"Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
News from the World Economic Forum this week, courtesy of Reuters. "There is a big push from this generation to go beyond profit." The Occupy WEF manifesto? Hardly. It's the opinion of Liesel Pritzker Simmons, the fantastically wealthy hotel heiress, one of the 0.01 percenters attending the annual gathering of global gliterati in the Swiss Alps.
Liesel continues: "It's not just that it is the flavor of the month or that it's cool. After experiencing the recent crisis at a relatively young age, I don't have confidence in traditional capital markets."
Profit is so passé. And who needs confidence in capital markets, traditional or otherwise, when you inherit billions at a "relatively young age"?
You will search the streets of Davos in vain to find anyone losing confidence in government's ability to do just about anything. Also conspicuously absent: any mention of the role government affordable housing enthusiasms played in the real estate bust and continuing Great Recession.
As for other of life's vicissitudes, well, we certainly know who to blame.
Leftist and environmental campaigners named British bank Barclays (BARC.L) and Brazilian mining company Vale (VALE5.SA) as the winners of an annual award in Davos on Friday for the worst case of corporate misbehavior.
"It is not fair to paint all corporations with exactly the same brush," said Kumi Naidoo, head of Greenpeace International.
"But on balance, at best corporations are taking baby steps in the right direction. At worst, they are pulling back and preventing movement on human rights and particularly on environment and climate change."
The campaigners accused Barclays of pushing up global food prices by speculating on commodity markets. They said Vale was responsible for human rights abuses, inhumane working conditions and environmental damage.
Barclays Capital denied it was responsible for rising food prices: "A considerable number of studies have demonstrated that financial flows have little or no impact on commodities prices. The factors influencing food prices are complex and multiple."
Gee, any chance green environmental policy may join evil speculation as just one of those "complex and multiple" factors behind food riots in the developing world? After all, 25 percent of US corn production is, by government fiat, being fed to hungry automobiles rather than people or livestock, and while you can burn corn you most certainly cannot eat oil. Even the United Nations has noticed. But in Davos it's all greedy speculators all the time.
Check out this scathing attack on the Man from an elderly protester in Davos: " 'We are in an era of profound change that urgently requires new ways of thinking instead of more business-as-usual,' the 73-year-old said, adding that 'capitalism in its current form, has no place in the world around us.' " Actually, Klaus Schwab is, technically speaking, not a protestor but the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
Stand back with me for a moment to gaze upon the crystalline absurdity of igloo-dwelling leftists and environmentalists protesting the consequences of unchecked leftism and environmentalism while blaming capitalism as practiced by rich one-percenters, themselves mainly hotel-dwelling leftists and environmentalists who each day declare their solidarity with the protesters and their anti-capitalist aims.
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May '11
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
"New ways of thinking". This is the mating call of those who wish to be oppressed. What all public policy evil has in common is its germination in "new ways of thinking". Failed ideas massacre those who oppose them as they fail, which is why "new ways of thinking" never become old ways of thinking after time. The "New Schools" never graduate to Old School, which remains the same.
Some Kipling:
Apr '11
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Zerohedge had a great graphic showing how the concerns of the Davos elite have changed over the past six years.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-davos-shocked-hear-poor-people-exist
God save us from our betters...
Oct '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Voicing support for the Global Green Marxist Agenda seems to be a way for corporations to buy an indulgence from the Church of the Left, for their sin of participating in capitalism.
Jun '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
"All we people at the top of the ladder think ladder-climbing is so passé."
Mar '11
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Oh for the love of Mike.
George Savage
You know who else speculates on commodity markets? Farmers - the folks producing the commodities. Bakeries and other businesses - the folks that make the stuff you buy. The grain doesn't just get dumped in one end of Ye Olde Magic Bakery with loaves of bread popping out the other side. Creating a market where the producers can sell, and the consumers can buy is pretty complicated. At every step, someone is assuming some risk. The farmer might not get back what it cost him to raise the crop. The baker might not get back what it cost to make the bread. These people are willing to take a little less now (the farmer) or pay a litlle more later (the baker) to avoid some of that risk. Complaining about the middlemen doesn't make the problem go away; without them, you would have to go down to the farm to get your own grain, grind it (or get it ground -- whoops, another middleman) and bake your own damn bread.
Mar '11
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Do these people realize that the quotes on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange aren't being read over rural area radio stations because farmers have this thing for random numbers?
Feb '11
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Well, George, when the economy is organized around profit, there is always a danger that people who were not born within the Charmed Circle will be able to gain wealth and social influence. Can't have that, obviously. With a nonprofit society, we can ensure that those with influence will have money and those with money will have influence and so on for generations.
The Davos attitude toward profits is much like the traditional British aristocratic attitude toward those who were "in trade."
