The 10 richest men in the world doubled their fortune during the pandemic, generating $15,000 per second, according to a report by the organization Oxfam International.
According to the report, the fortune of these people, including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, went from 700,000 million to 1,500 billion dollars during the first months of the pandemic.
This equates to
earning at a rate of $15,000 per second, or $13 billion per day.
"If these 10 men lost 99.999% of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99%
of all the people on this planet," Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said in the report "Inequality kills." .
Protest outside the Trump Hotel against tax cuts for the wealthy in the Build Back Better plan, Thursday, November 4, 2021Joy Asico / AP
The pandemic has caused the income of 99% of humanity to fall, pushing 160 million people into poverty.
This inequality, according to the organization, is
contributing to the deaths of at least 21,000 people a day,
or one person every four seconds.
This is a conservative estimate "based on global deaths from lack of access to health care, gender-based violence, hunger, and climate breakdown," according to the report.
This has disproportionately affected women and girls, Black and Latino communities in the United States, and other marginalized groups around the world.
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For example, black people in Brazil are 1.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people.
In the US, 3.4 million black Americans would be alive today if their life expectancy were the same as whites.
"This is directly linked to historical racism and colonialism," says Oxfam.
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Meanwhile, the wealth of billionaires has increased more since the start of COVID-19 than in the last 14 years.
At $5 trillion in total, this is the largest increase in wealth for billionaires on record.
“If these 10 men lost 99.99% of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99% of all the people on this planet”
Gabriela Bucher, director of oxfam
“Billionaires have had an incredible pandemic,” Bucher said. “Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets to save the economy, but much of it ended up lining the pockets of billionaires as the stock market rose.
Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, but wealthy governments allowed billionaires and pharmaceutical monopolies to cut off supplies to billions of people.
The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable is at risk of continuing to rise.
The predictability of this is disgusting.
The consequences of this kill,” Bucher said.
from left
From left to right: Elon Musk, founder of Tesla;
Microsoft founder Bill Gates;
and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, founder of the space company Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post newspaper. Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez.
Photos by Getty Images
Taxes for the richest
Oxfam also criticized how friendly governments in rich countries are to billionaires by allowing them not to pay taxes.
“They have fostered corporate monopolies to such an extent that, in the pandemic period alone, the increase in market concentration threatens to be greater in one year than in the last 15 years, from 2000 to 2015,” the report says.
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Following the immense impact of the pandemic on the world economy and with vaccines as the only effective solution in sight, the organization called on the US and Chinese governments to waive intellectual property rules on vaccines.
"Inequality is growing at such a rate and scale by choice, not by chance
," Bucher said.
"Our economic structures have not only made all of us less secure against this pandemic, they are actively allowing the already extremely wealthy and powerful to exploit this crisis for their own gain," he added.
