Larry Fink is unhappy. The grand panjandrum of BlackRock, the world’s largest and most odoriferously PC pile of pelf, can’t understand why the Lilliputians of the world are singling him out for abuse.
Having jetted in on his private plane to the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos in order to join the squads of beautiful people warning about the environmental dangers of gas stoves, the moral virtue of eating bugs not meat, and the need to “recalibrate” our understanding of free speech, the poor little rich boy is pouting because people are waking up to the totalitarian reality of what the WEF stands for.
What is that reality? Elon Musk got it in one: The “WEF,” he tweeted, “is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.” Bingo.
As the commentator CDR Salamander put it, we have reached the point where “any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion… This wannabee [sic] gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit.”
Part of the problem is that the fancy people who congregate at Davos have not taken onboard Gertrude Stein’s admonition about knowing how far to go when going too far. It’s okay to swan into the mountain vastness of Davos on your private jet as if you were a Bond villain. But then don’t lecture the rest of the world about “carbon footprints” and “equity.”
Speaking of Bond villains, did you know that the father of Klaus Schwab, the head of the WEF, not only looks like a Bond villain, but that his father, Eugen Schwab, ran an engineering company for the Nazis that employed slave labor? I am not sure if that is an illustration of Epictetus’s principle of like seeking like or the folk wisdom about the apple not falling far from the tree.
I suspect that to some extent the Davos big-shots can’t help it. Arrogant hypocrisy is built into the DNA of these greedy Mrs. Jellebys. They like their philanthropy to be “telescopic,” just as Dickens’s repellent character did. Emetic fatuousness is what they do. It’s who they are. No one was surprised to learn that among the snazzy Finks congregating at Davos were hundreds upon hundreds of prostitutes. The WEF meeting is high season not only for the bloviating would-be masters of the world but also for the poor girls (and, probably, guys) just plying their trade in the world’s oldest profession. “Demand skyrockets” for “sexual services” the Daily Mail reported, to which Jack Posobiac had this witty response: “I hear there are hundreds of prostitutes showing up in Davos this week. And maybe even some sex workers, too.”
Yes, there are cracks showing up everywhere in the ESG, DEI edifice. Stephen Soukup predicted as much a couple of years ago in his gimlet-eyed analysis, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. Now angry reporters are following Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, taxing him with questions about the efficacy and safety of the “vaccine” that his company disseminated to a credulous world and from which he made millions.
Larry Fink is warning about a burgeoning “huge polarization” that is attacking his whole ESG narrative. It has, he said, become, “ugly, personal.” Speaking for myself, I hope the polarization becomes more pronounced and that the attacks on these disgusting people who think that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a how-to manual become uglier and more personal.
