Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Economic Inequality
Sunday Debate: Oxfam
have launched their Even It Up campaign to end extreme economic
inequality. The video linked to here explains how the gap between rich
and poor is growing and how this is fuelling extreme poverty around the
world. They have released a massive 100+ page report detailing the
problems and laying out some of their solutions.
One of their
main asks is for legislators to close tax loopholes that allow
corporations and the super rich to avoid paying their "fair share" of
tax, creating more money for public services such as education and
healthcare. However, as they rightly identify, it is the economic elite
who hold the balance of legislative power. It is not that they are
"cheating the system", they created the system. So should we be
appealing to that same power structure to make things more equal, or
should we be working to build a movement to dismantle the current system
and create something more equal from the ground up?
They
identify the fact that 85 individuals hold as much wealth as the poorest
half of humanity and that just 1.5% of the wealth of all the world's
billionaires could pay for every child in the world to go to school and
fund the shortfall in health care in the world's poorest countries. But
is there any point in trying to prise back a tiny amount of the wealth
from the super rich without directly challenging the systemic
circumstances that allow individuals to accumulate such obscene wealth
in the first place?
Join the debate in the comments section below.
