The net asset worth of India’s richest has also shrunk by over a third from the time of the last Forbes scroll. By 2007, that worth had reached $ 335 billion. That is, 53 individuals in a population of one billion held wealth equal to almost a third of their nation’s GDP at the time. This year, that worth plunged to $107 billion. (A moment’s respectful silence in memory of the dear, departed billions seems in order.) But there is some comfort in that our team is still worth more than twice what their Chinese rivals are. And we even now have 8 billionaires more than all the Nordic nations put together -- though they boast the highest living standards in the world.

Anyone who is approached by beggars should call the police immediately, he said.

fallacy of poverty reduction:
An analysis of the sources of growth during the period 2000-01 to 2004-05 shows that the composition of growth during the period was pro-rich rather than pro-poor. It was fuelled mainly by the services sector, (particularly banking and communications) which contributed 60 per cent of GDP growth during the period and the manufacturing sector – primarily manufacture of automobiles, luxury consumer electronics, cement and textiles – which contributed 30.4 per cent of GDP growth during this period.
(...) It is clear that GDP growth during the period was overwhelmingly pro-rich since none of the sectors which mainly constituted the growth were either producing goods for the poor or directly providing employment to them.
(...) Our own poverty estimate also takes account of the inconsistencies in the Sindh sub-sample and yields a poverty reduction estimate of only 0.6 percentage points with poverty declining from 31.3 per cent in 1998-99 to 30.7 per cent in 2004-05. One can conclude therefore that, there has been no significant poverty reduction during the period 1998-99 to 2004-05. This conclusion is consistent with the sources of growth analysis based on national income data.
(...) In the three years after 2004-05 the demand-supply imbalances in the economy resulting from design errors of the economic policy led to accelerated inflation, particularly food inflation, severe shortages of flour, electricity, gas and fuel. The accelerating inflation rate particularly for items in the poor man’s basket would be expected to have worsened the poverty situation.

homelessness in toronto:
Inequality has reached a level not seen in this country for about a century, as Osgoode Hall tax professor Neil Brooks has noted. The swollen ranks of homeless people — a throwback to the early days of capitalism before protest movements won social benefits — are a sharp reminder that this class war has many victims, including the weakest and most vulnerable.
(...) This appears to be the underlying motivation behind Toronto's “Streets to Homes” program, which is modelled on the Bush administration's program to end homelessness in U.S. cities.
(...) One clue that something is amiss is the fact that, at the same time that it's ostensibly working to end homelessness, the Bush administration has made deep cuts to federal housing and support programs that would be key to any successful transition from homelessness to housing.
(...) In reality, the much-vaunted success of cities like New York in eliminating homelessness is largely spin, according to Patrick Markee, an analyst with New York's Coalition for the Homeless. “This decade has been the worst since the Great Depression,” he told me.
(...) And it's been accompanied by cutbacks in shelter beds, making the immediate plight of the homeless even more precarious. A survey of more than 300 homeless people by the group Street Health found that 39 per cent tried but were unable to get access to a shelter bed at some point last winter.
(...) Indeed, Toronto's launch of its Streets to Homes program in February 2005 was coupled with punitive new rules that banned the homeless from sleeping in public squares, and halted programs that provided them with food and sleeping bags. The city has also become more aggressive in prosecuting panhandlers and loiterers.

wealth, taxing, and agency:
According to Princeton University professor Peter Singer, the top 0.01 of taxpayers or 14,000 Americans earn an average of $12,775,000 with total earnings of $184 billion. The rest of the 0.1 percent, or 129,600 individuals, now have an average income of just over $2 million. And the top 0.5 or 575,900 have an average income of $623,000.
(...) Prof. Singer calculates that if the folks in the top 10 percent donated between 10-30 percent of their income, it would raise $404 billion, an amount that would eliminate half of global poverty. And they wouldn't be left to scrimp on their sumptuous lifestyles.
(...) And Warren Buffet, the second richest man in America, concedes that "If you stuck me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru you'll find out how much talent is going to produce in the wrong soil." Adding that he personally believes "society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned."
