Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience

Demoting Petraeus to a 3 Star, Spells Trouble for Hillary?

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General Petraeus is still not out of the realm of more disciplinary action when it comes to his troubles. The ‘all-in’ for Obama, Defense Secretary Ash Carter is considering additional punishment for Petraeus and if this demotion happens, it could set a standard for how Hillary should/could be punished as her crimes were much worse.

Exclusive: Pentagon May Demote David Petraeus

The Defense Secretary is looking to put the clamp down on misbehaving generals. Pentagon insiders say Petraeus could be the next general to face the consequences.

TheDailyBeast: The Pentagon is considering retroactively demoting retired Gen. David Petraeus after he admitted to giving classified information to his biographer and mistress while he was still in uniform, three people with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.

The decision now rests with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter who is said to be willing to consider overruling an earlier recommendation by the Army that Petraeus not have his rank reduced. Such a demotion could cost the storied general hundreds of thousands of dollars—and deal an additional blow to his once-pristine reputation.

“The secretary is considering going in a different direction” from the Army, a defense official told the Daily Beast, because he wants to be consistent in his treatment of senior officers who engage in misconduct and to send a message that even men of Petraeus’ fame and esteemed reputation are not immune to punishment.

Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook told The Daily Beast that Carter had requested more information on the matter before reaching a final decision.

“The Department of the Army is still in the process of providing the Secretary with information

relevant to former‎ Secretary McHugh’s recommendation,” Cook told The Daily Beast, referring to ex-Army Secretary John McHugh, who had recommended taking no action against Petraeus. “Once the Secretary‎ has an opportunity to consider this information, he will make his decision about next steps, if any, in this matter.”

Carter could also recommend other actions that don’t result in Petraeus losing his fourth star. Or the Defense Secretary could simply allow the Army’s previous recommendations to stand.

Petraeus, arguably the most well-known and revered military officer of his generation, retired from the Army in 2011 with the rank of a four-star general, the highest rank an Army officer can achieve. If Carter decides to strip Petraeus of his fourth star, he could be demoted to the last rank at which he “satisfactorily” served, according to military regulations.

Reducing Petraeus’ rank, most likely to lieutenant general, could mean he’d have to pay back the difference in pension payments and other benefits that he received as a retired four-star general. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over his retirement. According to Pentagon figures, a four-star general with roughly the same years of experience as Petraeus was entitled to receive a yearly pension of nearly $220,000. A three-star officer would receive about $170,000.

Petraeus didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But the financial pain to Petraeus isn’t likely to be severe. He has confided to friends and acquaintances that he’s making a hefty sum from his job at a private equity firm and through speaking fees.

The demotion in rank would be a bigger, lasting blow, and take from Petraeus the rare achievement he’d set his eyes on many years ago.

At any given time, there are only 12 four-star generals in the Army, the largest of the services. By the time he was a colonel, in the mid-1990s, many thought Petraeus was destined to be one of them.

The U.S military has, on several occasions, demoted generals, increasingly for improper personal contact and not for poor battlefield decisions. But rarely does it demote four-star generals, in part because there are so few of them. It’s also more common to reduce the rank of more junior officers than of top generals.

If Petraeus were demoted, it would mark another spectacular fall. Petraeus stepped down as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 after his affair with Paula Broadwell, a writer and current Army reservist, was revealed. At the time, Petraeus had been frequently mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016.

Petraeus pleaded guilty last year to giving Broadwell eight notebooks that he compiled while serving as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and that he knew contained classified information. The notebooks held some of the most sensitive kinds of military and intelligence secrets, including the identities of covert officers, intelligence capabilities, quotes from high-level meetings of the National Security Council, and notes about Petraeus’ discussions with President Obama.

After leaving Afghanistan, Petraeus brought the books back to his home in Virginia and gave them to Broadwell just three days before he retired from the Army. She later returned them. No classified information appeared in her biography, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, officials have said.

Petraeus could have faced felony charges, including for lying to FBI investigators, but was allowed to plead guilty last year to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized handling classified information. He avoided and avoid a prison sentence and received two years probation and a $100,000 fine.

But that was not the end of the matter. Last year, the FBI gave Army investigators information that the bureau had come across as it was closing up its own investigation of Petraeus, the defense official and one former U.S. official told The Daily Beast.

The information, the FBI believed, might be of interest to the Army, the defense official said. The Army investigated and decided “there was nothing new here that should change his retirement” and “recommended that there be no change” to his four-star rank, the official said. Last month, it went to the Secretary of Defense for final approval.

