The planet is not dying it is being killed and the people killing it have names and addresses, said singer activist and well known wobbly, Utah Phillips.
We talk about the one per cent. It is more like the one in ten million.
If we know the names and addresses of the 700 people who control the wealth and armies of the planet, then we might be able to adjust their behaviour.
Taking the Forbes rich list of 1,900 billionaires and chopping it off at 700 would give us a partial result, but it excludes royalty and dictators. Also, the arms dealers, drug runners, slave traders and engangered animal merchants deliberately keep themselves off the list.
Note that five percent of the 2,000 billionaires on the planet (ie 100 people) own more than $US10,000,000,000 (or to use the Vedic system, 100 crore $1,00,00,00,000). We might take them as our first tranche and see where that gets us.
I find it somewhat refreshing that six of the ten are tech related and there is a fashionista in there as well. Two are financiers and the Koch brothers are the biggest coal barons in the world and among the largest funders of the climate denial campaign of which Senator Malcolm Roberts is the latest outgrowth.
Of course, political power amounts to something even if we cannot simply give every politician that represents one crore of people a place in the one per crore and leave it at that. While that would represent one person one vote, the politicians from the world’s twentiest richest nations wield much more significant power than the one hundred poorer ones.
Note that the Indonesians are set to pass Australia, we might soon be begging for a seat at the G30 if we want to keep our nose in world affairs. The point here is that a small number of relatively underpopulated nations compete with China, India and Brazil, the USA, Indonesia and Russia for a place at the big table.
If we put in a political ofical for every crore of people in the G20 that would give us another 200 candidates for the 700 one per crore. Around 30 of them would be citizens of the USA, and 125 of them members of the Chinese Communist party. Russia would only get 15 places in this slice of the population, but it has around 60 billionaires to build up its numbers. This might be over estimating the power of political influence but it is at least a start.
Now that leaves out world leaders who have scammed their way into the game without declaring their hand.
Aross all time, the world’s most corrupt leaders have been named by Transparency International. A look at their embezzled fortunes, makes you realise how much wealth the truly wealthy have, even when you take inflation into account.
Source: Transparency International Global Corruption Report 2004 (not updated since)
There needs to be a tranche of members based on military influence and then some way of accounting for the crooks.
Cross referencing, updating and fleshing out these sources is just the beginning of a project to identify the One per Crore, the one in ten million people who actually call the shots. That is the 700 people in the world who we might clearly claim are running it. Once we have their names and addresses we can start working on ways to help them manage their affairs more in line with our communal and long term interest.
The Cage welcomes your suggestions on ways to flesh out this list.
Geoff is an author, publisher and performer dedicated to building an independent media. He worked for Australian Consolidated Press as a Packer editor until starting his own media company in the mid-nineties.
The Generator started life as a radio show on Byron Bay's Bay FM and continues as an umbrella for the Cage, the Cross and Great Notion. These digital assets have now been shared with EcoRadio.net, a radio show with a similar history.