(...) To this, we must add several additional sources for the great fortunes. A partial list includes: piracy, colonial pillage, black African slaves, extermination of first nation peoples, child labor, Chinese and Irish immigrant labor (railroads) indentured servitude, eminent domain, massive (often concealed) taxpayer subsidies, worker massacres, inheritance laws, public land grabs, unfair trade practices, supporting foreign dictatorships to gain cheap labor and resources, tax policy, corporate welfare, and always, underpaid, overworked employees.
(...) Self-made wealth is a largely a myth. In the words of economic analyst Mike Laphan, "It takes a village to raise a billionaire. Every taxpayer deserves some credit for the Forbes 400 wealth." So if all production is social -- from public investments to our combined labor power -- where is society's dividend?

from envio, january 2002:
[trickle down] The most defined feature of the new government’s economic design is that the motor force of economic growth during its five-year term will be large-scale foreign investment, followed by national private business investment. This growth strategy is based on the very traditional idea that the benefits of the big investments will trickle down to the others.
(...) These two investments reflect the new government’s priority areas: tourism and the assembly plants known as maquiladoras, which process imported materials for re-export and are exempt from import and export taxes. The latter will be given particular priority because this type of operation seems to be of greatest interest to the investors currently sniffing around.
(...) [employment] With all polls showing unemployment as the social problem most affecting the population over the past decade, Bolaños’ campaign promise to create new jobs sparked particularly high expectations. Like its predecessor, the current government is counting on the maquila industrial parks—commonly referred to as free zones—as the quickest way to mass-create the longed-for jobs. Indeed, when Alemán took office, around eight thousand people were employed in the maquiladoras; today, according to the Central Bank, that figure has climbed to nearly forty thousand. Nonetheless, his seemingly exclusive reliance on big investors is questionable considering that small urban and rural businesses still provide the bulk of Nicaragua’s jobs and the government has no clear plan for this sector.
(...) Bolaños is offering investors two advantages. The first is competitive prices—"starting with the cost of our labor force," to use his words. The second is security, at least compared to most of the other Central American countries vying for tourists and maquila investors. In his opening speech at the investment forum, Bolaños told the audience that "Nicaragua is a safe country, its people very warm and welcoming. We have one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America, and the public safety we can offer today is the envy of our neighbors north and south. There are no kidnappings or violent crimes against tourists or investors here, and the tourists who come don’t have to listen to special instructions about security beyond the dictates of common sense."
(...) [the future of agriculture?] The most noteworthy aspect of this government’s economic strategy is that agriculture, for nearly two hundred years the kingpin of the national economy and the source of the new President’s own wealth, has been left in the dust. It seems to be viewed as a problem rather than a solution, a sector that drags on the economy rather than driving it forward.
(...) [credit] In Nicaragua, private commercial banks do not work with the rural productive sectors. The bulk of their credit portfolios is dedicated to financing consumption. An individual can easily get a loan to buy one of the plethora of luxury 4-wheel-drive vehicles clogging Managua streets today, but faces often insurmountable obstacles when applying for a loan to plant papayas for export. Around five years ago, the World Bank set up a program to extend private banking services to the countryside, providing a US$30,000 subsidy to the banks for each branch they opened in rural areas. The banks jumped at the offer, but did precisely the opposite of what the World Bank intended: they used these branches to attract the savings of the rural population and thus increase their capacity to finance consumer loans in the cities, providing no credits for any rural productive activities.
(...) [strategy for poverty] If very few resources have been invested in the productive sector in the past decade, the Poverty Reduction Strategy, now an official World Bank-approved document that the new government is committed to implement, does not appear particularly concerned with production either, mentioning it only in very general terms. The strategy’s main objective is to create a social safety net that will use subsidies to alleviate (not reduce) the poverty of the most vulnerable population. The strategy does not propose incorporating the poor into the national economic project. Based on a very traditional mentality, it assumes that the poor will automatically be pulled in as the large, modern sector of the economy grows.
