It was my job to clip all the Davos articles from the Financial Times for Lewis after he returned from Switzerland.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Henwood [SMTP:dhenwood at panix.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 1999 2:58 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: post-socialist vacuum
>
> From Louis Lapham's The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy
> Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland, just out from
> Verso. Lapham is recounting his interview with Klaus Schwab, the
> founding
> proprietor of the annual ruling class retreat.
>
> "As supplements to the Davos meeting, the forum sponsors regional
> meetings,
> in Singapore or Cape Town or Washington, and Schwab had noticed that
> no
> matter what the latitude and time zone, the conversation over the last
> decade had been veering away from the sharply defined questions of
> means -
> How? At what price? - to a vaguely expressed questioning of ends -
> Why? For
> what purpose? He attributed the shift in emphasis to an awareness
> among the
> more thoughtful of the world's landlords that the global economy was a
> good
> deal more complicated than anybody had thought, and that in the
> absence of
> a coherent argument from the socialist left, even the most
> well-meaning
> corporate citizens found themselves marooned in a vacuum, a
> comfortable and
> well-furnished vacuum, of course, but still, unhappily, a vacuum."
>
> I'm going to be interviewing Lapham about his visits to the 1998 and
> 1999
> Davos meetings on the radio this afternoon - about 5:05-5:20, WBAI,
> 99.5
> FM, NYC.
>
> Doug