Oxfam’s most important goal was getting into Davos: ITESO

Ignacio Román, an academic at the Business School (Western Institute of Technology and Higher Studies (ITESO) or Jesuit University of Guadalajara, affirms that Oxfam has a relevant place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, since it can lobby for profound changes in the global economic model how to control corporate power.

“The most important goal that Oxfam has scored was being able to get into Davos. The importance of the global report Inequality SA “It is not only the report itself, but it is presented precisely at the main world meeting of the world of money, where the rulers, the large financial institutions, the representatives of large companies and some intellectuals are present.”

Oxfam’s arguments – radical, but not extremist – reveal the way in which large corporations have achieved economic power through monopolistic actions and agreements with political power, says the member of the National System of Researchers (SNII).

“This space has been one of the bases of economic liberalization agreements in recent decades, and the fact that Oxfam is in the middle of that obviously gives it enormous visibility,” says a member of the Board of Directors of Oxfam Mexico.

The civil organization founded in 1942 in Oxford, England, as a British relief organization to address the famine caused during World War II.

Oxfam transformed over time into a development promotion organization, organized as an international confederation. Today, its headquarters are in Kenya, although it has a presence in more than 80 countries.

A pair of diametrically opposed speeches grabbed the headlines at the last World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: On side A is the fierce defense of economic liberalism undertaken by the president of Argentina, Javier Milei. While on side B of the forum, the annual report on global inequality by the NGO Oxfam, titled Inequality SA

Javier Milei denounced the leaders of Western democracies for abandoning the model of freedom in exchange for different versions of collectivism, and advocated free enterprise capitalism as a system capable of eliminating world poverty.

The study Inequality SA notes that, since 2020, the combined wealth of the world’s five richest men had doubled, from $453 billion to $869 million. While the accumulated wealth of almost 5 billion people, the poorest 60 percent of humanity, lost more than 20 million dollars. This means that the richest one percent on the planet own 43 percent of global assets.

The Oxfam report points out phenomena such as tax evasion, climate collapse, the privatization of public services, the concentration of corporate and monopolistic power, and extreme inequality as symptoms of the decline we are going through, recalls the ITESO researcher. From this, he raises the need to revitalize the State, regulate the private sector and reinvent the business sector.

On January 23, Oxfam Mexico published the Mexican chapter The monopoly of inequalitywhere the diagnosis is similar, since the combined fortune of the 14 ultra-rich Mexicans—each one owns more than a billion dollars—has doubled since the start of the pandemic.

Only the joint fortune of businessmen Carlos Slim and Germán Larrea grew 70 percent during the last four years, to represent almost six out of every 100 pesos of private wealth and equivalent to the wealth of half of the poorest population in America. Latin America and the Caribbean, about 334 million people. “A lot of what Oxfam says on an international level also happens on a national level,” he says.

“Big capital in Mexico has achieved the direct transmission of the privileges of what were public wealth: at the moment when these companies go from being monopolies [estatales] and they remain in the private sector, their function stops being development and becomes profitability, but ultimately the entire society has to depend on these companies, in one way or another, and at that moment is when the profits are exacerbated” , he points out.

The academic explains that this phenomenon of enrichment is also supported by the political elites, in a process that has been denounced for decades and is called “state capture”, supported by a revolving door phenomenon, carried out by politicians who emerged from the highest positions. business spheres, or approved by them, who when they leave office become the main directors of those same private companies.

“We produce wealth together, it is not produced by Mr. [Carlos] Slim or Mr. [Jeff] Bezos,” declares the member of the Mexican Social Policy Research Network.

“Wealth is systemic, it is not individual. When we talk about resizing the role of the State, what we are talking about is realizing that we have social, environmental, political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights, and that each of the rights costs, and costs a lot.

“Society has to come in and say: ‘We need a redistribution scheme, between people and between companies.’ It is not about telling citizens again: ‘You have to pay more taxes’, or having the formal sector do it. “We are talking about the people who have the power of everything,” declares Ignacio Román.

The fundamental question underlying the report is whether we really live in fully democratic regimes, or whether they are more like plutocratic regimes, he says.

The fact that the need to generate a counterculture is raised allows society to put pressure on schemes that counterbalance and pressure in favor of conditions of greater equality.

“If we look at the history of humanity, when we talk about gigantic wealth, disproportionate and absurd with respect to the living conditions of the population, we talk about pharaonic riches. That is, we are talking about the Egyptian pharaohs, the imperial conduct or wealth of Louis XIV, Charles V or Henry VIII. Well, very possibly what we have now is more extreme than those situations,” says the researcher about the Oxfam study presented in Davos, Switzerland.