This week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in the luxury resort of Davos, Switzerland, has been slammed by anti-poverty group the World Development Movement today as “a strategy meeting for the 1%, whose decisions fuel inequality and poverty.”
The group added, “At a time when the poorest are being forced to suffer for the crimes of the very richest, it is incredible that the global financial and economic elite can meet in luxury and pretend they will solve the world’s problems.”
Nick Dearden, director of the World Development Movement, said today:
The Davos summit is the away day of capitalism, the strategic planning workshop of the ‘1%’. The very same financial and corporate giants that created the economic crisis will be in Davos, steering the global economy down a road that leads to an even more unequal world.
The focus of this summit is not on inequality or crisis, but on new opportunities for capital in new markets around the world. Although ordinary people are still reeling from the impact of a crisis they did not create, the global elite has walked away almost scar free. They are busy marking out new investment potential, pushing a model, for instance in many African countries, which is characterised by rapid growth and increasing poverty at the same time. This is how the Davos elites plan their ‘Reshaping of the World’ this week.
Robert Greenhill, the managing director of World Economic Forum, said on Sunday that mental and physical health were a priority of this year’s summit. He seems unaware of the irony of his comment, which comes amidst spiralling mental health problems across Europe as a result of economic policies being implemented by this elite, and indeed as health itself is increasingly seen as a commodity to profit from.
At a time when the poorest are being forced to suffer for the crimes of the very richest, it is incredible that the global financial and economic elite can meet in luxury and pretend they will solve the world’s problems.
(Via WDM)
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