Danny Schechter - ColdType

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eling but there was no discussion of what might replace it,
or expectation that just a few years later the world economy
would collapse into a global crisis. The hype that year was
about the promise of globalization, and a capitalist system
that could do no wrong. A spirit of “cautious optimism” was
as much criticism as was permissible.
Eight years later, Bloomberg News went back to Davos in
the heart of Europe and found leaders there willing to concede
that they had not alerted us to the problems, and in effect
may have contributed to the environment of greed and free
market bullishness. Now, in the riptide of the worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression, World Economic Forum
officials and delegates say many of the chief executive officers
who gathered in Davos over the last five years didn’t listen
to warnings from their peers. Davos organizers also say they
failed to play tough with the financial-industry bosses, opting
to accept their funding and let them turn Davos into a rave-up
for Wall Street excesses. “Once upon a time, the World Economic
Forum was the ultimate Wall Street jamboree,”
“The partying crept in,” says Klaus Schwab, the 70-year-old
WEF founder and executive chairman, told Bloomberg News.
“We let it get out of control, and attention was taken away
from the speed and complexity of how the world’s challenges
built up.”
It was not just the CEOs who indulged and enabled practices
that would destabilize the system, but many media outlets
that lacked the independence and critical judgment needed
to investigate the financialization of the economic system and
failed to warn of serious excesses and, sometimes, criminal
conduct. When I say “ the media,” I mean newspapers and TV
stations – with some exemplary exceptions – in the United
States and Europe.
Others saw the risks and were also ignored. In fact, the
economist James Galbraith of the University of Texas says that
only eight out of thousands of his colleagues saw what was