HOT AIR

Every day I discover in my inbox some news about another grand meeting which the elites of the world have attended or where a great person, totally unknown by anyone except his close family (you may call them a 'household name'!) has been feted.

I find it increasingly annoying to read about some international high-level global meeting of some totally unknown group of people who have given themselves the right to "devote" their time and energy to changing the world's framework.

Many such meetings concern world hunger issues. Among them is, for example, the United Nations Food Systems Summit, which is held annually in different countries around the world.

Terribly grand people start advocating one prescription for solving the challenges of starvation and food production. None of the grand people of course has ever experienced such a situation – unless it was because their doctor told them to lose some weight!

I find the same at the annual January meeting of the World Economic Forum, which is attended by the most powerful commercial and industrial grandees in the world. Four years ago, at the 2021 meeting, reportedly 1400 private planes landed at Zürich airport from all over the world in order to listen to the environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

I suppose no one among the grandees ever noticed the irony. The latest grand conference I've come across, although it has apparently been in existence for about 15 years, is called the Atlantic Council.

According to its website, the Atlantic Council represents 700 governments, business, military and media leaders as well as the head of the IMF and some big corporations in the chemical world and a number of large NGOs.

Every year it proclaims its Global Citizen awards. These awards, as one would expect, are intended for people who have played a serious role in making the world a better place. Among those who have been awarded the accolade of Global Citizen this year are two people whom one must at least question.

The first is the president of Argentina, who does not seem to have managed to reduce the amount of violence in his own country. Another awardee, Gianni Infantino, is the president of FIFA.

FIFA is well known as an organisation so corrupt that it is beyond reform.

It has been found to be rotten to the core, absolutely corrupt at all levels. Yet, because Mr Infantino has been able to gather the support of a number of powerful people, particularly among the Middle East oil producers, he has now become someone who can judge on all kind of issues of international relations.

The fact that he has no qualifications to do so shows that the Atlantic Council is clearly another enormous bubble of hot air and self-declared importance; this does not seem to matter one iota among its peers.