Elites Gather In Davos To Rich-splain Poverty As The World Spirals Into Crisis. By Louise Roug
"The plutocrats who shattered the world order are gathering to make out in the mountains."
DAVOS, Switzerland ―
This week, thousands of business leaders, lawmakers and activists will convene
in Davos to discuss the greatest challenges facing the world. At the yearly
gathering hosted by the World Economic Forum, there is much talk of
“worrying geopolitical
and geo-economic
tensions.” But, to its critics, Davos embodies
everything that’s wrong with the current moment. “They gather to talk
about making the world a better place. But instead they commandeer our
conversation,” said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The
Elite Charade of Changing the World, who will not be attending.
The U.S. government is
in its longest shutdown on
record. Britain is spiraling out of control over Brexit. Flames of rage engulf
France. But “the plutocrats who shattered the world order are gathering to make
out in the mountains,” Giridharadas said. According to a report
from the anti-poverty coalition Oxfam, timed to coincide with Davos,
the world’s 2,200 billionaires grew 12 percent wealthier last year. But the
wealth is not trickling down. The poorest half of the world got 11 percent
poorer in 2018, and today the top 26 billionaires own the same wealth as the
poorest 3.8 billion people.
“The economy we have
today is fundamentally inhuman,” Paul O’Brien, Oxfam America’s vice president
for policy and campaigns, told
HuffPost. “You’re not going to get a decrease in extreme wealth until you
have leadership committed to tackling its root causes, and right now we
don’t.”
In the U.S., wages have been essentially stagnant for decades while
members of the Davos elite have gotten significantly richer. The fortunes of a
dozen 2009 Davos attendees have jumped by a combined $175 billion in the years
since, a Bloomberg analysis found.
Among those on the list were Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who
has tripled his net worth since 2009, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose
wealth grew 1,853 percent in that period.
Zuckerberg is not
scheduled to attend Davos, but Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is using
the gathering as a stop on a Facebook “apology
tour,” after a slew of bad publicity over its role in the spread of
misinformation in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and evidence that the
company helped stir
violence in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The problem with Davos
is that it provides “a moral glow of heroism to people who should be begging
for society’s mercy for their role in breaking our social contract,” said
Giridharadas. “No one at Facebook should be on a panel explaining anything.
They should be apologizing … for breaking our democracy and for enabling ethnic
violence.”
To Giridharadas, Davos
amounts to a week of “rich-splaining,” characterized by terms that shift the
conversation away from actual social change: “Win-win” replaces a debate about
social justice. “Lean in” gets in the way of maternity leave. Talk of
“micro-credits” takes the place of a discussion about a wealth tax. “These
elites have essentially used the rhetoric of changing the world to prevent
change,” he said... read more:
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