President Trump will address the global elites at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later this month. A self-proclaimed and
system enabled self-made CEO, he’d command a personal invite anyway. He may
notice South Africa’s corporate-made billionaire (and president awaiting
election) Ramaphosa there too.
What the elite represent there has become for most the new aspiration,
setting how we live and behave each day. Those who don’t follow their doctrine,
who perhaps see a need for more equal societies with flatter hierarchies and fewer
angry, hungry and unproductive hordes beating at affluent gates, don’t belong.
About 40 years ago Margaret Thatcher famously declared “there
is no such thing as society”, only individuals in competition. Thatcher was an early
Davos employee. She helped push the new truth.
The New Truth
One year into the Trump era and world economic health has
never been better - the Dow racing through 25,000 proves that.
Forget about the job losses, the widening private citizen
debt, the dumbing down at the universities, millions on the move seeking refuge
and, particular to South Africa, the continuing high levels of poverty and
personal violence - all who are worthy have had an amazing 2017.
Prospects are even better as the full world-market benefits
of the Trump tax-breaks are still to add compound paper growth. “Message to the
population at large” wrote Michael J. Brenner on
January 4, 2018, “we must admire the top 1%. Our ‘fault’ is not belonging to
them.”[i]
Trump is merely a figurehead – under Clinton the trend would
have been the same. Even a cardboard cutout of an “illegal” “Hispanic American”
with 40 years residency and hard labour as president would make little
difference.
The pushing of weapons sales predates the Trump administration.
"Buy American" isn’t new policy but merely new packaging. With or
without the Republicans and Democrats weapons sales would still surge[ii] and the
profits would still drive the indices higher, adding to CEO pay, improving
banker bonuses and lubricating golden handshakes for those ‘caught-out’ doing
their job of maximising profits. The Nasdaq would still have punched out 7000.
The New Middle Class
At Davos they will speak about
a vast expanding and vitally important Middle Class - vital because it’s from
there that the new wave of intelligent middle level managers, producers and
advancers will come. And the Middle Class consumes, and consumption is the
bedrock of profits.
Pew Research[iii] defines middle-income
households as those making between two-thirds and twice the national median
household income, which means as income stagnates or net worth comes down so
too standards of living, but not class definition. Not mentioned is the enormous
debt burden the Middle Classes of the West have been encouraged to take on … in
order to work more! Such luxuries like overpriced homes, transport to get to
work, education to land a job and health insurance to make it each day.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese and other South Asians and
Russians have made enormous sacrifices to claw their way into the Middle Class,
but it hasn’t come because of the Davos showcased system – rather in spite of
it. And, estimates the Brookings Institution, the European and American middle
classes (i.e. of the West) are shrinking.[iv]
‘Shrinking’ is a misnomer. The analysts predict the West’s
Middle Class dropping from 50 percent of the total to just 22 percent. While
that has to be viewed as a ratio of the burgeoning new Eastern Middle Class it
begs the question, what of the poor and as a South African, what of the South
African poor? Will South Africa’s desperate 60% get even more desperate?
Likely, yes.
The Forum
The
World Economic Forum, better known as Davos, is a league of corporate giants.[v]
The 1st gathering was in 1971. The same year the Nixon administration ended
the US dollar’s convertibility
to gold, meaning, in practice, that as the USD was the world’s default currency,
all international trades had to be priced in and pass through the USD system.
Before the 70s were over, Reagan and Thatcher added emphasis by destroying
government for the people and advocating instead the CEO as the man in charge.
By its
25th anniversary the Forum had resolved that in the new vision of life nations
as viable leaders/economic entities were done, that capitalists (the moneyed
elite) hand over to managers, and that the companies they control lead society.
Privatisation was the new new. The politician
who served the Corporacy was electable.
In
this vein the rationale behind NAFTA and the various secret Trans-trade
agreements (Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP) etc.) dictates nations hand over leadership to business.
Adherence
to globalisation, free trade, floating currencies, private banks and the
absolution from liability for negligence for companies is the Davos path to
salvation. Assistance to stay on that path comes from the pivotal Central Banks
as well as business owned rating agencies (Moody’s et al) and rescue units like
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, through their structured ‘bankrupt-you’
packages.
There
is no identifiable leader, no body to take responsibility, only the all-consuming
objective of maximising profits.
The New King
The
King of Davos is a concept (writes John Ralston Saul) through which society is
controlled by the economics of the world’s Uppermost Echelon. The (professionally
trained) managers of the big companies and banks are the Knights and the
elected officials of all invited countries the powerless, kowtowing, and if
they (Ramaphosa, Gordhan et al from RSA) could only understand it, humiliated
princes in fancy dress.
