Questões de Inglês

Oxfam study finds richest 1% is likely to control

half of global wealth by 2016

By Patricia Cohen

January 19, 2015

  The richest 1 percent is likely to control more than half of the globe’s total wealth by next year, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam reported in a study released on Monday. The warning about deepening global inequality comes just as the world’s business elite prepare to meet this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

  The 80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own $1.9 trillion, the report found, nearly the same amount shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s income scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.) And the richest 1 percent of the population controls nearly half of the world’s total wealth, a share that is also increasing.

  The type of inequality that currently characterizes the world’s economies is unlike anything seen in recent years, the report explained. “Between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current U.S. dollars had been increasing more or less at the same rate as that of billionaires,” it said. “However since 2010, it has been decreasing over that time.”

  Winnie Byanyima, the charity’s executive director, noted in a statement that more than a billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day. “Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Ms.Byanyima said. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering.”

Investors with interests in finance, insurance and health saw the biggest windfalls, Oxfam said. Using data from Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, it said those listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and health care industries saw their net worth jump by 47 percent. The charity credited those individuals’ rapidly growing fortunes in part to multimillion-dollar lobbying campaigns to protect and enhance their interests.

(www.nytimes.com. Adaptado.)

Global protest grows as citizens lose faith in politics and the state

[1] The demonstrations in Brazil began after a small rise in bus fares that triggered mass

protests. Within days this had become a nationwide movement whose concerns had

spread far beyond fares: more than a million people were on the streets shouting about

everything − from corruption to the cost of living to the amount of money being spent on

[5] the World Cup.

In Turkey, it was a similar story. A protest over the future of a city park in Istanbul snowballed

too into something bigger, a wider-ranging political confrontation with prime minister.

If the recent scenes have seemed familiar, it is because they shared common features: viral,

loosely organised with fractured messages and mostly taking place in urban public locations.

[10] Unlike the protest movement of 1968, or even the end of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe

in 1989, these are movements with few discernible leaders and often conflicting ideologies.

Their points of reference are not even necessarily ideological, but take inspiration from

other protests, including those of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. The result

has seen a wave of social movements − sometimes short-lived − from Wall Street to Tel

[15] Aviv and from Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro, often engaging younger, better educated and

wealthier members of society.

In Brazil, the varied banners underlined the difficulty of easy categorisation as protesters

held aloft signs expressing a range of demands from education reforms to free bus fares,

while denouncing the billions of public dollars spent on stadiums for the 2014 World Cup

[20] and the Olympics.

“It’s sort of a Catch-22”, Rodrigues da Cunha, a 63-year-old protester told the Associated

Press. “On the one hand, we need some sort of leadership; on the other, we don’t want

this to be compromised by being affiliated with any political party.”

As the Economist pointed out, while mass movements in Britain, France, Sweden and Turkey

[25] have been inspired by a variety of causes, including falling living standards, authoritarian

government and worries about immigration, Brazil does not fit the picture, with youth

unemployment at a record low and enjoying the biggest leap in living standards in the

country’s history.

So what’s going on? “This is a very peculiar moment”, Saskia Sassen, a sociology professor

[30] at Columbia University, New York, told the Observer. She argues that one distinguishing

factor is that many of the protest movements of the past decade have been defined

by the involvement of what she calls “the modest middle class”, who have often been

beneficiaries of the systems they are protesting against, but whose positions have been

eroded by neoliberal economic policies that have seen both distribution of wealth and

[35] opportunities captured by a narrowing minority. As people have come to feel more distant

from government and economic institutions, a large part of the new mass forms of dissent

has come to be seen as an opportunity to demonstrate ideas of “citizenship”.

Sassen’s belief that many of the recent protests are middle-class-driven appeared to be

confirmed overtly − in the case of Brazil, at least.

theguardian.com

Global protest grows as citizens lose faith in politics and the state

[1] The demonstrations in Brazil began after a small rise in bus fares that triggered mass

protests. Within days this had become a nationwide movement whose concerns had

spread far beyond fares: more than a million people were on the streets shouting about

everything − from corruption to the cost of living to the amount of money being spent on

[5] the World Cup.

In Turkey, it was a similar story. A protest over the future of a city park in Istanbul snowballed

too into something bigger, a wider-ranging political confrontation with prime minister.

