Anand Giridharadas (author of “Winners Take All. The Elite Charade of Changing the World”) on the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the neoliberal plutocrats (2018): “There's a spectrum from the naive to the shrewd at Davos. I don't think anybody at Goldman Sachs thinks that Goldman Sachs is really in the business of making the world a better place for the least among us. I think they understand that they are a bank and are here to make money for their owners and that a certain amount of giving and public responsibility is necessary to buy goodwill and avoid having executives put in prison after a financial crisis. And in a way I kind of respect that because at least they know who they are. Then you go to Silicon Valley and you really do have these guys like Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg who are not cynical and really believe they are lucky enough to have alighted upon certain tools of emancipation, and if they are able to share them far and wide they'll be able to change the world for everybody. Their self-delusion comes from not at all understanding that they have become the problem rather than in any way representing the solution…
I believe that Davos should be cancelled. I think the only way forward for the plutocracy and for the Davos class in this age of rage is for a real period of reckoning and self-reflection and self-correction. Davos is a celebration and kind of carnival for those who have rigged so many countries around the world. And then as the working and middle classes of many societies have revolted against being stiffed by the plutocracy, the plutocrats have benefited yet again from demagogues -- and sometime plutocrats themselves like Donald Trump -- channelling that correct anger, but then diverting it so that the revolters punch down at the most vulnerable people in society, instead of punch up to people who stole the future (Anand Giridharadas in interview, “”Cancel Davos”, blasts anti-elite author”, France 24, 22 January 2019: https://www.france24.com/en/20190122-cancel-davos-blasts-anti-elite-author ).