Davos’s Supreme Big-Wigs (e.g. NYPL’s Stephen Schwarzman), Only In It For Themselves, Are Graduating To New Concept: “The Useless Class”– And They Don’t Mean Themselves!

The lower right corner is the Davos talk about "the useless class"

Davos is in the news.  We are increasingly hesitant and careful about recommending the increasingly often dangerously propagandistic (embedding disguised corporate mainstream narratives) reporting of Democracy Now, but we do recommend dropping in on today’s report on Davos-

“Davos Man”: How Billionaires Devour the World & Fuel Global Inequality, Prolonging the Pandemic, January 21, 2022.  It’s an interview with New York Times global correspondent Peter Goodman, author of the new book “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.”

The report features one of our favorite, regularly recurring bad guys, NYPL Trustee Stephen Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group.

Here on Schwarzman:

    •    Steve Schwarzman, who’s the world’s largest private equity magnate, worth about $35 billion, made a fortune on the foreclosure crisis in the U.S., and then around the world. He’s now vacuuming up homes again at distressed prices.

Not only was Schwarzman perfectly positioned in taking advantage of the 2008 financial crisis, he presciently invested to take advantage of the Covid crisis.

    •    Schwarzman invested heavily in healthcare in the run-up to the pandemic. He owns a company called TeamHealth, which is a huge staffing company that puts people in emergency rooms, where there’s just an epidemic of surprise billing — patients wheeled in, not knowing the terms of their insurance policies, discovering later that they’ve been treated by an out-of-network provider, with huge bills, collection agents hassling them. And Schwarzman has taken the opportunity of the pandemic to buy more healthcare assets.

Basically the discussion lambastes the wealthy that show up at Davos proclaiming their beneficent intentions while being out for their own interests at everyone else’s expense:

    •    it’s well and good that in Davos they’re talking about [‘important good issues ’ - “climate change,” “gender imbalance,” “systematic racism, “voting rights”] about which they not only do very little — . .  they put out some great reports — but then they go home, these participants, and they commence the battle to protect their privileges, to prevent actual redistribution of wealth.

    •    The forum convenes under the mantra “committed to improving the state of the world,” which is a handy phrase that connotes change. These are the ultimate beneficiaries of the status quo.

    •    these are the people who have rigged our system so that most of the wealth flows in their direction, at the direct expense everyone else.

“Stakeholder capitalism”?

    •    It’s all about us depending upon the goodness, the innate goodness, of . . . CEOs to run their companies so that everybody wins. And central to that is this idea, that is pervasive at Davos, that all solutions to problems can be found if people just earnestly debate them and find win-win solutions. They love win-win solutions, because then that obviates sacrifice. It’s all an elaborate prophylactic against the actual exercise of democracy toward the redistribution of wealth so that we can tax wealthy people and finance the things that we actually want . . .

Does that sound bleak enough?  It’s been said before by people like Anand Giridharadas with his “Winners Take All” book that pulls its punches and now Anand Giridharadas taking a big MSNBC salary is getting tamer by the minute, obfuscating his message. Giridharadas also came out of the New York Times which backed and heralded his message when his “Winners” book came out.

Here are bleaker and even more forthright concerns coming out of coverage of Davos.

Once upon a time, there was the lower class, the underclasses, and the poor.  Once upon a time, the thinking was that the wealthy wanted as many poor as possible to ensure a big pool of labor willing to work for low wages.  Now, at Davos they are beginning to trade in a new coinage implying things opposite to that notion: The “useless class.”  The “useless class” can be thought of as all of those who are now disposable and not needed because robots and the new technology that will take care of the wealthy without Their having to worry about who will labor to do it.

Watch the Unlimited Hangout and the very unsettling Davos speech it covers here:

Dump Davos #1: Data Colonialism & Hackable Humans (Bad news: this is from a year ago so time's a-wasting to catch up with these guys).

In this video series investigating the people and agendas of the World Economic Forum, Whitney Webb and Johnny Vedmore analyze a recent speech given at Davos by Israeli "futurist" historian Yuval Noah Harari that exposes the WEF's agenda for the "useless class", the rise of exploited data colonies and the creation of an internal and external surveillance state.

SEE ALSO: Upward Transfer of Wealth Alert! Upward Transfer of Power Alert! Look What Just Doubled! Enough To Make Everyone Sick! Tuesday, January 18, 2022