Russia’s war with Ukraine is first and foremost a tragedy for the people of both countries, especially those who live—and die—in the battle zones. The priority for humanity, though apparently not for the political class, is to encourage Moscow and Kyiv to stop killing men, women and children and negotiate a peace deal.

Beyond the immediate confines of the conflict, the war is also seen by some as representative of an alleged clash between great powers and, perhaps, between civilisations. All wars are momentous, but the ramifications of Ukrainian war are already global.

Consequently, there is a perception that it is the focal point of a confrontation between two distinct models of global governance. The NATO-led alliance of the Western nations continues to push the unipolar, G7, international rules-based order (IRBO). It is opposed, some say, by the Russian and Chinese-led BRICS and the G20-based multipolar world order.

In this 3 part series we will explore these issues and consider if it is tenable to place our faith in the emerging multipolar world order.

There are very few redeeming features of the unipolar world order, that’s for sure. It is a system that overwhelmingly serves capital and few people other than a “parasite class” of stakeholder capitalist eugenicists. This has led many disaffected Westerners to invest their hopes in the promise of the multipolar world order:

Many have increasingly come to terms with the reality that today’s multipolar system led by Russia and China has premised itself upon the defense of international law and national sovereignty as outlined in the UN Charter. [. . .] Putin and Xi Jinping have [. . .] made their choice to stand for win-win cooperation over Hobbesian Zero Sum thinking. [. . .] [T]heir entire strategy is premised upon the UN Charter.

If only that were so! Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be the case. But even if it were true, Putin and Xi Jinping basing “their entire strategy” upon the UN Charter, would be cause for concern, not relief.

For the globalist forces that see nation-states as squares on the grand chessboard and that regard leaders like Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping as accomplices, the multipolar world order is manna from heaven. They have spent more than a century trying to centralise global power. The power of individual nation-states at least presents the possibility of some decentralisation. The multipolar world order finally ends all national sovereignty and delivers true global governance.

World Order

We need to distinguish between the ideological concept of “world order” and the reality. This will help us identify where “world order” is an artificially imposed construct.

Authoritarian power, wielded over populations, territory and resources, restricted by physical and political geography, dictates the “world order.” The present order is largely the product of hard-nosed geopolitics, but it also reflects the various attempts to impose a global order.

The struggle to manage and mitigate the consequences of geopolitics is evident in the history of international relations. For nearly 500 years nation-states have sought to co-exist as sovereign entities. Numerous systems have been devised to seize control of what would otherwise be anarchy. It is very much to the detriment of humanity that anarchy has not been allowed to flourish.

In 1648, the two bilateral treaties that formed the Peace of Westphalia concluded the 30 Years War (or Wars). Those negotiated settlements arguably established the precept of the territorial sovereignty within the borders of the nation-state.

This reduced, but did not end, the centralised authoritarian power of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). Britannica notes:

The Peace of Westphalia recognized the full territorial sovereignty of the member states of the empire.

This isn’t entirely accurate. That so-called “full territorial sovereignty” delineated regional power within Europe and the HRE, but full sovereignty wasn’t established.

The Westphalian treaties created hundreds of principalities that were formerly controlled by the central legislature of the HRE, the Diet. These new, effectively federalised principalities still paid taxes to the emperor and, crucially, religious observance remained a matter for the empire to decide. The treaties also consolidated the regional power of the Danish, Swedish, and French states but the Empire itself remained intact and dominant.

It is more accurate to say that the Peace of Westphalia somewhat curtailed the authoritarian power of the HRE and defined the physical borders of some nation states. During the 20th century, this led to the popular interpretation of the nation-state as a bulwark against international hegemonic power, despite that never having been entirely true.

Consequently, the so-called “Westphalian model” is largely based upon a myth. It represents an idealised version of the world order, suggesting how it could operate rather than describing how it does.

Signing of the Peace of Westphalia, in Münster 1648, painting by Gerard Ter Borch

If nation-states really were sovereign and if their territorial integrity were genuinely respected, then the Westphalian world order would be pure anarchy. This is the ideal upon which the UN is supposedly founded because, contrary to another ubiquitous popular myth, anarchy does not mean “chaos.” Quite the opposite.