Army personnel regulations say that an officer doesn’t automatically retire with the highest rank he or she achieved while in uniform. And even though Petraeus had already been officially retired, through a process known as grade determination the Army can retroactively reopen his case and consider whether to demote him “[i]f substantial new evidence discovered contemporaneously with or within a short time following separation could result in a lower grade determination.”

The regulations also state that if “an officer’s misconduct while still on active duty is documented,” including by “conviction after retirement,” a new grade determination may be completed. Petraeus hadn’t yet retired when he gave Broadwell the classified information.

The Army received the information from the FBI that prompted this new review more than four years after Petraeus had retired. The Defense Department was also running its own investigation into Petraeus’ relationship with Broadwell and what classified information he gave her at the same time the FBI and federal prosecutors were pursuing their case. That may explain why the Army decided it had seen nothing new in the information it received last year from the FBI and decided not to recommend a demotion.

But Carter is said to be concerned that because he has recommended other generals be reduced in rank for actions not becoming an officer, he’ll be seen as inconsistent if he doesn’t do the same for Petraeus. The decision is as much about timing and politics as it is Petraeus’ own transgressions.

“This is about Ash Carter, not David Petraeus,” the defense official said.

Last November, Carter removed his senior military aide, Lt. Gen. Ron Lewis, for personal misconduct, and referred the matter to the Pentagon’s inspector general for investigation. Lewis was demoted a rank, to a major general.

Lewis was a long-time and influential aide to the secretary, and his removal and punishment signaled Carter’s commitment to maintaining upstanding behavior among of the military’s generals. The exact nature of Lewis’ misconduct has not been announced, but military officials have suggested he was involved in an improper personal relationship.

While few are familiar with Petraeus’ potential demotion, those who are aware of it said they were surprised that he could be punished years years after the scaNdal was presumably put behind him and after Petraeus pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information. No general in recent history has been demoted years after scandal swirled around him or her.

Those who know and have worked with Petraeus describe him as a man of extraordinary capabilities and ambition. He received his fourth star in 2007 and then served in several prestigious and demanding assignments, including commander of U.S. Central Command, the commanding general of all ground forces in Iraq, and later as commander of ground forces in Afghanistan.

Petraeus’ unorthodox thinking and willingness to buck conventional strategy was seen as key to the U.S. victory over insurgents and jihadists in Iraq during the so-called troop surge of 2007 and 2008. His reputation was so esteemed that there was talk of giving him a fifth star–a largely symbolic gesture that was highly unlikely–or renaming the road to Petraeus’ alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy, after him.

Should Carter choose to knock Petraeus down to the rank of a three-star general, he will have a chance to appeal his case to the secretary, but Congress doesn’t have to be informed of the decision, the official said.

There is no deadline on Carter to make a decision.

The last commander to lose rank for professional misconduct was Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was demoted to colonel in 2005 for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. The last four-star general to be demoted was Gen. William Ward who retired as a three-star in 2012 amid allegations he misspent government money on himself and his family.

Will Hillary Return Money to Soros After This?

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TheHill: George Soros, a billionaire Democratic donor, told a close Hillary Clinton ally that he regretted supporting President Obama over her in the 2008 Democratic primary, according to an email released Thursday by the State Department.

Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden said in a May 2012 email to Clinton that Soros made the admission to her during a dinner. Additional detail here.

Soros-Linked Human Rights Group Calls on Businesses to Boycott Israel

New report slammed by pro-Israel community

Kredo/FreeBeacon: A leading U.S.-based human rights organization linked to Hillary Clinton supporter George Soros is planning to release a report this week that will call on businesses to sever relations with any company operated by Israeli Jews in the West Bank, according to an advance copy of the report provided to the Washington Free Beacon.

Human Rights Watch, which has been substantially funded by Soros and long accused of harboring an anti-Israel bias, will publish on Tuesday a 163-page report purporting to document how so-called “settlement businesses” harm Palestinians, according to an advance copy of the report set to be released Tuesday and provided independently to the Free Beacon.

Pro-Israel critics of the report describe it as biased and part of a larger effort by Israel’s critics to mainstream support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which had been used by Israel’s detractors to wage economic warfare on the Jewish state.

The report comes as Israel battles a European Union effort to label any Israeli products produced in disputed areas. The Israeli government maintains that the effort to single out Israel for special designation is dangerous. Other critics say it is reminiscent of efforts by the Nazis to boycott and label Jewish businesses in Germany.

