For years the Great Reset has been promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF proclaims it to be the solution for the, in its own words “fragility and societally negative outcomes of contemporary capitalist economies.” It claims that COVID highlighted the “many vulnerabilities – within businesses, supply chains, economies, health systems and political institutions – that will need to be addressed”.
The WEF further claims “broken incentives and information flows” to be “at the heart of our current model of capitalism”. The WEF means by that that today “the costs of environmental and social damage” are (not) internalized”. Investors do not “integrate … environmental, social and governance (ESG) information into financial analysis and valuation models”.
Thus, in their mind after COVID “an inclusive and green recovery is vital”. In other words: their Great Reset is absolutely needed.
Already today the free-market economy is very much regulated by the governments to meet the broader needs of the society. There are laws that define what a company is allowed to release into the environment. Financial reporting follows detailed regulations. Construction of a new plant has to go through a complicated approval process. Employees have rights they can claim in front of a judge and so on.
The WEF wants, however, to go far beyond that. It wants to replace the free market economy with a system that features not owners, producers and consumers as the major drivers but the “stakeholders” of any economic activity. A stakeholder is an “individual or group that has an interest in any decision or activity of an organization.” (ISO 26000).
In this blog and the following I will show how this idea has affected us over the last few years and explore where it ultimately will lead our societies.
The stakeholder idea and its dark underbelly
50 years ago, Klaus Schwab the founder of the WEF introduced the idea of stakeholder capitalism.
The claim was that a business needs to look out not only for the shareholders but to take care of the interests of all stakeholders to be sustainable.
Certainly, any manager or owner with the longer-term interests of the business in mind will agree that disgruntled or sick employees, unhappy neighbours, a hostile community, distrustful local officials will influence the business in a rather negative way. And without doubt they will pay attention to the fact that the social and environmental impact of economic activities has been gaining more and more
public attention. The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has given targets and a structure to this extended responsibility requested from the companies.
Accordingly the stakeholder idea found open doors in businesses as well as in universities and business schools. To take care of our environment has been implanted in our western minds over the last decades. Soon, related frameworks like the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria were developed and launched globally.
However, the stakeholder approach has a very dark underbelly which, however, seems to be a constituting aspect of the Great Reset:
- The shareholder capitalism is focused on the interests of the private owners with the customers as the major regulation entities.
- The stakeholder capitalism, on the other hand, claims to focus on the interest of much less well-defined groups and entities. Among many others we have seen mentioned the planet, the society, governments, suppressed minorities, etc. The WEF, taking it from the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, published the four pillars of stakeholder capitalism as follows:
- Owners and shareholders have clearly defined mechanisms to express their interests.
- The above-mentioned groups and similar entities, on the other hand, don´t.
Thus, the proponents of stakeholder capitalism create the perfect opportunity for those who want (more) power to claim to represent those affected by a business activity. In their name they then tell us what is right and wrong. Very obviously this shifts influence away from the shareholders to unaccountable power players.
Their next logical step toward an expansion of their influence is to allege that almost everything is wrong with our society and needs correction and they can do it. Furthermore, they will invent, create or use crises to add urgency and reduce opposition to their power grab. They argue that bottom up systems like democracies are not very efficient to deal with global threats. That is the basis for the Great Reset.
And it has begun
We have seen quite a bit already playing out. By claiming to represent stakeholder interests unelected political power players like the UN or the EU, social media giants, government bureaucrats, wall street etc. have taken control over much of our economic and social life. They tell us what to drive, what to eat, which pronouns to use, how to raise our children and, even, what we are allowed to say.
If necessary they collude with each other to control the information flow. They unify in cancelling or punishing those who question measures like the suppression of ivermectin, the vaccine mandate, the massive build-up of wind parks, the access of biological males to girls’ bathrooms etc. Doctors are losing their credentials. Scientists are pushed from their jobs. Parents are being monitored by the FBI. Bloggers and journalists are censored and shut down.
The Twitter files have shown where the public privat partnership idea, one of the pillars of the Great Reset, leads to. In this case it resulted in a partnership of the government with a big company to control what the normal people are allowed to know.
Efficient tools have been developed to get the “right” behaviour from businesses and other organizations. Every major company long since had a “Diversity and Inclusion” or a “Health, Safety and Environment” department with wide reaching powers. But this was just the beginning. Based on the “UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) index is pushed onto businesses by powerful entities like Black Rock and banks in cooperation with governments. The target it to either force them to comply or to threaten their existence. This index is in many aspects a social credit score – an invention of the Chinese Communist Party which they use to control their citizens.
This aspect of the Great Reset is very much confirmed by the great Klaus Schwab himself. In an interview with Chinese state media he voices his admiration for their capability to get things done as proven in the last 40 years of the opening and reform policy. He then declares that the “Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”
Italy seems to agree and started to institutionalize its own version of a social credit score system with the goal to manipulate the citizens into a desired behaviour.
The elite and the rest
Looking at the consequences as demonstrated in the fear-based management of COVID and Climate Change we have to wonder how much a top-down society is already the reality in the West. We see the elites in their private jets travel from Davos to Sharm el Sheik (COP 27).
The same people tell the bottom 90% of the world that they have to eat less meat or even go hungry altogether, stop flying planes, must not burn coal or oil to be warm in winter or should replace the word “mothers” with “birthing people”.
And, not by accident, in the 21st century the wealth share of the top 1% in the US has increased from around 30% to about 34%. Only between March 2020 and November 2022 the wealth of the top 10 billionaires in the US has doubled. Such a separation of the society into an all knowing, powerful and rich elite and the rest is really the major consequence of the Great Reset (albeit hidden behind a lot a great sounding words).
In the next two blogs I will dig deeper into the two major examples where the Great Reset has already shown this rather ugly face: the Covid pandemic and the global warming scare.