“Along The Color Line”, written by
Manning Marable, PhD and distributed by www.BlackCommentator.com,
is a public educational and information service dedicated to
fostering political dialogue and discussion,
inspired by the great tradition for political event columns written
by W. E. B. Du Bois nearly a century ago.
At no previous moment in world history has the gap
between the rich and poor been as wide as today. As an important,
newly-released report reveals, this growing class divide exists
in virtually every nation on earth.
A 2006 study by the World Institute for Development
Economic Research of the United Nations University, establishes
that as of 2000, the upper 1 percent of the globe’s adult
population, approximately 37 million people, who average about $515,000
in net worth per person, collectively control roughly 40 percent
of the world’s entire wealth. By contrast, the bottom one-half
of the planet’s adult population, 1.85 billion people, most
of whom are black and brown, own only 1.1 percent of the world’s
total wealth. There is tremendous inequality of wealth between nations,
the U.N. report notes. The United States, for example, comprises
only 4.7 percent of the world’s people, but it has nearly
one-third, or 32.6 percent, of global wealth. By stark contrast,
China, which has one-fifth of the world’s population, owns
only 2.6 percent of the globe’s wealth. India, which has 16.8
percent of the global population, controls only 0.9 percent of the
world’s total wealth.
Within most of the world’s countries, wealth
is disproportionately concentrated in the top ten percent of each
nation’s population. It comes as no surprise that in the United
States, for example, the upper 10 percent of the adult population
owns 69.8 percent of the nation’s total wealth. Canada, a
nation with more liberal social welfare traditions than the U.S.,
nevertheless still exhibits significant inequality. More than one-half
of Canadian assets, 53 percent, are owned by only ten percent of
the population. European countries such as Norway, at 50.5 percent,
and Spain, at 41.9 percent, have similar or slightly lower levels
of wealth inequality.
The most revealing finding of the World Institute
for Development Economics Research is that similar patterns of wealth
inequality now exist throughout the Third World. In Indonesia, for
example, 65.4 percent of the nation’s total wealth belongs
to the wealthiest 10 percent. In India, the upper ten percent owns
52 percent of all Indian wealth. Even in China, where the ruling
Communist Party still maintains vestiges of what might be described
as “authoritarian state socialism,” the wealthiest 10
percent own 41.4 percent of the national wealth.
But even these macroeconomic statistics, as useful
as they are, obscure a crucial dimension of wealth concentration,
under global apartheid’s neoliberal economics. In the past
20 years in the United States, where deregulation and privatization
has been carried to extremes, we are witnessing a phenomenon that
the media has described as “the very rich” leaving “the
merely rich" behind. A recent study by New York University
economist Edward N. Wolff has found that one out of every 825 households
in the U.S. in 2004 earned at least $2 million annually, representing
nearly a 100 percent increase in the wealth percentage recorded
in 1989, adjusted for inflation. As of 2004, one out of every 325
U.S. households possessed a net wealth of $10 million or more. When
adjusted by inflation, this is more than four times as many wealthy
households as in 1989. The exponential growth of America’s
“super-rich” is a direct product of the near-elimination
of capital gains taxes, and the sharp decline in federal government
income tax rates.
We still tend to perceive the political world in eighteenth
and nineteenth century terms: as competing “nations,”
geopolitical units defined by territorial boundaries, which conduct
international affairs based on their perceived objective interests.
In the twenty-first century, however, we must perceive of our political
world entirely differently: as an environment in which multinational
corporations exert greater power and influence than many countries;
where millions of low-wage, manufacturing jobs each year are being
relocated to south Asia, China, and Latin America. Globalization,
and the widespread adoption of the neoliberal economic model of
development, are constructing an affluent, transnational “ruling
class,” a privileged stratum whose class interests largely
supercede its national allegiances.
SOURCES:
“Jamaica Today: The Legacy of Michael Morley”
Thomas Edsall, “Risk and Reward,” New
York Times, 5 December 2006.
Eduardo Porter, “Study Finds Wealth Inequality
is Widening Worldwide,” New York Times, 6 December, 2006.
Louis Uchitelle, “Very Rich are Leaving the
Merely Rich Behind,” New York Times, 27 November 2006.
Douglas W. Payne, “In Jamaica, Hero Day is Done,”
Dissent, Vol. 45, no. 3 (Summer 1998) pp. 24-26.
Fred Magdoff, “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation,”
Monthly Review, Vol. 58, no. 6 (November 2006), pp. 1-23.
The Editors, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,”
Monthly Review, Vol. 53, no. 10 (March 2002), pp. 1-14.
In 1976, at the age of 26, Manning Marable began
a syndicated public affairs series “Along The Color Line”,
focusing on political issues and public events that had special
significance to African Americans and to other people of color internationally.
For more than 25 years, the column was distributed regularly free-of-charge
to over 400 newspapers worldwide. Medical problems forced the temporary
halt to the distribution of “Along The Color Line”.
BC and Dr. Marable are pleased to announce the
return of the “Along The Color Line” public affairs
series, beginning in 2007. The series is still absolutely without
charge to all black-owned, black-oriented, and independent/progressive
publications and internet websites for distribution worldwide. You
are completely free to reproduce any one column, or all of them,
that you see published on BlackCommentator.com so long as credit
is given to Dr. Marable and www.BlackCommentator.com.
BC Editorial
Board member Manning Marable, PhD is one of America’s most
influential and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has
been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and
African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City.
For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding director of the Institute
for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University,
from 1993 to 2003. Dr. Marable is an author or editor of over 20
books, including Living Black History (2006); The
Autobiography of Medgar Evers (2005); Freedom (2002);
Black Leadership (1998); Beyond Black and White
(1995); and How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America
(1983). His current project is a major biography of Malcolm X, entitled
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, to be published by Viking
Press in 2009. Click
here to contact Dr. Marable. |