The Forbes 4,000,000,000! Let's Hear it for Trickle-Up! (HuffPost)

[marmar]

Tony Hendra


03.12.2007
The Forbes 4,000,000,000! Let's Hear it for Trickle-Up! (2 comments )

Once again it's that time of year when Forbes reminds us that over the last 12 months the poor got poorer and the rich much, much richer! The total collective net worth (real property, liquid assets, stocks, jewelry, artwork, slaves) of the world's 946 billionaires, was way up over 2006 for a grand total of $3.5 ter-illion!

Way to go, robber barons and baronesses!

Amusingly the total collective net worth (see above) of the world's four billion poorest plunged for the twentieth year running, to an all-time low of just under 35 bucks! For you Eng-Lit majors that's a barely measurable one-hundred-billionth of what the big guys have stashed in Monaco, Geneva and Grand Cayman. Surging oil prices, protectionist G8 food and cotton subsidies, over-fishing by global fleets, privatization of local water supplies, environmental die-offs of crops, animals and marine life due to climate change, all combined to widen the global income-gap to historic proportions! Break out the Cristal, you red-suspender hedge-funders!

Meet just two of the Forbes Four Billion Poorest, those pathetic, scarcely sentient humans who form the fastest growing segment of the global economy and whose pathetic few coins trickling up the global opportunity pyramid (or GOP) helped make those 946 'self-made' men the financial titans they are!

#2,445,616,179: Lakshmi Patel 33, Calcutta, India. Net worth: one obsolete 1966 3-paisa piece (face value $.0016) which was his wife's dowry. Lakshmi grew up in northern India, eighth son of a subsistence lentil farmer, dispossessed in an illegal real-estate grab by corrupt Congress Party officials. His land was converted into a landing strip for Transmile Group, the global air-freight company owned by Malaysian Robert Kuok (net worth $7.0 billion; world's #104 richest man). Lakshmi now makes his home in slums of Calcutta with his wife and seven children, the smallest of whom the family was recently forced to eat. For shelter they've scavenged a sheet of rusty steel manufactured by Lakshmi's namesake and countryman, Lakshmi Mittal (Net worth $32 billion, world's #5 richest man). Says Patel:"I thank the gods each day for Mr Mittal's fine product" .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-hendra/the-forbes-4000_b_43268.html