WATCH: Jon Stewart Nails the Absurd Corporate Elite Whiners at Davos
Poor world's economic elites. It's getting so difficult for them to fly under the radar and fly their (1700) private jets to their annual backslapping confab in the Swiss mountain town of Davos.
Jon Stewart took on the ostentatious absurdity that is Davos on his Thursday night show, and he found plenty of totally absurd hypocrisy to mock there. A top item on the agenda for this large but rarefied pool of private jet travellers is climate change, Stewart suggests, "that they are causing." Oh yes, they are deeply concerned. But not deeply concerned enough to fly commercial, or, say, "jetpool."
Second on the to-discuss list, global inequality. This at an event that Stewart suggests might better be called, "Wealthstock," attended by every kind of one percenter and financial totan in the world, many of whom love to whine about how mean the government has been to them after they crashed the economy in 2008. No doubt, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon will be full of innovative ideas for addressing global inequality and financial regulation. The chairman of  AIG made the wonderfully tonedeaf comment that, now that his once imploding company that was rescued by the feds, has those same feds "looking over our shoulder . . . we couldn't do and 0-8 if we wanted to."
"Why would you want do?" Stewart asks, incredulously. The man is basically saying, 'we couldn't crash the economy if we wanted to.' Echoing Stewart, why the fuck would you want to? And how did 'doing an 0-8' become a part of the lexicon?
The latest corporate whiner is MetLife, the gigantic insurance company under pressure to be more financially responsible by the government, which plans to take on the federal government, but simultaneously claim it is just a little guy trying to make a buck that 's being picked on by the government.
It goes on and on.
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