Photograph Source: Eneas De Troya – CC BY 2.0
Have our world’s super rich become absolutely paranoid about the future? Or do they, deep down, understand that our exceedingly unequal global distribution of income and wealth has placed them — and everyone else — in ever-present danger?
The Robb Report, a news service that offers our most awesomely affluent the ultimate in consumption advice, has no interest in psychoanalyzing what the wealthiest among us believe. But Robb Report analysts certainly do enjoy chronicling how these rich behave.
“Forget Butlers,” a Robb Report headline has just pronounced. “Private Security” has now become “the Ultimate Service for the Ultra-Wealthy.”
The Samphire Risk insurance firm, the Robb coverage goes on to relate, specializes in policies that insure the rich against the dangers that our world visits only upon them. Say, for instance, two monied motorcyclist pals get involved in a crash that leaves one of them badly injured and the other kidnapped amid the accident’s chaos. Samphire prides itself on providing “the connective tissue between the problem and the expertise needed” to solve whatever dilemma the rich may encounter.
The AHNA Group run by a Dubai-based former military operative from South Africa last year provided top corporate execs protective services for over 500 trips into more than four dozen countries. AHNA, says its mover and shaker Mac Segal, always goes the extra mile and even takes the time to prep its operatives on how to make conversation with their rich clients.
“You should speak in short sentences,” Segal advises, “so the client can stop the conversation whenever they want to.”
Still another new security service available for the fretful rich offers “a bodyguard in your pocket,” an Artificial Intelligence-powered mobile phone app that can tell if a deep pocket’s limo is following its normal daily route.
Budding entrepreneurs worldwide, in short, are devoting their time and talents to making our Earth as safe as possible for our planet’s most comfortable, that top 1 percent that now holds more wealth, relates a just-released report from the global humanitarian group Oxfam, than the entire bottom 95 percent combined.
This “immense concentration of wealth,” notes Oxfam’s new Multilateralism in an Era of Global Oligarchy analysis, has allowed large corporations and the ultra-rich “who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else.”