“The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”

As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.

Credit: U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley

Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.

Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.

They include the ripping up of international cooperation, the gutting of life-saving programmes for people in poverty abroad and at home, and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.

A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded “the death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.

So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?

One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.

This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.

Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.

What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.

That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are”, that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.

It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”

Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)

So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbour is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbour thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros”.)

But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “no man is an island”. We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”

The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.

“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Revd Martin Luther King in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.

Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”

Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: UNICEF

By Attiya Waris and Ben Phillips
NAIROBI / BANGKOK, Feb 6 2025 (IPS)

Why can’t there be education for every child? Why can’t there be healthcare for everyone who needs it? Why can’t everyone be freed from hunger and deprivation? Though these are promised to all as rights, people are repeatedly told that there is no money.

The wonderful news is that this is false: there is money, we know where it is going missing, we know how to get hold of it, and this year brings vital new opportunities for progress.

Across the world, US$492 billion is lost to tax abuse by the rich and powerful a year: two-thirds, US$347.6 billion, is lost to multinational corporations shifting profit offshore to underpay tax; one-third, US$144.8 billion, is lost to wealthy individuals hiding their wealth offshore.

This revelation, set out in the latest State of Tax Justice report, is shocking and appalling. But it can and should also be recognised as cause for hope: we have a world to win.

Taxation is technical and complex, and this technical complexity is often weaponised to claim that any policies to raise revenues from the wealthy won’t work. But expert economic analysis that the G20 has commissioned shows that wealth taxes would be effective in unlocking vital resources to tackle poverty and fulfil the Sustainable Development Goals.

Indeed, some countries are already taking action to do this. Spain has successfully introduced a wealth tax on the richest 0.5%. Calculations by the Tax Justice Network have demonstrated that the world could raise US $2.1 trillion by copying Spain’s example.

Likewise, the policy framework required to prevent profit shifting by multinational enterprises is known – a combination that needs to include them having to register who owns them, having to report on the tax they paid in each country they operate in, and having to pay tax in the places where they generate profit.

The major challenge then is ultimately less technical and more political. But even for this political challenge, a path through can be seen.

This year, countries finally begin negotiations on a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, which will include “commitments on equitable taxation of multinational enterprises [and] addressing tax evasion and avoidance by high-net worth individuals and ensuring their effective taxation.”

This year, too, momentum will be further boosted by the International Conference on Financing for Development, hosted 30th June to 3rd July by Spain, the draft outcome document of which includes commitments to ensuring that “profit shifting” by multinational enterprises is tackled so that they “pay taxes to the countries where economic activity occurs and value is created”, and to “strengthening the taxation of high-net-worth Individuals.”

Taxing the wealthy has been shown to be hugely popular across countries. And civil society campaigning is picking up pace. Building on the wave of mobiisation for tax justice worldwide, over forty organisations from across the world have united a joint campaign to “tax the super-rich”.

Their common platform calls for:

• Implementing ambitious tax rates on the richest people that are high enough to reduce inequality
• Using revenues raised to invest ending poverty, reducing inequality, and tackling the world’s most pressing social and environmental issues
• Ensuring global cooperation to curb illicit financial flows that allow the super-rich to evade tax responsibility
• Shifting decision-making on taxation to a fair and globally inclusive forum, ensuring that all countries – particularly poorer ones – have an equal voice

For too long it has been normalised that whilst international law and national constitutions promise people inalienable rights, the resourcing needed to realise those rights is denied. But what does it mean for a child to be promised a notional right to an education if there is no school nearby, if fees prevent her attending, if there are not enough teachers, or if the conditions of the school make learning impossible?

What does it mean for a person to be promised a notional right to health if health centres are not staffed with enough nurses and doctors – and medicines? Fiscal policy is the instrument that makes the promise of rights a lived reality.

The extent of resources that can be deployed, and the measures that can secure those resources, are not mysteries, they are political choices.

Securing the resources needed to deliver on rights will not be easy. The concentration of wealth has also brought a concentration of power. But that is another reason why taxing the super-rich in each country across the world is vital: it won’t only raise essential revenue to provide essential services and prevent the most vulnerable from slipping deeper into poverty; it will also help restore democracy.

Attiya Waris is Professor of Fiscal Law at the University of Nairobi and UN Independent Expert on foreign debt, other international financial obligations, and human rights.

Ben Phillips is the author of “How to Fight Inequality”.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)

By Ben Phillips
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jan 9 2025 (IPS)

The debt disaster is back. Indeed, the aid agency Cafod reports that developing countries today face “the most acute debt crisis in history”.

At least 54 countries are in a debt crisis – more than double the number in 2010. A further 57 countries are at risk of debt crisis. In the past decade, interest payments for developing countries overall have risen by 64%, and for Africa by 132%.

African countries are paying over 100 billion dollars a year to creditors. The share of African countries’ budgets going on debt payments is four times higher than in 2010.

Net finance flows to developing countries are now negative – that is, debt service repayments are now higher than inflows to governments.

“It’s time to face the reality,” says World Bank Chief Economist Indermit Gill. “The poorest countries facing debt distress need debt relief if they are to have a shot at lasting prosperity. Private creditors ought to bear a fair share of the cost when the bet goes bad.”

“Debt is choking the countries of the Global South,” says the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba, “denying us what we need for health and education. Please, let us breathe!”

The scale of the crisis has not shocked world leaders into action, however. So far, the G20 debt restructuring mechanisms have come nowhere close to what is needed.

The recurrence of the debt crisis is even cynically held up as a reason not to resolve it. “They got debt forgiven in 2000,” goes the mantra, “now they are back, which means it failed and there is no helping them.”

It’s a false narrative that deliberately ignores two key points: first, that the debt cancellation secured by the broad Jubilee 2000 movement saved and transformed millions of lives, including affected countries switching from most children not completing primary school to most children completing; secondly, that the reforms needed to prevent a recurrence of catastrophic debt payment levels have been held up by creditors.

But being untrue hasn’t taken away the power of the “debt cancellation failed” story for excusing and enabling inaction.

