Looks Like The Corporate Elite Are Getting A Little Nervous. Maybe They’re Starting To Notice All Those Riots?
I think it’s starting to sink in those thick skulls that a lot of people are very, very angry with the corporate elite : Left-wing activists claimed responsibility for a minor explosion on Thursday at a hotel in Davos, close to where top executives and world leaders were meeting, but nobody was hurt. Devin Wenig, CEO of Thomson Reuters’ Markets division, was in a breakfast meeting of senior executives at the hotel when the explosion happened. “A huge boom went off. The whole ceiling lifted. Everyone was convinced it was a bomb,” he said. “It took a half hour to reassemble the meeting.” Participants were later told that a boiler had exploded, he added. The Forum’s main programme was not disrupted. A group calling itself Revolutionary Perspective said in a statement on an activist website it had targeted the luxury Posthotel with a firebomb and said Swiss ministers and representatives of top bank UBS were staying there. “Our fight against the dictatorship of capital is focused on the social alternative to capitalism: communism,” the group said in the statement . Someone noted yesterday that the makeup of the Egyptian demonstrators had changed — that the middle class had broken through the “fear barrier” and had now taken to the streets. Think about that, because all over the world, the fear barriers are starting to fall and this is a huge threat to the global establishment, the very people who flock to Davos each year for the World Economic Forum: Poverty and unemployment reared their heads at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, with speakers urging the elite audience to bridge a growing gap between booming multinationals and the jobless poor. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who also chairs the Socialist International group of center-left parties, said the global crisis had led to an “unsustainable” race to the bottom in labor standards and social protection in developed nations. “Politically, I believe we are at a turning point where… there are signs in Europe of more nationalism, more racism, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitism, fundamentalisms of all types,” he said. “We need to look to a different model.” Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of French advertising giant Publicis, said there was “a huge suspicion about CEOs, bankers, corporations.” “People do not understand that these large corporations are doing extremely well, while their lives have not improved and without the support of the people, there is no way we will be able to grow,” he told a panel discussion. “We have been led by greed. We have been led by only the bottom line, the profit and we have sacrificed the workers in order to please the stockholders.” Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said tackling income inequalities was essential to future growth and needed to be part of the core of doing business in the 21st century .
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on January 28, 2011. Filed under