Davos 2023 a coven for feudalism 2.0
It is now the season of Davos, where the 1% pretend to the world that they are both caring and good stewards of the economy. At this time of year, anti-poverty charities always publish reports showing how much of the world’s wealth the 1% own, which is all of it.
While at capitalism’s coven in Switzerland, under-taxed billionaires plead to be taxed more to politicians who they fund or will employ post-politics. It’s the worst magic show at the seaside because they don’t even really try to hide the cards up their sleeves.
Davos is a theatre of the absurd which is stuck on an eternal rinse and repeat cycle. Its aim is public relations to show the ordinary world the rich are invested in everyone’s well-being. Think the Royal Family’s Garden Party for charity workers or the Pope washing the feet of the poor on the odd occasion. Davos is about trying to convince society; we, with their guidance, are struggling towards the light rather than fumbling around in the dark on purpose.
We live in weary times, and most of us are showing the symptoms because anxiety is on a wartime level. The simple fact is we don’t know when we can let our guard down against the pandemic against our declining standard of living and the loss of leisure that doesn’t require a monetary transaction. Our anxiety is warranted because neoliberalism and globalism didn’t give us what was promised personal affluence and leisure.
Moreover, our angst grows because our political choices to change society and our lives are not out there. Every political party within a hairsbreadth of power offers a variant of the status quo.
Just look at how every political party handles the question of private healthcare in either the UK or Canada. All of them are prepared to let the private sector take an active role in your healthcare as if preserving your good health was a consumer choice rather than a human right. It is despairing to think how low we have sunk as a society that once understood that businesses must be properly taxed to fund public works not tasked with the job of owning a nation’s infrastructure. Unmitigated capitalism hijacked our democracies which explains why most politicians are richer than the average citizen they claim to represent. The 1% bought our news media platforms, our publishing companies, and our movie and tv production companies and propagated the myth that wealth rather than empathy is humanity’s supreme virtue. Underpaid and over-leveraged by debt, ordinary citizens are like racing dogs chasing mechanical rabbits at the track. They will never acquire the wealth, they need to feel safe, secure, and virtuous. It's why people look for salvation in bitcoin, lotteries and the deadliest of get-rich schemes voting for conservative politicians.
It's not hyperbole to say that for the average person, the clock of progress has been moving backwards since neoliberalism was born under the governments of Thatcher and Reagan. Wages haven’t matched the cost of living since my dad was middle-aged in 1975.
In 2023, life spans are decreasing in the USA because capitalism decided that most of humanity is here to be a wealth generator for the entitled class. Public healthcare is in palliative care and will soon be in the complete hands of corporations. Long Term Care for the elderly who don’t have a pot to piss in, which is most of us- is now controlled by hedge funds that will treat us as well as we treat livestock destined for slaughter. And, in Canada, disabled people who are also poor and fear homelessness are beginning to contemplate legal assisted suicide as a viable option to living rough. Military budgets are rising because empires are dying, and others are being born and the 1% of Davos know like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse there is gold and riches beyond imagination in the killing fields of war. Finally, workers’ rights are being abolished by draconian laws that are so authoritarian they would not be out of place in any fascist dictatorship.
Covid, like the Climate emergency, was supposed to be about the “Great Reset.” It was our wake-up call to change our ways to not become extinct as a species. Instead, we were delivered a cost-of-living crisis to diminish our expectations for our lives. But the rub is things will not get better for the average citizen for a hundred more years or perhaps never. Should we despair? Of course, we should because it is horrific what we are enduring and must undergo in the future. But in every age of darkness, and humanity has been through many of them, people kept buggering on.
In our lives, we might not see again the light of socialism, which rebuilt civilisation at the end of World War Two. But we owe it to future generations to preserve our stories about how it was a tide to raise all boats. What the world is sailing into in the near future will be grimmer than today's heartaches. The 1% will suffocate democracy across the planet. A world of great inequality oozes over our lands like lava from an angry volcano. Hold on tight and remember we are many, and they are few.
Thank you for reading my substack. Your support and subscriptions helps me maintain my dad Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive. On February 25, 2023 Harry Leslie Smith would have been a hundred. I think he would have been sickened that his warning to not make his past our future became true. Take care, John