Debt restructuring has continued to be a painfully slow, ad hoc process, dominated by rich countries and dependent on persuading creditors. That’s not a bug, it’s feature. It’s not surprising that private lenders, who today make up the largest share of creditors of affected countries’ debt, have obstructed efforts to resolve the crisis: without sufficient compulsion that is what they will continue to do.

It seems almost unnecessary to add that we have now entered an era where anything requiring multilateral cooperation has gotten even harder. And yet, 2025 also brings two powerful reasons for hope.

First, the moment.

As the first ever African chair of the G20, South Africa has seized the opportunity to lead an intergovernmental push for action on debt, successfully bringing it to the core of global economic diplomacy. The South African G20 presidency has set out a bold agenda that prioritises tackling what they name in frank terms as the “crippling sovereign debt levels that force many countries to sacrifice their developmental obligations to service unmanageable debts”.

South Africa has set out what would be transformative frame for G20 delivery: “We must take action to ensure debt sustainability for low-income countries. A key obstacle to inclusive growth in developing economies is an unsustainable level of debt which limits their ability to invest in infrastructure, healthcare, education and other development needs”.

“South Africa will seek to advance sustainable solutions to tackle high structural deficits and liquidity challenges and extend debt relief to developing economies. South Africa will also seek to ensure that the sovereign credit ratings are fair and transparent and to address high risk premiums for developing economies. Key to addressing the debt question is dealing with the Cost of Capital.”

Second, the movement.

Intergovernmental diplomacy alone, however well played, can never break through the power imbalances of global finance. The resolution of the debt crisis needs a determined and organized mass movement of people. This movement is rising.

Amongst those who are coming together in the broad Jubilee 2025 movement are civil society organisations from climate justice marchers to human rights activists, trade unions from every sector and every part of the world, and artists raising their voices to demand the breaking of the chokehold of debt.

At the heart of the Jubilee 2025 movement are the faith communities, who were also at the heart of Jubilee 2000. As the Jubilee name signifies, debt cancellation is not a mere technical economic issue, it is a moral one, with deep roots in biblical traditions and in ethical understandings of the common good.

“We urgently need a new debt Jubilee,” leaders of diverse faiths from across Africa declared in their joint call to action, “to bring hope to humankind, and bring the planet back from the brink.” Faith communities combine deep local organising and wide global networking, mobilise in the Global South and Global North amongst the most excluded and amongst the better off, and have proven to be especially hard for decision-makers to ignore.

A moment of hope, powered by a movement of hope. Debt distress need not be destiny. This is not a prediction that the campaign on debt will succeed, but rather an assessment that it has a fighting chance. “More than a question of generosity,” Pope Francis declared in his Papal Bull for 2025, debt cancellation is “a matter of justice.”

Notably, he titled the document Spes non confundit – “Hope does not disappoint.”

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality.

IPS UN Bureau

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Dr. Martin Luther King and Mrs. King are greeted by Ralph Bunche on a visit to the United Nations in 1964. Credit: UN Photo
 
Ralph Bunche received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s work as a United Nations mediator in the Palestine conflict. He called himself 'an incurable optimist'. Bunche was the first African American and person of color to be so honored in the history of the prize.

By Ben Phillips
ROME, Jan 9 2024 (IPS)

All through this week, leading up to January 15th, the world will commemorate Martin Luther King. In a world as wounded as ours is today, the lessons of his life’s work offer a vital opportunity for healing.

But the opportunity to hear his message continues to be obstructed: too many of the soundbites of TV pundits and the tweets of politicians are, once again, not distilling the insights of Dr King, but are serving instead to obscure a library of wisdom behind wall-to-wall repetition of the same few lines, extracted from their context, of one speech.

This is not a mistake, it is a tactic, and we owe it not only to the legacy of Dr King but to the future of our world to ensure that his authentic message is shared.

The true message of Martin Luther King is not a saccharine call for quietude or acceptance, but an insistence on being, as he put it, “maladjusted to injustice.” It represents not an idle optimism that things will get better but a determined commitment to collective action as the only route to progress.

When Dr King said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”, he didn’t mean this process is automatic; as he noted, “social progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people.”

And he was clear that advancement of progress requires the coming together of mass movements, “organizing our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.”

Children from a dozen countries met with the President of the General Assembly and toured the United Nations on a federal holiday in the United States honouring the late civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Martin Luther King Jr. 17 January 2023. Credit: Paulina Kubiak, United Nations

Justice, Dr King taught, is never given, it is only ever won. This always involves having the courage to confront power. Indeed, he noted, the greatest stumbling block to progress is not the implacable opponent but those who claim to support change but are “more devoted to order than justice.” As he put it, “frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action movement that was ‘well-timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly; this ‘wait!’ has almost always meant ‘never.’”

When the civil rights movement’s 1962 Operation Breadbasket challenged companies to increase the share of profits going to black workers and communities, it was only after the movement showed that they could successfully organize a boycott that those companies, in Dr King’s words, “the next day were talking nice, were very humble, and [later] we signed the agreement.” As he noted when challenged by “moderates” who asked why he needed to organize, “we have not made a single gain without determined pressure…freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Advancing progress, he emphasized, involves challenging public opinion too. Organizers cannot be mere “thermometers” who “record popular opinion” but need to be “thermostats” who work to “transform the mores of society”. In 1966, for example, a Gallup Opinion poll showed that Dr King was viewed unfavourably by 63 per cent of Americans, but by 2011 that figure had fallen to only four per cent.

Often, people read the current consensus view back into history and assume that Dr King was always a mainstream figure, and imagine, falsely, that change comes from people and movements who don’t ever offend anyone.

Dr King’s vision of justice was a full one. It called not only for the scrapping of segregation, but for taking on “the triple prong sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism.” He challenged the “economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few” and noted that “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it understands that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring.”

He spoke out against war not only for having “left youth maimed and mutilated” but for having also “impaired the United Nations, exacerbated the hatreds between continents, frustrated development, contributed to the forces of reaction, and strengthened the military-industrial complex.”