Human Rights Watch, which has long been viewed as overly critical when it comes to Israel, claims that Palestinians who work at Israeli companies based in the West Bank are being exploited by their Jewish employers.

Business should “stop operating in, financing, servicing, or trading with Israeli settlement in order to comply with their human rights responsibilities,” according to an advance press release sent by the organization to reporters. “Those activities contribute to and benefit from an inherently unlawful and abusive system that violates the rights of Palestinians.”

Israeli companies based in disputed territories currently employ nearly 21,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Pro-Israel experts maintain that this relationship is fostering goodwill between the communities and offering struggling Palestinians stable employment.

“Human Rights Watch has a well-earned reputation for hostility to Israel, producing report after report attacking the Jewish state year after year,” said Elliott Abrams, a Middle East expert and deputy national security adviser for George W. Bush. “They are as obsessed with Israel as the [United Nations] is.”

Now, Abrams said, “they have done it again, this time jumping in with the BDS movement to urge boycotts of the Israeli companies that, ironically, provide the most employment for Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Palestinians are still seeking employment with them despite the political conflict surrounding the location of these Israeli companies, according to Al Monitor.

However, Human Rights Watch claims that Palestinians are harmed by their employment, claiming in its release that “settlement businesses facilitate the growth and operations of settlements.”

“These businesses depend on and contribute to the Israeli authorities’ unlawful confiscation of Palestinian land and other resources,” the group maintained. “They also benefit from these violations, as well as Israel’s discriminatory policies that provide privileges to settlements at the expense of Palestinians, such as access to land and water, government subsidies, and permits for developing land.”

William Jacobson, a Cornell law professor and pundit who publishes the website Legal Insurrection, said the Human Rights Watch Report is biased and agenda-driven.

“For many years Human Rights Watch has been criticized as having an anti-Israel political agenda,” said Jacobson, who writes frequently about the BDS movement. “This report reflects that agenda, with distorted presentations of international law geared towards reaching a preconceived conclusion supporting the BDS movement. Add this report to the long list of reasons why HRW cannot be taken serious as a neutral human rights group.”

One foreign policy consultant who declined to speak about the report on record said that the report is part of a larger campaign to defame and delegitimize Israeli efforts to form economic partnerships with Palestinians.

“The Israeli-Jewish companies targeted in this report provide jobs to Palestinians and support Arab-Jewish coexistence,” the source said. “These days they’re some of the only organizations and people in the West Bank doing those things, and yet HRW just produced a book calling for economic warfare against them. This attack is part of a broader political campaign targeting Israel and Israeli Jews. HRW is always willing to demonize Israel to the last Palestinian.”

***

Back in 2009: Visitor logs released by the White House late Friday show that a host of prominent people have been spending time at the executive mansion, including liberal powerhouses George Soros and former vice president Al Gore.

After a FOIA request to gain access to the White House visitor logs, it seems Marxists and progressives often visit the White House, see more detail here.

Here are some of the details of the Soros visits and imagine the phone calls.

On February 25, 2009 Soros visited David Lipton, then a White House economic adviser. (file #U70808)

On February 25, 2009 Soros visited Lawrence (Larry) Summers, who at the time was chairman of the White House U.S. National Economic Council for President Barack Obama. (file #U71032)

On March 24, 2009 Soros visited Christina “Tina” Tchen.  (file #U80165) Tchen is Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. According to her online bio from the White House website:

Tchen was previously a partner in corporate litigation at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. In that capacity, Tchen represented public agencies in state and federal class actions, including the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the Illinois Department of Public Aid, and the Chicago Housing Authority. Tchen is the recipient of many awards, including the Leadership Award from the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois (1999); “Women of Achievement” award from the Anti-Defamation League (1996); and Chicago Lawyer “Person of the Year” (1994).

On March 25, 2009 Soros visited Lipton again. (file #U80759)

On February 16, 2010, Soros visited Summers (again) . (file #U79042)

Ruh Roh, State Dept. Knew of Hillary’s Emails

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While Hillary blamed her ‘Blackberry’ for malfunctions, she knew so little that it was the server, not her NON-issued mobile device(s). Huma pushed back hard to several at the State Department, calling for more secure conditions, calling them silly. State even offered generators to ensure that private server would not fail. What????

EXCLUSIVE: Clinton Aides Resisted State Department Suggestion That Clinton Use State.gov Account

Great job to DC and Chuck:

Bombshell emails from the State Department show that a top official at the agency suggested to Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, in Aug. 2011 that the then-secretary of state begin using a government email account to protect against unexpected outages of her private email server.