Anarchy is exemplified by Article 2.1 of the UN Charter:

The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

The word “anarchy” is an abstraction of the classical Greek “anarkhos,” meaning “rulerless.” This is derived from the privative prefix “an” (without) in conjunction with “arkhos” (leader or ruler). Literally translated, “anarchy” means “without rulers”—what the UN calls “sovereign equality.”

A Westphalian world order of sovereign nation-states, each observing the “equality” of all others while adhering to the non-aggression principle, is a system of global, political anarchy. Unfortunately, that is not the way the current UN “world order” functions, nor has there ever been any attempt to construct such an order. What a shame.

Within the League of Nations and subsequent UN system of practical “world order,”—a world order allegedly built upon the sovereignty of nations—equality exists in theory only. Through empire, colonialism, neocolonialism—that is, through economic, military, financial and monetary conquest, coupled with the debt obligations imposed upon targeted nations—global powers have always been able to dominate and control lesser ones.

National governments, if defined in purely political terms, have never been the only source of authority behind the efforts to construct world order. As revealed by Antony C. Sutton and others, private corporate power has aided national governments in shaping “world order.”

Neither Hitler’s rise to power nor the Bolshevik Revolution would have occurred as they did, if at all, without the guidance of the Wall Street financiers. The bankers’ global financial institutions and extensive international espionage networks were instrumental in shifting global political power.

These private-sector “partners” of government are the “stakeholders” we constantly hear about today. The most powerful among them are fully engaged in “the game” described by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard.

Brzezinski recognised that the continental landmass of Eurasia was the key to genuine global hegemony:

This huge, oddly shaped Eurasian chess board—extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok—provides the setting for “the game.” [. . .] [I]f the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity [. . .] then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically. [. . .] That mega-continent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically pre-eminent global power. [. . .] Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. [. . .] [I]t would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.

The “unipolar world order” favoured by the Western powers, often referred to as the “international rules-based order” or the “international rules-based system,” is another attempt to impose order. This “unipolar” model enables the US and its European partners to exploit the UN system to claim legitimacy for their games of empire. Through it, the transatlantic alliance has used its economic, military and financial power to try to establish global hegemony.

In 2016, Stewart Patrick, writing for the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign policy think tank, published World Order: What, Exactly, are the Rules? He described the post-WWII “international rules-based order” (IRBO):

What sets the post-1945 Western order apart is that it was shaped overwhelmingly by a single power [a unipolarity], the United States. Operating within the broader context of strategic bipolarity, it constructed, managed, and defended the regimes of the capitalist world economy. [. . .] In the trade sphere, the hegemon presses for liberalization and maintains an open market; in the monetary sphere, it supplies a freely convertible international currency, manages exchange rates, provides liquidity, and serves as a lender of last resort; and in the financial sphere, it serves as a source of international investment and development.

The idea that the aggressive market acquisition of crony capitalism somehow represents the “open markets” of the “capitalist world economy” is risible. It is about as far removed from free market capitalism as it is possible to be. Under crony capitalism, the US dollar, as the preferred global reserve currency, is not “freely convertible.” Exchange rates are manipulated and liquidity is debt for nearly everyone except the lender. “Investment and development” by the hegemon means more profits and control for the hegemon.

The notion that a political leader, or anyone for that matter, is entirely bad or good, is puerile. The same consideration can be given to nation-states, political systems or even models of world order. The character of a human being, a nation or a system of global governance is better judged by their or its totality of actions.

Whatever we consider to be the source of “good” and “evil,” it exists in all of us at either ends of a spectrum. Some people exhibit extreme levels of psychopathy, which can lead them to commit acts that are judged to be “evil.” But even Hitler, for example, showed physical courage, devotion, compassion for some, and other qualities we might consider “good.”

Nation-states and global governance structures, though immensely complex, are formed and led by people. They are influenced by a multitude of forces. Given the added complications of chance and unforeseen events, it is unrealistic to expect any form of “order” to be either entirely good or entirely bad.

