From FT:
While much of the world has been transfixed by the Occupy Wall Street movement, a new and potent offshoot has been readying itself for a launch this month. It’s all very well camping in a park or outside a cathedral but this new group is taking its demands to the very heart of the global capitalist system – the World Economic Forum in Davos.
While the main movements have allied the interests of the poor with the middle classes, we are looking to restore the middle-class alignment with the rich. The Occupy protesters fret over the growing gap between rich and poor, we are worried about getting on the right side of that divide. The poor may always be with us but that doesn’t actually mean that we always want to be with them. We don’t want to be the 99 per cent. We are looking for something closer to a 95:5 split.
So now we are striking back. The Occupy Davos movement (motto: “We are the 5 per cent”) will force the world’s elite to hear our cries. We are going to reclaim the slopes. We want to reduce the gap between the super-rich and the nicely off. Some of our supporters are clinging on to that 1 per cent tag by their fingernails; others fear they may never get there; still others are safely inside but nowhere near a WEF invite. Once we didn’t worry because we knew our Davos day would come. For years we watched our leaders wasting cash on lavish parties in the Steigenberger because one day we too would get to sip a few cocktails on the shareholders.
But the new era of austerity has left us as part of that squeezed middle tier whose leaders can no longer be trusted to secure our future. As they persist with the same failed policies we can no longer be sure we will ever sit in plenary with Sharon Stone or be patted down by a Swiss security guard. Once we believed our leaders were smarter than us and had the answers to the world’s problems but now we know they are just as likely to cock things up, we don’t see why they should get to hog the networking opportunities.
For the first time in a generation, middle managers are beginning to wonder if they will ever get to Davos. Worse still, we fear our children may never get there either. We may be reconciled to not making it but we took it for granted that our children would one day get to hang out in the piano bar at the Belvedere hotel. We’ve borrowed heavily for their education to get them that hope of making it to the Google party. But now they are a generation betrayed.
http://?www.countercurrents.org/?salmony200112.htm
Humankind is presented with an incredible and unprecedented situation. We are spectacularly successful at doing something potentially ruinous of all we claim to be protecting and preserving by ever increasing natural resources exploitation and continually increasing food production. We hold fast to a wicked delusion that, if we don’t do these things, a catastrophe will follow. This upside down, delusional thinking is leading us to precipitate a disaster of some unimaginable sort because the continuous exploitation of limited resources, including continually increasing food production to feed a growing population, is precisely what is actually causing humanity to careen toward a colossal global ecological wreckage.