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	The choice is ours: oligarchy or democracy? by Carlos Brown Sola Program Director at Oxfam Mexico   For over a decade, Oxfam has published an annual report on extreme economic inequalities to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, where global elites gather to discuss the future of our societies and economies in a notably exclusive and non-democratic setting.   A recurring theme in these reports has been how the wealthiest in our societies continue to grow ever richer, at the expense of the lives of billions of people around the world.   Oxfam’s most recent annual report, ‘Resisting the rule of the rich: defending freedom against billionaire power’, shows that we have reached a new peak in the concentration of extreme wealth – posing urgent questions for the future of democratic society.   In 2025, despite economic and geopolitical turbulence, the combined fortunes of billionaires – some 3,000 people worldwide with a net worth exceeding one billion US dollars – grew three times faster than the average of the previous five years, reaching an all-time high of US$18.3 trillion. Last year alone, their fortunes increased by $2.5 trillion, an amount equivalent to the entire wealth held by the poorest half of humanity.   Indeed, that sum would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. One multi-billionaire, Elon Musk, became the first person in history to surpass the half-trillion-dollar mark and now has a fortune of nearly $766 billion (as of January 2026), closing in on becoming the first ever trillionaire.   This phenomenon is not exclusive to the United States or Europe. Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, currently boast a record 109 billionaires with a combined wealth of US$622 billion, equivalent to the combined annual GDP of Chile and Peru. These Latin American fortunes, of which slightly more than half are the product of inheritances, grew by 39% in the last year alone. Over the last five years, the richest man in Latin America and the Caribbean today, Carlos Slim Helu, earned each second what the average Mexican earned in a week’s work.   But it’s not just that billionaires have accumulated more wealth than they could ever spend. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that the extreme concentration of their fortunes is incompatible with a democratic society.   This is in part because the majority of resources in our societies are in the hands of a few who decide how they are used. But it’s also because economic power allows them to be politically powerful. We hear about this every day – from governments that are run by and for the wealthiest that make decisions to deepen a system that only benefits them (such as tax cuts while working people pay ever more) to aspiring presidential candidates whose only merit is having inherited fortunes that they use to cultivate a favourable public image.   This is not a new phenomenon. But the pattern is becoming increasingly clear: how the decisions of a few individuals are increasingly shaping the economic and political “rules of the game” – a game that, by its very nature, has worked for them.   The ultra-wealthy do this primarily in three ways: by buying political support, by investing in legitimising the power of the elites, and by guaranteeing themselves direct access to institutions. They are investing more and more money in elections and have greater control over the algorithms behind our newsfeeds and AI-generated content. Billionaires are also 4,000 times more likely to hold elected office than the average person. It’s one thing to buy a private jet or a mansion, but quite another to buy off a judge, a legislator, a social network or a newspaper.   In this way, governments end up siding with the wealthiest, prioritising the interests of big capital over the lives of billions of people around the world who not only remain in poverty or go hungry but also see their rights and freedoms increasingly repressed.   In short, governments have preferred oppression over redistribution, which is worrying because while economic poverty produces hunger, political poverty breeds anger and fear, a central driver (and tool of) authoritarian and reactionary politics.   It doesn’t have to be this way. These economic and political inequalities are the product of choices, so changing course to build a fairer future depends on making different economic and political decisions that place people, communities, and nature at the centre.   A growing political movement is demanding that governments drastically reduce economic inequalities, as well as curb the political power and influence of the ultra-wealthy. This is possible, for example, by effectively taxing their fortunes to reduce their economic power or by regulating lobbying practices and the algorithms that allow them to influence governments and societies.   It is urgent and necessary to resist the rule of the rich: to halt their growing power and influence and instead build a fairer economy while guaranteeing the future of our democracies. We can have extreme wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or we can have democracy, but we cannot have both, as the US Supreme Court judge Louis Brandeis affirmed a century ago. The choice is ours: oligarchy or democracy?   http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2026/01/27/democracy-at-risk-resisting-the-rule-of-the-richest/ http://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-jumps-three-times-faster-2025-highest-peak-ever http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/resisting-rule-rich Visit the related web page
