by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with the Asia Times by special agreement with the author)
For billions of people, the Groucho Marx rule applies when talking about Davos. This is the exclusive club, which meets in the luxury Swiss resort each year to discuss the global business environment.
Groucho, of course, has been immortalized along with the rest of the Marx Brothers in the zany Hollywood movies of the 1930s, such as A Night a the Opera, A Day at the Races and Animal Crackers.
In one quick-fire response, he joked: “I sent the club a wire stating, ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’.”
Well, to start off with those billions of people would not get past the bouncers, because the self-defined World Economic Forum is about exclusion. Yet even if, by divine design, they were handed free passes, what would be the point?
The austerity mantra holds sway over large swathes of Europe. The US remains mired in the fiscal cliff maelstrom and the Japanese are about to unleash an economic tsunami – devaluation of the yen at all costs.
On the other hand, growth does apply to parts of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of emerging nations and selected members of Next 11.
Certainly, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea and Vietnam fall into this category in N-11, a BRICS-like organization.
So, what is the point of spending the GDP of a sub-Saharan country trekking to the Alps to Davos for a mere blabber fest, when basic membership plus access to private sessions at the summit cost a whopping US$245,000?
For instance, the slopes of Jackson Hole, where the annual central bank symposium is held in Wyoming, are way cooler.
In comparison, Davos is essentially double-dip land. On one side, we have ‘Bad for Labor’, with millions in the West thrown into an unemployment hell or suffering from a wages freeze. On the other side, we have ‘Good for Capital’, with companies flush with cash.
Yet the result is uncertainty, all over again. Quite simply, more “robust” companies are just not investing. Why? Because there is no demand. That is the “price” of the austerity mantra, and there is no evidence that the business, financial and government suits in Davos will address the drama.
After all, since the 1990s, the summit has always been about hardcore globalization and its prime spin-off – the absolute marketization of everything in life.
To get to the bottom of it, CEOs, bankers and techno-bureaucrats would have to engage in an in-depth discussion of hardcore neoliberalism.
To do that, they would have to bring in David Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has been teaching Karl Marx’s “Capital: Critique of Political Economy” for more than 40 years.
They would have to hold global banking to account. They would also have to consign austerity to the dustbin of history, and level the playing field between capital and labor. Of course, that will not happen.
Still, this year’s Davos theme is “Resilient Dynamism.” As a definition of the current woes of turbo-capitalism, a five-year-old in a favela, or slum, in Rio could come up with something more meaningful.
But then, Davos is a one-trick pony. “Resilience” remains a euphemism for the ever-expanding markets and low pay for workers syndrome. In a nutshell, globalization driven by huge multinational corporations.
We should scrap “Resilience” as the name of their game is “Inequality.” Davos, of course, does not do “inequality.”
In a study released by UC Berkeley, the wealth of the top 1% of Americans accrued by 11.6% in 2010, while for the other 99% it was a mere 0.2%. This is what is at the heart of hardcore neoliberalism and capitalist.
Davos should be discussing how a key segment of elites concocted the Wall Street-provoked financial crash. That was only ‘virtual’ business, but it was not ‘virtual’ national governments that had to intervene afterward to pick up the bill and bail out the banks.
No, I am afraid “Resilient Dynamism” will not do for Davos. But it is a good definition of China. While European and American elites accrue their capital to contain Beijing’s advance in Africa and Asia, China’s interventionism is of the business kind. It is a case of building roads, not wars.
Still, the question Davos refuses to ask remains: Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind, from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system of relations spawned by capitalism?
Stay tuned for that one.
Who is the well-fed chappie on the left of the photo?
Surely not Sir Elton?
Yes, that’s him. He walks up to the podium at 1:10, and the TV speaker comments it accordingly. How cute (not).
Don’t laugh, guys. Sir Elton, who had his first public appearance at the Queen’s coronation ceremony, if I remember correctly, is still going strong and thus a fitting personification of ‘Resilient Dynamism’. Rumors are, he is back in the studio, recording new material, presenting the compressed wisdom of his life extraordinary experiences, tentatively titled ‘Sex, Drugs & Kindergarten’.
