Davos 09

The Davos Conference starts Tuesday. For those who've forgotten (and how could anyone) it's the get-together held in the Swiss Alps report where big wigs get together to hob nob, drink champagne, dine on caviar, play a few rounds and this year, save the western economy. No doubt the corporate jets are already enroute.

Recent events might make this a consequential event, with the buzz being about one-world solutions. Here in America the bailouts are already causing problems, for instance, how dare Citigroup buy a Falcon Jet with our money, and how dare BoA use bailout cash to pay Merrill Lynch employees their bonuses, etc.

Outrageous--it's our money! Yes, but nobody told us how to spend 'our money' when we received bailout stimulus checks last year. That slope is slippery.

With that in mind here's a preview of coming attractions:

"The capitalist myth is lovely and youthful. It kicked off the industrial revolution, but maybe we need a new one," says Richard Olivier, son of the late British actor Sir Laurence Olivier. Mr. Olivier, who owns a company that gives seminars, will give a dinner talk on business leadership at Davos, based on Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. The tale shows a heroic soldier turned bad, led to self-delusion by his own ambition and greed -- think Lehman Brothers, says Mr. Olivier.

We're all down with the greed thing. Even the Founders warned that unbridled capitalism without a moral/ethical anchor would lead to tyranny. Thing is, most people assume the anchor comes from within the individual, whether through personal values, religious grounding, etc, not from international elitist pointy heads. An international Borg of sorts.

Fearing the one-world pointy-heads requires some level of tinfoil adornment--the internet is currently a fantastic safety valve of dissent. Then again, the internet depends on corporations to keep it going, entities that could one day get a bailout.

MORE 1/26/09

If they take the internets there's always the streets.