But as the emails show, Abedin pushed back on the suggestion, telling the official, Stephen D. Mull, then the executive secretary of the State Department, that a State-issued Blackberry equipped with a state.gov email address “doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Besides showing that Clinton’s top aides were against the idea of her using a state.gov email account, the emails show for the first time that top State Department officials were aware of Clinton’s private email server arrangement.

The Daily Caller obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed on its behalf by the government watchdog group, Cause of Action.

The State Department — and Clinton — have resisted questions about who inside the State Department knew about and signed off on the private server, which Clinton kept at her house in New York. The FBI seized that device in August after it was discovered that two “top secret” emails had been sent to Clinton.

Besides Mull, the emails show that Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary for management at the State Department, knew of the private server. Kennedy is a powerful figure within the State Department. The career diplomat handles logistical issues within the agency and was the official responsible for requesting emails from Clinton and her aides.

The first email in the Aug. 30, 2011 chain was sent from Mull and addressed to Mills, though Abedin, Kennedy, and Monica Hanley, another Clinton aide, were copied on the correspondence.

“Thanks for alerting me to the communications issues the Secretary has been having,” Mull wrote.

In the email, Mull mentioned Clinton’s use of the personal email server and also proposed providing Clinton with a new Blackberry equipped with a state.gov email account.

“We are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry to replaced her personal unit which is malfunctioning,” wrote Mull, noting that the device was malfunctioning “possibly because of [sic] her personal email server is down.”

He offered to prepare two Blackberries, one of which would include “an operating State Department email account.”

And curiously, Mull noted that the official version “would mask her identity” but “would also be subject to FOIA requests.”

Mull also suggested a new communications package for Clinton which, he wrote, “will include things that anticipate the normally unexpected such as hurricanes, power outages, earthquakes, locusts, etc.”

The package included “generators, uninterrupted power supplies, supplementary satellite capabilities, including satellite phones for when local infrastructure fails.”

Other emails released by the State Department have showed that Clinton’s email sever crashed at least three other times. The crash in and around Aug. 30, 2011 seems to be the fourth documented outage. Other crashes occurred in Oct. 2012, well after Mull offered suggestions to Clinton’s staff, suggesting that the problem was never fixed.

Likewise, Mull’s suggestion that Clinton begin using a state.gov-equipped Blackberry device was met with resistance from Abedin, the emails show.

“Let’s discuss the state blackberry, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Abedin wrote.

The State Department has claimed in court filings that Clinton was not provided a government-issued Blackberry. In August, the agency stated in response to another FOIA lawsuit that it “does not believe that any personal computing device was issued by the Department to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and has not located any such device at the Department.”

The filing made no mention of the effort to provide Clinton with an official device.

In her email to Mull, Abedin also asserted that “even the white house attested” that outages were a “pretty wide spread problem, not just affecting us.”

“Thanks for reminding all of this very helpful context,” Mull responded solely to Abedin.

She emailed back: “Its pretty silly and she knows it.” It is unclear if Abedin was referring to Clinton or to Mills, who was the first to email Mull about the communications issues.

 

Stephen Mull Emails to Cheryl Mills

No comment from the State Department…Hillary?

 

 

 

 

Where is Barbara Boxer on the Iran Deal Now?

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Inspectors will monitor Iran’s key nuclear facilities 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” President Obama promised yesterday. Praising the Iran deal’s implementation, he asserted that Iran cannot build a nuclear weapon and that the Middle East has been made safer. Tellingly, the president also referenced Iran’s detention of U.S. sailors last week: “We worked directly with the Iranian government and secured the release of our sailors in less than 24 hours.” These two quotes illustrate President Obama’s kidnapping of realist international-relations theory, which, as he sees it, involves balancing U.S. interests with the realities of a complicated world. Or, as he puts it, “Don’t do stupid sh**.”