He noted how “speaking out against war has not gone without criticisms, there are those who tell me that I should stick with civil rights, and stay in my place.” But he insisted that he would “keep these issues mixed because they are mixed. We must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

When I went to Dr King’s memorial in Atlanta I did so to pay my respects at his tomb. But arriving at the King Center I found a vibrant hub of practical learning, at which activists and organizers working for justice were revisiting Dr King’s work and writings not as history that is past but as a set of tools to help understand, and act, in the present.

Together, we reflected not only on his profoundly radical philosophy, but also on his strategies and tactics for advancing transformational change. Conversations with Dr King’s inspirational daughter, Bernice, were focused not on her father’s work alone; instead, she asked us what changes we were working for, and how we were working to advance them.

This year, on 10th January, the King Center is hosting a Global Summit, a series of practical conversations accessible to everyone, for free, online. I’m honoured to be panelist. It is open for sign ups here.

“Those who love peace,” noted Dr King, “must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” And he even guided us how.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality, Communications Director of UNAIDS, and a panelist at the King Center Global Summit on 10th January.

IPS UN Bureau

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Protest sign, London. Credit: People’s Vaccine Alliance

By Ben Phillips
ROME, Jan 7 2022 (IPS)

As the Omicron surge overwhelms the world, it is clear to people everywhere that the actions which leaders so far have taken in response to the Covid-19 crisis have not been sufficient to overcome it.

We are not beating Covid. It looks rather like Covid is beating us. What is to be done?

Crucially, they are two key dimensions to what is needed now which, though related, are distinct. The first dimension is what policies are required to get us out of the crisis. The second dimension is how to get those policies put into place.

In other words, the first key question is “what do leaders need to do?”, and the second key question is “how do we make them do it?”

On the first question, the world is fortunate that we are not short of excellent public health expertise. Whilst there are no quick fixes, the contours of the policies required are not a mystery, and have been set out, to leaders and to media, repeatedly, by the World Health Organisation, by leading academics, and by health practitioners.

They come down essentially to this: in a pandemic emergency, leaders need to deploy the whole range of tools that have been shown to help. The key here is the whole range.

Importantly, in terms of how these approaches can be realized, this requires that they are realized for the whole world. Until they do, none of us will get out of the crisis. When Desmond Tutu said that “I am because you are, I am because we are”, that was not only true ethically, but, it turns out, true epidemiologically too.

The approaches required include vaccines, treatments, and also, as the WHO’s Peter Singer has noted, “public health measures that encourage spending time outdoors, physical distancing, wearing masks, rapid testing, limiting gatherings and staying home when sick”.

None of these alone is enough. Any approach that only does one of these, however well, would fail – all of them are needed, together.

It requires the application of the whole range of policy tools. For example, rich countries, and Foundations based in rich countries, have emphasized the importance of sharing doses as a solution (even whilst they have comprehensively failed to deliver on their promises to do so).

In contrast, developing countries, the World Health Organisation and civil society have all highlighted that sharing doses alone cannot ensure enough for everyone, and that it is essential also to share the technology so that multiple producers across the world can simultaneously manufacture enough to vaccinate the world.

This requires rapid agreement and implementation of the TRIPS Waiver proposed by South Africa and India at the WTO, and it also requires that rich country governments use their huge leverage (as procurers, investors and regulators) over the companies they host to make them share knowledge, know-how and material. Furthermore, this requirement to share Covid technologies needs to apply to vaccines, medicines and diagnostics.

As public health professors Madhukar Pai of McGill and Manu Prakash of Stanford have noted, “Science has delivered many tools that work against Covid-19. But equitable distribution of these tools is where we are failing.

If we can find a way to share effective tools equitably and increase their production across the world, then we have a real shot at ending this pandemic.

If we hoard these tools, block TRIPS waiver, and think we can boost our way out of this pandemic in the global North, we will begin 2023 by playing whack-a-mole with the rho, sigma, tau or Omega variants.”

The challenge then, is not that we don’t know what leaders need to do. The challenge is that they are not doing it. We like to believe that our leaders are led by the evidence. But evidence alone is not enough.

The brilliant and essential reports of scientists will not be enough to shift the much harsher world of political interests. Getting leaders to do what is needed to overcome the Covid-19 crisis – in particular getting leaders to force the big pharmaceutical companies to share the rights and recipes for the vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics so the world can produce the billions needed – will depend on pressure from ordinary people.

This is not a new lesson. We saw it in the late 1990s and early 2000s with antiretrovirals for HIV. Then, as now, a monopoly hold on production was preventing people in developing countries from accessing life-saving help.

Then, as now, the big pharmaceutical companies worked aggressively to block other producers from manufacturing what would save millions of lives. Then, as now, rich country governments sided with the big pharmaceutical companies. Twelve million people died. Finally, massive global public pressure, together with assertive action by developing countries, ensured that production was opened up and lives could be saved.

It was not a coincidence that when the Covid-19 crisis erupted the first groups to call for the sharing of medical technologies, and to start to organise for it, were groups of people living with HIV. They are the heart of the movement for a People’s Vaccine because, from painful experience, they know what it takes. Health, like justice, is never given; it is only ever won.

Some people are inspired by activism. Others, understandably, just want to get on with their lives. Activism feels like another burden. They’re ready to do their part by wearing a mask when available and getting vaccinated when offered. But they want to leave the leadership to our leaders.

The thing is, that’s not enough. Our leaders are not leading. They are not doing all they can to end the crisis. They are not forcing the big pharmaceutical companies to share technologies so that enough can be produced. They are not ensuring access to health care as right. They are not protecting the vulnerable from the shock of the crisis.

The past two years can best be summed up like this: the science is working, but the politics is failing.

It is only through bold action by political leaders that the Covid-19 crisis will be ended. It is only through people’s organising that we’ll make leaders take that bold action. As the great novelist Alice Walker once put it so powerfully, “activism is the rent we pay for living on the planet”.

Ben Phillips is the author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ and an advisor to the United Nations, governments and civil society organisations (CSOs).