That being said, if that “order” is iniquitous and causes appreciable harm to people, then it is important to identify to whom that “order” provides advantage. Their potential individual and collective guilt should be investigated.

This does not imply that those who benefit are automatically culpable, nor that they are “bad” or “evil,” though they may be, only that they have a conflict of interests in maintaining their “order” despite the harm it causes. Equally, where systemic harm is evident, it is irrational to absolve the actions of the people who lead and benefit from that system without first ruling out their possible guilt.

Since WWII, millions of innocents have been murdered by the US, its international allies and its corporate partners, all of whom have thrown their military, economic and financial weight around the world. The Western “parasite class” has sought to assert its IRBO by any means necessary— sanctions, debt slavery or outright slavery, physical, economic or psychological warfare. The grasping desire for more power and control has exposed the very worst of human nature. Repeatedly and ad nauseam.

Of course, resistance to this kind of global tyranny is understandable. The question is: Does imposition of the multipolar model offer anything different?

Signing the UN Charter – 1948

Oligarchy

Most recently, the “unipolar world order” has been embodied by the World Economic Forum’s inappropriately named Great Reset. It is so malignant and forbidding that some consider the emerging “multipolar world order” salvation. They have even heaped praise upon the likely leaders of the new multipolar world:

It is [. . .] strength of purpose and character that has defined Putin’s two decades in power. [. . .] Russia is committed to the process of finding solutions to all people benefiting from the future, not just a few thousand holier-than-thou oligarchs. [. . .] Together [Russia and China] told the WEF to stuff the Great Reset back into the hole in which it was conceived. [. . .] Putin told Klaus Schwab and the WEF that their entire idea of the Great Reset is not only doomed to failure but runs counter to everything modern leadership should be pursuing.

Sadly, it seems this hope is also misplaced.

While Putin did much to rid Russia of the CIA-run, Western-backed oligarchs who were systematically destroying the Russian Federation during the 1990s, they have subsequently been replaced by another band of oligarchs with closer links to the current Russian government. Something we will explore in Part 3.

Yes, it is certainly true that the Russian government, led by Putin and his power bloc, has improved the incomes and life opportunities for the majority of Russians. Putin’s government has also significantly reduced chronic poverty in Russia over the last two decades.

Wealth in Russia, measured as the market value of financial and non-financial assets, has remained concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. This pooling of wealth among the top percentile is itself stratified and is overwhelmingly held by the top 1% of the 1%. For example, in 2017, 56% of Russian wealth was controlled by 1% of the population. The pseudopandemic of 2020–2022 particularly benefitted Russian billionnaires—as it did the billionaires of every other developed economy.

According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2021, wealth inequality in Russia, measured using the Gini coefficient, was 87.8 in 2020. The only other major economy with a greater disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the population was Brazil. Just behind Brazil and Russia on the wealth inequality scale was the US, whose Gini coefficient stood at 85.

In terms of wealth concentration however, the situation in Russia was the worst by a considerable margin. In 2020 the top 1% owned 58.2% of Russia’s wealth. This was more than 8 percentage points higher than Brazil’s wealth concentration, and significantly worse than wealth concentration in the US, which stood at 35.2% in 2020.

Such disproportionate wealth distribution is conducive to creating and empowering oligarchs. But wealth alone doesn’t determine whether one is an oligarch. Wealth needs to be converted into political power for the term “oligarch” to be applicable. An oligarchy is defined as “a form of government in which supreme power is vested in a small exclusive class.”

Members of this dominant class are installed through a variety of mechanisms. The British establishment, and particularly its political class, is dominated by men and women who were educated at Eton, Roedean, Harrow and St. Pauls, etc. This “small exclusive class” arguably constitutes a British oligarchy. The UK’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has been heralded by some because she is not a graduate of one of these select public schools.

Educational privilege aside, though, the use of the word “oligarch” in the West more commonly refers to an internationalist class of globalists whose individual wealth sets them apart and who use that wealth to influence policy decisions.

