Znet - the lessons of seattle
Interviewer: Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, called the demonstrators at Seattle “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates.”
Chomsky:
>From his point of view that’s probably correct. From the point of view
of slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. If
you want some numbers, a recent issue of Doug Henwood’s invaluable Left
Business Observer gives the global facts. This is a recent estimate by a
World Bank economist. It only goes as far as 1993. In 1993, the richest
1 percent of the population had as much wealth as the bottom 57 percent.
So that’s 2.5 billion people. The ratio of average incomes from the
world’s top 5 percent and the world’s bottom 5 percent, that’s the one
that increased from 78 to 1 in 1988 to 114 to 1 in 1993, and probably
considerably more since. The inequality index, the Gini index, as it’s
called, has reached the highest levels on record. That’s world
population. One might argue that this doesn’t matter much if everyone is
gaining, even unequally. That is a terrible argument, but we don’t have
to pay attention to it, because the premise is incorrect.