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.
00:00:00.000I keep on getting told it's an anti-Semitic one, but I don't understand how.
00:00:04.600Klaus Schwab is a non-Jewish German, and he looks like Dr. Evil.
00:00:10.000He even goes out of his way sometimes to dress as Dr. Evil.
00:00:13.400I mean, it is a powerful organization. It's got revenues of about half a billion dollars a year.
00:00:18.480He gets paid about a million Swiss francs a year, which works out to about a million USD.
00:00:23.080I've never really bought in that it's pulling the strings on governments all over the world.
00:00:31.760It has obvious influence. It's a very influential organization.
00:00:36.680But I don't know. What do you think the significance is of Klaus Schwab stepping down here?
00:00:40.380Well, 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.
00:00:49.120I mean, they meet in a Swiss resort in the mountains with influential business leaders and political leaders, and they plot.
00:00:55.940And even as he speaks, it's like he's trolling.
00:00:58.480He likes to brag about how many world leaders he's influenced, and he's gotten into the inner circles of.
00:01:07.880Again, probably overstated by just how much influence he has, but he stirs everybody up when he talks about it.
00:01:12.740But if somebody more modest and rational is his replacement in coming forward, and it just turns more into an international lobby group,
00:01:21.760it might calm some of the conspiratorial worries about this group or whatnot.
00:01:27.300Or it could be somebody as colorful as he is and make it worse. We'll see.
00:01:32.460But for the time being, he was the symbol of that organization.
00:01:35.300So it'll be interesting to see how well the organization fares without him being in the front.
00:01:40.020Nigel, the World Economic Forum has begun, Klaus Schwab aside, who's kind of leaned into the Dr. Evil look of things,
00:01:48.520I think it's become aware that its ability to influence, and therefore ability to continue to bring in as much money as it does,
00:01:57.640is threatened by how it's now become viewed broadly by the right across the Western democratic world right now.
00:02:07.180It'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,
00:02:19.580How conservative is a conservative party in Scandinavia?
00:02:22.400Yeah, that's debatable, but I mean, they used to have a lot of prominent conservatives attending these things.
00:02:30.140I mean, Stephen Harper would go to it, and it wasn't considered unconservative to go.
00:02:35.440Actually, at that point, the conspiracy theories and the negative press on WEF came mostly from the left.
00:02:41.880But since then, the WEF has had these crazy things like,
00:02:45.200you'll own nothing and you'll be happy, you know, trying to eliminate cars.
00:02:52.640But, you know, it kind of socialism for the ultra rich that, you know,
00:02:58.840the people live under destitute socialism, but there's still a place for the ultra uber wealthy to live lives of luxury.
00:03:06.000Do 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
00:03:19.000to be able to attract people from the right side back to it,
00:03:22.260not 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?
00:03:30.080Well, of course, Pierre is going to say that, and so he should.
00:03:35.240But he himself, I believe, has attended, and so have many other members of the Conservative Party waiting to take government next year.
00:03:45.900Mr. Harper himself attended a number of times and used the podium there to make substantial public policy statements.
00:03:54.800I remember one about raising the age of retirement from 65 to 67.
00:04:00.080I don't want to talk about that particularly, but the point is, it was a good place to make a major economic policy statement
00:04:08.620because it was the World Economic Forum.
00:04:12.060And the kind of anxiety that has been generated since, has come since those days, I don't think he would do that now,
00:04:20.980but there's a tremendous number of Canadian politicians have been through, there's like a sort of a lecture program that you go through,
00:04:29.020they try to expose the politician to their ideas, sometimes they get recruited right in, I think Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is on the board,
00:04:39.920but that's not typical, that's not the case for everybody, they basically just want to put their ideas out there.
00:04:45.560Now, their ideas are nothing that we would support.
00:04:50.760This is a dreamy group with an ideal in which everybody lives within 15 minutes of everything they need.
00:04:59.520Nobody has a car, nobody owns anything, you've made that.
00:05:03.200Schwab didn't say that, by the way, but somebody close to him did.