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Young people take part in a pro-democracy demonstration in Myanmar. Credit: Unsplash/Pyae Sone Htun via United Nations
 
Meanwhile, more than 10 months since Myanmar's military seized power, the country’s human rights situation is deepening on an unprecedented scale, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), warned December 10.

By Ben Phillips
ROME, Dec 17 2021 (IPS)

Human rights are under global assault. In 2021, the escalation of the worldwide siege on human rights included clampdowns on civil society organisations, attacks on minorities, the undermining of democratic institutions, and violence against journalists.

Human rights came under attack not only from coups, from Myanmar to Sudan, but also from strong men in democracies, from Brazil to the Philippines. The January 6th attack on the Capitol in the US exemplified the fragility of human rights worldwide.

2021 saw the conservative think tank Freedom House raise the alarm about what it calls one of the biggest worldwide declines in democracy “we’ve ever recorded”. But to protect human rights, it is vital to understand why they are under threat.

Crucially, it is not a coincidence that humanity has been simultaneously hit by a crushing of human rights and ever-increasing inequality; they are mutually causal. There is no winning strategy to be found in the approach followed by institutions like Freedom House which cleaves civil and political rights from economic and social rights, and has no answer to the inequality crisis.

Organisations rooted in civil society organising have set out powerfully the interconnectedness of the human rights crisis and the inequality crisis.

Civicus’s 2021 State of Civil Society report notes how “economic inequality has become ever more marked, precarious employment is being normalized [and] big business is a key source of attacks on civic space and human rights violations.”

So too, Global Witness’s 2021 Last Line of Defence report notes that “unaccountable corporate power is the underlying force which has continued to perpetuate the killing of [land and environmental] defenders.”

As human rights scholars Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz have noted, “when the political power of the elites expands as the income and wealth distribution becomes more polarized, this compromises the entire range of human rights.” Civicus terms the assault on human rights as one of “ultra-capitalism’s impacts”.

The World Inequality Report records how “in 2021, after three decades of trade and financial globalization, global inequalities are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.

The Covid pandemic exacerbated even more global inequalities. The top 1% took 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, with an acceleration since 2020.”

Societies that are more unequal are more violent. As collective institutions like trade unions are weakened, ordinary people become increasingly atomized. As social cohesiveness is pulled apart by inequality, tensions rise.

It is in such contexts that far right movements thrive, and whilst such movements claim to be anti-elite, they soon find common cause with plutocrats in directing anger away from those who have taken away the most and onto those who can be targetted for the difference in how they look, speak, pray or love.

Yet, as writer Michael Massing put it, “many members of the liberal establishment dismiss populism as a sort of exogenous disease to be cured by appeals to reason and facts rather than recognize it as a darkly symptomatic response to a system that has failed so spectacularly to meet the basic needs of so many.”

Human rights can only be protected in their fullness – civil, political, economic and social. As Lena Simet, Komala Ramachandra and Sarah Saadoun note in Human Rights Watch’s 2021 World Report: “A rights-based recovery means governments provide access to healthcare, [and] protect labor rights, gender equality, and everyone’s access to housing, water and sanitation.

It means investing in public services and social protection, and strengthening progressive fiscal policies to fund programs so everyone can fulfill their right to a decent standard of living. It means investing in neglected communities and avoiding harmful fiscal austerity, like cutting social protection programs.”

Only determined organising connecting the inseparable struggles for human rights and a more equal society will be powerful enough to win.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality and an advisor to the UN, governments and civil society organisations.

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Afghans are a proud people with a rich cultural heritage. They have known generations of war and hardship. They deserve our full support. The following days will be pivotal. The world is watching. We cannot and must not abandon the people of Afghanistan-- UN Secretary-General António Guterres in remarks to the Security Council on Afghanistan, 16 August '21. Credit: IOM/Mohammed Muse

By Ben Phillips and Jonathan Glennie
ROME, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

As the Western occupation of Afghanistan has come to an end, TV news is broadcasting harrowing scenes of death and destruction, citizens in fear, allies abandoned, and dreams dashed.

While the cynicism of key leaders has been exposed – exemplified by Afghan President Ghani sneaking out, reportedly with bags of cash – the end of the war is also a moment of reckoning for war’s idealists, those who believed in invasion and occupation as a route to development.

Those who believed that the war would bring a new dawn have made clear that they want to hold to account those who presided over its failure, and they want to ensure that such failure not be repeated again. They also want to know what it is that they can do to advance development and human rights.

It is right to hold leaders to account.

But the most important lesson from the occupation of Afghanistan is not principally that it was finished, or conducted, in the wrong way. The tough truth that war’s idealists need to face is this: those responsible for failure of the war are not those who ended it but those who initiated and maintained it, and the way to ensure that the next occupation of a country does not similarly fail is not to start it.

At the conclusion of twenty years of occupation and at a cost of one to two trillion dollars, Afghanistan has been left the poorest country per capita in Asia; the number of Afghans in poverty has doubled; half of the population is dependent on humanitarian assistance; half lack access to drinkable water; poppy cultivation has trebled and opium production is at its height.

Beyond the capital, Kabul, the reach of the formal structures of the created state was weak. The state that the Soviets built lasted three years; the state that the West constructed was so lacking in legitimacy and institutional depth that it collapsed within days.

Theories of “just war” have long recognised that to determine whether a war is just, one must necessarily consider not only what high intentions are declared, but also the likelihood of success.

The facts here are inconvenient: in Libya, it brought about the return of slave markets; in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it facilitated the rise of ISIS; it did not dislodge Assad from Syria, and in Afghanistan a twenty-year occupation ended up replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.

There is a desperate attempt to rewrite history and pretend that one man, Joe Biden, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Whatever tactical mistakes and miscalculations the US has made in the last phase of this war, the fact is that it was lost long ago.

He just told the truth. Two successive US administrations of different parties admitted frankly that the US had lost. And at the point when the US drew down, the entire “Western” operation followed.

This is because whilst the US has been shown to be unable to win a war of occupation to remake a state, every other Western power has been shown to be unable even to attempt to do so.

