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Fat Cats Play In the Snow at Davos, Switzerland
By Vince Williams | December 31, 2008
World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 28 January – 1 February 2009.
I’m surprised I haven’t yet read any mention this year of Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, which was set in Davos. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote at The Guardian in February 2005: it “shows how the economically interdependent pre-1914 Europe, knitted together by a sophisticated international elite of aristocrats, [and] businesspeople… was torn apart by national prejudices and ideological arguments…”
While Bono’s Davos Men/fat cats in the snow speak volubly of ‘brain trusts’, Global Agenda ‘trustees’, and the ‘talent commons’, I’m simply glad that after this election we didn’t have to call on our European friends “to invade the US to save the country from Christian theocratic fascism,” as humorously suggested by a respondent to Ash’s screed.
I for one shake in my boots when international venture capitalists speak of reforming the global financial architecture– the IMF and the World Bank having done such a splendid job of fomenting hunger and disease.
I have little faith that the elitists-without-borders will tackle first things first and address the staggering inequalities of wealth between the haves and have-nots among nation-states, much less within developed countries like the US or in developing ones like China, Russia, and India.
As Ash so shrewdly made clear, while the political relationship between the US and Western Europe deteriorated under the ruinous policies of the Bush regime, the economic relationship, through cross-ownership and investment, has become stronger than ever.
And need I say, made each of them more vulnerable to economic turbulence and banking crises in the other.
Topics: Fiscal Policy, Foreign Policy, George Bush |