Today – Jan. 19, 2022

1. Elon Musk – $268.1 billion

Source: Tesla, Space X

2. Bernard Arnault – $188.2 billion

Source: LVMH

3. Jeff Bezos – $188 billion

Source: Amazon

4. Bill Gates – $134.5 billion

Source: Microsoft

5. Larry Ellison – $120.1 billion

Source: Software

6. Larry Page – $119.4 billion

Source: Google

7. Mark Zuckerberg – $117.5 billion

Source: Facebook

8. Warren Buffett – $116.9 billion

Source: Berkshire Hathaway

9. Sergey Brin – $115.1 billion 

Source: Google

10. Muckesh Ambani – $98.5 billion

Source: Microsoft

Data from Forbes, as of January 4

Oxfam called for governments to impose a one-time 99% tax on the world’s billionaires and use the money to fund expanded production of vaccines for the poor – part of an effort to combat global inequality widened by the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic has plunged 160 million people into poverty, the charity added, with non-white ethnic minorities and women bearing the brunt of the impact as inequality soared.

‘The pandemic has been a billionaire bonanza,’ Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said.

‘When governments did the rescue packages and pumped trillions into the economy and to financial markets in order to support the economy for all, what happened is a lot of it went into the pockets of the billionaires.’

Vaccine development has been one of the pandemic’s success stories but Bucher said they’ve been ‘hoarded by the rich countries’ seeking to protect pharmaceutical monopolies.

The report follows a December 2021 study by the group which found that the share of global wealth of the world’s richest people soared at a record pace during the pandemic.

The study found that the top 1% have captured 19 times more of global wealth growth than the whole of the bottom 50% of humanity.

‘Inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century has been surpassed,’ the report said

Oxfam urged tax reforms to fund worldwide vaccine production as well as healthcare, climate adaptation and gender-based violence reduction to help save lives.

Oxfam called for rich countries to waive intellectual property rules on COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to expand their production.

A one-off 99% tax on the 10 richest men’s pandemic windfalls could earn more than $800 billion and be used to fund that effort and other progressive social spending, the group said.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is among the world’s top 10 richest men

The money ‘would be able to pay for vaccines for the whole world, have health systems for everyone,’ Bucher said.

‘We would also be able to compensate for the damage of climate change and have policies that address gender-based violence,’ while still leaving the 10 billionaires $8 billion richer than they were at the start of the pandemic, she added.

The group said it based its wealth calculations on the most up-to-date and comprehensive data sources available, and used the 2021 Billionaires List compiled by the US business magazine Forbes.

Forbes listed the world’s 10 richest men as: Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates (pictured) and Steve Ballmer, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, US investor Warren Buffet and the head of the French luxury group LVMH, Bernard Arnault

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The group noted that the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest economies, are starting to consider policies aimed at countering inequality, such as raising tax rates on the rich and taking action against corporate monopolies.

‘The point is extreme inequality is not inevitable and this is why it brings us hope,’ Bucher said.

Oxfam has long sought to inspire debate at the annual gathering of business and political elites typically held in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

The pandemic forced organisers to put off the event for a second year, instead holding virtual sessions where political leaders will be joined by business executives and campaigning groups such as Oxfam.

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Those who believe tyranny isn’t coming to Canada are in for a rude awakening

David Solway, LifeSite News, Jan. 13, 2022

(https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/thanks-to-trudeau-and-a-complacent-majority-it-will-be-tough-to-make-canada-canada-again/)

What Canadians do not seem to understand is that mandatory this eventually leads to mandatory that. Initial consent will often culminate by increments in abject capitulation to the imposition of autocratic measures.

(The Pipeline) — Things are not going well in this country. In fact, things have rarely gone worse. We have a prime minister who has deliberately flouted The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, imposing vaccine mandates that violate several of its sections, in particular Sections 1, 7, 15 and 52(1), which guarantee the life, liberty, security and protection of every citizen under the law without discrimination. Covid has furnished a gilt-edged opportunity to scrap such constitutional provisions.