The US spends about 780 billion dollars a year on its military; the UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Italy together spend about 340 billion dollars per year. If the US cannot do this, no one can.

The West could have ended the Occupation much more honourably – for example by providing safe passage for all those who had become exposed by working with them – and can still make a difference by fully funding the massively underfunded international humanitarian aid operation. But the fact is the war could not be won.

Confronted by these realities, war’s idealists ask back, “well, are we just supposed to sit back and do nothing?” No. While occupation is not the tool, there is indeed a fundamental moral obligation, and an enlightened self-interest, to work to tackle poverty and advance human rights worldwide.

The most effective tools to advance those include supporting grassroots civil society organisations, integrating human rights and development into diplomacy, the provision of aid, addressing international bottle-necks to progress (from trade rules to debt and more), and working across nations to advance global public goods (like enabling the mass production of vaccines and other medicines, and limiting climate change).

Are those easy and fast? No, they are hard, but they work. To take one example, it used to be only a minority of kids in developing countries who finished primary school. As a result of grassroots advocacy, national leadership, joined up international engagement, debt cancellation, the deployment of domestic resources and assistance from aid, most children in developing countries now complete primary school.

But most do not yet complete secondary school. Ensuring that almost all children across the world finish secondary school is eminently achievable, in less than a decade, for much less than the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

To advance the full realisation of human rights worldwide, supporting civil society organisations (CSOs) and strengthening international institutions may seem like “weak” approaches compared to just replacing governments one doesn’t like with new governments in one’s own image, but the former approach has proven successful – slowly, and imperfectly – in improving the “soil” in which rights flourish, while the latter approach has been shown to enable nothing to be able to grow on its own.

Occupation forces of foreign soldiers with unaccountable power have not proven an effective starting point for building up good governance and human rights. In contrast, we have witnessed strong civic organising, and international solidarity, secure a return to Constitutional rule in Zambia; we have seen the decriminalisation of LGBT relationships in Angola.

We have also seen Sudan accept the authority of the International Criminal Court (something the US has not yet done); in Lebanon and Jordan, law reform has removed the ability of a rapist to avoid punishment by marrying his victim; in Sri Lanka, civil society organisations have secured court holds on the imposition of the death penalty; in the Maldives, women have joined the Supreme Court for the first time.

In Afghanistan, in contrast, the operating environment of occupation led many human rights organisations to be seen to be associated with it, unfairly, undercutting their ability to enable sustained progressive change – and placing many leaders at great risk – now the end has come.

And the end will always come.

Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires. But we must judge outcomes, not mission statements. In addressing the myriad injustices of the world, invading countries to remake them is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong.

There are people who hope to invade Iran, or Venezuela, or pick-a-country-with-a-problem, but next time, they insist, they’ll do it “better”. They must stop. They must be stopped.

Of course, what drives war is not only – or even principally – idealism. What US President Eisenhower (a Republican, and a great General) called the “Military-Industrial Complex” has only grown.

And the contractors, of course, keep winning, even as the occupations so demonstrably fail. But the maintenance of war depends on the idealists. War’s idealists must now accept defeat, and embrace better ways to change the world.

It’s no surprise that advocates for war as a strategy for development get so misty-eyed; a clear-eyed reading of the facts shows that occupation is not the answer.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality; Jonathan Glennie is the author of The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment.

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Credit: The UN Office at Vienna (UNOV)

By Mwanahamisi Singano and Ben Phillips
NAIROBI / ROME, Mar 3 2021 (IPS)

The greatest danger to the effectiveness of International Women’s Day is that it has become respectable. It is time for it to be day of good trouble again.

It’s become somewhat of a tradition for respectable International Women’s Day commentaries to repeat three establishment talking points: first, that the world is making progress but not fast enough; second, a set of comparisons between men as single group (earning more, represented more, accessing more) with women as single group (earning less, represented less, accessing less); and third, an appeal to those in power to put it right.

This Women’s Day we need to smash all three of those traditions.

We need to stop saying that the world is making continuous progress on gender equality. The COVID-19 crisis is seeing women’s rights go into reverse.

Women’s jobs are being lost at much faster rate than men’s; women are shouldering most of the increased burden of unpaid care for children and elders; girls have been taken out of school more than boys; domestic violence has shot up, and it’s harder for women to get away.

And the fact that as soon as the crisis happened women were pushed so far back shows how insecure and insubstantial were the “good times” – if you are allowed to keep holding onto an umbrella only until it rains, then you don’t really own that umbrella.

The pandemic laid bare the structural inequalities and dysfunctional social and political systems crafted to serve endless wealth accumulation of a powerful few (men) while leaving billions of people in poverty and hopelessness.

The idea of progress has lulled the conversation into an idea that we only need to speed up: it’s now clear that to get to equality we need to change course.

We have to go behind the comparisons between what men and what women have and speak plainly about the intersecting inequalities of race, nationality and class that compound the experience of women.

To give one example, in December last year the US figures showed 140,000 job losses. Then it was revealed that all these job losses were women (men had in fact net gained 16,000 jobs, and women net lost 156,000).

So, the story was that women as a group were losing to men as a group. But then it was revealed that all these job losses amongst women could be accounted for by jobs lost by women of colour – white women had net gained jobs!

As James Baldwin noted, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

To give another example, every year the annual United Nations meeting on women’s rights – the Commission on the Status of Women – meets in New York (15-26 March 2021) , and every year there is hugely disproportionate representation by women from the Global North and by women representing global North-led organisations.

This is exacerbated by the fact that because the meeting is in New York, the travel cost burden is much higher for women from the Global South, and the US Government needs to approve who can come, and it refuses or fails to approve in time visas for women from the Global South in far higher numbers than women from the Global North.

And the visas for women from developing countries that the US government least often approves for the CSW and other New York gatherings? Those of poor women, rural women, slum dwelling women, migrant women, women with chronic illnesses, women who have been in conflict with the law, women sex workers – the more socially excluded, the more likely you are to be literally excluded.