(...) [on GDP] In 1990, the annual per capita GDP was equivalent to US$454. Today it is US$484. In other words, eleven years after the war, during which Nicaragua has been receiving an annual average of US$500 million in foreign cooperation, the income of each Nicaraguan has only grown US$30! If that is not shocking enough, it must be remembered that this figure only expresses a mathematic or artificial reality, homogenizing the head count of not only both babies and the retired, but also the very rich and the very poor. It in no way reflects real income distribution, which is profoundly inequitable in Nicaragua and becoming more skewed with every passing day.
(...) [poverty] International analysts calculate that a country’s economy must grow at least 7% a year to effectively reduce that country’s poverty. During the reactivation period of the past seven years, Nicaragua’s economy grew an average of 4.5% annually.

christian parenti on capitalism and prisons (2001):
...there is a debate going on, which is not always acknowledged as such, as to what is the enemy? Is the enemy nasty corporate practice or is the enemy a whole society that is a specific stage of historical economic development that has, as a system, a logic. And that's you know, what I think. And I think that, I'll give you the punch line first, I think that if we limit our critique to bad corporations we will end up in a cul-de-sac where we will eventually be patting Nike on the head for changing their nasty habits, which they will never do anyway.
(...) So, more specifically, why does America with 5% of the world's population have 25% of the world's prisoners.
(...) [why?] When this criminal justice crackdown that we're living in now began was really in the late sixties and what was going on in the late sixties? Basically the U.S. system faced a dual crisis, political and economic. the political crisis, you're all familiar with, I'm sure: the civil rights movement, the black power movement, then the anti-war movement adding into that. Also a little known wildcat labor movement that was making things difficult for the captains of industry, massive strikes also making things difficult for the corrupt leadership of the AFL-CIO forcing them to actually act like actual unionists, and of course rioting: massive rioting from 64 on. (...) There's also the war in Vietnam that is the background for all of this. You have to remember that the U.S. is bogged down in this hugely expensive, incredibly technically complicated war that by the late-sixties was threatening the power of the U.S. dollar and undermining the whole world financial system and also, after the Tet offensive of '68, it was a war that was falling apart from the U.S. side. (...) And in response to all of this on the domestic side, the police were not up to the task of basically crushing and containing the rebellion. We often forget that because ultimately they prevail, right? They crush the panthers, they put so many activists in prisons, they shut things down, they were tremendously brutal, broke the law, got away with it, et cetera.
(...) [the effect of all this:] And it didn't scare people away; it radicalized the movement. It made the U.S. look really really bad. It made it harder for the U.S. to get on the world stage and say "Capitalism and liberal democracy deliver the goods. Not any of these other options people are fighting for. This is The system."
(...) [the concrete result: the underpinnings of today's justice system] So in response to the police crisis, Lyndon Johnson, in 1967 proposes legislation, that in '68 passes the house of representatives as D.C. is literally burning for the second time. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated, there is massive riots, there is like smoke billowing over the congress and these guys are designing this piece of legislation which creates the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the LEAA, this huge federal bureaucracy, which over the next ten years redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local police to retool and retrain american law enforcement and the judicial system and prisons, to some extent, to deal with the crisis of an incipient revolution which is what they had on their hands at the time.
(...) [world-economic situation at the time] The second part of the crisis that was going on parallel to this was economic. The U.S. ended world war 2 as the industrial power on the planet. Europe and Japan, the two main capitalist rivals had been destroyed economically and so the U.S. was, by the end of the war, producing half, or some people say more than half of the world's output and it was in the position to make incredible profits. (...) So you had, like, fifteen years of deprivation and pent up economic demand coupled with generous aid from the U.S. and U.S. corporations there to provide the machines, tools, and the commodities at first. And you get this incredible boom throughout the nineteen fifties and the early sixties: the golden era of capitalism.
(...) [the crisis...] So finally you have the fundamental crisis that capitalism always returns to: you have a crisis of overproduction. This is one of the central irrationalities of this system. That when things work out the way they're supposed to, you run into trouble. When the economy is going well, you inevitably produce too much stuff and therefore you can't keep producing at the same rate of profitablity, which is the logic, which is the reason that investors invest, that's what keep capitalism going, is profitability.
