The WEF, where it’s all about money and power ...
(Photo infosperber)
by Christian Müller*
(11 June 2022) Sic transit gloria mundi: This is how the splendour of the world degenerates! The WEF, once a hopeful international platform where high-ranking politicians and influential business managers could meet and talk on neutral Swiss soil. The WEF, today a neo-liberal economic propaganda event that strives for globalisation under Western leadership, not least at Swiss expenses, and simply excluding disobedient countries. A geopolitical tragedy.
Klaus Schwab, son of a Swiss mother and a German father, was born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938 and trained as a mechanical engineer and Dr sc. nat. at the ETH Zurich until 1965. As Wikipedia1 describes it, his family was always interested in simplifying economic cooperation beyond national borders. This can certainly be described as idealism, if one believes that globalisation does not only serve the rich of this world, but also the poor.
The “European Management Forum” founded by Klaus Schwab in 1971, as Wikipedia reports elsewhere”,2 changed its name to the ‘World Economic Forum’ in 1987 and subsequently sought to broaden its vision and develop into a platform for resolving international conflicts. Leaders use Davos as a neutral platform to settle their differences. For example, the ‘Davos Declaration’, which prevented Greece and Turkey from starting a war at the last minute, was signed by these two countries in 1988. At the 1992 Annual Meeting, South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, Nelson Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi made their first joint appearance outside Africa. At the 1994 Annual Meeting, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed a draft treaty on Gaza and Jericho. In 2008, Bill Gates gave a keynote lecture on Creative Capitalism – the form of capitalism that both generates profits and eliminates the world’s inequalities by using market forces to better address the needs of the poor.” (end quote Wikipedia)
In 1989, only two years after the formal founding of the WEF – but seasonally before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November – at the time, I had the opportunity, as a media manager of the Ringier media house, to meet Klaus Schwab in person at his office in Cologny/Geneva. It was about the idea of publishing a WEF magazine. The conversation was open and interesting, even if it remained without any concrete results.
Since then, however, the WEF has most of all developed into a “money machine”, as the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” vividly reported:3
“The turnover is now around 200 million euros. The Forum finances itself primarily through the contributions of member companies and sponsors. There are 120 strategic partners, including Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Post, Audi, Henkel, Burda, Allianz. The waiting list is long. Two years ago, the minimum annual contribution was raised by a fifth to 600,000 francs (613,000 USD). [...] The Forum’s little unassuming permanent motto is: ‘Improving the state of the world’. This seems to be a good way of living. At the same time, it is run like a family business. Founder Klaus Schwab draws a salary of around one million Swiss francs a year. He, with contacts all over the world, and his wife Hilde have the reins firmly in their hands.”
As Kurt Marti rightly criticised on “Infosperber.ch”4 in February 2021, Switzerland’s costs for police and military protection of the WEF in Davos also rose to over 40 million Swiss francs per event. Political criticism of the WEF as the annual meeting of the global “elites” also increased significantly, especially from the left. Who can afford 50,000 Swiss francs just for a guest admission at the WEF? And that’s without all the follow-up costs for accommodation and meals and for the hoped-for contacts?
... a nail in the coffin for the WEF
But now, Klaus Schwab himself has given the WEF its first nail in the coffin. Whereas up to now he could boast about the WEF as a “platform for the resolving of international conflicts” – see above – with his decision to exclude Russia from participation in the WEF 2022 he has publicly admitted what it is all about today: the money of the (Western) rich and the power of the (Western) great powers.
And how does “official” Switzerland react to all that? No less than six of the seven members of the Swiss Federal Council,5 including Simonetta Sommaruga and Alain Berset from the SP, which has been critical of the WEF up to now, are rushing to Davos to pay their respects to the international money and power celebrities. Defence Minister Viola Amherd of the Centre Party took the bun: today, on 24 May 2022, she met NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the WEF in Davos and told him that Switzerland wanted to move closer to NATO.6
No more needs to be said. It is to be hoped that in future many countries of this world will avoid the WEF after it has degenerated from a mediator in international conflicts to an open supporter of the worldwide hegemonic claims of the USA and the NATO led by it.
Sic transit gloria mundi. This is how the splendour of the world degenerates. Also at the WEF in Davos.
| * Christian Müller, born in 1944, studied general history and constitutional law at the University of Zurich and received his doctorate with a dissertation on a social-historical topic of the period 1890 to 1914. However, he did not subsequently choose an academic career, but rather that of a journalist and editor at all levels of the professional hierarchy up to and including the position of editor-in-chief of a (then) major Swiss daily newspaper. As a journalist, he travelled to more than 50 countries – from New Zealand in the southeast to Alaska in the northwest – each with a special focus on the cultural characteristics of the countries visited and on their social conditions. In 1989, Christian Müller switched from editorial work to media management, was CEO of the largest media company in Prague for several years and then set up his own business as a media consultant. Since 2009, he has been working exclusively as an independent journalist again, with a special focus on West-East tensions and other geopolitical issues. He is the initiator of the website Globalbridge. |
Source: https://globalbridge.ch/das-wef-wo-es-vor-allem-um-geld-geht/, 24 May 2022
Reprinted with kind permission of the author.
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
1 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab
2 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltwirtschaftsforum
4 https://www.infosperber.ch/wirtschaft/subventionen-wef-entscheidet-bund-zahlt/
5 https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-88925.html