Incredible irony to hear billionaire Donald Trump complain about inequality

The one thing you can be certain of is that the rich will get richer on his watch, writes Fergus Finlay.

Tue, 24 Jan, 2017 - 00:00

Donald Trump, sadly, is only the 324th richest man in the world. He’s not even the most powerful — that honour goes to Vladimir Putin.

And as for his celebrity status, he’s outranked by dozens of people, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Taylor Swift. He used to benumber 30 on the world’s celebrity list, but he doesn’t even feature any more.

That must be galling, especially for the man who had the biggest and best inauguration the world has ever seen. These facts, as reported by Forbes Magazine, means he’s really only middling wealthy.

Of course, they’re not real facts unless Donald J accepts them as facts. We all know that he’s really the richest, the smartest, and the most powerful man in the world. After all, he’s told us so himself.

At least, according to Forbes, he’s good for other billionaires — because, according to the magazine, Russia’s richest men have gained $29bn since Trump’s election, thanks to the rising value of Russian stocks and currency.

Forbes counts more than six times as many American billionaires as Russian billionaires. While the Americans have boosted their net worth by an average of 2.8% since the election, the richest Russians have increased their fortunes by an average of 7.1%.

In addition to rising stocks, the oligarchs have benefitted from the comeback of the rouble, which fell 55% against the dollar over 2014 and 2015 but rose 20% in 2016, thanks to increasing oil prices and hopes of better relations with the US and Europe.

So that’s good news, right? Forbes, after all, is not some mad lefty magazine. It has been in business since 1917, and its motto — the way it describes itself — is “the capitalist tool”. You can be reasonably certain that it is not in the business of generating fear where Mr Trump is concerned.

When a magazine like that talks about what Mr Trump’s election means for the accumulation of wealth, you can be pretty sure they’re not exaggerating.

That’s probably why Oxfam use Forbes as one of their sources, and why they draw on data published by Forbes to illustrate one of the most dramatic and striking statistics in their latest report on inequality. Just eight men, Oxfam say, own the same amount of wealth as half of the population of the world.

I’m guessing there’s a bit of hyperbole in this. But it’s incredible, nevertheless, that, over the past 30 years, the most constant characteristic of the world’s economy has been its rising inequality. There is an astonishing irony in the fact that Trump can take to the stage in front of the Capitol and berate “elites” for looking after themselves.

This man, who is still afraid to publish his tax returns despite promising to do so if elected, described a carnage of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealised potential”.

It sounds not so much like carnage, but a perfect description of exactly what inequality in economic and social policy means. The Republican party that Trump now represents, at least ostensibly, has fought for decades to resist any attempt to address inequality.

Then the poster boy for inequality describes the outcome as carnage, and follows that up, in his first official act, by taking steps to begin dismantling the only access to health care that poorer working people in America have ever had.

At one level, we can say that Trump is America’s problem. It seems already pretty clear that this is not a grown-up. The juvenile obsession with the size of the crowd at his inauguration and the way it was reported smacks of a man who will be a national laughing stock before he’s done.

But along the way, inequality will grow and grow. The one thing you can be certain of with this man, who values money more than anything else, who has surrounded himself with a cabinet of billionaires, is that the rich will get richer on his watch.

Forbes names the eight people who Oxfam claims own as much wealth as half the world’s population. Bill Gates. Amancio Ortega. Warren Buffet. Carlos Slim. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Larry Ellison. Michael Bloomberg. Add in the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, and you have a top 10. Most of these men, and the companies they own, are household names.

Between them, according the Forbes list, they own €505bn. That’s almost nine times what the government of one of the richest countries in the world — Ireland — intends to spend this year.

For other, more urgent comparisons, look at the Oxfam report. It is called “an economy for the 99%”, and it’s readily available online. It doesn’t just point out the disparity between the richest and the poorest, it describes the structural inequalities behind this disparity.

How workers and producers are squeezed. How tax is avoided — and tax systems built to favour wealth. How power and influence are exercised to protect those who already have most. How businesses are driven by the over-riding goal of maximising returns to shareholders.

How a third of the world’s richest men (yes, predominantly men) inherited their wealth, and how nearly half can be related to cronyism. How the rich spend millions on buying the sort of politics they like.

The two brothers in the top 10 — the Koch brothers — were reported as contributing tens of millions to favoured candidates (all, naturally, on the Republican side) in the most recent election in the US.

This is the real carnage. And the ultimate hypocrisy. Mr Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan will, for sure, increase inequality throughout the world, but it will also do nothing to address the ever-growing inequality within the US.

You can’t address inequality if you’re not willing to invest in education, if you’re prepared to rip up access to health care, if your tax policies are aimed at making the rich richer.

I’m guessing that if there is one ambition Mr Trump has, one thing that drives him on, it’s the desire to be even richer than he already is. And of course, more popular and more famous.

Right down on the bottom of his list of priorities are the women and children and beautiful students he talked about in his inaugural address. The words ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ don’t feature in his vocabulary, and they won’t feature in his actions.

It is deeply depressing to have to watch someone so self-centred and so childish going to war with the media over how many people turned up for his moment of glory.

But in a week when Oxfam publishes its report on inequality, it was even more deeply depressing to watch a man who thrives on inequality, who believes in it and had been enriched by it, being inaugurated as the leader of the free world.