Kate Blanchett too.
Hmmmm…
they’re all one big happy family there are a few black sheep but only Roger Waters – is a true hero
See? I have suggested before that these ‘corporate entites’ are made up of actual people in actual locations on the surface of our actual planet,… Well, there they are… *Hint, hint*.
Great article, btw.
Yes, Another great article from Mr Pepe. However, since the big protests around the turn of the millennium, these shindigs have been massively protected with concentric rings of steel. Why else has all that surveillance and security legislation been passed in the years since?
It would be unfortunate if a cruise missile aimed at terrorists in Syria went off course and landed in Davos . . .
I am delighted beyond words that Trump is going to Davos, and I hope he is in his usual form and performs nonstop his trademark clownish boorishness.
For one thing, it will be enormously entertaining.
For the other, it will bring further embarrassment and disgrace upon our corrupt and rotting neoliberal regime here in the USA. The collapse is going to be brutal, and I myself will probably not survive it, but it has to happen, and it might as well be sooner than later.
The ‘bread and circus’ clown show is only for the msm and his deplorables. These Davos types are his peers — expect professional business behavior and a few more Trump Towers spreading out across the empire.
Davos is just another club for the elites, just like the Bilderberg meetings are, and a number of others. We are basically seeing the international mafia holding their globalist deliberations, deciding what to do. Well, those days are coming to an end. Nobody sane wants to see a globalist empire run by a few. It remains to be seen if the elites will accept this. Ofcourse they wont. Well, events in the end will force them to a change of attitude.
Latest unconfirmed news on the Internet is that US special forces in Syria, dressed in Kurdish uniforms, are fighting the Turkish Army. If true, then this cheap tactic is bound to fail, including the cheap tactic of using Kurds to grab Iraqi and Syrian oil fields. The elites are using colonial and imperial methods. They always backfire in the end.
“Resilience” is about the elites maintaining their advantages: how can they continue to grind the peasants into the dirt without a meeting with the local guillotine?
Well, there were the rivers of blue blood in Paris some time ago; and, it will come to, at least in the whole US of A, the rivers of green blood some time rather soon…
‘Resilient Dynamism?’
Dear Davos, I am embarrassed at your failed attempt at neurolinguistic programing. (Seriously, did you hire some schlub from Buzzfeed?)
For a (slightly princessly) fee,
I am willing to offer my services as a coiner of phrases, buzzwords and assorted neologisms. (Actually, I want a villa in Puglia with a swimming pool – don’t be cheap. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys, right? And how many MSM orang-utans have you got already?)
I also do a neat line in puns, much beloved of tabloids.
Of course, if you prefer to stick with meaningless word – f**ts, delivered with just the right amount of pomp and circumstance, I can do that too.
As a bonus, I can still do the old student trick of twisting a question to deliver a predetermined ‘answer’ – you guys seem to have a lost the knack…..
‘Resilient Dynamism’
Reminds me of the fact, that mostly Jewish psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have been busily publishing an ever increasing body of literature concerning the field of ‘resilience research’.
The big question of course is: how come that certain individuals, having to suffer through defamation, pogroms and holocausts on an almost daily basis, still manage to become professors, write bestseller and collect one or the other Nobel prize, while other folks, often of ‘White Privilege’ background, seem to be be less resilient, and never ever manage to land even a single article in der Spiegel, the Guardian or the New York Times?
What to say? It is all very puzzling…
Gold Bull Market appears to be starting a sustained period of higher 52-week highs.
Good for Russia and China who have been accumulating gold for years. Bad for the USA.
http://schrts.co/vLUYwY
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article61337.html
And even worse for Canada, which sold its last paltry holdings last year, I believe.
The great and the good at Davos remind me of a line from one of Samuel Becket’s bleak novella’s ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ in which the main figure states,’I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ This I think pretty much describes the neoliberal hell-hole the world has been driven into, a recognition of its effects and then TINA (there is no alternative) gets trotted out, as is customary of course. This is a system headed to self-destruction, a runaway train which cannot and must not be stopped, after all there is no alternative, or so we are told.
great article Pepe – very true at the end there – thanks !~