As
much as the Corporacy gives the appearance of being in competition, that state
is overridden by the condition that they are inseparably bound by the duty to
make maximum profit for its shareholders, no matter the cost to humanity or the environment.
If a
company fails or heads for bankruptcy, so be it – it has failed the system,
given up its right to membership. If it is caught bending the rules, the
question whether the transgressions were in reasonable pursuit of profit is the
one to be answered - not what damage was done. Maximum profit is, as Canadian academic
Joel Bakan despairingly points out, a legal requirement of all legal business
units.[vi]
Profit, The Ultimate Cost
The
shark, often described as the ultimate machine, is what every capitalist
company aspires to become. Staff compensation, numbers and (increasingly with
AI advancement) duties and workloads are dictated by cost, cost measured against
dividends to shareholders and not to the wider society or the nation.
Likewise
participation in the community, or for example, waste disposal, are measured in
terms of the profit line - there has to be an accumulating benefit to the
business unit. If the river is polluted and people get sick, build a profitable
clinic or give out pills, pills which have to be bought expensive once they’re
understood to be needed.
Charity
begins at home. Home for the Davos man and woman is the Board Room and the
address to which the dividend cheque is to be mailed is his/her bank. No member
of Corporacy will give or change or advocate anything for free. The dismantling
of the slave trade was a business decision and so too the process of
de-colonisation of Africa.
A
just-like-you-and-me dude retired businessman Robert Monks realised late in
life that “the corporation is an externalising machine”.[vii]
It pushes on to the accepting/uncaring public every cost it can. The corporate
machine “doesn’t take into account the concerns of flesh-and-blood human people,”
or of their world, but feeds on that flesh and blood and the world they
inhabit.
Take Back The Rand
At
Davos, stories of the grand-good the corporates have done will dominate, as
will near film-star level stories of the participants’ activities/attributes. But
the more truthful truth will only come out if scrutinised for basic logic,
reason and plausibility. I guess it takes the experience of having been around
for some 70 years to recognise that the capitalism we have now is not the
capitalism of the 1950s and 60s. It was softer then, more equal, and there was
a greater chance of drawing everyone – each to his/her own level for we’re not
all equal – in and of making them participating consumers, lovers of leisure
and able to pay for it.
Many don’t
seem to see the link between climate change and environmental disasters (and
elephant deaths) because they’ve grown up – evolved with - the advent of the
Corporacy. Tolerating company errors and queues and price increases and thefts
are fine. Just don’t ask anyone to queue at a government passport, post or
municipal payment office!
Genes
are passed from one generation “enabling” the next. Memes – rumours, mass media distortions,
advertising nonsense, and so on – are the genes of the manipulated word run by
the machines of the World Economic Forum. Their domination is such that they
are passed on from one human mind to the next in a split second, every split
second.
The folk who run these machines and the ever-changing
shareholder bodies will be showing off in Switzerland at Davos. Mostly they’re
‘nice’ people. Like the Germans who directed, organised and ran the WWII death
camps they do their jobs effectively and efficiently during duty times
(otherwise no pay or bonus or capital gain/dividend) and when off duty bounce
their kids on their knees and play tennis with you and me. Our politicians are
their lackeys.
Because of our capacity to want to believe, along with our
(collective) inability to analyse the root of our disappearing lives, we’re
happy.
If those of us who live in Southern Africa want to regain a measure
of control we need to start by taking back the Rand. Will Anglo-American’s
Ramaphosa save it? No – it’s likely to be over R14 to the dollar come December.[viii] Why? Well we’re already
down the road to privitising water.
[i] He was
bashing us sheep and the NYT (https://www.theglobalist.com/united-states-tax-reform-inequality-society-media) and it fitted my line so easily.
[iii] Pew Research Center ... www.pewresearch.org
… A nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes
and trends shaping America and the world.
[iv] “Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas estimates that the
European and American middle classes will shrink from 50 percent of the total
to just 22 percent” reports https://www.reuters.com/middle-class-infographic
and see https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/5-charts-which-show-what-is-happening-to-the-middle-class-around-the-world/
… “Poor employment prospects and low-income growth in many developed economies
have laid the groundwork for the rise of populism. Did policy-makers ignore
these trends or do too little to redress them? What can be done to restore
growth in the middle class and confidence in the future?”
[viii] “Sonja Keller, senior economist at J.P Morgan said that the firm’s
base macroeconomic projections see the rand at R14.50 to the dollar –
regardless of who won the December election.” https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/217991/heres-what-the-rand-could-be-worth-at-the-end-of-2018/
