February 21, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
Many skeptics and the unknowledgeable view the Great Reset as a conspiracy theory. So, I elected to begin the series with a counter to that assumption following an introduction to the World Economic Forum. Further, many others are knowledgeable about a few aspects of the Great Reset, but not its all-encompassing nature. So, I want to provide a glimpse of its nature.
To accomplish these two objectives, I felt Michael Rectenwald’s article in the Hillsdale College’s Bulletin Imprimis accomplished both, supplemented with some perspectives in United Libraries Great Reset Infoguide.
Within this first segment’s excerpts, six different Great Reset topics are touched upon that call for more research: climate and sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, economy, and income inequality issues, the effect of COVID, digital governance, and corporate and state governance. Advocate and critic’s views will be presented on each of these in segments 6 through 11.
Segments 2 & 3 will feature excerpts from Klaus Schwab’s first two recent books, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Segment 4 will be a counter to segments 2 & 3. Segment 5 will provide some history on the genesis of some of Schwab’s ideas – late 20th century attempts to modify World Order.
Segment 12 will provide perspectives and background on some of the global elites behind the Great Reset. Segment 13 will define the “new normal” following the coronavirus pandemic. Segment 14 will provide some interesting history of the current “World Order” and insight on changes to it as viewed by Henry Kissinger in his 2014 book, World Order.
Hopefully the series will provide sufficient information to answer the question: “Is Democracy in the world in Danger?” and the follow-on question: “Is the answer good or bad” from your perspective?
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Many skeptics and the unknowledgeable view the Great Reset as a conspiracy theory. So, I elected to begin the series with a counter to that assumption following an introduction to the World Economic Forum. Further, many others are knowledgeable about a few aspects of the Great Reset, but not its all-encompassing nature. So, I want to provide a glimpse of its nature.
To accomplish these two objectives, I felt Michael Rectenwald’s article in the Hillsdale College’s Bulletin Imprimis accomplished both, supplemented with some perspectives in United Libraries Great Reset Infoguide.
Within this first segment’s excerpts, six different Great Reset topics are touched upon that call for more research: climate and sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, economy, and income inequality issues, the effect of COVID, digital governance, and corporate and state governance. Advocate and critic’s views will be presented on each of these in segments 6 through 11.
Segments 2 & 3 will feature excerpts from Klaus Schwab’s first two recent books, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Segment 4 will be a counter to segments 2 & 3. Segment 5 will provide some history on the genesis of some of Schwab’s ideas – late 20th century attempts to modify World Order.
Segment 12 will provide perspectives and background on some of the global elites behind the Great Reset. Segment 13 will define the “new normal” following the coronavirus pandemic. Segment 14 will provide some interesting history of the current “World Order” and insight on changes to it as viewed by Henry Kissinger in his 2014 book, World Order.
Hopefully the series will provide sufficient information to answer the question: “Is Democracy in the world in Danger?” and the follow-on question: “Is the answer good or bad” from your perspective?
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GREAT RESET: IS DEMOCRACY (worldwide) IN DANGER?
THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM – EXCERPTS: SEGMENT 1
INTRODUCTION: The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a foundation and lobbying organization based in Cologny in the Swiss canton of Geneva, known primarily for the annual meeting of the same name it organizes, which takes place every year in Davos, Switzerland. This brings paid-up members, leading international economists, politicians, scientists, social actors and journalists to discuss current global issues.
The forum, which is funded primarily by its 1,000 member companies – typically global firms with sales of more than five billion U.S. dollars – and by public grants, was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab. It organizes other meetings around the world during the year, including the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in China. In addition to its events, the WEF regularly publishes research reports.
With initiatives such as the “Global Redesign,” the WEF calls for a multistakeholder governance approach to make global decisions not only inter-governmentally, but in “coalitions” with multinational corporations and civil society organizations. It sees phases of global instability – such as during the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – as a window of opportunity to intensify its program. The WEF’s agenda increasingly focuses on activist issues with positive connotations, such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, which critics see as a strategy to mask the organization’s true plutocratic goals. It describes itself as impartial and not bound by any political or national interests.
The WEF has observer status at the United Nations Economic and Social Counsel. They have offices not only in Cologny, but also in Beijing (China), New York (USA), and Tokyo (Japan). In 2016, the Forum opened the “Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” in San Francisco (USA).