The president believes that, with a mix of hard compromise and unwavering leadership, he has prevented a nuclear-arms race and facilitated Iranian political moderation. But this isn’t realism; it is delusion.
First off, it’s willfully ignorant. Consider again President Obama’s remark on inspecting “Iran’s key nuclear facilities.” It’s relevant because it reminds us that the deal in fact prevents timely inspections of other Iranian military sites. And by describing only some nuclear facilities as “key,” President Obama is tacitly accepting Iran’s obstruction of non-key facility inspections. Iran will simply use military sites for nuclear-weaponization research and then claim those facilities are off limits or clean them up before inspections. This isn’t really debatable; after all, Iran’s ongoing ballistic-missile tests prove its public determination to build a nuclear-weapons delivery platform. Of course, announcing new sanctions yesterday on eleven individuals and organizations connected to Iranian ballistic-missile research, the president said he will “remain steadfast in opposing Iran’s destabilizing behavior elsewhere.” He neglected — as do most in the media — to mention that these new sanctions are so weak that they’re functionally irrelevant. Iran will simply use new cut-out entities and further evasion to continue its ballistic activities. The Obama administration knows this, the Sunni monarchies know this, the Iranians know this, and the Europeans — who cannot wait to get their hands on Iranian business contracts — are banking on it.

The second way in which this deal distorts realist theory is in its fatally narrow-minded strategic vision. As I noted recently at National Review Online, Iran’s unchallenged dissection of U.S. credibility on inspections, missile tests, support for regional terrorism, etc., is fueling reciprocal escalation by the Sunni-Arab monarchies. As a consequence, opportunities for political moderation in the Middle East are rapidly being displaced by sectarian extremism. Making matters worse, as attested by President Obama’s failure to meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Washington last week, the president seems to have decided to simply ignore America’s Sunni allies. This preference for a short-term perceived win (the Iran deal) over long-term U.S. influence with the Sunni kingdoms (promoting political reform and restraining their sectarian impulses) further exemplifies the president’s defective realism. Yet the president’s realist delusion is enabled by many in the international-relations community. Just contemplate how his Twitter supporters mobilized this weekend. Professor Daniel Drezner of Tufts University gleefully tweeted: “All US negotiations with Iran this week have been a win-win. Which, if you believe relations with Iran’s regime are zero-sum, is infuriating.” Drezner also claimed that the Iranians released in exchange for Jason Rezaian and Amir Hekmati and two other Americans were largely insignificant actors. Vox’s Max Fisher tweeted: “Amazing fact: Iran surrenders the bulk of its nuclear program, and it is considered a partisan issue in America whether that is good or bad.” From the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko tweeted that every Joint Staff and Central Command defense planner is “elated.” All these claims deserve great scrutiny. First, while defense planners hope the Iran deal will hold, they also know it fuels second- and third-order risks of sectarian escalation. Moreover, although I support the deal to release Rezaian and company, we shouldn’t pretend that the released Iranians are insignificant. They were variously involved in supporting Iran’s satellite communications capability, in stealing U.S. technology for the Iranian military, and in hacking into the U.S. power-grid and airline-service databases. According to an American cyber-investigations firm, the airport hacking involved Iranian attempts to access ground-crew credentials. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Iran wants access to civilian aircraft and power infrastructure: the capability to launch spectacular attacks on U.S. and allied interests. Again, realism demands our assessment of the facts in the context of Iran’s previous actions. For one, we should remember Iran’s 2011 attempt to blow up a packed Washington, D.C., restaurant. Oh, and as Josh Rogin reports, two other Iranian suspects the Obama administration has agreed to stop pursuing are involved in the drowning and starving of Syrian civilians. Related: Assad Is Deliberately Starving Sunni Muslims in Syria Finally, any true realist must also accept what this deal means for hard-liners aligned with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). Holding dominion over key sectors of Iran’s economy and controlling foreign commercial access to the economy, the IRGC is getting a big payday. Realism also requires our objective assessment as to where the IRGC will spend its money: exported death. Consider that in the past five years, the IRGC has plotted an attack on the U.S. capital, supported the Taliban, assassinated U.S. allies in cities such as Beirut, and kidnapped U.S. citizens. And upon presenting these tests of U.S. resolve, the IRGC has witnessed two distinct Obama-administration responses: silence and, as in the case of last week’s sailor kidnap, gratitude. Yesterday, we learned of another Iranian test: Within the past few days, several Americans were kidnapped by a militia in Baghdad. I would confidently venture that an IRGC-proxy such as Kataib Hezbollah is responsible. As I warned back in December, “if the IRGC leadership senses American weakness, it will take hostile action (directly, via KH, or via covert subgroups) against U.S. interests.” Don’t get me wrong; realism demands that we actively pursue diplomacy with Iran. Iran’s youthful population is an existential threat to the theocrats and a source of major internal political pressure. We must not alienate these future leaders with a leap to military action. Yet by our failure to deter Iran’s hard-liners, we only encourage them further. And in their empowerment, political moderation perishes. Foreign-policy realism demands that we sometimes deal with unpleasant people. But it also requires our commitment to honest policy.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429907/obamas-realism-iran?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=569ce98d04d3012242625e14&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

Davos: Europe’s Social Breakdown, Begins with Immigration

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And all the signals are beginning to apply to the United States….fair warning.

