World Economic Forum, 'missionaries for freer trade’

Prior to World War Two, the Swiss municipality of Davos was known for its sanatoriums. Thomas Mann wrote of the “narrowness of this charmed circle of isolation” produced by the seclusion of the mountain infirmary.

“It is a sort of substitute existence”, he observed, “and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a … person from actual and active life. Everything there, including the conception of time, is thought of on a luxurious scale.”

The sanatoriums disappeared in the 1950s; the buildings were refurbished and fitted out as luxury hotels. Those now attracted to the place might have been physically fit, but many harboured the unhealthiest of agendas.

Klaus Schwab – then professor of Business Policy at the University of Geneva, today the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum – organised a gathering of business people in Davos in 1971. The meeting was concerned to make the European ruling class even more filthy rich than it already was.

Later that year, the European Management Forum was born. A system of membership, open to “the 1,000 leading companies of the world”, was soon adopted.

As the years rolled on, forum participants and members became increasingly intoxicated by power as much as by the copious amounts of schnapps on offer at the resort.

Narrow schemes for economic advancement spawned farcical pronouncements about “world peace” and “health for all” – as though those who profited from the exploitation and enslavement of the better half of humanity could offer any positive strategy on those fronts.

The institution was renamed the World Economic Forum in 1987. The scholar David Rothkopf, asked in 2010 by the Washington Post to explain the point of the WEF meeting, wrote, “[I]f you think Davos is about anything other than status-seeking-behaviour, then you have read too many of the press releases of the overly-earnest Swiss gnomes who put the meeting together.”

Every year the meeting is sponsored by some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world. The most free-spending are called “Strategic Partners”.

The WEF website explains that Strategic Partners “comprises a select group of 100 leading global companies … [that work] closely with the Forum to set the intellectual agenda of Forum meetings, driving the insight agenda of its publications and steering the impact of its initiatives”.

Conference organisers add token debates – such as one this year on the question, “As income inequality rises, is money politics undermining democracy?” But since the conference is strictly “invitation only”, you can be sure that the level of discussion was not particularly gripping.

Today it’s not just CEOs and country leaders, but a vast apparatus of self-serving NGOs, academics and, occasionally, celebrities seduced by naked power who attend the event.

Still, an Economist analysis of the 2,622 invitees to this year’s meeting found that more than 60 percent were business associates; the stock valuation of the companies represented amounted to $12 trillion. The future was of great concern to them: “Bosses ... are downright depressed about how unsuited Western workers are for the era ahead.”

Davos remains, as Mann wrote, narrow in view, isolated in location and full of people weaned entirely “from actual and active life”.

Dogma at Davos

Tony Abbott’s 23 January address to the annual meeting of the WEF was blatant, jaw-dropping propaganda.

Yet the PM’s message – that free market capitalism and large corporate profits are the panacea for all of society’s ills – found no detractors. He was, after all, in sympathetic company. That possibly gave him all the more confidence to go for broke.

He started with the brazen assertion that the collapse of the North Atlantic financial sector five years ago, one of the greatest market failures in the history of global capitalism, “was not a crisis of markets”.

Politicians as much as economists often work from the axiom that if you repeat nonsense often enough it will become established truth. So he added, “Markets are the proven answer”, “Freer trade and smaller government will strengthen prosperity”, “Real progress is always built on clear [market] fundamentals” and “Every time one person freely trades with another, wealth increases.”

Never mind that the advanced economies are still struggling with the fallout from the collapse – an episode that led even former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to admit that there was a “flaw” in his free market ideology.

For Tony Abbott, however, “big government” is the problem. The only solution to global stagnation and unemployment is more of what in reality helped trigger the crisis: fewer corporate regulations. And freer trade, of course.

The market fundamentalism Abbott defended not only shaped the acute crisis in financial markets, but over decades has led to growing global inequality. Two recent studies have highlighted the obscene levels it has now reached.

In October, Credit Suisse released its annual Global Wealth Report, which estimates that the richest 0.7 percent of the world’s population own 41 percent of the total wealth, while the bottom 70 percent claim a meagre 3 percent.

In January, Oxfam also published a briefing paper, “Working for the few”, which estimates that the richest 85 people own more than the combined wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.

This inequality has been increasing at the same time that free market ideology has become a reference guide to political decision making around the world. Abbott’s agenda, however, is for more of the same: lower corporate taxes, less government spending, more freedom for the rich to make more money.

Abbott avoided the real questions: why, when the global rich added $524 billion to their collective net worth in 2013, do 80 percent of humanity live on less than US$10 per day? Why, when the productive capacity of civilisation is at a level previously undreamed of, is half of the world living in poverty?

Why, when enough food is produced to feed everyone, are almost 1 billion people chronically undernourished? Why, in his own country, are banks and mining companies recording record multi-billion dollar profits, yet more than 100,000 are homeless?

The answer is simple. The system that Tony Abbott and those of his ilk hobnobbing at Davos claim as an unparalleled success is a dismal failure for the vast majority of the planet.