Davos Blues

 Davos: ‘This week, some of the richest people on Earth will gather high up a snowy mountain in the world’s biggest tax haven.’ Photograph: Ruben Sprich/Reuters

"We’ve been conned by the rich predators of Davos", writes Aditya Chakrabortty in today's Guardian:

The great mistake made by the mainstream left and right, even by NGOs such as Oxfam, is in imagining that the super-rich, now enjoying such massive riches, are somehow playing by the same rules as the rest of us. That they are “wealth creators” providing jobs and investment for the rest of us, or that they might give up their tax havens. If that ever were the case, it isn’t now. A tiny minority has gained from massive tax cuts and legislative leniency about where they shove their money. They have siphoned off gains in salaries and profits wherever possible and enjoyed hundreds of billions flowing into their asset markets. Meanwhile, the rest of us who provide the feedstock for their revenues see our welfare states hollowed out, our wages frozen and our employers failing to invest. But none of that matters very much in Davos.

More from Davos

From Bloomberg

Filipino mogul Enrique Razon loathes rubbing shoulders with fellow billionaires in Davos. “It’s loaded with bloated self-importance,” the casino and cargo-terminal owner said in an interview today in the Swiss village, where he was wrapping up his second trip to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. “I’m here to do business, not save the world.” 

 Razon, who controls a $4.7 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is one of at least 80 billionaires in town. Most have spent their time attending panels on the state of the global economy, debating income inequality and attending parties with bankers.

Bill & Melinda are there

Gates insists the world's a better place than it used to be. For him and his 84 friends, maybe. The world’s 85 wealthiest people hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion, or half the world population, according to a new report from global anti-poverty group Oxfam.

The global economy has become so skewed in favour of the rich that economic growth in many countries today “amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest.” 

Telling the world's poorest that they are better off that they were 50 years ago, just won't cut it. As for Gates' own benevolence -- Injustice Facts Tweets, "100% of Bill Gates' donations are tax write-offs, 94% of his donations go to paying staff and corporate research, 4% goes to needy people."

See my note to Cong. Eric Cantor about his Davos junket.

Red flag flying at Davos?

Funny -- Occupiers at Camp Igloo have Davos billionaires quoting Marx. Andy Robinson, in The Nation, reports:

CEOs and private-equity fund managers—even some of the seventy Forbes billionaires attending—interrupted their search for distressed assets in the eurozone this year to attend lectures by grim-faced New York University economist and Davos regular Nouriel Roubini or Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. More than half the 1,200 investors, analysts and traders consulted in a Bloomberg poll published on the eve of the summit agreed that inequality damages economic growth.

“Marx was right; capitalism creates obstacles to its own advancement,” said Roubini. The audience nodded in agreement and then headed off for sessions on new investment opportunities in “frontier markets” like Mongolia and Azerbaijan.

Davos: We don't want your millions, mister

I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
-- 1930s union song by Jim Garland

The world's poor are not begging for charity from the rich, writes the Guardian's Robert Newman, – they're asking for justice and fairness. 

As the world's one-percenters gather for this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they can feel the presence of 99ers camped outside their doors over at Camp Igloo. As usual, the most powerful of the power philanthropists will be there, led by the "designated voice of the world's poor", Bill Gates.

Writes Newman:

Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn't have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.

 But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man's whim for the right to life.