{"id":364849,"date":"2018-06-10T03:18:35","date_gmt":"2018-06-10T02:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/inequality-social-dysfunction-and-misery\/"},"modified":"2018-06-10T03:18:35","modified_gmt":"2018-06-10T02:18:35","slug":"inequality-social-dysfunction-and-misery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/inequality-social-dysfunction-and-misery\/","title":{"rendered":"Inequality Social Dysfunction and Misery"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Year on year the economic divisions and sub-divisions in the world deepen, and the associated social ills increase: The rich, comfortable, and the very extremely rich keep getting richer, and the rest, well, whilst some may be raised up out of crippling poverty into relative poverty, the majority of people continue to live under a blanket of economic insecurity and largely remain where they are.<\/p>\n<p>Straddling the global ladder of economic and social division sit the Multi-Billionaires (there <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/billionaires\/%22%20%5Cl%20%2213ccc7d1251c\">are<\/a> now 2,208 billionaires), 42 of whom (down from 61 in 2016), according to a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oxfam.org\/en\/pressroom\/pressreleases\/2018-01-22\/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year\">report<\/a> by Oxfam, own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity combined. Together with their lesser cohorts this coterie of Trillionaires sucked up \u201ceighty-two percent of the wealth generated [in the world] last year\u2026while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>The defining challenge of our time<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Income and wealth inequality is not simply a monetary issue, it is a complex social crisis that supports and strengthens notions of superiority and inferiority, and was <a href=\"https:\/\/obamawhitehouse.archives.gov\/the-press-office\/20\">described<\/a> by President Barak Obama in 2013 as \u201cthe defining challenge of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s obscene levels of inequality are the result of the Neo-Liberal economic system. This extreme form of capitalism took hold first in America and Britain in the early 1980s when Reagan and Thatcher ruled, workers\u2019 rights were trampled on, \u2018society\u2019 was a&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2018\/06\/inequality-social-dysfunction-and-misery\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Year on year the economic divisions and sub-divisions in the world deepen, and the associated social ills increase: The rich, comfortable, and the very extremely rich keep getting richer, and the rest, well, whilst some may be raised up out of crippling poverty into relative poverty, the majority of people continue to live under a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-364849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}