ANNUAL MEETINGS:
In Davos: The central event of the Forum is the meeting of more than 1,000 member companies as well as politicians and representatives of science, non-government organizations, religion and the media every year in January or February in Davos. Guests are able to participate in approximately 220 sessions of the official programs during the five-day event.
In China: The “Annual Meeting of New Champions,” which is held annually in China is also known as “Summer Davos.” This is a meeting of participants whom the Forum describes as representatives of “global growth companies.” These companies are primarily flagship companies from fast-growing emerging markets such as China and India, but also include fast-starters from developed countries.
YOUNG GLOBAL LEADERS: In 2005, the Forum established the Young Global Leaders (YGL) community. This has the organizational form of a Swiss foundation and is managed by a 14-member foundation board. The members of YGL are young leaders who belong to a wide variety of disciplines and come from all parts of the world. They are appointed for six years and must not have reached the age of 40 at the time of the appointment. New members are appointed annually. In 2014, YGL leaders had more than 900 members. Notable members of the YGL include Emmanuel Macron, president of France and Justin Trudeau, president of Canada.
EXAMPLES OF DIGNITARIES WHO HAVE ATTENDED WEF ANNUAL MEETINGS: South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Bill Gates (keynote address in 2008), U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (opening speech – 2008), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (opening address – 2009), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Un Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (opening speech – 2013), Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, Iranian President Hassan Rohani, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (opening address – 2015), U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, American investor George Soros, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping (opening address – 2017), British Prime Minister Theresa May, U.S. President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, musician Elton John, Canada’s president Justin Trudeau, Swiss President Ueli Maurer (opening address – 2019), Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Swedish climate activist Great Thunberg.
THE GREAT RESET: The WEF calls its initiative to make the global economy more equitable, social and sustainable and more aligned with the interests of “stakeholders” after the COVID – 19 pandemic The Great Reset. The initiative was drafted by WEF Director Klaus Schwab and unveiled in June 2020. Since then, various groups and authors have used the term Great Reset to describe alleged plans for world domination by a powerful financial and political elite that is behind the pandemic and is using it to further its goals. According to Forbes magazine, the WEF’s Great Reset agenda is “another example of how rich, powerful elites assuage their conscience with phony efforts to help the masses, making themselves even richer and more powerful in the process.”
GOVERNMENTS: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a speech to the UN in September 2020 that “rebuilding better” means “supporting the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The pandemic, he said, “provides an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to rethink economic systems that actually address global challenges such as extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.” The “building back better” idea of using the waning pandemic to stimulate a recovery for a more sustainable and equitable economy was also echoed by newly elected U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Source: Great Reset Infoguide by United Library (May 2022).
WHAT IS THE GREAT RESET? From: Hillsdale College Imprimis by Michael Rectenwald chief academic officer American Scholars. Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. The Great Reset is real. Indeed, just last year Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In the book, they define the Great Reset as a means of addressing the “weakness of capitalism” that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.
But the idea of the Great Reset goes back much further. It can be traced at least as far back as the inception of WEF, originally founded as the European Management Forum, in 1971. In that same year, Schwab, an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering. It was in this book that Schwab first introduced the concept he would later call “stakeholder capitalism,” arguing “that management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.”
In 2018 and 2019, the WEF organized two events that became the primary inspiration for the current Great Reset. In May 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct “CLADE X,” a simulation of a national pandemic response. Specifically, the exercise simulated the outbreak of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus, called CLADE X, without effective vaccines, “experts tell us that we could eventually see 30 to 40 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 900 million around the world – twelve percent of the global population.” Clearly, preparation for a global pandemic was in order.
In October 2019, the WEF collaborated with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on another pandemic exercise, “Event 201,” which simulated an international response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. This was two months before the COVID outbreak in China. The CLADE X and Event 201 simulations anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual COVID crisis, the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat “misinformation,” the flooding of social media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.
In addition to being promoted as a response to COVID, the Great Reset is promoted as a response to climate change. On June 13, 2019, the WEF signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the United Nations to form a partnership to advance the “UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Shortly after that, the WEF promised to help finance the UN’s climate change agenda and committed the WEF to help the UN “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” including providing assets and expertise for “digital governance.”
