By Peter Koenig

Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up… Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk,” and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. .. stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.: Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines (ICH)

January 28, 2016 "Information Clearing House" -  The 45^th World Economic Forum – WEF – was hosted again by Switzerland and took place from 20-23 January 2016 – again in Davos, an 11,000-soul remote but lush mountain resort in the south-eastern part of the Swiss Alps. The elite summit was attended by some 2,500 hi-flying politicians, corporate execs, celebrities, and so-called social network movers and shakers – most of them billionaires – accompanied by 500 journalists and some 600 staffers fully equipped with social media gear.

The Davos WEF happening is perhaps the most prominent and most visible one of a series of the globe’s elitist events – most of them secret, of the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the British Chatham House, to name just a few. Their memberships are overlapping and comprise the crème de la crème of the crop of the world elite.

They keep setting the standards for wars and conflicts, for who is to live and who is to die. They use highly civilized language in public, but their decisions behind closed doors eventually prompt such atrocities, as took place more than 100 years ago in the Philippines and later in Vietnam (see box), and were repeated since then all over the world umpteen times over, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine — and before during hundreds of years of European colonialism and plunder, torture and rape of Africa, Latin America and Asia, for resources and domination.

The only place you and I disagree . . . is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I (in contrast) don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”. . . “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. . . Does that bother you? I just want you to think big.” : Richard Nixon to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the Watergate tapes (ICH)

Human lives mean nothing to the ruling elite – which in Davos and elsewhere walk the talk of ‘political correctness’, about the world’s inequalities and its dangers. The more astute ones, even talk about social justice that would bring peace and stability. Words are cheap. They have of course no interest whatsoever in changing anything. Never had and never will. Their growing mountains of privileges are sacrosanct. The profits from wars and conflicts, from the weapon industry, are astronomical.

They talk about imminent climate change and its dangers, yet they fly into the Davos summit in hundreds of private jets, totally oblivious to the carbon footprint they paint in the sky.

A few days before the WEF event, Oxfam published a telling report, “Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More”, including some significant statistics. In 2015, 62 families owned US$ 1.76 trillion, more than the bottom half of the world’s population, 3.6 billion people. The wealth of the poorest half of the globe’s population has fallen by 41% since 2010, while the riches of the wealthiest 62 families has increased by half a trillion dollars. The gap is growing at breath-taking speed. According to a Credit Suisse report the world’s total wealth in 2015 was estimated at US$ 250 trillion. By 2016, with ongoing trends, 1% of population will own more wealth than 99% of the world’s populace; and the 1% (some 72 million people) would own more than half of the world’s wealth, meaning about US$ 130 trillion. The trend is alarming, pointing to an ever faster increase of social misery.

Now – given these growing inequalities, will the glaring injustice bring more social upheavals, protests, conflicts? Will it bring the World Order down? Will our corrupt system collapse or will it not – that is the question? – The question has to be asked for rhetoric and credibility’s sake. But be aware, nobody in power wants the system to collapse. As long as the powers that be – the Masters of the Universe, those behind the scene, those who pull the strings and send their emissaries of CEOs, politicians and celebrities to events like Davos; as long as this white collar murderous scum* (see box) is in place and ticking – and we the 99.99% look on in awe and fear, fear from invented terror, as long as we allow this injustice to prevail, the system will not collapse. They – the Masters of the Universe and their ambassador stooges – have us under their fingernails and can crush us at will. After all, they live from permanent conflicts and wars. As the Washington Post so honestly proclaims, wars are profitable. There is no soap in the world strong enough to cleanse their blood-stained hands.

*White collar murderous scum – You may be shocked at my calling these smooth elitists assassins. Aren’t people who decide on wars, on invading countries, on sending drones to kill – leaders who direct torture camps around the globe, or who sit on top of financial institutions that starve entire segments of people to death, or deprive them of vital medical and social services, people who direct corporations that knowingly and willingly contaminate the environment and poison the waters of entire communities, making them sick and killing them – aren’t these people murderers by any definition of the term?

The perpetuation of these rotten WEF-type elite is precisely what drives inequality, what causes insecurity through widening rich-poor gaps, prompting wars, atrocities, endless chains of refugees, famine, misery, discrimination. These elite carry the stamp of poverty with which they brand the vast majority of the population like cattle. Their ultimate goal is to reduce the world population to some 500 million to 1 billion people to be used as their serfs. A reduced world population might allow an ever shrinking and ever richer elite to live longer in splendour and luxury with Planet Earth’s overexploited resources, what’s left of them. In the 1960s we, the western world, crossed the critical threshold of the resources balance. Today, the west with its steadily growing consumption and growth fetish, (ab)uses by a rate of about 4 times the generous resources Mother Earth provides.

The elite have seen the writing on the wall. In the 1950s Henry Kissinger was appointed as a Board Member of the CFR, a Rockefeller creation. He soon started propagating a reduction in world population. In 1974, Kissinger, then head of the US National Security Council, commissioned a classified 200-page study on “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” which concluded proposing population-reduction programs using food as a weapon, i.e. food shortages would induce massive famine and death – genocide by famine  (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_kissinger_food.html). Genetically modified food by Monsanto is the direct result of Kissinger’s quest, “Control the oil, and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people. Control money and you control the world.”