Davos/World Economic Forum

Davos Boss Warns Refugee Crisis Could Be Precursor to Something Much Bigger

Bloomberg: As the crash in commodities prices spreads economic woe across the developing world, Europe could face a wave of migration that will eclipse today’s refugee crisis, says Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

“Look how many countries in Africa, for example, depend on the income from oil exports,”Schwab said in an interview ahead of the WEF’s 46th annual meeting, in the Swiss resort of Davos. “Now imagine 1 billion inhabitants, imagine they all move north.”

Whereas much of the discussion about commodities has focused on the economic and market impact, Schwab said he’s concerned that it will also spur “a substantial social breakdown.”

That fits into what Schwab, the founder of the WEF, calls the time of “unexpected consequences” we now live in. In the modern era, it’s harder for policy makers to know the impact of their actions, which has led to “erosion of trust in decision makers.”

“First, we have to look at the root causes of this,” Schwab said. “The normal citizen today is overwhelmed by the complexity and rapidity of what’s happening, not only in the political world but also the technological field.”

That sense of dislocation has fueled the rise of radical political leaders who tap into a rich vein of anger and xenophobia. For reason to prevail, Schwab said, “we have to re-establish a sense that we all are in the same boat.”

The theme for this year’s meeting is the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which the WEF defines as a “fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

While that presents huge opportunities, Schwab warns that technological innovation may result in the loss of 20 million jobs in the coming years. Those job cuts risk “hollowing out the middle class,” Schwab said, “a pillar of our democracies.”

At the same time, Schwab argues, trends like the sharing economy and the changes wrought by technology mean economists must adapt the tools they use to assess well-being. “Many of our traditional measurements do not work anymore,” he said.

After decades watching the ebbs and flows of the global economy, Schwab said the current anxiety is “not new” for him. But he said that as the world gets ever more interconnected, the consequences of such turmoil could become more grave. This week’s WEF meeting, he said, will offer policy makers “the first opportunity after the markets have come down to look at the situation and coordinate.”

Davos facts for this year:

CNNMoney: Around 2,500 participants from more than 100 countries, including 40 heads of state, attend the gathering in Switzerland, formally known as the World Economic Forum annual meeting. This year, the theme is “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

It takes place in the mountains. Way up. At 1,560 meters (5,120 feet) above sea level, Davos is Europe’s highest town. Its population is just over 11,000 and the average temperature in January is -5°C/23°F.

Why in such a remote, cold place? Tradition. Also, it’s much easier to secure a little town wedged between the mountains than a conference center in a big city — remember, 40 heads of states are coming.

Only once was the meeting held outside of Davos: In 2002, in New York, as a gesture of solidarity after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Davos is safe. The organizers don’t release specific information, but it is estimated that around 5,000 Swiss troops, police and security personnel guard the town.

Davos is pricey. The ticket is around $20,000 and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Travel can cost thousands, and a night in a medium-range hotel is around $600. Add to it wining, dining, and essential accessories like snow boots, and the total bill can add up to around $40,000.

Davos is green. The town’s CO2 levels fall on average up to 30% during the annual meeting, thanks to controls on vehicle emissions and the use of electric transport.

Besides the skiing, what’s it all about? Meetings. Hundreds of them. With major companies, countries and media represented, there is hardly a better opportunity to schmooze and make deals. But the forum is not about big public announcements. Meetings are informal and take place behind closed doors.

Who is coming this year? Nearly everyone who matters in the world of business. Bill Gates will be there, as will Mary Barra, Satya Nadella, Jack Ma, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg and dozens of other CEOs.

The IMF chief Christine Lagarde will be in Davos, with ECB President Mario Draghi and the governors of 10 national central banks.

The U.S. will be represented by Joe Biden and John Kerry. Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, is also coming, as is Penny Pritzker, the Secretary of Commerce.

The King and Queen of Jordan will be there, as will Bono, Leonardo DiCaprio, Yao Chen and will.i.am.

They’ll all be closely followed by around 250 journalists, including a posse from CNN.

And the no-shows? Neither Barack Obama nor Vladimir Putin are coming to Switzerland. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also sitting it out this year.