In June 2020, at its 50th annual meeting, the WEF announced the Great Reset’s official launch declaring that COVID represented an “opportunity that can be seized”, that “we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world”; that “the moment must be seized to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity – a source of profitable opportunity at a time of distress for the majority.” The Great Reset aims to usher in a bewildering economic amalgam – Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism – which I have called “community capitalism.” In brief, stakeholder capitalism involves the behavioral modification of corporations to benefit not shareholders, but stakeholders – individuals and groups that stand to benefit or lose from corporate behavior. Stakeholder capitalism requires not only corporate responses to pandemics and ecological issues such as climate change, “but also rethinking corporations’ commitments to already vulnerable communities within their ecosystems.” This is the “social justice” aspect of the Great Reset. To comply with that, governments, banks, and asset managers use the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) index to squeeze non-woke corporations and businesses out of the market. The ESG index is essentially a social credit score that is used to drive ownership and control of production away from the non-woke or non-compliant.
One of the WEF’s many powerful “strategic partners,” BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model. Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink’s 2021 letter to other CEOs indicating his support, is more than a report. It is an implicit threat; be woke or else.
Stakeholder capitalism entails corporate cooperation with the state and vastly increased government intervention in the economy. The tendency of the Great Reset is toward monopolization – vesting as much control over production and distribution in as few favored corporations as possible, while eliminating industries and producers deemed non-essential or inimical. To bring this reset about, Schwab writes, “every country from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”
Another way of describing the goal of the Great Reset is “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” – a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below. Several decades ago, as China’s growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe its economic system. Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, the Chinese system amounts to a socialist or communist state increasingly funded by capitalist economic development.
The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, but in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political class began with a socialist political system and then introduced privately held for profit production, the West began with capitalism and is now implementing a Chinese-style political system. This Chinese-style system includes vastly increased state intervention in the economy, on the one hand, and on the other, the kind of authoritarian measures that the Chinese government uses to control its population.
Schwab and Malleret write that if “the past five centuries in Europe and America” have taught us anything, it is that “acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state.” The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the WEF could only dream – above all, the destruction of small businesses, and eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state. In the U.S. alone, millions of small businesses closed their doors due to the lockdowns. Yelp data indicates that 60% of those closures are now permanent. Meanwhile companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google enjoyed record gains.
Other developments that advance the Great Reset agenda have included unfettered immigration, travel restrictions for otherwise legal border crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money and the subsequent inflation, increased taxation, increased dependence on the state, broken supply chains, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances. Such policies reflect the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset – fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to reset downwards – except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year.
This corporate-state hybrid is largely unaccountable to the constituents of national governments. Governance is not only increasingly privatized, but also and more importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions to governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous corporate assets. As such, corporations become what I have called “governmentalities” – otherwise private organizations wielded as state apparatuses, with no obligation to answer to pesky voters. Since these corporations are multinational, the state essentially becomes globalist, whether or not a one-world government is ever formalized.
As if the economic and governmental resets were not dramatic enough, the technological resets read like a dystopian science fiction novel. It is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution – or 4-IR for short. The first, second, and third industrial revolutions were the mechanical, electrical, and digital revolutions. The 4-IR marks the convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The foreseen result will be the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds, which presents a challenge to the ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including the definition of a human being.
In short, 4-IR seeks to accelerate the merging of humans and machines, resulting in a world in which all information, including genetic information, is shared, and every action, thought, and motivation if known, predicted, and possibly precluded. Unless taken out of the hands of corporate-socialist technocrats, the 4-IR will eventually lead to a virtual and inescapable prison of body and mind. Big Digital is the communications, ideological, and technological arm of an emerging corporate-socialist totalitarianism. The Great Reset is the name that has since been given to the project of establishing this world system.
Just as Schwab and the WEF predicted, the COVID crisis has accelerated the Great Reset. Monopolistic corporations have consolidated their grip on the economy from above, while socialism continues to advance for the rest of us below. In partnership with Big Digital, Big Pharma, the mainstream media, national and international health agencies and compliant populations, hitherto democratic Western states – think especially of Australia, New Zealand, and Austria – are being transformed into totalitarian regimes modeled after China.
But let me end on a note of hope. Because the goals of the Great Reset depend on the obliteration not only of free markets, but of individual liberty and free will, it is, perhaps ironically, unsustainable. Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to ultimate failure. That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t, again like those earlier attempts, leave a lot of destruction in its wake – which is all the more reason to oppose it now and with all our might.
Source: Hillsdale College Imprimis by Michael Rectenwald chief academic officer American Scholars (December 2021)
FORMATION OF A DETACHED ELITE: The emergence of a detached elite, often referred to by the neologism “Davos Man,” refers to a global group whose members consider themselves to be fully “international.” The term refers to people who “have little need for national loyalty, regard national borders as obstacles that are fortunately disappearing, and view national governments as relics from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the global operations of the elite,” according to political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who is credited with inventing the neologism.
