The Money Machine of the 1% — How to Break Free
“Breaking free of the 1% and their constructs is not just possible, it has become necessary. It is a human necessity because participating in a world of limitless greed, profit, violence and power robs us of our humanity.” —VANDANA SHIVA
We can seed another future when we deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons and regenerate the earth
“rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness.”
This, then, is healthier, necessary way forward—where humans reconnect to other life. This is the Oneness we must fight for.
The following is an excerpt from Oneness vs. the 1% by Vandana Shiva and Kartikey Shiva. It has been adapted for the web.
1% is not just a number, it is a system, an economic system shaped by the rich and powerful, where unbridled greed and accumulation are seen as virtues to be rewarded by society, instead of aberrations which must be kept within limits through social and democratic processes.
It is a model in which who produces, what is produced, or whether anything at all is in fact produced, are questions that disappear from the economic equation. They are replaced by tools of money-making, money making money, or what Aristotle called ‘chrematistics’. It effects an economic apartheid between the haves and havenots, which translates into an ecological apartheid between the lives and live- nots, not just in the human family, but in the earth family. The rise of the 1% embodies a will to exclude, an urge to exterminate. Its inevitable consequences are ecocide and genocide.
The Oxfam report, ‘An Economy for the 1%’, reveals that the richest 1% own as much as 3.6 billion people do—the bottom 50% of humanity.1 While the wealth of the richest 62 people in the world increased by more than 45 percent between 2010 and 2015—an increase of more than half a trillion dollars, from $542 billion to $1.76 trillion—the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars over the same period—a drop of 38 percent.
In 2010, 388 individuals had as much wealth as the poorest half; in 2011, the figure was 177; in 2012, it dropped to 159; in 2013, it went down further to 92; in 2014, it was 80; and in 2017, the figure came down to just eight.2
Today, the financial sector, where the rich make money out of money, has increased to 15 percent of the GDP in most countries worldwide, including India and the US. As the Oxfam report indicates, in the economy of the 1%, 437 of the largest corporations in 2014 were financial, and their assets were five times greater than those of corporations in other sectors.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the richest 1% captured 95% of the world’s growth, reports The Wall Street Journal. While ordinary people lost jobs, homes, pensions and security, those gambling in the financial markets got richer.
Financial deregulation, which included removing the separation between savings and investment, created an economy based on speculation, with the financial economy overtaking the real economy and depleting it of oxygen in multiple ways.
From 2009, when the Great Recession officially ended, through 2012, the top 1 percent of Americans raked in 95 cents out of every dollar of increased income. Almost one-third of the national increase went to just 16,000 households, the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, as Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s analysis of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data shows.3
The income changes for the vast majority are just as revealing. The bottom 90 percent saw their average incomes rise 8.8 percent in 1934 over the previous year (the year 1933 marked the beginning of recovery from the Great Depression), and in 2012, the same statistical group had to get by on 15.7 percent less than in 2009.
Piketty points out that the 1% made more money from capital investments, whereas others get money from wages; because capital income is unequally distributed, it leads to growing inequality.
He shows that whether capital is taxed or not, inequality will grow under current policies because savings from current wages and salaries cannot grow as much as returns on existing wealth. According to Piketty, the process of accumulating ‘becomes more rapid and inegalitarian as the return on capital rises and the [overall economic] growth rate falls.’
The 1% economy is not just a system of economic inequality; it has implications for the planet, for society, and for democracy, because it symbolises a system of thought and an intellectual paradigm, based on a worldview of separation, extraction and extermination.
- ‘An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped’.Oxford: Oxfam, January 18, 2016. https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/ file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-en_0.pdf.
- ‘World’s eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%’, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds- eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-poorest-50. Published on January 16, 2017; ‘Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world’, Oxfam International. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8- men-own-same-wealth-half-world. Published on January 16, 2017.
- Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income and Wealth Inequality: Evidence and Policy Implications’. October 2014. https://eml.berkeley. edu/_saez/lecture_saez_chicago14.pdf.
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