If the recent scenes have seemed familiar, it is because they shared common features: viral,

loosely organised with fractured messages and mostly taking place in urban public locations.

[10] Unlike the protest movement of 1968, or even the end of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe

in 1989, these are movements with few discernible leaders and often conflicting ideologies.

Their points of reference are not even necessarily ideological, but take inspiration from

other protests, including those of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. The result

has seen a wave of social movements − sometimes short-lived − from Wall Street to Tel

[15] Aviv and from Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro, often engaging younger, better educated and

wealthier members of society.

In Brazil, the varied banners underlined the difficulty of easy categorisation as protesters

held aloft signs expressing a range of demands from education reforms to free bus fares,

while denouncing the billions of public dollars spent on stadiums for the 2014 World Cup

[20] and the Olympics.

“It’s sort of a Catch-22”, Rodrigues da Cunha, a 63-year-old protester told the Associated

Press. “On the one hand, we need some sort of leadership; on the other, we don’t want

this to be compromised by being affiliated with any political party.”

As the Economist pointed out, while mass movements in Britain, France, Sweden and Turkey

[25] have been inspired by a variety of causes, including falling living standards, authoritarian

government and worries about immigration, Brazil does not fit the picture, with youth

unemployment at a record low and enjoying the biggest leap in living standards in the

country’s history.

So what’s going on? “This is a very peculiar moment”, Saskia Sassen, a sociology professor

[30] at Columbia University, New York, told the Observer. She argues that one distinguishing

factor is that many of the protest movements of the past decade have been defined

by the involvement of what she calls “the modest middle class”, who have often been

beneficiaries of the systems they are protesting against, but whose positions have been

eroded by neoliberal economic policies that have seen both distribution of wealth and

[35] opportunities captured by a narrowing minority. As people have come to feel more distant

from government and economic institutions, a large part of the new mass forms of dissent

has come to be seen as an opportunity to demonstrate ideas of “citizenship”.

Sassen’s belief that many of the recent protests are middle-class-driven appeared to be

confirmed overtly − in the case of Brazil, at least.

theguardian.com

The Genre of Autobiography and Autofiction

[1] Derived from three Greek words meaning “self”, “life” and “write”, autobiography is a

style of writing that has been around nearly as long as history has been recorded. Yet,

autobiography was not classified as a genre within itself until the late eighteenth century.

In his book, Inside out, E. Stuart Bates offers a functional definition of autobiography as “a

[5] narrative of the past of a person by the person concerned”. That definition, however, is too

broad for some literary critics. Many, such as Philippe Lejeune, wish to define the genre more

narrowly: “(a) retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own

existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality”.

Despite disagreements concerning how inclusive the category of autobiography should

[10] be, there are characteristics that are common to the majority of autobiographical works.

These features are the grammatical perspective of the work, the identity of the self, selfreflection

and introspection.

Most autobiographies are written from the first person singular perspective. The author, the

narrator and the protagonist must share a common identity for the work to be considered

[15] an autobiography. This common identity could be similar, but is not identical. The self that

the author constructs becomes a character within the story that may not be a completely

factual representation of the author’s actual past self.

In their book The voice within, Roger Porter and H. R. Wolf state that “truth is a highly

subjective matter, and no autobiographer can represent exactly what happened back then,

[20] any more than a historian can definitively describe the real truth of the past”.

Because the author cannot describe events objectively, even the most accurate

autobiographies have fictional elements. The blurring of fiction and truth characteristic

of autobiography has even led to the creation of a subdivision within the genre of

autobiography that deals with fictionalized self-accounts. For this style of writing that

[25] blends characteristics of both fiction and autobiography, Serge Doubrovsky coined the

literary term “autofiction”.

The difference between traditional autobiography and the genre of autofiction is that

autobiographers are attempting to depict their real life, while writers of autofiction are

only basing their work upon real experiences. Writers of autofiction are not expected to be

[30] as historically accurate as possible as autobiographers are. According to Alex Hughes,

authors of autofiction are saying “this is me and this is not me”. This sums up autofiction.

Autofiction draws from the life of the writer with the addition of fictional elements to

make the work more than just a life story.

Autobiography is a popular genre. Writers of memoirs and life stories never lack an

[35] audience. People are interested in the actual lives of others and want to know about

others’ pasts and feelings and desires. Autobiography is a way to organize the story of a

life and reflect on the past in order to better understand the present.

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