Bill Gates is a prime example of an oligarch. The former advisor to the UK Prime Minister, Dominic Cummings, said as much during his testimony to a parliamentary committee on May 2021 (go to 14:02:35). As Cummings put it, Bill Gates and “that kind of network” had directed the UK government’s response to the supposed COVID-19 pandemic.

Gates’ immense wealth has bought him direct access to political power beyond national borders. He has no public mandate in either the US or the UK. He is an oligarch—one of the more well known but far from the only one.

CFR member David Rothkopf described these people as a “Superclass” with the ability to “influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis.” They do this, he said, by using their globalist “networks.” Those networks, as described by Antony C. Sutton, Dominic Cummings and others, act as “the force multiplier in any kind of power structure.”

This “small exclusive class” use their wealth to control resources and thus policy. Political decisions, policy, court rulings and more are made at their behest. This point was highlighted in the joint letter sent by the Attorneys General (AGs) of 19 US states to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

The AGs observed that BlackRock was essentially using its investment strategy to pursue a political agenda:

The Senators elected by the citizens of this country determine which international agreements have the force of law, not BlackRock.

Their letter describes the theoretical model of representative democracy. Representative democracy is not a true democracy—which decentralises political power to the individual citizen—but is rather a system designed to centralise political control and authority. Inevitably, “representative democracy” leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of the so-called “Superclass” described by Rothkopf.

There is nothing “super” about them. They are ordinary people who have acquired wealth primarily through conquest, usury, market rigging, political manipulation and slavery. “Parasite class” is a more befitting description.

Not only do global investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street use their immense resources to steer public policy, but their major shareholders include the very oligarchs who, via their contribution to various think tanks, create the global political agendas that determine policy in the first place. There is no space in this system of alleged “world order” for any genuine democratic oversight.

As we shall see in Part 3, the levers of control are exerted to achieve exactly the same effect in Russia and China. Both countries have a gaggle of oligarchs whose objectives are firmly aligned with the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. They too work with their national government “partners” to ensure that they all arrive at the “right” policy decisions.

US President Joe Biden, left, and CFR President Richard N. Haass, right.

The United Nations’ Model of National Sovereignty

Any bloc of nations that bids for dominance within the United Nations is seeking global hegemony. The UN enables global governance and centralises global political power and authority. In so doing, the UN empowers the international oligarchy.

As noted previously, Article 2 of the United Nations Charter declares that the UN is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” The Charter then goes on to list the numerous ways in which nation-states are not equal. It also clarifies how they are all subservient to the UN Security Council.

Despite all the UN’s claims of lofty principles—respect for national sovereignty and for alleged human rights—Article 2 declares that no nation-state can receive any assistance from another as long as the UN Security Council is forcing that nation-state to comply with its edicts. Even non-member states must abide by the Charter, whether they like it or not, by decree of the United Nations.

The UN Charter is a paradox. Article 2.7 asserts that “nothing in the Charter” permits the UN to infringe the sovereignty of a nation-state—except when it does so through UN “enforcement measures.” The Charter states, apparently without reason, that all nation-states are “equal.” However, some nation-states are empowered by the Charter to be far more equal than others.

While the UN’s General Assembly is supposedly a decision-making forum comprised of “equal” sovereign nations, Article 11 affords the General Assembly only the power to discuss “the general principles of co-operation.” In other words, it has no power to make any significant decisions.

Article 12 dictates that the General Assembly can only resolve disputes if instructed to do so by the Security Council. The most important function of the UN, “the maintenance of international peace and security,” can only be dealt with by the Security Council. What the other members of the General Assembly think about the Security Council’s global “security” decisions is a practical irrelevance.

Article 23 lays out which nation-states form the Security Council:

The Security Council shall consist of fifteen Members of the United Nations. The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [Russian Federation], the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council. The General Assembly shall elect ten other Members of the United Nations to be non-permanent members of the Security Council. [. . .] The non-permanent members of the Security Council shall be elected for a term of two years.

The General Assembly is allowed to elect “non-permanent” members to the Security Council based upon criteria stipulated by the Security Council. Currently the “non-permanent” members are Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.