The Transnational institute describes the primary purpose of the World Economic Forum as “a socializing institution for the emerging global elite, the ‘mafiaocracy’ of globalization made up of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats, and politicians. They promote common ideas and serve common interests: their own.”
Manager Magazine journalist Henrik Muller argued in 2019 that the “Davos Man” has already broken up into different groups and camps. He sees three central drivers for this development:
DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES AND INSTITUTIONS: In its 2010 “Global Redesign” report, the World Economic Forum calls for a global world to be best governed by a coalition of multinational corporations, governments (including through the United Nations system), and select civil society organizations. It argues that governments are no longer “the overwhelmingly dominant actors on the world stage” and that “the time has come for a new stakeholder paradigm of international governance.” The WEF’s vision includes building a “public-private” UN in which certain specialized agencies operate under shared governmental and non-governmental systems.
According to the Transnational Institute, the Forum is therefore planning to replace a recognized democratic model with one in which a self-selected group of “stakeholders” makes decisions on behalf of the people. According to the European Parliament think tank, critics also see the WEF as a tool for political and business leaders to “make decisions without accountability to voters or shareholders.”
Source: Great Reset Infoguide by United Library (May 2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM – EXCERPTS: SEGMENT 1
INTRODUCTION: The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a foundation and lobbying organization based in Cologny in the Swiss canton of Geneva, known primarily for the annual meeting of the same name it organizes, which takes place every year in Davos, Switzerland. This brings paid-up members, leading international economists, politicians, scientists, social actors and journalists to discuss current global issues.
The forum, which is funded primarily by its 1,000 member companies – typically global firms with sales of more than five billion U.S. dollars – and by public grants, was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab. It organizes other meetings around the world during the year, including the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in China. In addition to its events, the WEF regularly publishes research reports.
With initiatives such as the “Global Redesign,” the WEF calls for a multistakeholder governance approach to make global decisions not only inter-governmentally, but in “coalitions” with multinational corporations and civil society organizations. It sees phases of global instability – such as during the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – as a window of opportunity to intensify its program. The WEF’s agenda increasingly focuses on activist issues with positive connotations, such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, which critics see as a strategy to mask the organization’s true plutocratic goals. It describes itself as impartial and not bound by any political or national interests.
The WEF has observer status at the United Nations Economic and Social Counsel. They have offices not only in Cologny, but also in Beijing (China), New York (USA), and Tokyo (Japan). In 2016, the Forum opened the “Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” in San Francisco (USA).
ANNUAL MEETINGS:
In Davos: The central event of the Forum is the meeting of more than 1,000 member companies as well as politicians and representatives of science, non-government organizations, religion and the media every year in January or February in Davos. Guests are able to participate in approximately 220 sessions of the official programs during the five-day event.
In China: The “Annual Meeting of New Champions,” which is held annually in China is also known as “Summer Davos.” This is a meeting of participants whom the Forum describes as representatives of “global growth companies.” These companies are primarily flagship companies from fast-growing emerging markets such as China and India, but also include fast-starters from developed countries.
YOUNG GLOBAL LEADERS: In 2005, the Forum established the Young Global Leaders (YGL) community. This has the organizational form of a Swiss foundation and is managed by a 14-member foundation board. The members of YGL are young leaders who belong to a wide variety of disciplines and come from all parts of the world. They are appointed for six years and must not have reached the age of 40 at the time of the appointment. New members are appointed annually. In 2014, YGL leaders had more than 900 members. Notable members of the YGL include Emmanuel Macron, president of France and Justin Trudeau, president of Canada.
EXAMPLES OF DIGNITARIES WHO HAVE ATTENDED WEF ANNUAL MEETINGS: South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Bill Gates (keynote address in 2008), U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (opening speech – 2008), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (opening address – 2009), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Un Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (opening speech – 2013), Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, Iranian President Hassan Rohani, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (opening address – 2015), U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, American investor George Soros, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping (opening address – 2017), British Prime Minister Theresa May, U.S. President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, musician Elton John, Canada’s president Justin Trudeau, Swiss President Ueli Maurer (opening address – 2019), Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Swedish climate activist Great Thunberg.