At last year’s CSW, the Covid crisis saw this reach a peak, with only New York based representatives allowed to participate. At this year’s CSW, it has gone all virtual – great in theory, but it remains fixed to a New York time zone only, forcing participants in Asia to take part through their night or opt out.

Next year it is likely to go back to being live, and the US is likely to require vaccine passports – which 9 in 10 people in the Global South will not have, because the US and other Global North countries are blocking Southern companies from making generic versions of the vaccines.

Once again, women from the Global South will be excluded from the meeting about exclusion, will have no equality in the meeting about how to win equality.

Equality for women will only be realised when all the forms of exclusion holding women back are challenged. When several African countries introduced night-time curfews in COVID-19, they made exemptions for private ambulances, but did not make allowances for those taking informal private transport to hospital – which is how the majority of expectant women, who cannot afford private ambulances, get there.

Likewise, women experiencing domestic violence could leave their houses at night if they went with the police, but if they lacked the social capital to be able to have the police come to accompany them (in other words, anyone not well-off), and they tried to make their own way to a shelter, they found themselves stopped by law enforcement for being out, illegally – indeed, many women told Femnet of fleeing the beatings of their husband to then meet the beatings of the cops.

These were not challenges well foreseen or planned for by well-off men and women who dominate policy making.

It is not enough for the men in power to be persuaded to open a narrow gate in the fortress of patriarchy, through which a small group of the most well-connected or respectable women can slip through to join them.

For all women in their diversity to be able to access decent jobs, equal rights and equal power, the walls must be brought tumbling down. None of this will be given, it will only be won.

As Audre Lorde set out, our task is “to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Respectability isn’t working. Equality requires good trouble.

Mwanahamisi Singano is Head of Programmes at the African feminist network FEMNET; Ben Phillips* is the author of How to Fight Inequality

*The link to Ben Phillip’s book, How to Fight Inequality, in paperback, hardback or ebook, here – or at: https://www.amazon.com/How-Fight-Inequality-That-Needs/dp/1509543090

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Women in Nigeria collect food vouchers as part of a programme to support families struggling under the COVID-19 lockdown. Credit: WFP/Damilola Onafuwa

By Ben Phillips
ROME, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

Any of the first names that the media reported as having Covid were those of the rich and powerful, from movie stars to political leaders. Be ye ever so high, the virus is above thee – or so it seemed.

Now we understand that this perception, that came in part because at first only the wealthy and well-connected were getting tested, was misleading. The data is now crystal clear: Covid risk maps on to inequality, and Covid is a great unequaliser – in health, and in wealth.

But just as the initial “optimistic” take about Covid – that it would equalize us – got it wrong, so too the now pervasive “pessimistic” take – that the huge costs of the crisis leave us simply unable to act boldly – also gets it wrong.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, when we look at when it was that countries have embarked on the boldest steps to tackle inequality, it has not been when their coffers were most full, but when they were in the midst of, or emerging from, crises. As Covid has worsened inequality, it has also helped to expose it and to demonstrate its harm.

We have witnessed, in ever starker view, the inverse relationship between the concentration of wealth and social contribution. We have watched key workers without proper protections hold our society together, while elites looked after themselves, increasing their wealth by hundreds of billions. We have seen the immorality and unsustainability of systems in which our right to life is shaped by our bank balance.

The acute crisis of the present moment has revealed the deeper crisis of our age. Public opinion surveys, and media coverage have shown that many inequality-reducing policies previously deemed “radical” are now garnering widespread support. The opportunity to properly address inequality is now.

The point is not that the crisis “will” lead to action to tackle inequality, only that it helps generate a “could”. If social structures are like hard metal, crises are like heat that makes them molten: longstanding rules and norms can be reshaped, but in which ways they are reshaped depends on how hard they refashioned and from what direction.

If you’re stirred by the idea of emerging from this crisis into a more equal world, and you’re wondering who it is who can ensure that we do, history provides a very clear answer: you.

For my forthcoming book, How to Fight Inequality, I reviewed when progress had been made in tackling inequality. What I found was that if there is one generalizable lesson of social change it seems to be this: no one saves others, people standing together is how they liberate themselves.

It can be slow and it’s always complicated and it sometimes fails – but it’s the only way it works. The structure will not change from the top. As young activists expressed it to me: ‘There is no justice, just us.’ That can sound quite down, but it turns out that ‘just us’ – organized – is powerful.

Looking at history can help guide us. Crises are important, but what matters most is how we seize them. Three vital elements for stand out for success in the fight against inequality: we need to overcome deference; build power together, and create a new story.

All successful movements against inequality have faced hostility from the powerful, and therefore have depended on people’s willingness to get into trouble. The landless workers who successfully demanded access to land in Latin America, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the trade unionists who won the welfare state in Europe, were all treated as threats to be squashed before they were recognized for prompting needed change.

Governments have not acted with the determination needed to tackle inequality without a push from the rest of us, and have consistently resisted that push at first. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who worked with movements for women’s rights, civil rights, migrant rights and the environment across the twentieth century, summed up her key lesson as ‘be a nuisance where it counts’.

Today’s heroes are yesterday’s troublemakers, and those who will define tomorrow will not be those whom the establishment embraces today.

Victories against inequality were rooted too in mass organizing – the change in each case was collective, never individual – because winning the battle against inequality has required power, which for ordinary people is only ever collective. The Montgomery bus boycott is sometimes told as if it was only a story of Rosa Parks sitting down and Martin Luther King speaking. But it was planned, and trained for. Rosa Parks wasn’t just tired!

And as Dr King himself pointed out, ‘I neither started the protest nor suggested it.’ Two years before Rosa Parks was arrested, the Women’s Political Leadership Council, a group of African-American activists, had been preparing for a bus boycott. The Montgomery Improvement Association, set up after the arrest, had to maintain the boycott for 381 days. And they had to resource it from the community.

Activists printed thousands of flyers to get the message out and got hundreds of volunteers to help organize. Black churches across the city served as centres of organizing. People who didn’t even use the bus helped by providing people lifts in their cars. Postal service workers helped work out the routes that the carpools should take. Taxi operators agreed to reduce rates.

