Admittedly, a little grandiose. I wasn't invited and there's no auditing allowed. Security in Davos (pronounced Dah-VOHS, if you care to get it right) is tighter than a drum. That's because a lot of troublemakers think the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is just an excuse for a lot of celebrities to convene and be rich together. To network with other greedheads so they can all get richer. Personally, I would like to see the WEF merge with the WWF so Vlad Putin and George Soros could meet in a fight-to-the-death cage match.
If you want to protest, the Swiss will let you hold up placards in, say, Zurich or Basel, but you're not getting anywhere near Davos, the highest city and biggest ski area in Europe. The WEF is a non-profit organization dedicated to "global issues" like the environment and world health. Hard to get more global than the environment, I suppose. Arianna Huffington is going and wrote an excited blog on the eponymous HuffPost about all the forums she'll be attending, with names like "Empowering the Netroots for Change in a Changing World." I made that up, but it doesn't make any difference. The real titles are equally meaningful. The WEF has been holding Davos since 1971. That corresponds pretty neatly with the expansion of the biggest wealth disparity between rich and poor in modern history. Also, the accelerating takeoff of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the death of 95% of all large predator fish in the oceans, the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, the pandemic of AIDS and the looming disaster of bird flu. Just the jets flying into Switzerland for this shindig alone probably moved us five years closer to the greenhouse tipping point. Some deep ecologists (such as those quoted in James Speth's "The Bridge at the Edge of the World") rate the odds of Earth being habitable for humans in 2100 at no more than 50/50. But if you're a glass-half-full person, you might say that without Davos maybe it would be 50/50 next week.
I wrote Arianna in the comments section and asked her the question the Beatles once asked:
How does it feel to be
One of the beau-ti-ful
Peo-ple!!?
The HuffPost wouldn't accept it. Did I hit a nerve? Globalization, of course, has been a disaster for everyone except for people who go to things like Davos. It has allowed huge multinational corporations to ride roughshod over local law and custom so that poorly-paid workers (dark melanin) can make stuff and sell it to people who used to make it themselves (less melanin), thus bringing about a new "global" standard of living for both light & dark, that is, dirt poor. Much as the much-maligned Karl Marx predicted; hey, just because he was an evil Commie doesn't mean he wasn't right. But as Freud said about Marxism, Karl was right about the greedy self-centeredness of humans which leads to exploitation, but his solution won't work because of the greedy self-centeredness of humans.
I'm dreaming of a White Dah-VOHS!
Just like the ones I'll never know,
Where the ass-holes gather
To drink and blather
And watch...fat cats in the snow...
The last line is Bono's summary take on Davos. We'll breathlessly await dispatches from the slopes. Thank God these beautiful people are hard at work, looking out for you and me.
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