AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to Davos, Switzerland, the site of the World Economic Forum. Traditionally, the WEF is a gathering of the global elite. But this year, it’s turned into an emergency summit over President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. Over the weekend, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on eight European allies that oppose his push to take over Greenland. On Tuesday, Trump posted a fake photograph showing Greenland, Canada and Venezuela as part of the United States.

Speaking in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned of a “rupture in the world order.”

PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY: We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window, we participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaking Tuesday in Davos at the World Economic Forum. President Trump is addressing the World Economic Forum today.

Hundreds protested in Davos ahead President Trump’s visit to the WEF, an annual gathering of global business elites. Here are some of their voices.

SARAH MULLER: I think it’s really — it’s really bad, especially what he just did with Venezuela. Like, he literally started a war. And now Switzerland lets him in, and also the WEF just accepts him. Yeah, I think that’s unacceptable.

CARMEN JUNGE: So, we are here because it’s a meeting, the WEF is a meeting. Since 1971, it exists. And it proposes that the world becomes better, that everyone has a better life, if those people are meeting. But it’s just a meeting of rich people, of politics and so on.

MASSA KONE: [translated] If Trump declares, “I am here for the United States,” and he comes to Davos, then he will bring the United States the slightest usefulness that Davos has for the world. And so it is scary.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now in Davos by Oxfam International’s executive director, Amitabh Behar. Oxfam has just released a new report titled “Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power.”

We’ll talk about that in a moment, but first, if you could talk about what’s happening on the ground right now, the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the global elite, but now an emergency summit to deal with President Trump threatening to seize Greenland? Can you talk about the significance of this, Amitabh Behar?

AMITABH BEHAR: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I must say that the sound is extremely poor.

But at the moment, in fact, now there’s a massive queue for attending the Trump session. And you can hear, actually, protest sounds from outside. So this is really the moment where everybody is gathering. There’s, I would say, massive nervousness. The people that I’m talking to, they’re extremely concerned about what is the speech going to do. So, that’s really what’s happening at the moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond, from your perspective as head of Oxfam International, to what it means to turn this into an emergency summit, with President Trump threatening to militarily invade Greenland, when you look, for example, in the context of what you deal with at Oxfam International, the world’s — the global inequality of the world, the amount of money just going into the military to protect Greenland and for the attack, and where else it could go?

AMITABH BEHAR: So, if I’m hearing the question right, absolutely, I think this is really a critical question, that we, as Oxfam, work on human rights, on humanitarian support. And at this juncture, the entire multilateral structure seems not just fragile, it’s broken. And at this juncture, we need to understand why is this happening.

So, the very specifics, because I have not heard what’s happened in the last few hours — the very specifics are very relevant, but, essentially, this is a reflection of the rule of the rich. As our report highlights, we are looking at billionaires actually sitting at $18.3 trillion. And last year, they added $2.5 trillion to their kitty, which was — which is enough to eradicate poverty 26 times over. But really, what we are also saying is that this money needs to be seen in the context where 50% of the global people live in poverty. One in four, quarter of the global population, actually sleeps hungry.

But I think the real point that we want to underscore is that these billionaires are now not happy being rich and richer. They really want now political power. And they’ve started buying votes, media houses, political parties and governments. So, at this moment, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than an average citizen. So, that’s the reality. And what we are seeing is that, essentially, we are moving away from democracies to oligarchies. So, this emergency of inequality is leading to oligarchies, and what we are seeing in the world is a reflection of that.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to summarize more what’s coming out of this stunning report of Oxfam International. You’ve pointed out the collective wealth of billionaires last year surged by two-and-a-half trillion dollars, almost equivalent to the total wealth held by the bottom half of humanity, 4.1 billion people; the number of billionaires topping 3,000 last year for the first time, while the richest, Elon Musk, becomes the first ever to surpass half a trillion dollars. The two-and-a-half trillion-dollar rise in billionaires’ wealth would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. And U.S. billionaire wealth now stands at $7.935 trillion, more than one-third of all billionaire wealth globally, and the U.S. is home to more billionaires than any other country. Finally, Oxfam reporting highly unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience the erosion of the rule of law and the undermining of elections. Do you say that we are seeing that in the United States today? And overall, talk about what this means, inequality leading to authoritarianism.