What does this have to do with the WEF? – Everything. The WEF is led by the invisible hands of the Masters of the Universe – the clandestine powers to which belong the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgan Stanleys and many of the military industrial complex and pharmaceutical leaders – and to which the criminal mind of Kissinger’s is a helpful advisor (Who Really Controls the World http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-really-controls-the-world/5445239). Forefathers of world history, including Mahatma Gandhi, Presidents Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy, as well as British PM Winston Churchill have warned of the looming ascension of this occult power to the detriment of world peace.

They, the Masters of the Universe, pull the strings by sending their billionaire puppets to Davos to confuse the obedient listeners, spectators and serfs, i.e. the world at large, with wise and politically correct but totally hollow speech, “will there be more crises ahead?” – “Will the current World Order collapse?” – “Will it survive? “- “How will climate change affect our future?” And of course, “what will the markets do and say?” – The markets, the epitome of the Washington Consensus doctrine, will never be forgotten in this neoliberal, neo-fascist western world, whose creation and simultaneous destruction, we, the 99.99%, have not only tolerated but facilitated. The answers to these questions were as diverse and empty as were the questions themselves. However, there was one common theme permeating everything: Money rules the world.

Switzerland is the epicentre of neoliberalism in Europe; the archetype of what the western world calls democracy, where parliamentarians have the legal right to sit on several boards of directors of corporations and financial institutions representing in Parliament their corporate and financial interests rather than those of the people who elected them; a truly built-in lobby in the name of democracy, unique among OECD countries.  Who would be better placed than the Swiss to host again and again shamelessly this notorious Davos event for the super-super rich – politicians, corporate CEOs, celebrities and so-called social change-makers (who change of course absolutely nothing for the betterment of society), clogging Swiss airports with their fleet of private jets?

The Swiss government mobilized over 5,000 military police plus countless Police officers from around the country to protect this international nobility. Rooftop snipers in their winter gear looked like ISIS in white.

They provided airspace and highway protection above and around Davos. The total cost to Swiss tax-payers of protecting WEF attendees is not published, but must be astronomical.

The conference centres were fenced-off by steel barriers; all to defend the self-styled luminaries from imaginary ‘terror threats’ and protesters. If not in the news, because these illustrious and notorious personalities, including at least 40 heads of state, are not to be unnecessarily scared, lest they may not come – what a loss that would be!

Terror is seamlessly built-into today’s societies’ thought processes. Never mind, that those who pretend to defend the populace are the same that cause and create the terror, hence justifying militarization and eventually police states – soon inscribed in the Constitutions of Washington’s European vassals. France’s Hollande and his PM Mr. Valls, are asking the French Parliament to approve such legislation by declaring a permanent state of emergency; all justified by the January and November 2015 (false flag) attacks in Paris.

A few days after the sun set on WEF 2016, Europol, giving no foundation whatsoever, announces increasing ‘terror threats’ throughout Europe, justifying a rapid increase of militarization of Europe. People will ask for it, for fear – as they have been thoroughly brainwashed by the lie and propaganda and corrupted mainstream media. Their brains are waning, as rapidly as the police state is taking over.

Despite these measures to increase security for the rich, hedge fund managers are reportedly buying airstrips and farms in such remote areas as New Zealand, because they think they need a getaway.  

TeleSUR suggests that the WEF’s claim to make the world a better place is a joke. That might be an understatement considering who the WEF’s partners are. Nestlé, the Swiss food giant, whose CEO, Peter Brabeck, recently stated that considering water as a fundamental human right is “extreme”. Nestlé’s human rights and environmental abuses abound. They are accused of forced child labor on their cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast. Nestlé’s water CEO, Tim Brown, has refused to stop bottling water in Sacramento, California, despite the extreme drought. While farmers were ordered to stop pumping water to irrigate their crops, Brown retorted, “If I could increase (bottling water) I would.”

Other disreputable WEF partners include Chevron which dumped allegedly over 16 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste in the pristine forests of Ecuador’s Amazon, affecting 30,000 indigenous residents, some with cancer and early death. They won a US$ 9.5 billion law suit for damages which Chevron never paid.

There is also Coca Cola with water conflicts throughout Latin America, including in a northern El Salvador municipality, where the beverage giant affects the lives of tens of thousands of residents with contaminated water they say poisons them and kills their animals. Elsewhere in Latin America, Coca Cola allegedly hires paramilitaries for intimidation, torture and murder of unionists in Colombia and Guatemala.

Social justice activist Susan George calls the Davos gang “predatory”, running the west’s major institutions. She sums the conference up as an organization of dirty partners, from polluting miners, to money-laundering banks and community-destroying corporations. Yet, the populace is made believe that the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world.”

As long as the Masters of the Universe are in charge – and they have been for the last at least 150 years – there is no chance for a world of harmony and peace. They have decided the fate of the Middle East and the world – next Syria and eventually Iran must fall. The following targets are Russia, then China through Central Asia and the South China Sea. The well-paid WEF morons in Davos are ordered to deceive and confuse, time and again, as they have done throughout the 45 annual WEF summits – all adapted to the ‘current dangers and fears’. It is high time that we, The People, the 99.99% wake up and open our eyes to an uncomfortable reality

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.