The organizers of the boycott had to hold huge numbers of meetings. They had to fend off legal challenges – and violent attacks. But, because of the joined-up organization uniting faith groups, women’s groups, labour unions and others, holding together even under strain, they won. As civil rights leader Diane Nash noted, ‘It took many thousands of people to make the changes that we made, people whose names we’ll never know.’

Victories against inequality have also depended on the stories that people have developed, the pictures they painted of a more equal world. In Britain in the early twentieth century, suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s water colours of women cotton mill and pottery workers highlighted their struggle for dignified working conditions.

In the 1940s, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, coined the phrase ‘welfare state’. Progress in tackling inequality in African and Asian countries after independence was also rooted in a narrative of the meaning of independence and of national destiny. Political independence was not seen as the end but as the first stage: achieving greater equality was core to honouring those who had made a sacrifice for freedom, and core to fulfilling the national destiny.

Citizens in newly independent countries were clear that the role of the new governments was to reshape society by tackling inequality. When later the era of adjustment came, tackling inequality was excised from many countries’ mainstream narratives of nationhood, where once it had been inseparable. Activist musicians and writers are organising now to ensure that the story is retold.

Looking back, we can observe how victories against inequality did not just ‘happen’, and were not just ‘given’, but were won, by ordinary people who were challenging, organized, and painted a picture of the world that could be. We have won before, we can win again.

Covid has exacerbated that feeling that we are not in control of events, that things are all just going on around us, that we are always and only objects, never subjects. But the Covid crisis has also meant that changes that had once seemed impossible have now been shown to be plausible.

The hardened structures are molten again. We can shape what happens – not alone, but with each other. Now, too, we must make our own history.

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Credit: United Nations

By Ben Phillips
MEXICO CITY, Oct 9 2019 (IPS)

Last month 195 world leaders once again met in New York for big speeches and grand events. But on inequality, when all is said and done, more has been said than done.

Four years after governments across the world committed to fight inequality as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, far too little has been seen in the way of government action. That’s not the verdict of critical NGOs – that’s the official assessment of UN Secretary-General António Guterres himself.

As Guterres told countries, adding only the thinnest diplomatic coating, “the shift in development pathways to generate the transformation required to meet the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 is not yet advancing at the speed or scale required.”

Indeed, he noted, “the global landscape for Sustainable Development Goal implementation has generally deteriorated since 2015”. It is in this context that the UN has called for a “decade of delivery” following five years in which we the people have been able to feast on words whilst fasting on action.

For years, grassroots organisations have been sounding the alarm about the damage being caused by widening inequality. More recently, the formal debate on inequality shifted and the accepted mainstream normative position has become that inequality is dangerous and needs to be reduced.

The UN has also stepped up in providing coordination and advice. But governments have not shifted in recognition of the new consensus. Cynicism about whether anything will be done has taken root amongst even the most hopeful observers.

And the big headlines from this year’s UN General Assembly did very little to counter that cynicism, dominated as they were by the world’s loudest leaders, who seem to make up for an absence of substance with a surfeit of bombast.

Quietly, on the sidelines, however, another group met to plan not a communique on the stage but a series of actions at home. It was not a huge group of countries, just a dozen, but it included countries from every region of the world and every income level.

They met not because they think they have the answers, but because they are keen to learn from each other and to act. From Indonesia to Sierra Leone to Sweden to Mexico, they and others gathered in the first heads of state and government meeting of the Grand Challenge on Inequality, a new multi-stakeholder initiative to support vanguard governments, committed to tackling inequality, in finding the path by walking it.

Then, even more crucially, these same leaders mandated senior leaders and officials – the doers – to gather just after the New York meetings in Mexico City, and then in a few months in Jakarta, and onwards, to plan the implementation of a series of practical country-specific policies to narrow the gap between the runaway few and the many pushed behind.

You haven’t heard about this meeting because the leaders don’t believe that they have yet earned the right to declare themselves the leaders. Saint Francis of Assisi said “Preach the Gospel, and if you must, use words.”

In a similar spirit, the country leaders in the Grand Challenge on Inequality recognized, in the New York and in Mexico City meetings, that the power of their commitment to tackling inequality will be shown not in what they say but in what they do.

They recognized that there is no single policy that on its own can beat inequality, and so a series of complementary policies year on year is needed. They recognized that tackling inequality means taking on vested interests: that it means progressive tax and universal public services, it means protected workers and regulated corporations, it means designing policy from the bottom-up not the top-down, and it means tackling the wealth and power of the very wealthy.

As part of that, they opened themselves up to forthright challenge from grassroots social movements and trade unions, and shared what they as leaders were finding most challenging and the lessons they had learnt from their mistakes. It was, I’ll confess, something of a shock to hear leaders start off not with justifications but with self-criticism.

It was a world away from the (in)famous “Big Men Who Strode New York”. In a world saturated by the fake, to witness sincerity was disorientating.

It is early days for the pioneer governments Grand Challenge on Inequality, but, as a witness and as someone who has spent years bluntly challenging governments for their failures, here’s why it matters: social transformation doesn’t happen when people recognize that ther society is unfair – it happens when people also recognize that it can be fairer.

And that depends on people witnessing change, somewhere. Cynicism and despair are ultimately tools of the status quo. There is nothing more dangerous to those who would keep things as they are than the threat of a good example.

And, quietly, this group of countries, of leaders who do not call themselves leaders, are starting to build that good example. Oxfam have started to call this group of governments the “axis of hope”. Perhaps these governments could be more prosaically named the “axis of action”.

Grassroots organising will remain essential to help foster leaders’ determination, and to push back against the pressures that will continue to be exerted by economic elites. There is no certainty that change is coming. But there is no longer certainty that it isn’t. And the sound that accompanies this change is not the bang of fireworks. It is a quiet whirring of hard work.

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By Ben Phillips
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 18 2018 (IPS)

As the elite in the world of finance gather in the Swiss luxury town of Davos, rallies are taking place around the world as citizens demand for solutions to rising inequality.