Article 24 proclaims that the Security Council has “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” and that all other nations agree that “the Security Council acts on their behalf.” The Security Council investigates and defines all alleged threats and recommends the procedures and adjustments for the supposed remedy. The Security Council dictates what further action, such as sanctions or the use of military force, shall be taken against any nation-state it considers to be a problem.

Article 27 decrees that at least 9 of the 15 member states must be in agreement for a Security Council resolution to be enforced. All of the 5 permanent members must concur, and each has the power of veto. Any Security Council member, including permanent members, shall be excluded from the vote or use of its veto if they are party to the dispute in question.

UN member states, by virtue of agreeing to the Charter, must provide armed forces at the Security Council’s request. In accordance with Article 47, military planning and operational objectives are the sole remit of the permanent Security Council members through their exclusive Military Staff Committee. If the permanent members are interested in the opinion of any other “sovereign” nation, they’ll ask it to provide one.

The inequality inherent in the Charter could not be clearer. Article 44 notes that “when the Security Council has decided to use force” its only consultative obligation to the wider UN is to discuss the use of another member state’s armed forces where the Security Council has ordered that nation to fight. For a country that is a current member of the Security Council, use of its armed forces by the Military Staff Committee is a prerequisite for Council membership.

The UN Secretary-General, identified as the “chief administrative officer” in the Charter, oversees the UN Secretariat. The Secretariat commissions, investigates and produces the reports that allegedly inform UN decision-making. The Secretariat staff members are appointed by the Secretary-General. The Secretary-General is “appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”

Under the UN Charter, then, the Security Council is made king. This arrangement affords the governments of its permanent members—China, France, Russia, the UK and the US—considerable additional authority. There is nothing egalitarian about the UN Charter.

The suggestion that the UN Charter constitutes a “defence” of “national sovereignty” is ridiculous. The UN Charter is the embodiment of the centralisation of global power and authority.

UN Headquarters New York – Land Donated by the Rockefellers

The United Nations’ Global Public-Private Partnership

The UN was created, in no small measure, through the efforts of the private sector Rockefeller Foundation (RF). In particular, the RF’s comprehensive financial and operational support for the Economic, Financial and Transit Department (EFTD) of the League of Nations (LoN), and its considerable influence upon the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), made the RF the key player in the transformation of the LoN into the UN.

The UN came into being as a result of public-private partnership. Since then, especially with regard to defence, financing, global health care and sustainable development, public-private partnerships have become dominant within the UN system. The UN is no longer an intergovernmental organisation, if it ever was one. It is a global collaboration between governments and a multinational infra-governmental network of private “stakeholders.”

In 1998, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the World Economic Forum’s Davos symposium that a “quiet revolution” had occurred in the UN during the 1990s:

[T]he United Nations has been transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a “quiet revolution”. [. . .] [W]e are in a stronger position to work with business and industry. [. . .] The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world. [. . .] We also promote private sector development and foreign direct investment. We help countries to join the international trading system and enact business-friendly legislation.

In 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO), a specialised agency of the UN, published a report on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in healthcare titled Connecting for Health. Speaking about how “stakeholders” could introduce ICT healthcare solutions globally, the WHO noted:

Governments can create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.

The 2015, Adis Ababa Action Agenda conference on “financing for development” clarified the nature of an “enabling environment.” National governments from 193 UN nation-states committed their respective populations to funding public-private partnerships for sustainable development by collectively agreeing to create “an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development;” and “to further strengthen the framework to finance sustainable development.”

In 2017, UN General Assembly Resolution 70/224 (A/Res/70/224) compelled UN member states to implement “concrete policies” that “enable” sustainable development. A/Res/70/224 added that the UN:

[. . .] reaffirms the strong political commitment to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development [—] particularly with regard to developing partnerships through the provision of greater opportunities to the private sector, non-governmental organizations and civil society in general.

In short, the “enabling environment” is a government, and therefore taxpayer, funding commitment to create markets for the private sector. Over the last few decades, successive Secretary-Generals have overseen the UN’s formal transition into a global public-private partnership (G3P).

