Survival of the richest
DID Mark Zuckerberg, one of the wealthiest men in the world, take a really good look at the Richard Mille wristwatch of Anant Ambani during the latter’s lavish pre-wedding ceremony in Jamnagar, a city in India’s western Gujarat state where the Ambanis — Asia’s richest family, says wealth tracker Forbes — built the world’s largest oil refinery? The Meta founder was one of the world’s super-wealthy who traveled to Gujarat for the ceremony earlier this month in their private jets, whose total cost could have fed the refugees starving in Central Africa’s war zones. Pop star Rihanna, shuttled by a luxury jet, provided the entertainment, with Bollywood stars as the front act.
Oh, that wristwatch was worth at least $1 million, and we can safely assume it is just one of many expensive watches Anant owns.
But his father Mukesh, Asia’s richest man, would not mind the cost of that three-day celebration this month and of his son’s actual wedding to Indian socialite Radhika Merchant later in July. Maybe the price of the pre-wedding splurge was just a loose change in the weekly earnings of the Ambanis’ flagship company, Reliance. And some members of the elite, like entertainment mogul Bob Iger, were there not only to have fun, but also to forge business deals with the Ambanis on the side.
The superrich, as we all know, are different from you and me. We have been so used to their ostentatious displays of wealth that they have numbed us. The Ambanis’ main residence is a 27-story skyscraper in Mumbai. If it were a commercial building, it would have 63 floors.
But one group noticed that: poverty tracker Oxfam. It probably made a quick calculation on how many starving people in the world — especially pregnant women, children and the sickly elderly — could have been fed by the cost of that pre-wedding ceremony. Or how many of India’s poor and hungry — estimated by Oxfam at more than 228 million — could have received much-needed nourishment had all that money been redirected to anti-hunger, antipoverty programs there? The pre-wedding celebration, Oxfam said, just highlighted the deep inequality in India, where the top 1 percent own more than 40 percent of the country’s total wealth.
Oxfam called today’s India a deeply unequal society where the super wealthy are not covered by oversight — the “survival of the richest” — and where billionaires are tied to the apron strings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In fact, Anant paid tribute to Modi during the three-day celebration. This struck a chord in the Philippines, where every big news is about our own superrich. And those big news have the blessing of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
Consider Headline No. 1: Three billionaires agree on an energy deal. Headline No. 2: Billionaire bags P170-billion-plus airport rehab contract. A months-old headline: Billionaires named to government posts. A headline that has not lost its currency and is a constant in public-private sector relations: Billionaires join the presidential trip.
Much of the major events in our country have unfolded in a limited sphere — the sphere of the superrich collaborating with government. The Philippines — and I can say this categorically — has been the lebensraum of the super wealthy, and the media, much of it owned by the superrich, have been complicit. The news of mining workers and residents of entire communities buried alive by rampaging mudflows in Davao de Oro recently, creating a vast communal grave in the process, was hardly news to billionaire-worshipping Filipinos.
And state policy, whose last big “fiscal reform” was to lower the corporate income tax to 20 percent, is pushing ahead with adopting the policy of the 1980s, the so-called Washington Consensus, a bundle of policies espousing liberalization, deregulation and privatization — the same neoliberal policies that made the rich richer, exacerbated the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and have been declared passé and unworkable elsewhere.
Right now, our political and economic overlords are working in tandem to amend the negligible equity and patrimony provisions in the 1987 Philippine Constitution precisely to make the country’s economy very well like Chile’s during the time of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, where free market tenets were applied and experimented upon so recklessly and without restraint. A Constitution that vested the Chilean rich with the full legal mandate to exploit their country’s resources with their foreign partners.
The same Pinochet-era, freemarket Constitution of Chile that we want to adopt is ironically the same one the government of current President Gabriel Boric wants to scrap and change with a more egalitarian basic law that enshrines comprehensive equity and patrimony provisions.
The cynical sponsors of our current Charter-change efforts claim that the country needs a forwardlooking, 21st-century Constitution. The truth is they want to go back to the 1980s, when deregulation and liberalization were the craze, along with the discredited thesis of trickle-down economics that a “rising tide lifts all boats.”
Right now, the World Bank says, the top 1 percent gobble up 17 percent of yearly income gains, with the bottom 50 getting a meager 14 percent. It is also safe to say our top 1 percent own at least 40 percent of the country’s wealth. At least 47 percent of Filipino families selfrate themselves as “poor.”
If Oxfam ever gets to describe the deep inequality in Philippine society, it would not hesitate to repeat what it said of India: the “survival of the richest” and the lebensraum, or “living space,” of the superrich.