(...) [the solution?] Well, the solution in the real, you know, true organic solution to this problem is war. That is one of the functions of war under capitalism. Not that it's thought of as such, but structurally this is how it works: one of the heuristic positive things about war for the capitalist class is that it destroys, not just people, but stuff. You clear away the commodities of capital and then restart a period of growth. It's like burning a field and we are their weeds, unfortunately. So they couldn't just write off capital, destroy Europe's economic base, destroy the U.S. economic base, so where are they going to make up the difference?
(...) [the other solution?] Well, from labor. That's the easiest place to go, is to take back the gains that the working class had made over the last thirty years since the depression. Both directly through higher wages and indirectly through what's called the social wage, funding for welfare, increased funding for education, increased funding for the environment. You have to remember that it's under Nixon in the early seventies that you have the creation of the EPA, the creation of OSHA, all of these huge agencies. (...) So capital tries to attack labor in the Seventies. They try to drive down wages, but it doesn't work, and the ruling class is trying to figure out "well, why is this?"
(...) [on this engineered crisis] At one point, congress asked Volcker, the crisis was getting very very bad, Mexico was threatening to bail out on its ninety billion dollar debt and Volcker goes before congress and they say you have to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and he says "Well, I can't do that," because basically, this is his quote, "the standard of living of the average american worker has to decline, I don't think you can get around that," until economic health returns. His colleague in England, where the same policy was being pursued, because this is a world system, Alan Budd, later described the policy this way: "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. What was engineered in Marxist terms," this guy is a Thatcherite conservative, "was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed the capitalist's to make high profits ever since."
(...) [and the 80s] In 1980, not a single union contract included a wage freeze or wage giveback and none of them really had since the early sixties. By 1982, forty-four percent of all union contracts included wage freezes or outright wage givebacks. So you have, in the eighties, you have the return of mass poverty.
(...) [on why capitalism needs poverty] If the poor, you want the poor to intimidate your workers, right? Say you own a hotel, you want the poor. You want homeless people to scare the shit out of your waitstaff, but you don't actually want those homeless people in front of your hotel, cause then they scare away the tourists. And, of course, poor people organize and rebel. So how do you manage this contradiction? You have to have poverty under capitalism, capitalism produces poverty through policy and organically through crisis, but it's always threatened by poverty. --> [and the repression/prison-complex] Well, one way was welfare, right? Absorb the poor, co-opt the poor, placate the poor, but that was seen to be aiding workers in general, so that's not an option. Well, what do you do? You switch back to the old-fashioned method of repression, increased demonization. So you get, in the early eighties, a re-engagement with that earlier part of the story of the criminal justice crackdown. and it's very much about containing and controlling the poor. You get the War on Drugs, ramps up in '82, first by changing the rules to favor the prosecution. In '84, there's the first really big federal crime bill that does a whole bunch of stuff. It creates a lot of grants for local law enforcement, local incarceration, but one of the key things it does is create the Asset Forfeiture laws which is a way of recruiting local police into the drug war, because this is really coming down from the top in certain levels.
(...) [and more militarization...] Eighty-six, you get another major crime bill that creates new, twenty nine new mandatory minimums, billions of dollars for grants to the locals. Eighty-eight through ninety-two, more of these crime bills. Ninety-two riots, Clinton comes in. More of the same policies culminating in the '94 crime bill where there's thirty billion dollars doled out to the states. Of course, always with strings attached that they must repress poor people more, essentially, right? So you can get the money to build your prison if you have a three-strikes law or truth-in-sentencing law. Which means that in many cases nonviolent offenders on a third or second offense are put away for twenty-five to life. Then you can get extra money from the Feds, etc etc. Ninety-six, effective terrorism anti-death penalty act. Numerous immigration restrictions to militarize the border. And on and on and on, and we're still in that moment of buildup though it is beginning to plateau to some extent and there is this response to it.