The world is beginning to look like France, a few years before the Revolution. There are no reliable wealth statistics from that time, but the disparities are unlikely to have been greater than they are today. The wealthiest 5% of the world's people now earn 114 times as much as the poorest 5%. The 500 richest people on earth now own $1,54-trillion -- more than the entire gross domestic product of Africa, or the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of humanity.
Now, just as then, the desperation of the poor counterpoises the obscene consumption of the rich. Now, just as then, the sages employed by the global aristocrats - in the universities, the thinktanks, the newspapers and magazines -- contrive to prove that we possess the best of all possible systems in the best of all possible worlds.
In the fortress of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay we have our Bastille, in which men are imprisoned without charge or trial.
Like the court at Versailles, the wealth and splendour of the nouveau-ancien regime will be on display, not far from the stinking slums in which hunger reigns, at next week's world trade summit in Cancun in Mexico. Between banquets and champagne receptions, men like the European trade commissioner Pascal Lamy and the US trade representative Robert Zoellick will dismiss with their customary arrogance the needs of the hungry majority. There we will witness the same corruption, of both purpose and execution, the same conflation of the private good with the public good: le monde, c'est nous. As Charles Dickens wrote of the ruling class of that earlier time: "the leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance."
http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=19922
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