The list of corporate speakers Davos probably doesn’t want you to see

There’s a reason Biden and Johnson aren’t at Davos. They aren’t really in charge at all.

LONDON (Bywire News) - The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) yearly gathering at Davos, Switzerland, gets properly underway on Monday, May 23. While the list of government attendees is public, the WEF doesn’t produce the same for the corporations and their bosses who mingle and decision-make at the annual event.

So, how do we know just what the ‘Who’s Who’ of the companies that really run the world is? Well, after some serious doomscrolling Bywire News has produced one. And it reads like a list of the planet’s biggest corporate criminals.

Davos: mopping up their own mess

Davos invariably sees ‘leaders’ in the public, private and NGO sectors come together to solve the world’s problems. The reality is, of course, that the Davos elite are the ones who create the problems in the first place: from climate chaos to poverty and war.

This year’s theme? Mopping up the mess these miscreants manufactured. Or rather, as the Davos PR blurb would phrase it:

“The meeting is centered around the theme History at a Turning Point: Government Policies and Business Strategies. It happens at the most consequential geopolitical and geo-economic moment of the past three decades and against the backdrop of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

The war in Ukraine and the resulting tragedy calls for global moral action. Leaders will address urgent humanitarian and security challenges as they simultaneously advance long-standing economic, environmental and societal priorities – all while reinforcing the foundations of a stable global system”.

So, who’s going to Davos to work out ways to keep the plebs quiet while keeping themselves in the lifestyles they’ve become accustomed to?

Political attendees – and those who aren’t

The WEF helpfully provides a list of “public” figures (government, international government, NGO etc) who are attending. The absence of the ‘big three’ leaders – Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron – is telling. What’s also telling is the volume of Eastern European, African, South American and Asian political figures attending (all from the more-developed developing nations, naturally).

Larry Elliott (wrongly) asserted in the Guardian that, on the lack of “A-list” politicians:

“Davos has always been dedicated to globalisation and has long been keen on using the forum to tackle common problems such as global heating and inequality. But how will it cope with a fragmented world where globalisation is in retreat?

A combination of pandemic and Putin has accelerated an already existing trend towards deglobalisation and that process – rather than the protesters outside the ring of steel – poses the biggest threat to the future of Davos”.

Corporatism 2.0

Elliott mistakenly works on the assumption that lack of big Western leaders = Davos and globalisation are dead. Far from it. Davos has adapted to this new order (a ‘world’ one, you could say). And it’s where politicians are irrelevant manservants and corporations are the kings of globalisation.

The embedding of corporate capitalism (corporatism, if you prefer) means that corporations drive political decisions, not the other way round. You only have to look at the UK’s pandemic response (creating a load of money to prop-up corporations under the guise of ‘furlough’, jobs schemes and VIP public contract lanes) or the extent of lobbying in the US to realise this. The point is, that corporatism is essentially the blurring of the lines between big government and big corporations; you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

So, if Davos is corporatist ground zero – then who’s attending?

Meet the kings of the world

Of course, a list of people from private corporations speaking at Davos doesn’t exist. So, Bywire News has helpfully for you (and painfully for us) trawled through the four-day programme to find out what the ‘Who’s Who’ of criminal companies is. You can read our full list of notable attendees here.

Corporate speakers include:

Then, Davos’s main “partner” organisations (presumably funnelling money into it) include some of the most notorious companies on the planet:

Johnson & Johnson.
JPMorgan Chase.
Chevron.
Morgan Stanley.
Uber.
Amazon.
Barclays.
HSBC.
Goldman Sachs.

Press poodles and useful idiots

Media lapdog speakers joining (and promoting) this shitshow include:

And, like corporatism’s useful idiots, the charities and NGOs propping all this up to include:

The boss of the Red Cross.
INTERPOL.
The executive director of Oxfam.
The boss of WWF (wildlife, not wrestling).
The founder of the Rise Up Movement.
The boss of Human Rights Watch.
Amnesty.

No Greta this year. Maybe she’s wised up to the fact the WEF was playing her.

So, the list of corporations and media in attendance sums up the way the world works now – where corporations run the show and the media acts as lapdogs for them and their political puppets. Then, the seminars and talks embed this.

Greenwashing and crypto

For example, if you want some greenwashing then Davos is for you. The corporate capitalist co-opting of the climate change movement continues during the “Financing Net Zero” talk, with the boss of a major investment management company, HSBC and a certain Mark Carney speaking. Similar will be discussed during “Biodiversity Finance” and “Clean Energy Superpowers”

Meanwhile, for you EOS investors there are whole sessions dedicated to “Central Bank Digital Currencies”, the “Future of Crypto” (from a US state government’s POV) and “Crypto’s Carbon Footprint”, Read it and weep. Crypto won’t be yours for much longer.

Oh, and the reason leaders from so many developing nations are there? Corporations see a business opportunity and those leaders will probably get the bungs in return.

The point is, Davos is now the meeting of the real people who run the world – the corporations.

The doctrine of shock

As Naomi Klein wrote in her prophetic 2007 book The Shock Doctrine:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist.

Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.

For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture”.

Where’s Elon?

Ring any bells? Because this year’s Davos, and our post-pandemic world, are peak corporatism. But – there’s one stand-out issue. And that’s a couple of notable absences.

Amazon is a “partner” at Davos, but there’s no one from the company speaking. Meanwhile, Apple, the world’s biggest company, is nowhere to be seen on the main partners' list – being tucked away on a general one. Elon Musk wasn’t invited, either. And Meta/Facebook and Twitter’s absence from proceedings is also telling.

But still, four of the world’s top five biggest companies by revenue are all represented in some way. Meanwhile, many of the top 25 banks and investment management firms who own those and all the other huge companies (and therefore really “run the world”) are also at Davos – either as speakers or main partners.

Rapid dystopia, incoming

So, who needs politicians when the real global superpowers have got it all stitched up?

Davos 2022 is little more than a furthering of the rapid march to a dystopian society – where faceless corporations control our every move and politicians are their willing servants. It shows that discussions about, and decisions over, the economic, environmental and social direction our species and planet will take are further out of the hands of those we elect. This is, of course, how the rich and powerful would like it. But it certainly is not in anyone else’s best interests.

(Writing by Steve Topple, editing by Klaudia Fior)