AMITABH BEHAR: So, it’s very clear that the billionaires are not happy being rich. And we are seeing how they are actually rigging the economic system, rigging the political system to gain more power. Just let’s look at the media. Fifty percent of the global media is owned by these billionaires. Nine out of the 10 biggest social media platforms are, again, owned by the same billionaires. And eight of the 10 biggest AI initiatives are, again, owned by the same billionaires. So, what you’re seeing is they have enormous power of shaping narratives, of ensuring how politics is going to be run.

And it doesn’t stop here. They’re able to twist policies. We have seen what happened when we saw Trump, a billionaire president, coming in, initially backed by the richest man in the world for many months, with some billionaires sitting in his Cabinet. The first big thing they do is to slash taxes for the super rich. So, this is the story of how economic policies get twisted.

But let’s juxtapose this. I’ve already talked about hunger. I’ve already talked about poverty. But when you actually see slashing of taxes — and this is not just a phenomena in the U.S., it’s happening globally — on the other hand, you don’t have enough resources to invest in basic services like education and health. So, what we are seeing is governments are making a massive mistake. They are making a choice of further supporting these billionaires in their accumulation of wealth, in their accumulation of political power, in their capture of state power. On the other hand, as in let’s take the continent Africa, if you combined the debt reservicing that’s happening from all the countries there, it’s one-and-a-half times more than the combined budget of education, health, social security. And we all know, through research, through experience, that education, health, social security, daycare are the primary drivers of an equal society.

So, I think it’s really important for us to understand that when World Economic Forum says that we’re going through a polycrisis, it’s not really a polycrisis. It’s not a crisis, a climate crisis independent of the hunger crisis and independent of the inequality crisis. These are all one crisis of the economic system we have created, with multiple manifestations of it.

AMY GOODMAN: In the last minutes we have, you single out the media, and you talk about the importance of the media being free to cover inequality. And you also talk about accountability for the political empowerment of ordinary citizens, including stronger protections for people’s freedoms of association, assembly and expression. The media can be used to further autocracy or to challenge it. Talk about what you have found and how people, overall, everyday people, the vast majority of people in the world, can be protected.

AMITABH BEHAR: Yeah. I think it’s really important for us to recognize that when you have economic poverty, it leads to hunger, but when you have political poverty, it leads to anger. And that is what we are seeing across the world. Just last year, we have seen 144 protests, large mass protests by people in more than 60 countries. And that’s happening at scale. The anger of common, ordinary people against this rigged economic system is spilling onto the streets, when they see that you have a trillionaire in the making; on the other hand, people are not able to get bread on their table. There is real anger coming around every, every street.

I come from India. So, just in South Asia, if you look at countries around me, in the last two years, we have seen a change of regime happening, first in Sri Lanka because of people’s protests, then in Bangladesh because of the students’ protests, then in Nepal because of the Gen Z protests. So, these protests are really what gives us hope. But let’s not forget, the states, instead of supporting the aspirations of common and ordinary people for an equal and just future, they’re actually cracking down on protest and repressing protest. And that’s translating in dramatic erosion of civil and political rights, dramatic erosion against voices of dissent. So, that’s really at the moment what we are seeing. But I work with social movements across the globe. I can clearly see that people are rising. And at the moment, because the media is so controlled by these billionaires, we do not get to hear about the anger. And I think the global leadership is making a massive mistake by not listening to the real voices of the people. And these voices are going to come together, and they will work towards a just and equal future.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much, Amitabh Behar, for joining us. You’re speaking to us as President Trump has taken the stage at the World Economic Forum, and we’ll report on what he says tomorrow. Amitabh Behar is Oxfam International executive director, joining us from Davos, Switzerland, from this World Economic Forum, WEF. And we’ll link to Oxfam’s new report, titled “Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power.”

Next up, we hear from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders on the picket line of the largest nurses’ strike in New York history. And we’ll speak with a striking nurse who’s a lead organizer with their union. Stay with us.

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