	Nuclear weapons threaten everyone on the planet by Melissa Parke International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, agencies   Feb. 2026   We have entered 2026 with the highest threat ever from nuclear weapons, and we are on the cusp of the expiration of the last remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, the New START treaty, removing the last restraints on an accelerating arms race.   This dangerous moment comes on Feb. 5, as both countries are using military force against other countries illegally — Ukraine and Venezuela, respectively — to coerce them into complying with their demands as signs also point to another US attack on Iran.   Underlining the threat we face, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was moved forward on Jan. 27 to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever progressed since its creation in 1947 to the time that signifies humanity’s annihilation.   Contrast the current situation to the optimism that was felt at the end of the Cold War, when many people assumed that nuclear weapons arsenals would shrink, eventually to be retired as relics.   Instead, mostly without impinging the reality on public consciousness, the original nuclear-armed states, Britain, China, France, Russia and the US, defying their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), did not disarm. Rather, they are building a new generation of weapons.   Since the 1990s, three more countries that are not parties to the NPT — India, Pakistan and North Korea — have joined the “nuclear club,” while Israel continues to refuse to admit it has such weapons, though the rest of the world assumes it has them.   Yet, there is a bright spot on the disarmament horizon: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which has been in force for five years as of Jan. 22.   The treaty was established after discussions shifted around nuclear weapons by focusing on the humanitarian effects of their deployment. The debate sparked impetus for a new effort to abolish nukes that culminated in a UN treaty that, as of the end of 2025, a global majority of countries had signed or ratified.   While the leaders of the nuclear-armed states have so far refused to join it, turning their backs on the rest of the world and isolating themselves from the broader community of nations, the treaty’s architects always envisaged disarmament would not happen immediately.   Inspired by the land mines and cluster munitions bans, the idea is that as more countries join the TPNW, clinging to these weapons will become less acceptable as the diplomatic and reputational costs of doing so will become greater, leading to the nuclear-armed countries realizing it is no longer useful to keep them.   Adopted in 2017, the treaty came into force in January 2021. Although the countries with nuclear weapons and their nuclear-weapons-endorsing allies have tried to pretend the ban does not exist and dismiss the TPNW as purely symbolic, this is hardly true.   As we marked the fifth anniversary of the TPNW’s entry into force on Jan. 22, we took stock of how the treaty is working and how it has changed the geopolitical and humanitarian landscape.   First, nuclear weapons are now banned under international law, like other weapons of mass destruction. This is a major landmark.   The TPNW has also strengthened the nuclear taboo that developed from the knowledge of what happened to the people hit by the first nuclear bombs — relatively small by today’s standards — in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A quarter of a million people died within four months and catastrophic, lingering and intergenerational harm has affected the survivors.   Nuclear weapons threaten everyone on the planet, so everyone should have a say in them. The TPNW has broken the stranglehold that nuclear-armed states and their misguided, dangerous doctrine of nuclear deterrence had on the public debate around nuclear weapons.   Now, the 99 countries that have signed or ratified the treaty so far are directly challenging this baleful doctrine as a threat to all countries and an obstacle to disarmament, while providing an alternative to deterrence through the TPNW.   The treaty has strengthened the international consensus that threats to use nuclear weapons are inadmissible. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, using nuclear threats to try to intimidate others not to support Kiev, TPNW members gathered at their first meeting a few months later in Vienna and issued the first multilateral condemnation of such threats.   Their condemnation has since been echoed by the G20 and individual leaders, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and US President Joe Biden at the time as well as China’s President Xi Jinping.   By putting humanitarian concerns at the center of the push for nuclear disarmament, TPNW countries addressed the reality that the weapons are designed to cause mass, indiscriminate and lingering damage to civilians.   The TPNW has also inspired many investors to take their money out of nuclear weapons production. Financial institutions representing at least $4.7 trillion of global assets have cited the treaty as a reason for no longer doing business with the nuclear weapons industry.   This year, both the NPT and the TPNW will hold major conferences where progress in treaty implementation is reviewed and their members decide on their next steps.   The NPT meets in April, for its 11th review conference, but there has been no agreed outcome to the last two such conferences, and the prospects are dim for the meeting. In contrast, TPNW states meet in early December for its first review conference, and members are optimistic they will agree to strengthen the treaty’s impact. That includes the crucial act of providing international support for tens of thousands of victims of the more than 2,000 nuclear-test explosions across the globe since 1945.   The countries that pose the threat through their continued possession of nuclear weapons — or support for their use, chiefly, US allies and Belarus — could start to mend their reputations at these conferences by agreeing to progress at the NPT and by attending the TPNW conference as observers.   In a world where great-power rivalry and a zero-sum approach to international relations has returned with a vengeance, the TPNW shows that multilateral dialogue and diplomacy are still very much alive and that it is possible for countries to work together to save us from destroying ourselves.   * Melissa Parke is the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2017.   http://passblue.com/2026/02/01/the-right-way-to-stop-a-new-nuclear-arms-race/ http://www.icanw.org/ http://thebulletin.org/2026/01/press-release-it-is-85-seconds-to-midnight http://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2026-statement/ http://theelders.org/news/elders-urge-usa-russia-halt-nuclear-arms-race-new-start-expires http://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166892
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