Blinken rallies developed world to confront inequality

PARIS (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Tuesday on the world’s most developed countries to take on and counter widening gaps between the rich and poor.

He told the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris that the coronavirus and climate change have exacerbated inequality between and within nations and that action must be taken to reverse the trend.

In addition to tackling those two threats, he told an OECD conference on climate and security that curbing corporate tax avoidance and ending discrimination against women and minorities are critical to improving global living conditions.

Blinken said the Biden administration is committed to addressing the root causes of inequity and inequality. His comments came as President Joe Biden is struggling to win congressional approval of major initiatives aimed at doing that.

“The data are crystal clear: both the pandemic and the climate crisis are hitting underserved populations in our societies hardest,” Blinken said. He urged members of the OECD, which was spawned from the post-WWII Marshall Plan that rebuilt much of war-ravaged Europe, to look at their own culpability for the situation.

“We all bear some responsibility for this," Blinken said. “For decades, our member countries measured economic success chiefly in terms of rising GDP (gross domestic product) and stock markets — which don’t reflect the reality of millions of working families. Instead, our unprecedented growth has frequently come with rising inequity.”

To combat that, he said establishing a global corporate minimum tax rate would “avoid a self-defeating race to the bottom” that has arisen with countries competing to offer the lowest tax rates, which in turn has enabled large corporations “to avoid paying their fair...