Western Standard - May 23, 2024


Klaus Schwab retires from WEF

Topics
Klaus Schwab stepping down
Mentioned
Evil Stephen Harper Pierre Poilievre Klaus Schwab Chrystia Freeland Nigel
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

161.07

Word count

908

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the sudden departure of World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab, and the implications for the future of the organization and its future in the face of growing right-wing opposition to it. We also talk about the impact of the WEF on the perception of it as a place for the ultra-rich to live lives of luxury.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I keep on getting told it's an anti-Semitic one, but I don't understand how.
00:00:04.600 Klaus Schwab is a non-Jewish German, and he looks like Dr. Evil. 1.00
00:00:10.000 He even goes out of his way sometimes to dress as Dr. Evil.
00:00:13.400 I mean, it is a powerful organization. It's got revenues of about half a billion dollars a year.
00:00:18.480 He gets paid about a million Swiss francs a year, which works out to about a million USD.
00:00:23.080 I've never really bought in that it's pulling the strings on governments all over the world.
00:00:31.760 It has obvious influence. It's a very influential organization.
00:00:36.680 But I don't know. What do you think the significance is of Klaus Schwab stepping down here?
00:00:40.380 Well, I guess it depends on who replaces him, because as you said, he presents a caricature of what the head of a shadowy world country is like out of a Bond movie.
00:00:49.120 I mean, they meet in a Swiss resort in the mountains with influential business leaders and political leaders, and they plot.
00:00:55.940 And even as he speaks, it's like he's trolling.
00:00:58.480 He likes to brag about how many world leaders he's influenced, and he's gotten into the inner circles of.
00:01:07.880 Again, probably overstated by just how much influence he has, but he stirs everybody up when he talks about it.
00:01:12.740 But if somebody more modest and rational is his replacement in coming forward, and it just turns more into an international lobby group,
00:01:21.760 it might calm some of the conspiratorial worries about this group or whatnot.
00:01:27.300 Or it could be somebody as colorful as he is and make it worse. We'll see.
00:01:32.460 But for the time being, he was the symbol of that organization.
00:01:35.300 So it'll be interesting to see how well the organization fares without him being in the front.
00:01:40.020 Nigel, the World Economic Forum has begun, Klaus Schwab aside, who's kind of leaned into the Dr. Evil look of things,
00:01:48.520 I think it's become aware that its ability to influence, and therefore ability to continue to bring in as much money as it does,
00:01:57.640 is threatened by how it's now become viewed broadly by the right across the Western democratic world right now.
00:02:07.180 It's expected, his expected replacement, I can't recall the name of it, but he's apparently a former conservative prime minister of some Scandinavian country,
00:02:17.140 I think Norway, but I'm not positive.
00:02:19.580 How conservative is a conservative party in Scandinavia?
00:02:22.400 Yeah, that's debatable, but I mean, they used to have a lot of prominent conservatives attending these things.
00:02:30.140 I mean, Stephen Harper would go to it, and it wasn't considered unconservative to go.
00:02:35.440 Actually, at that point, the conspiracy theories and the negative press on WEF came mostly from the left.
00:02:41.880 But since then, the WEF has had these crazy things like,
00:02:45.200 you'll own nothing and you'll be happy, you know, trying to eliminate cars.
00:02:52.640 But, you know, it kind of socialism for the ultra rich that, you know,
00:02:58.840 the people live under destitute socialism, but there's still a place for the ultra uber wealthy to live lives of luxury.
00:03:06.000 Do you, I don't know, do you think that, is there any way for the WEF to kind of salvage its formally fairly lofty reputation
00:03:19.000 to be able to attract people from the right side back to it,
00:03:22.260 not see it so anathema to the degree that Pierre Paulyov has vowed that no minister of his will be permitted membership or attendance at these things?
00:03:30.080 Well, of course, Pierre is going to say that, and so he should.
00:03:35.240 But he himself, I believe, has attended, and so have many other members of the Conservative Party waiting to take government next year.
00:03:45.900 Mr. Harper himself attended a number of times and used the podium there to make substantial public policy statements.
00:03:54.800 I remember one about raising the age of retirement from 65 to 67.
00:04:00.080 I don't want to talk about that particularly, but the point is, it was a good place to make a major economic policy statement
00:04:08.620 because it was the World Economic Forum.
00:04:12.060 And the kind of anxiety that has been generated since, has come since those days, I don't think he would do that now,
00:04:20.980 but there's a tremendous number of Canadian politicians have been through, there's like a sort of a lecture program that you go through,
00:04:29.020 they try to expose the politician to their ideas, sometimes they get recruited right in, I think Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is on the board,
00:04:39.920 but that's not typical, that's not the case for everybody, they basically just want to put their ideas out there.
00:04:45.560 Now, their ideas are nothing that we would support.
00:04:50.760 This is a dreamy group with an ideal in which everybody lives within 15 minutes of everything they need.
00:04:59.520 Nobody has a car, nobody owns anything, you've made that.
00:05:03.200 Schwab didn't say that, by the way, but somebody close to him did.
00:05:08.040 It's one of their position papers.
00:05:09.060 It's one of their position papers.
00:05:10.680 But, you know, one thing worth noting, this is not a conspiracy organization.
00:05:16.220 Everything is on the website.
00:05:18.180 So when so-and-so says, you know what the West says, and everything, ah, you're just a conspiracy theorist.
00:05:24.100 Well, probably not.
00:05:25.680 You can probably go to the website and find what the conspiracy theorist is actually quoting from.
00:05:30.860 They're very, very open about it.
00:05:32.400 They're just completely wrong.
00:05:33.420 They're the worst conspiratorial secret society ever.
00:05:37.060 It's all there. 0.87