True to form, Trudeau the Younger has falsely claimed that the uninjected are responsible for the pandemic. He has scapegoated the unvaccinated as “a small, fringe element in this country that is angry, that doesn’t believe in science, that is lashing out with racist, misogynistic attacks [he meant “misanthropist”], andwho are taking up space… Do we tolerate these people?” Obviously not. He went on: “And I know we’ll not allow those voices, those special interest groups, those protesters — I don’t even want to call them protesters, those anti-vaxxer mobs — to dictate how this country gets through this pandemic and how we recover our economy free from lockdowns.”

What Canadians do not seem to understand is that mandatory this eventually leads to mandatory that. Initial consent will often culminate by increments in abject capitulation to the imposition of autocratic measures.

Just ask the Germans.

Taking a page from the Covid dictatorship in Australia, the Public Health Agency of Canada’s News Release of August 13, 2021 earmarks funding for what is euphemistically called the Safe Voluntary Isolation Sites Program. One wonders how “voluntary” such an institution will be. Camps will be built in various municipalities in the provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Such camps begin to sound suspiciously like internment centers, all in the name of saving us from ourselves.

Trudeau is cut from the same tattered cloth as Joe Biden, who warned “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” This is fear-mongering on steroids in an attempt to impose unconstitutional mandates upon the country in defiance of the data showing the vaccines to be largely ineffective and even harmful.

Biden continues: “But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death.” After two weeks to flatten the curve morphing into two years of masking, quarantining, lockdowns, two initial jabs followed by a growing queue of booster shots, all without provable long-term effect, all waning and helpless against viral mutations (Sources: 1  2  3  4  5 ) and perhaps responsible for them, it should be obvious that Biden is a liar from the egg, as is Trudeau.

Regardless of the similarity between the two leaders, there is a crucial difference between Canada and the U.S. In America one can still find enclaves of liberty in the so-called red states, which have abolished Covid mandates, lockdowns, masking and vaxxports. Not so in Canada, where not a single province or territory offers even a modicum of sanctuary for those who oppose a mandatory system and who refuse to allow an experimental and poorly tested gene-therapy vaccine to be injected into their bodies.

But these stalwart souls are a minority. The majority are easily manipulated and seem to have no problem with the gradual march of tyranny into their lives. The extinction of liberty and the tactics of repression can begin slowly and insidiously, aided by a condition that Ghent University professor Mattias Desmet and psychiatrist Mark McDonald call “mass formation psychosis” among the public, until it reaches a a point at which it become too late to withstand the rise of totalitarian regimes.

On January 27, 2020, Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski delivered a speech during a memorial commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. “But be careful, be careful,” he warned, “we are already beginning to become accustomed to thinking that you can exclude someone, stigmatize someone, alienate someone. And slowly, step by step, day by day, that’s how people gradually become familiar with these things… Don’t be complacent, whenever you see historical lies. Don’t be complacent, whenever you see the past being misused for current political purposes. Don’t be complacent, whenever any kind of minority is discriminated against… Don’t be complacent, whenever any government violates already existing, common social contracts. Remain faithful to the Eleventh Commandment: Never be a bystander.”

Failing which, the next stages of the process inevitably follow: the stripping of further rights, dehumanization, detention and incarceration, and eventual elimination.

Those who believe it can’t happen here are in for a rude shock. It is happening as we speak. Under the reign of the Trudeau the Younger, and considering the utter lack of opposition parties and a largely compliant and indifferent public, Canada is approaching the inflection point of no return from the precipice of unaccountable government intent on absolute authority and the eradication of Charter freedoms. Despite a number of resistant organizations like No More Lockdowns Canada, Russ Cooper’s C3RF,  Take Action Canada, and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, it seems an uphill battle to Make Canada Canada Again.