Nation-states do not have sovereignty over public-private partnerships. Sustainable development formally relegates government to the role of an “enabling” partner within a global network comprised of multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations and other actors. The “other actors” are predominantly the philanthropic foundations of individual billionaires and immensely wealthy family dynasties—that is, oligarchs.

Effectively, then, the UN serves the interests of capital. Not only is it a mechanism for the centralisation of global political authority, it is committed to the development of global policy agendas that are “business-friendly.” That means Big Business-friendly. Such agendas may happen to coincide with the best interests of humanity, but where they don’t—which is largely the case—well, that’s just too bad for humanity.

Kofi Annan (8 April 1938 – 18 August 2018)

Global Governance

On the 4th February 2022, a little less then three weeks prior to Russia launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued an important joint statement:

The sides [Russian Federation and Chinese People’s Republic] strongly support the development of international cooperation and exchanges [. . .], actively participating in the relevant global governance process, [. . .] to ensure sustainable global development. [. . .] The international community should actively engage in global governance[.] [. . .] The sides reaffirmed their intention to strengthen foreign policy coordination, pursue true multilateralism, strengthen cooperation on multilateral platforms, defend common interests, support the international and regional balance of power, and improve global governance. [. . .] The sides call on all States [. . .] to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) defined “global governance” in its 2014 publication Global Governance and the Global Rules For Development in the Post 2015 Era:

Global governance encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which States and their citizens try to bring more predictability, stability and order to their responses to transnational challenges.

Global governance centralises control over the entire sphere of international relations. It inevitably erodes a nation’s ability to set foreign policy. As a theoretical protection against global instability, this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but in practice it neither enhances nor “protects” national sovereignty.

Domination of the global governance system by one group of powerful nation-states represents possibly the most dangerous and destabilising force of all. It allows those nations to act with impunity, regardless of any pretensions about honouring alleged “international law.”

Global governance also significantly curtails the independence of a nation-state’s domestic policy. For example, the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda 21, with the near-time Agenda 2030 serving as a waypoint, impacts nearly all national domestic policy—even setting the course for most domestic policy—in every country.

National electorates’ oversight of this “totality” of UN policies is weak to nonexistent. Global governance renders so-called “representative democracy” little more than a vacuous sound-bite.

As the UN is a global public-private partnership (UN-G3P), global governance allows the “multi-stakeholder partnership”—and therefore oligarchs—significant influence over member nation-states’ domestic and foreign policy. Set in this context, the UN-DESA report (see above) provides a frank appraisal of the true nature of UN-G3P global governance:

Current approaches to global governance and global rules have led to a greater shrinking of policy space for national Governments [. . . ]; this also impedes the reduction of inequalities within countries. [. . .] Global governance has become a domain with many different players including: multilateral organizations; [. . .] elite multilateral groupings such as the Group of Eight (G8) and the Group of Twenty (G20) [and] different coalitions relevant to specific policy subjects[.] [. . .] Also included are activities of the private sector (e.g., the Global Compact) non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and large philanthropic foundations (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Turner Foundation) and associated global funds to address particular issues[.] [. . .] The representativeness, opportunities for participation, and transparency of many of the main actors are open to question. [. . .] NGOs [. . .] often have governance structures that are not subject to open and democratic accountability. The lack of representativeness, accountability and transparency of corporations is even more important as corporations have more power and are currently promoting multi-stakeholder governance with a leading role for the private sector. [. . .] Currently, it seems that the United Nations has not been able to provide direction in the solution of global governance problems—perhaps lacking appropriate resources or authority, or both. United Nations bodies, with the exception of the Security Council, cannot make binding decisions.

A/Res/73/254 declares that the UN Global Compact Office plays a vital role in “strengthening the capacity of the United Nations to partner strategically with the private sector.” It adds:

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development acknowledges that the implementation of sustainable development will depend on the active engagement of both the public and private sectors[.]

While the Attorneys General of 19 states might rail against BlackRock for usurping the political authority of US senators, BlackRock is simply exercising its power as valued a “public-private partner” of the US government. Such is the nature of global governance. Given that this system has been constructed over the last 80 years, it’s a bit too late for 19 state AGs to complain about it now. What have they been doing for the last eight decades?

