What Really Goes on at the Davos Carnival to Celebrate the Global Economic System
By now everyone in the business and political in-crowd knows about the annual World Economic Forum meeting held in Davos, Switzerland commonly known as “Davos”.
This is an invite-only event for the world’s movers and shakers. Rumors that it’s led by the Bilderberg group abound making it really a dictate for their global vision as they “share” their visions with the political, business, and communication leaders from around the world.
The attendees attend meeting halls and group sessions to discuss and resolve the world’s biggest challenges. But outside the halls, many Davos participants pay no mind. They loiter in various lounges carrying on conversations with each other. They talked and talk—as though they hadn’t been talking all day. They talk while sitting on panels or while skipping panels that others sit on.
They discuss issues like “How Did We Get Here?” “The Compensation Question,” “Global Risks 2013: over the course of five days. There are more than two hundred such sessions.
Many Davos participants rarely, if ever, attend even one. Instead, they float around in the slack spaces, sitting down to one arranged meeting after another, or else making themselves available for chance encounters, either with friends or with strangers whom they will ever after be able to refer to as friends.
The Congress Center, the daytime hub, is a warren of interconnected lounges, cafés, lobbies, and lecture halls, with espresso bars, and juice stations.
The participants have their preferred hovering areas. Wandering the center in search of people to talk is like hunting on an African Savanah; one could observe, over time, which water holes were full of game, and what times of day they liked to feed.
Jamie Dimon, running shoes in hand, might be near the espresso stand at the Global Leadership Fellows Program. In the early afternoon, you may see CNN’s Fareed Zakaria happily engaged with unnamed others hanging out in the Industry Partners Lounge. Eventually, the trolls will emerge from their deep holes and secret passageways. And they will glide through the crowds with aides alongside like remoras stuck to their shark-like bodies.
* NOTE: The World Economic Forum overtly says that Davos is an entourage-free zone. But this doesn’t seem to apply to the biggest of the fish; like heads of state. It is said that the faster you walk the more important you are.
We are talking about a name-dropper’s paradise. Central bankers, industrial chiefs, hedge-fund titans, gloomy forecasters, astrophysicists, monks, rabbis, tech wizards, museum curators, university presidents, financial bloggers, and virtuous heirs.
Participants get into conversations with newspaper columnists and executives from big think tanks; everyone with an agenda.
Everyone says that you can’t get the hang of Davos until you’ve been three or four times. So many things are going on at once that it is impossible to do even a tenth of them. You could spend the week in your hotel room, puzzling over a plan, wrestling with your doubts and regrets, but a person who would do this is not the kind who would be invited to Davos anyway. This is a place for the real in-crowd. They know who they are….. and if you get invited, well, get ready for the indoctrination.
The World Economic Forum was first conceived in January 1971 when a group of European business leaders met under the patronage of the European Commission and European industrial associations. German-born Klaus Schwab, then Professor of Business Policy at the University of Geneva, chaired the gathering, which took place in Davos, Switzerland.
What happens in Davos stays in Davos!
Davos is like Congress, the Factory, Scientology, the Mormon Tabernacle, the Bohemian Grove, the “best dinner party in the world,” the financial system, Facebook, Burning Man, boot camp, high school… Davos is an onion, a layer cake, and a Russian doll. Participants are NEVER out of the loop. They are in the loop.
Whether you think the World Economic Forum is a worthy enterprise or a bunch of garbage, its annual meeting is an extraordinary creation—a miniature society that controls 7 billion of us through the global economic system
Forty-two years ago, a German academic named Klaus Schwab founded this cabal. Now, at seventy-five, he continues to nurture it, with dogged sincerity. Is he the most connected man on the planet?
Around the Congress Hall, they say no one walks faster than Klaus. The only question is… where does Klaus go for his marching orders? And that’s the big secret of Davos.
Some say there is another unseen level of leadership. Some say it’s the Bilderberg group. Whatever it is, it’s providing direction through influence to the world’s movers and shakers providing them a Burning Man-Esque cultish experience to enjoy each and every year; a carnival to celebrate and perpetuate the global monetary economic system.
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