Tag Archives: wealth

Followup On Money

Next week I will move beyond the US elections, but so long as the big media does such a poor job of looking behind the show, I feel the need to bring forward whatever information I feel is of importance.

Some months back my internet colleague Chris Weagel recommended a media source to me, by the name of consortium news.  I’ve subscribed to that site, and have indeed found useful information that is not available in the mainstream.

The latest eye-opening article went over Hillary Clinton’s income, on the heels of her 5 million dollar loan to her own campaign.  Some people may not be surprised or remotely uncomfortable about the numbers, but I want to lay it out anyway.

According to author and journalist Nat Parry, Hillary’s income breaks down like this:

  • Senate salary of $169,300 a year.
  • From her memoir Living History, 9.9 million$
  • $10.2 million for giving 57 speeches in 2006

And then there is husband Bill’s money coming from such places as:

  • $20 million via business relationship with Yucaipa Cos., the investment firm of his longtime supporter, billionaire Ron Burkle, which has connections to the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.  – according to the Wall St. Journal
  • Helped Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra in securing a lucrative uranium deal with the repressive government of Kazakhstan in 2005, shortly before Giustra made an unreported $31.3 million donation to Clinton’s foundation. – according to the New York Times.

This is just a taste, read the full post for details as well as links to the sources.

Seeing these numbers just makes me do a double-take, as sometimes I forget how very wealthy politicans in the United States can be; especially if they’ve lived in the white house.

Wealth Pyramid

Sometime around the spring of 1999, I stepped into my first day of a class that would change my life forever. It was African-American politics at William Paterson U, and in walked a polite and mild mannered man who would later become one of my most valued friends and mentors.

In my fuzzy memory, the first thing Yemane did, after telling us his name, was to draw a pyramid on the board. He divided that pyramid, a tiny line near the narrow top, which he labelled — 80% of the world’s wealth. Then he circled the rest of the pyramid, pointing especially to the large bottom part — 20% of the world’s wealth.

Actually I think it was more dramatic than that… Yemane was (and is) excellent at breaking down the world around us. From that point on politics, understanding who gets what, why, and how, became an obsession.

This week I see a familiar statistic… the global concentration of wealth report reveals that in the last 5 years… that pyramid has gotten worse. The people at the top, the small group, have gotten richer than ever before. And the rest of the people in that pyramid, the majority of people in our world, have gotten poorer.

The updated and more accurate statistic from the report is as follows:

  • 0.7% of world’s population control more than 1/3 of the world’s wealth.
  • Where? Half of that group are in North America, while 1/4 are in Europe.

I’ve always believed that this statistic is one of the best places to start if you want to pick apart what is wrong with the world. If you want to spark people’s concern and interest in figuring out why this has happened and the tremendous price humans pay because of this mind boggling inequality.

Later this week I’ll have a podcast on this topic, with guests. So stay tuned.

bmtv8 Religion versus Wealth

With this vlog I intend to begin a series focused on questions of poverty, religion, education, health and more. Somehow these things are all inter-related, and I’m going to look into the numbers around the world.

This episode deals with Religion versus Wealth. Using the data from PEW’s 2002 study, we can see the level of religiousness in both wealthy and poor countries. But the conclusions don’t come easy, so I’ve got much more work to do.

Watch the Video

PS — Yes, you may notice I make several guesstimates that are somewhat incorrect in this vlog. I was speaking only from memory, so forgive me. The numbers are still there for you to see for yourself, thats the important part.