'World leaders' meeting at an economic forum have a lot on their mind – their own interests, writes VIncent Browne.
THE PRESIDENTS or prime ministers of 37 countries, along with ministers from 34 countries, plus heads of central banks, senior opposition politicians, most of the EU Commission, heads of most of the well-known international organisations, along with Barack Obama’s new economic adviser Larry Summers, several US senators, a few governors, the Duke of York, Tony Blair and Al Gore are meeting this week to discuss the state of the world.
Brian Cowen was scheduled to attend – he is on the list of attendees – but I don’t think he was able to make it. Or was he?
You might think their focus would be on how to deal with the executives in the banks and the business world and the harm this has caused; and how to rescue the world economy from their recklessness.
Or how to protect the world’s poor from the ravages of recession.
Or how to shape a new agenda for the global community, one that gives priority to the people of the world over cosseted self-interested.
If you thought this was the purpose of this extraordinary gathering you would be mistaken.
For these “world leaders” have congregated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week to deliberate on an agenda: “Shaping the Post-Crisis World” and they are doing so at the behest of the “world’s business leaders” or almost 2,000 of them.
Many of these “world business leaders” will be ferried to Davos on their private jets or helicopters, staying at hugely-expensive lavish hotels, and attending even more lavish dinners and parties.
The heads of at least 17 financial institutions are present, many recently rescued by the citizens of their respective home countries.
Many more are from accountancy firms associated with the financial recklessness that has engulfed the world.
The total cost of the occasion would probably keep a few million African children alive for a year or so.
Some of those attending will be disappointed to have missed the special breakfast arranged by American banker John Thain. He was to board his executive jet in New York last Friday to fly to Davos but he was fired the day before. He had applied for a bonus of €30 million from his new bosses at Bank of America for the success he had made of Merrill Lynch which had had to be bailed out by Bank of America having lost $5 billion. He had spent over $1 million on refitting his office and the toilet bowl alone had cost $35,000.
Another absentee this year is Indian businessman Ramalinga Raju, who is chairman of India’s fourth largest information technology company Satyam Computers. He is in jail having admitted to falsifying his company accounts to the extent of $1 billion.
Mr Raju would probably have been feted at Davos this year because last September he won the Golden Peacock Global Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance for 2008 at a ceremony in London.
By the way, Mr Raju has stated in his defence that at all times he had the full backing of the powers that be in India. Incidentally, and without any insinuation that these are among the “powers that be” to which Mr Raju was referring, India has three senior ministers attending the forum and the deputy chairman of the planning commission.
A few thousand business leaders and politicians on a skite might be of little consequence if all they did was have a few drinks and try out on the ski slopes.
But it isn’t just a skite for here are the world’s agenda-setters, meeting together in the environs of the richest club in the world, reshaping the world’s agenda to correspond with their interests, aided and abetted by the representatives of the world’s peoples.
They won’t be talking much about increasing taxation, having the wealthy pay for the crisis – those that made such staggering wealth in the recklessness that caused the crisis.
Their focus will be on public expenditure cuts, which is a cover for making everyone else pay for the crisis: public servants, people who depend on social welfare, on a public health service and on publicly-funded housing.
They will talk of the damage tax increases would cause economies, the damage to entrepreneurship and incentives, and they will disguise their self-interest by reference to the impact tax increases would have on job creation, as though job creation was their goal in life.
These are clever, able people, and their greatest capacity is to convince us that the indulgence of their self-interest is actually in the interests of all.
And so it is here as in Davos.
No talk now about having the beneficiaries of the boom pay for the collapse of the boom, and pay for it through the only instrument that society has: the instrument of taxation.
No talk about a higher rate of tax on the higher earners – say a 66 per cent tax on all incomes over €150,000. Economic suicide, we are told.
No care about the social suicide that cuts in the incomes of low-paid public servants or cuts in health, education and housing bring about.
Our leaders have been to Davos often enough to know the ropes by now.