A group of the richest, most powerful people on the planet landed their private jets and parked their black Audis in the picturesque skiing town of Davos, Switzerland last week. But skiing was the last thing on their minds…
Protected by barbed wire and rooftop snipers, the world’s financial and political elite gathered to plot their moves for the coming year.
The World Economic Forum is a yearly “meeting” that is supposed to address the ills of the world and come up with solutions to improve it “by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”
But it’s really a glorified cocktail party where the richest people in the world can hobnob quickly and effectively to increase one another’s wealth. The whole point is to make connections, and the global elite has never been more “connected” than right now…
An Orgy of Adulation
The mayor of London once called the World Economic Forum “a constellation of egos involved in massive mutual orgies of adulation.”
Rock star and global philanthropist Bono referred to the gathering as “fat cats in the snow.”
Even the Pope weighed in on Davos with a statement about the runaway gap between the world’s richest and poorest people.
“The growth of inequality demands something more than economic growth, even though it presupposes it. It also calls for decisions, mechanisms and processes directed to a better distribution of wealth, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.”
His Holiness added, “I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it.”
You can already hear the laughter echoing through the Swiss Alps. The world’s richest men and women tackling income inequality?
Talk about the cat guarding the hen house…
Tickets for the event are priced at $70,000 a pop — over one and a half times more than the average American household makes in an entire year!
These globetrotting elites aren’t dropping that kind of dough to decide how best to give their money away. They use Davos as a massive cocktail mixer — a place where they can rub elbows with the rest of their elite brethren and concoct new and inventive ways to continue their stranglehold over the world’s finances….
It’s almost laughable that the World Economic Forum identified widening income disparity as the greatest risk to worldwide stability over the next decade.
They’ve been saying the same thing in Davos for the last thirty years! So how have the elites done on the wealth inequality front?
They have only made it worse and worse. From Oxfam’s 2014 economic briefing:
- Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
- The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
- The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in
the world. - Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in
the last 30 years. - The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for
which we have data between 1980 and 2012. - In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.
I’ll go out on a limb and say the Pope’s plea will have no effect on these trends…
Filipino billionaire Enrique Razon minced no words when addressing the reason he was at Davos. He came out and ridiculed even the premise that they were there for anything but their bottom lines: “It’s loaded with bloated self-importance. I’m here to do business, not to save the world.”
Well, then. By that measure, Davos continues to be a smashing success…
Lots of Risks, No Reward
Economic inequality wasn’t the only target for the elite’s token navel-gazing. Here’s a rundown of the World Economic Forum’s risk assessment for the world this year:
1) ECONOMIC RISKS:
- Failure of a major financial mechanism or institution
- Structurally high unemployment/underemployment
- Decline of importance of the US dollar as a major currency
Kind of sounds like the U.S. in a nutshell…
We watched in abject horror as our entire banking system came dangerously close to collapse. What did the elite do then? Bail it out with your money…
And now the bulk of those institutions are posting record profits. What did the taxpayer get?
Structurally high unemployment!
If you go by the government’s juiced stats, it appears unemployment is hovering around 7.5% — which isn’t good, but that figure isn’t nearly as horrifying as the actual numbers.
If you take into account short-term discouraged workers and those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs, you’ll see actual unemployment is between 13% and 23%.
And let’s not get started on the state of the U.S. dollar as the major world currency. Just look at what’s happened to it since the Federal Reserve was put in place:
Not exactly a rousing endorsement for the world’s reserve currency…
2) TECHNOLOGICAL RISKS
- Escalation in large-scale cyber attacks
- Massive incident of data fraud/theft
In the U.S., we’ve been victims of both cyber attacks and massive data fraud in just the past few months alone…
Hackers attacked Target and made off with up to 100 million credit card numbers! A similar attack against Neiman Marcus compromised another million…
The FBI just released a statement that in 2014, “we expect to see one or more of these major breaches a month.”
3) SOCIETAL RISKS
- Food crises
- Antibiotic-resistant bacteria
- Pandemic outbreak
Here’s where these “risks” become a whole lot easier to relate. While we all feel the weight of the global elite in our economic, technological, and political lives, it is when the disasters hit the societal level that citizens begin to stand up and take notice…
If there is a food crisis, people will take to the streets, and the illusion of the elite caretaker will vanish in an instant. Same goes for an outbreak or pandemic.
Just look at the response to a disaster like Hurricane Katrina. Societal norms broke down overnight, and the powers that be seemed helpless to stop it.
Just imagine the response if there was an actual pandemic…
Again, all of these travesties and tribulations have been under the watchful eye of the same “altruistic” global elite that has gathered at Davos.
These guys have been in charge for a long, long time. Under their watch, all of the above “risks” have done nothing but further entrench the elite, giving them more power and more control. No amount of lip service at a globalist ski lodge can begin to instill confidence…
Patrick L. Young, the author of Capital Market Revolution, says it best:
“Ultimately Davos is a product of these stagnant times – a phony capitalist-socialist mish mash. The world needs individual empowerment, not more top down policy that is outmoded before it is implemented. With globalization a fact of digital life, we need to educate workers with the flexible skills to prosper in an interconnected world. It is small business and start-ups which need to be unshackled from suffocating pro-corporatist regulations designed by sprawling crony committees. Incredible prosperity awaits through further technological innovation, but first we must prevent the reactionary protectionist Davos man mindset suffocating our individual abilities. Growth will only come from the bottom, not the snowy peaks of Davos groupthink.”
It’s going to take more than a few outsiders to built up that new paradigm and disrupt the globalist groupthink. Stay vigilant…