THE GREAT RESET: The WEF calls its initiative to make the global economy more equitable, social and sustainable and more aligned with the interests of “stakeholders” after the COVID – 19 pandemic The Great Reset. The initiative was drafted by WEF Director Klaus Schwab and unveiled in June 2020. Since then, various groups and authors have used the term Great Reset to describe alleged plans for world domination by a powerful financial and political elite that is behind the pandemic and is using it to further its goals. According to Forbes magazine, the WEF’s Great Reset agenda is “another example of how rich, powerful elites assuage their conscience with phony efforts to help the masses, making themselves even richer and more powerful in the process.”
GOVERNMENTS: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a speech to the UN in September 2020 that “rebuilding better” means “supporting the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The pandemic, he said, “provides an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to rethink economic systems that actually address global challenges such as extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.” The “building back better” idea of using the waning pandemic to stimulate a recovery for a more sustainable and equitable economy was also echoed by newly elected U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Source: Great Reset Infoguide by United Library (May 2022).
WHAT IS THE GREAT RESET? From: Hillsdale College Imprimis by Michael Rectenwald chief academic officer American Scholars. Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. The Great Reset is real. Indeed, just last year Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In the book, they define the Great Reset as a means of addressing the “weakness of capitalism” that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.
But the idea of the Great Reset goes back much further. It can be traced at least as far back as the inception of WEF, originally founded as the European Management Forum, in 1971. In that same year, Schwab, an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering. It was in this book that Schwab first introduced the concept he would later call “stakeholder capitalism,” arguing “that management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.”
In 2018 and 2019, the WEF organized two events that became the primary inspiration for the current Great Reset. In May 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct “CLADE X,” a simulation of a national pandemic response. Specifically, the exercise simulated the outbreak of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus, called CLADE X, without effective vaccines, “experts tell us that we could eventually see 30 to 40 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 900 million around the world – twelve percent of the global population.” Clearly, preparation for a global pandemic was in order.
In October 2019, the WEF collaborated with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on another pandemic exercise, “Event 201,” which simulated an international response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. This was two months before the COVID outbreak in China. The CLADE X and Event 201 simulations anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual COVID crisis, the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat “misinformation,” the flooding of social media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.
In addition to being promoted as a response to COVID, the Great Reset is promoted as a response to climate change. On June 13, 2019, the WEF signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the United Nations to form a partnership to advance the “UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Shortly after that, the WEF promised to help finance the UN’s climate change agenda and committed the WEF to help the UN “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” including providing assets and expertise for “digital governance.”
In June 2020, at its 50th annual meeting, the WEF announced the Great Reset’s official launch declaring that COVID represented an “opportunity that can be seized”, that “we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world”; that “the moment must be seized to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity – a source of profitable opportunity at a time of distress for the majority.” The Great Reset aims to usher in a bewildering economic amalgam – Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism – which I have called “community capitalism.” In brief, stakeholder capitalism involves the behavioral modification of corporations to benefit not shareholders, but stakeholders – individuals and groups that stand to benefit or lose from corporate behavior. Stakeholder capitalism requires not only corporate responses to pandemics and ecological issues such as climate change, “but also rethinking corporations’ commitments to already vulnerable communities within their ecosystems.” This is the “social justice” aspect of the Great Reset. To comply with that, governments, banks, and asset managers use the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) index to squeeze non-woke corporations and businesses out of the market. The ESG index is essentially a social credit score that is used to drive ownership and control of production away from the non-woke or non-compliant.
One of the WEF’s many powerful “strategic partners,” BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model. Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink’s 2021 letter to other CEOs indicating his support, is more than a report. It is an implicit threat; be woke or else.
Stakeholder capitalism entails corporate cooperation with the state and vastly increased government intervention in the economy. The tendency of the Great Reset is toward monopolization – vesting as much control over production and distribution in as few favored corporations as possible, while eliminating industries and producers deemed non-essential or inimical. To bring this reset about, Schwab writes, “every country from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”
Another way of describing the goal of the Great Reset is “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” – a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below. Several decades ago, as China’s growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe its economic system. Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, the Chinese system amounts to a socialist or communist state increasingly funded by capitalist economic development.
The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, but in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political class began with a socialist political system and then introduced privately held for profit production, the West began with capitalism and is now implementing a Chinese-style political system. This Chinese-style system includes vastly increased state intervention in the economy, on the one hand, and on the other, the kind of authoritarian measures that the Chinese government uses to control its population.
