Posted on 01/24/2022 6:52:26 PM PST by yesthatjallen
Until Omicron forced a late change of plans, the World Economic Forum was expected to hold its annual meeting in person in Davos, Switzerland this coming week.
That was to be the context for the release of Davos Man by Peter S. Goodman, a New York Times reporter, on Tuesday.
The book is a pointed critique of the Forum and US CEOs—including Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink, and Stephen Schwarzman—who are part of the class of globe-trotting billionaires which political scientist Samuel Huntington dubbed Davos Men.
It’s an impressively detailed recounting of the reordering of conventions of American capitalism by its uncontested contemporary winners—financiers and corporate chieftains—over the past four decades.
The rapid shifting of money and power from workers to the executive class since the early 1980s has been well documented—but Goodman additionally shows how, despite their “stakeholder capitalism” rhetoric, profit-seeking CEOs stripped privatized healthcare systems of resources that would have allowed the US and other countries to better weather the pandemic, and profited directly from the global crisis. He also connects their “relentless plunder” directly to the rise of populist, nativist politicians including Donald Trump, as voters are manipulated to think immigrants or the media are to blame for their loss of standing rather than private equity firms and multinationals who worsened jobs or shifted them overseas.
Goodman repeatedly blames what he calls “the Cosmic Lie,” or as he puts it “the alluring yet demonstrably bogus idea that cutting taxes and deregulating markets will not only produce extra riches for the most affluent, but trickle the benefits down to the lucky masses—something that has, in real life, happened zero times.” (p. 9)
His diagnosis, ultimately, is that billionaires have successfully used their wealth and related political influence to dramatically reduce taxation and evade the taxes in place, thereby hobbling government’s financial ability to support its citizens. Davos Man then deploys philanthropic dollars—representing a minuscule fraction of the taxes he has sidestepped—to “cast himself as a concerned global citizen, while pervading the idea that his continued victories are a requirement for society to achieve any wins at all.” (p. 8)
In that vein, Goodman memorably quotes Salesforce founder Marc Benioff as saying, “In the pandemic, it was CEOs in many, many cases all over the world who were the heroes.”
Goodman follows in the footsteps of other critics of Davos and Davos Man over the years, including Lewis Lapham, the longtime Harper’s editor whose small 1998 book The Agony of Mammon incisively lampooned the Forum gathering. Anand Giridharadas’s 2018 Winners Take All importantly similarly argued that the global elite’s talk about changing the world in places like Davos serves to preserve the status quo that benefits them.
While polemical, Davos Man is a very readable, extensively reported explanation of the various junctures over the past 40 years that have led us to this point of extreme wealth and inequality, and systemic and democratic frailty. Goodman has a dry humor, as when recounting the absurdities of Davos, including the pervasive hierarchy and attendees’ persistent feeling that they’re always missing out on something more interesting somewhere else. He also relatively successfully demonstrates the impact of Davos Man’s excesses on individual people, such as ER doctor Ming Lin and Amazon warehouse worker Christian Smalls, both fired after whistleblowing about a lack of pandemic protections.
One blind spot is that by focusing on the very wealthiest, Goodman doesn’t acknowledge other contributors to the economic inequality he decries. Those include the top 10% to 20% in terms of income, the upper middle class who Richard Reeves has labeled “dream hoarders” for their success at passing their status to children to the detriment of others’ economic mobility.
Near the end of the book, Goodman discusses potential remedies for the problems he chronicles, arguing at length in favor of universal basic income.
“We can run global capitalism in a way that preserves its capacity for innovation and prosperity without handing all the rewards to Davos Man,” he writes. “What capitalism lacks is an inherent mechanism that justly distributes gains. That is the responsibility of government, operating under a democratic mandate.” (p. 404) Goodman also makes the case for higher worker wages, government job guarantees, tougher antitrust enforcement, and a wealth tax.
SNIP
"The annual “globalization ball” in Davos is upon us once again - a virtual event for the second year running. A new book ‘Davos Man’ reveals how its founder Klaus Schwab benefits from this gathering of the global elite."
“You Will Own Nothing & Be Happy” - Davos 2022 The Great Reset (12 min video)
you will own nothing and be happy....OR ELSE!
Benioff is quite possibly the worst of the lot.
Oh yeah...that'll work.
Sounds like a globist,huh?
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