30

Jan

A Pauperised World awaits its first Trillionaire.

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Today’s Edition

New Delhi, 30 January 2024

John Dayal

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In the last twenty years, pharmaceutical companies merged into just 10 giant, global ‘Big Pharma’ firms. The Union government has tried to make a dent in this by subsiding and advertising generic drugs, but swifter patented drugs are still expensive.

International news agencies told us this week that the world’s first trillionaire may come out of hiding sometime soon. A trillionaire has so many zeros in the kitty to make mere billionaires look like paupers.  The real paupers have been invisibilised long ago, together with their women folk and their neighbour, the Dalits, Tribals and so on lumped together under the rubric of the “marginalised’.

 Who will it be? Bezos, who makes money not by manufacturing goods, but largely by investing and by service units such as Amazon, the global behemoth which brought us good and clothing during the Covid lockdown without any of us going to the market but punishes any worker who may dream of unionising to ask for a living wage. True of it in India, as much as it is in the West.

 This race will not have an Indian for many more years. Mr Adani and Mr Mukesh Ambani may be Rupee trillionaires, but the dollar is still seventy times stronger or more.

 This becomes clear in two reports that were published this week. One is by Devos, the billionaires club nestling in that Christmas-card township of that name in the Alps. The second was by Oxfam, from London. Oxfam is now headed by an Indian, Amitabh Behar who for long years was one of the prime coordinators of civil society in New Delhi.  The Davos report has got its due publicity. Oxfam has been largely ignored by the Indian media, specially TV news.

 Jeff Bezos, Oxfam points had a fortune of US$ 167.4 billion, which has increased by US$32.7 billion since 2020. Amazon has a history of making efforts to prevent unionising by workers, Oxfam says. It quotes an American worker describing the work as physically demanding, monotonous and gruelling, with employees subject to discrimination. 

In another industry, a woman worker said ‘While we were working there wasn’t time to rest. I was not allowed to drink.”  This columnist has met workers in Delhi and elsewhere who say they have to walk half a kilometre to a municipal toilet and could be penalised if some ailment triggers a more frequent break from work.

 According to Oxfam, for most people around the world, the three years of this decade have been incredibly hard. Over 4.8 billion people are poorer than they were in 2019. The gap between Global North and the Global South – has grown for the first time in 25 years.

 In India as in the rest of the world, prices outpace wages, with people having to reduce their purchases, and their prospects of a better future.

 Third world governments – and India is no exception - pay nearly half a billion US dollars a day in interest and debt payments. Naturally, there is dramatic increase in extreme wealth, mostly in west or Japan, Korea or China. 

 The other big winners in this period of crisis are global corporations, with the biggest firms experienced an 89% leap in profits in 2021 and 2022, and 2023 will shatter all records when the data is available.

 Oxfam lays out a fundamental choice for the world, between a new age of billionaire supremacy, controlled by monopolists and financiers, or transformative public power that is founded upon equality and dignity.

Since 2020, and the beginning of this decade, the profits of the five richest men in the world have more than doubled, while five billion people have seen their wealth fall. Globally, men own US$105 trillion more wealth than women. The disparities also show between White and Blacks in the United States, and their equivalents in other countries, Dalits, and Tribals in India, for instance. As an illustration, it would take a woman in the social sector to earn what a CEO in the biggest Fortune 100 companies earns in a year.

 There is need to worry about the connect between extreme wealth and rising corporate and monopoly power.  The Oxfam research says  corporate power exploits and magnifies inequalities of gender and race, as well as economic inequality. 

 India faces ‘rising industrial concentration’, especially by the top five firms. Monopolies increase the power of corporations. Energy, food and pharma sectors seeing huge price hikes. Such monopolies impact ordinary people by influencing the wages, the foods people can afford, and the medicines they can access. 

Any diabetic can vouch for this in the rising prices of life-saving drugs, including insulin. In the last twenty years, pharmaceutical companies merged into just 10 giant, global ‘Big Pharma’ firms. The Union government has tried to make a dent in this by subsiding and advertising generic drugs, but swifter patented drugs are still expensive.

We have seen even in India how corporate giants use their clout to oppose policies that could benefit workers, such as fighting minimum wage increases, and even political restrictions. Corporate returns rather than human rights, the report argues, are snapping up everything from water systems to healthcare providers and nursing homes. 

In India, Oxfam report shows, inequalities have increased.  Dalits face high and unaffordable out-of-pocket fees in the private healthcare sector, financial exclusion in the private education sector; an overt discrimination in both.

The leading international civil society group has a disquieting caution: corporate power across the globe is relentlessly pushing into the public sector, commodifying and segregating access to vital services such as education, water and healthcare.  This can gut governments’ ability to deliver the type of high-quality, universal public services that can reduce inequality.

For countries such as India, there is hope that government will use its power to “reinvent and repurpose” the private sector by promoting  a  new generation of companies, including worker and local cooperatives, social enterprises, and fair-trade businesses,  owned and governed in the interest of workers, local communities, and the environment. 

It remains to be seen if this can become an election platform by the ruling BJP as also by the political challengers in the 2024 polls. Therein would lie hope for the majority of the citizens.

(Words  1035)

(John Dayal is an author, editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist)

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