.

“We should have put in place a transatlantic snake in the tunnel in order to establish, softly, a real parity between the euro and the dollar. We cannot talk about free trade when the parity between euro and
dollar go from one to two in ten years only.”

In his opinion, this aspect should be included in the negotiations, but the minister Bricq replied it was not on the agenda.

André Gattolin, a Green MP, also strongly opposed the partnership project, said that Europe had its own identity and should preserve it.  He also put forward the impact it would have on inequality in different European countries.

“We are promised 0.5% growth but only some zones will take advantage of it like the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp,” the MP went on to say.

“As it is, this project is bad and we saw with the NSA scandal that the dice are loaded,” he added.

Jean Bizet from the centre-right opposition, UMP, expressed concern about the food and agriculture aspects of the deal and notably the milk file, as cheese imports increase in France and milk producing regions grow anxious at the end of milk quotas in 2015.

The sharpest remark came from a member of the government's socialist majority, Marie-Noëlle Lienemann.

“I am very hostile to this treaty,” she said. “We are forced to note that happy globalisation did not happen! … multinational companies are in a situation that we cannot regulate,” she added.

The MP was sceptical about the growth perspectives, too. She added that the promised growth points could be reached with a recovery policy supported by large-scale work projects.

Read more: French senators strongly attack EU-US trade deal | EurActiv

Austerity: an international backlash against the wealthy is reshaping politics from Europe to the US to China

The well-off in Europe invest in bonds issued by banks, property companies and states, like Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Spain, which offer attractive rates of interest. In so doing, they have financed ill-judged investment on an enormous scale – the construction of housing and motorways that remain unused and other foolhardy infrastructure projects – that these countries would never have been able to undertake on their own.

As it stands, the sole purpose of the bridging loans provided by eurozone bailout funds is to aid states and their banks to remain solvent so that they can continue to pay their debts to misguided investors. As a result, we now have a situation in which it is not a matter of Germans, or the Dutch or the Finns etc, being obliged to bail out the Greeks, the Irish and the Spanish, but rather of middle class European taxpayers being forced to provide the funds required to save the fortunes of Europe’s wealthiest citizens.

As it stands, the EU debt collectors are urging crisis stricken countries to cut social services and increase taxes on the middle classes, while Greek shipping tycoons, Irish property barons and the Spanish super-rich pay hardly any income tax and invest their money in tax havens.

The priority for those who wish to save the euro should be to fight against such dysfunctions. If they do, the representatives of the unpopular European troika might still be perceived as heroes.

It is a mistake to portray the French Hollande administration as Socialist dinosaurs. The truth is that the new French government is at the extreme end of a new global trend: an international backlash against the wealthy that is reshaping politics from Europe to the US to China.

US President Barack Obama has been making political capital ahead of the November election with his pledges to tax “millionaires and billionaires”, while branding his Republican rival Mitt Romney as representing of the tax-dodging elite. Eventually that kind of shift is liable to spark a political backlash.

Western politicians, from Barack Obama to François Hollande are seeking to capture and channel this new mood... If this new mood hardens, it could mark the end of an era of lower taxes, deregulation and rising inequality that began in the late 1970s, with the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the west and of Deng Xiaoping in China.

EU-Digest

Occupy Wall Street and the global trend against inequality. - by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now engulfed Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enable social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right—at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests. In July, I talked to Spain’s indignados. From there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. And last month I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99 percent.”

That slogan echoes the title of my recent article "Of the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent, and by the 1 Percent", the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1 percent of the population controls more than 40 percent of the wealth and receives more than 20 percent of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society—bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality—but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers

.For more: Occupy Wall Street and the global trend against inequality. - Slate Magazine