Schwab and Malleret write that if “the past five centuries in Europe and America” have taught us anything, it is that “acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state.” The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the WEF could only dream – above all, the destruction of small businesses, and eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state. In the U.S. alone, millions of small businesses closed their doors due to the lockdowns. Yelp data indicates that 60% of those closures are now permanent. Meanwhile companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google enjoyed record gains.
Other developments that advance the Great Reset agenda have included unfettered immigration, travel restrictions for otherwise legal border crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money and the subsequent inflation, increased taxation, increased dependence on the state, broken supply chains, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances. Such policies reflect the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset – fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to reset downwards – except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year.
This corporate-state hybrid is largely unaccountable to the constituents of national governments. Governance is not only increasingly privatized, but also and more importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions to governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous corporate assets. As such, corporations become what I have called “governmentalities” – otherwise private organizations wielded as state apparatuses, with no obligation to answer to pesky voters. Since these corporations are multinational, the state essentially becomes globalist, whether or not a one-world government is ever formalized.
As if the economic and governmental resets were not dramatic enough, the technological resets read like a dystopian science fiction novel. It is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution – or 4-IR for short. The first, second, and third industrial revolutions were the mechanical, electrical, and digital revolutions. The 4-IR marks the convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The foreseen result will be the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds, which presents a challenge to the ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including the definition of a human being.
In short, 4-IR seeks to accelerate the merging of humans and machines, resulting in a world in which all information, including genetic information, is shared, and every action, thought, and motivation if known, predicted, and possibly precluded. Unless taken out of the hands of corporate-socialist technocrats, the 4-IR will eventually lead to a virtual and inescapable prison of body and mind. Big Digital is the communications, ideological, and technological arm of an emerging corporate-socialist totalitarianism. The Great Reset is the name that has since been given to the project of establishing this world system.
Just as Schwab and the WEF predicted, the COVID crisis has accelerated the Great Reset. Monopolistic corporations have consolidated their grip on the economy from above, while socialism continues to advance for the rest of us below. In partnership with Big Digital, Big Pharma, the mainstream media, national and international health agencies and compliant populations, hitherto democratic Western states – think especially of Australia, New Zealand, and Austria – are being transformed into totalitarian regimes modeled after China.
But let me end on a note of hope. Because the goals of the Great Reset depend on the obliteration not only of free markets, but of individual liberty and free will, it is, perhaps ironically, unsustainable. Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to ultimate failure. That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t, again like those earlier attempts, leave a lot of destruction in its wake – which is all the more reason to oppose it now and with all our might.
Source: Hillsdale College Imprimis by Michael Rectenwald chief academic officer American Scholars (December 2021)
FORMATION OF A DETACHED ELITE: The emergence of a detached elite, often referred to by the neologism “Davos Man,” refers to a global group whose members consider themselves to be fully “international.” The term refers to people who “have little need for national loyalty, regard national borders as obstacles that are fortunately disappearing, and view national governments as relics from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the global operations of the elite,” according to political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who is credited with inventing the neologism.
The Transnational institute describes the primary purpose of the World Economic Forum as “a socializing institution for the emerging global elite, the ‘mafiaocracy’ of globalization made up of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats, and politicians. They promote common ideas and serve common interests: their own.”
Manager Magazine journalist Henrik Muller argued in 2019 that the “Davos Man” has already broken up into different groups and camps. He sees three central drivers for this development:
- The liberal Western model is no longer seen as the universal model to which other countries aspire.
- Societies are increasingly breaking down into different groups, each of which is creating its own identity.
- The measured economic reality largely contradicts established notions of how the economy is supposed to work.
DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES AND INSTITUTIONS: In its 2010 “Global Redesign” report, the World Economic Forum calls for a global world to be best governed by a coalition of multinational corporations, governments (including through the United Nations system), and select civil society organizations. It argues that governments are no longer “the overwhelmingly dominant actors on the world stage” and that “the time has come for a new stakeholder paradigm of international governance.” The WEF’s vision includes building a “public-private” UN in which certain specialized agencies operate under shared governmental and non-governmental systems.
According to the Transnational Institute, the Forum is therefore planning to replace a recognized democratic model with one in which a self-selected group of “stakeholders” makes decisions on behalf of the people. According to the European Parliament think tank, critics also see the WEF as a tool for political and business leaders to “make decisions without accountability to voters or shareholders.”
Source: Great Reset Infoguide by United Library (May 2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| democracy_1l_world_economic_forum_--_segment_1.pdf |