Jun '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
david foster: Well, George, when the economy is organized around profit, there is always a danger that people who were not born within the Charmed Circle will be able to gain wealth and social influence. Can't have that, obviously. With a nonprofit society, we can ensure that those with influence will have money and those with money will have influence and so on for generations.
The Davos attitude toward profits is much like the traditional British aristocratic attitude toward those who were "in trade." · 2 minutes ago
And income tax is the implemented institutionalization of the disdain/fear of those "in trade" and has as its purpose the active prevention of their actually accumulating some some wealth and influence of their own. "Revenue" is a secondary consideration at best.
Nov '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
In Our Enemy, The State, Albert Jay Nock said his ideas of a government that protected negative rights and granted no positive rights nor tried to manage economies would always appeal to an "intellectual remnant".
Ricochet... Realm of the Remnant. And thank God for it, in the face of all this nonsense.
Oct '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
This semester I'm taking a class on Development Economics. I have a feeling it isn't going to be the more technical class I had expected. Yesterday we were talking about looking at Gross National Happiness rather than GNP or GDP as a measure of economic development. The professor was pointing out that it was a bad thing to see income disparity in a country. I tried asking him what the problem was but it seemed like he assumed it was self-evident. That sets off red flags for me.
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Bereket, I commend Mrs. Thatcher's memorable formulation as the ideal response to your professor's concerns about income disparity per se.
Aug '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Little Miss Pritzker in 95.
Inherited money is nice, and Eloise here also sued the family and gained another 500mill. So she really does speak truth to power, as long as her attorneys are present.
The disingenuous nature of these G5 Liberals doesn't fool me for a second. Like giving the maid a couple hundred bucks at Christmas, they simply want people to do their bidding and cleanup after them. WIthout the Pritzker money in Chicago, Obama might not be in the White House. These folks can find no problems with indulging their liberal fantasies, as long as the money made in an illiberal world doesn't run out.
Their milieu requires a form of radical chic that surfaces every so often, usually as the orchestration behind lost political causes.
Soviet sympathy swelled at the times when the Soviets needed. The civil rights movement was accompanied by Leonard Bernstein and the Black Panthers, the collapse of the Democrat Party and the EU at the same time is surprisingly (not) evoking them out of the joinery again. It's like clockwork.
They perceive big cracks in their platforms. Climate change shaky, entitlements threatened, basic government protection rackets have doubtful futures.
Edited on Jan 28 at 10:50amRe: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Fantastic line. And a great summation of the rather calibrated limousine-Marxist approach to sticking it to the Man.
Nov '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
I would like to quote it all but it would use up my entire word limit, so let me just say: Nice work, Flownover.
It sounds like you're in for a long semster, Bereket. Hang in there.
May '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
I understand that every society has, and probably needs, elites. But couldn't we fire the ones we have and get some new ones? These people are foolish, anti-intellectual, and completely untethered from Western values or even any desire to see the West survive. Who made them our elites? Is there any mechanism by which we could replace them, or at least render them irrelevant?
I wouldn't worry about a bunch of rich morons navel-gazing in a fancy spa town, but Davos acts as an incubator for all the toxic memes that infect our elites. Davos is Patient Zero in the epidemic of Western decline.
Oct '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Thanks George and mfgcbot. I think I'm realizing that in the international club fads have quite an influence on people and how they think about economic issues.
Jan '11
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Is the Add/Drop period over yet? Get thee to a registrar!
May '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
Does Liesel Pritzker Simmons happen to live in Europe, perhaps in one of hte Benelux countries or something like that? Or perhaps she spends a lot of time there, drinking deep at the well of EU-fueled socialism/collectivism/utopian ism? She sounds much like one of those people Lenin called a "useful fool..."
Oct '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
KC Mulville
Is the Add/Drop period over yet? Get thee to a registrar! · 11 hours ago
Unfortunately I need the class and there aren't a whole lot these days that are available due to budget constraints (i.e., insanity). This is the CSU system we're talking about. I have only two more semesters to go before graduating. I like to think of it as a sparring session to sharpen my views.
Aug '10
Re: "Beyond Profit" at the World Economic Forum
I wonder. Does the alinksyite OWS crowd know something profound here?
The top 0.01% isn't conservative, and it isn't particularly full of hard-hearted capitalists.
As such, the OWS crowd knows that if it can pluck at the heartstrings of a few 0.01%ers, it can count on its philosophy of wealth redistribution getting a hearing at the ritzy meetings of top global opinion-makers.
The OWS crowd doesn't target middle-class (or working-class) institutions, because it knows its message would fall on deaf ears.
In any city where OWS occupied an area used by "ordinary people", the OWS dropped in popularity and its message was diluted.
I predict we'll see more stuff like Occupy Davos.
Expect to see Occupy Bilderberg and Occupy Bohemian Grove in the near future.