At the same time as the World Economic Forum’s rich and powerful hold forth about fixing the crisis of inequality they created, a new movement called the Fight Inequality Alliance is telling another story that is growing around the world.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking at the World Economic Forum in 2017. Credit: World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico

As the world’s 1% gather in the luxury Swiss mountain resort Davos this week, rallies are taking place around the world on mountains of a very different sort – the mountains of garbage and of open pit mines that millions of the most unequal call home.

People will be gathering in events in countries including India, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, United Kingdom, The Gambia, Tunisia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Denmark, Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Mexico to publicly demand an end to inequality.

Worldwide the groups involved include Greenpeace, ActionAid, Oxfam, Asia People’s Movement on Debt and Development, Femnet, Global Alliance for Tax Justice and the International Trade Union Confederation. Events worldwide include a pop concert at a slum next to a garbage mountain in Kenya, a football match in Senegal, a public meal sharing in Denmark, a rally at open-pit an mine in South Africa, a sound truck in Nigeria, and a giant “weighing scales of injustice” in the UK.

Worldwide the groups involved include Greenpeace, ActionAid, Oxfam, Asia People’s Movement on Debt and Development, Femnet, Global Alliance for Tax Justice and the International Trade Union Confederation.

The protesters are demanding an end to the age of greed, and say that the solutions to the inequality crisis will not come from the same elites that caused the problem. People living on the frontlines of inequality are the key to the radical change that is needed, they say.

They are already organising to build their power by joining together in a global Fight Inequality Alliance that unites social movements, women’s rights groups, trade unions, and NGOs in over 30 countries across the world. They are urging the world to hear the solutions to inequality from those who suffer it not those who caused it.

Nester Ndebele, challenging mining the companies widening inequality in South Africa, remarks: “These mining companies claim to bring development but they make a fortune while leaving our land unfarmable, our air dangerously polluted, and our communities ripped apart. Women bear the brunt of this. They claim it is worth it for the energy they provide but the wires go over our homes with no connection. The politicians need to stop listening to the mining companies fancy speeches and hear from us instead.”

Mildred Ngesa, fighting for women’s rights in Kenya, explains why the events are taking place at the same time as, and as a counter to, the elite Davos meeting in Switzerland: “All these rich men at Davos say all these nice things about women’s empowerment but when young women in the places I grew up have no economic security, many have little real choices beyond the red light. We need jobs, housing, and free education and health, not speeches from the same people who push for corporate tax exemptions which take away resources needed to advance equality.”

Campaigners call on governments to curb the murky influence of the super-rich who they blame for the Age of Greed, where billionaires are buying not just yachts but laws. Community groups ideas, which elites don’t mention, include an end to corporate tax breaks, higher taxation on the top 1% to enable quality health and education for all, increases in minimum wages and stronger enforcement, and a limit how many times more a boss can earn than a worker.

“We have rising inequality because the rich are determining what governments should do. Davos can never be the answer because the problem is caused by the influence of the people at Davos. Governments around the world must listen instead to their citizens, and end the Age of Greed. We know that governments will only do that when we organize and unite, so we are coming together as one. The power of the people is greater than the people in power.” says Filipina activist Lidy Nacpil, a co-founder of the international Fight Inequality Alliance.

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Credit: UN photo

By Ben Phillips
NAIROBI, KENYA, Apr 19 2017 (IPS)

As the world marks 100 days of the Trump Presidency, we can see that we are now in a new era of crisis, that it goes well beyond one man and one country, and that only a profound and international response can get us out of the state we are in.

The crises of xenophobia and inequality embodied by the Age of Trump are profound and are worldwide. Refugees without safe haven; ethnic and religious minorities facing officially sanctioned discrimination; women facing an aggressive onslaught of misogyny.

Civil society leaders supporting marginalized people are seeing an upsurge of these injustices in every continent. We are witnessing a world in danger not just of a slow down in social progress but of a reverse in it.

For leaders of civil society, four things are clear.

First, this is a global challenge. The whirlwind first hundred days of the Trump administration in the US have both epitomized and exacerbated worrying global trends in which an increasingly economically divided world is becoming an increasingly angry and intolerant one.

Secondly, we must take sides against intolerance. We must unashamedly support the oppressed and commit ourselves to resisting forces of division – whether it be hate speech at refugees in Hungary, xenophobic attacks in South Africa, extrajudicial killings of activists in Latin America, discrimination against religious minorities in South Asia, or unconstitutional bans on migrants in the USA. We will work together with others to help foster societies built on respect for diversity, and open to refugees from war and persecution.

The rapid rise in xenophobia and the rise in inequality which is helping to drive it need not be accepted, and can be defeated. When we stand together.
Thirdly, to tackle the forces of intolerance we must also confront the ever widening inequality that is driving societies apart. Progressive values are put under massive strain when economies cast millions aside. We know from history that 1929 economics can lead to 1933 politics, and that when people lose hope fascists ascend. Growth must benefit ordinary people, economies must be reoriented to create jobs, decent jobs, and not see wealth ever more concentrated in the hands of a view.

Fourthly, we must work together as one. There is an old saying, “the people united will never be defeated”. Sadly, that is not always true. But what is true is that the people divided will always be defeated. The challenge to foster societies of equality and solidarity can not be achieved by one organization or even one sector alone. That is why we have come together as many different leaders in NGOs, trade unions, and social movements in a joint call to #fightinequality, and to build power from below.

The stakes could not be higher. The forces of ever widening inequality, and of ever increasingly intolerance, are mobilizing. But so are the forces of solidarity and equality.

We are more united than ever to fight inequality and intolerance. Inspired by the great campaigns of old – anti-slavery, anti-colonialism, votes for women, anti-apartheid, drop the debt – and by the determined young people of today – in Fees Must Fall, Black Lives Matter, Gambia Has Decided – we will work to bend the long arc of the universe towards justice. The rapid rise in xenophobia and the rise in inequality which is helping to drive it need not be accepted, and can be defeated. When we stand together.

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