Oxfam Inequality Report, Piketty & New India || Midweek Matters 43 || Parakala Prabhakar https://youtu.be/0KCzu1KpDxI?t=80
Jan 26, 2022
Dr Parakala speaks about Thomas Piketty's absorbing book, Capital and Ideology and the recently released Oxfam's report, Inequality Kills which has an India supplement also. He suggests that we all engage with these two works, challenge them. And, even if we do not agree with them, we should allow ourselves to be troubled by both them. He points out that New India is not troubled by inequality. It also tolerates it and justifies it. And it added social and cultural inequality to the existing economic equality.
“economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most. Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality. We can claw back extreme wealth through progressive taxation; invest in powerful, proven inequality-busting public measures; and boldly shift power in the economy and society. If we are courageous, and listen to the movements demanding change, we can create an economy in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which
inequality no longer kills.
INEQUALITY KILLS Full report https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621341/bp-inequality-kills-170122-en.pdf
EQUALITY FIRST
Huge amounts of public money, poured into our economies, have inflated stock prices dramatically and in turn boosted the bank accounts of billionaires more than ever before. Huge amounts of public money, poured into vaccines, have in turn boosted the profits of pharmaceutical firms, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
Governments must turn this around and refuse to spiral deeper into a dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating downfall into levels of extreme inequality human history has never seen before.
There is no shortage of money. That lie died when governments released $16 trillion to respond to the pandemic.60 There is only a shortage of courage to tackle inequality, and the wealth and might of the rich and the powerful, and a shortage of the imagination needed to break free from the failed, narrow straitjacket of extreme neoliberalism