The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland ended on May 27. The conference – a group of capitalist billionaires and representatives from the governments that serve them – was marked by anxiety. The war in Ukraine has caused massive destruction and a spike in food prices, the existential threat of the climate crisis hangs overhead, and inflation has been rising worldwide. The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, even warned about the potential for a recession in the next year and widespread defaults on the debts of underdeveloped countries, which could cause a financial crisis. The rich and their lackeys are worried about the crises they’ve caused! If they want to find the cause of the climate crisis, imperialist wars, inflation, and food shortages, they should just take a look in the mirror.
Even as the One Percent pretended to care about the crises facing the world in Davos, they were off causing those same crises in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been racked with an economic crisis, facing food and energy shortages and an inflation rate topping 40 percent. There have been massive protests against the government’s response to this crisis, which has been to slash social spending and impose harsh austerity measures on the poor. And why has social spending been cut so much? So that the Sri Lankan prime minister can get a loan from the IMF! What gall must the head of the IMF have to bemoan a debt crisis that she herself is directly causing.
The high point of this circus came when Fatih Birol, the Chief of the International Energy Agency (IEA), begged the businessmen to not use the war in Ukraine as an excuse to invest in fossil fuels. Birol said that a new wave of fossil fuel investments “will forever close the door to reaching our climate targets.” This is the lunacy of capitalism: pleading with a few rich people to stop making more money, in order to not destroy our planet and our species. Why is the Chief of the IEA begging billionaires to save the people and planet that they’ve never cared about before?
The capitalists and their servants – the politicians and government bureaucrats – can’t save us. It’s them and their capitalist system that are causing the problems in the first place!