The governmental “partners” of the UN-G3P lack “authority” because the UN was created, largely by the Rockefellers, as a public-private partnership. The intergovernmental structure is the partner of the infra-governmental network of private stakeholders. In terms of resources, the power of the private sector “partners” dwarfs that of their government counterparts.

Corporate fiefdoms are not limited by national borders. BlackRock alone currently holds $9.5 trillion of assets under management. This is more than five times the size of the total GDP of UN Security Council permanent member Russia and nearly four times the GDP of the UK.

So-called sovereign countries are not sovereign over their own central banks nor are they “sovereign” over international financial institutions like the IMF, the New Development Bank (NDB), the World Bank or the Bank for International Settlements. The notion that any nation state or intergovernmental organisation is capable of bringing the global network of private capital to heel is farcical.

At the COP26 Conference in Glasgow in 2021, King Charles III—then Prince Charles—prepared the conference to endorse the forthcoming announcement of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). He made it abundantly clear who was in charge and, in keeping with UN objectives, clarified national governments role as “enabling partners”:

The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global systems level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel based economy. [. . .] So ladies and gentleman, my plea today is for countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required. We know this will take trillions, not billions of dollars. [. . .] [W]e need a vast military style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector, with trillions at [its] disposal far beyond global GDP, and with the greatest respect, beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders. It offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.

Unless Putin and Xi Jinping intend to completely restructure the United Nations, including all of its institutions and specialised agencies, their objective of protecting “the United Nations-driven international architecture” appears to be nothing more than a bid to cement their status as the nominal leaders of the UN-G3P. As pointed out by UN-DESA, through the UN-G3P, that claim to political authority is extremely limited. Global corporations dominate and are currently further consolidating their global power through “multi-stakeholder governance.”

Whether unipolar or multipolar, the so-called “world order” is the system of global governance led by the private sector—the oligarchs. Nation-states, including Russia and China, have already agreed to follow global priorities determined at the global governance level. The question is not which model of the global public-private “world order” we should accept, but rather why we would ever accept any such “world order” at all.

This, then, is the context within which we can explore the alleged advantages of a “multipolar world order” led by China, Russia and increasingly India. Is it an attempt, as claimed by some, to reinvigorate the United Nations and create a more just and equitable system of global governance? Or is it merely the next phase in the construction of what many refer to as the “New World Order”?

The pdf will be available after publication of Part 3.

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Twice in the late winter and early spring of 2018, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, a Venetian-Gothic jewel box designed by Frank Furness as the main library of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia campus in 1890. It had been years since I’d been inside the building whose open stacks of books I haunted in the early 1990s as a graduate student in the historic preservation program. It is there, for better or worse, that I learned about decoding symbols and interpreting diverse landscapes of industrialization and predatory finance.

I hold a crisp memory of my thesis advisor, a striking German woman with long white hair tucked into a tidy bun originally from the Palatinate who relocated to Oley, PA. We were walking down Walnut Street when she paused to look at me, put her hand on my shoulder, and tell me that one day I would see it; that my family would be protected because I could see it. Thirty years later the ability to sense worrisome artifacts lurking behind consensus reality is a burden I’d like to abandon, but I can’t. I’m still waiting for the upside. I don’t feel protected at all, and my family doesn’t understand me.

The account that follows isn’t about placing blame. I recognize we’re all caught in a terrible machine. Some of us are enmeshed more deeply than others. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. My ability to keep a roof over my head is intimately intertwined with the fate of Philadelphia’s largest private employer. If you believe the press releases, it is one of the best big employers in the nation. I am doing my best to complicate their contrived narratives. My lot is being a gad fly for Ben Franklin’s big project, the University of Pennsylvania.

I consider myself fortunate to have the stability to witness and tell the stories I tell. I harbor some guilt, because many people I care about don’t have that luxury. Still, there is nothing to do but forge ahead honing our skills, learning from our missteps, being human. Hanging back because we are afraid to fail is not an option. So, I choose to chip away at the foundation upon which my world rests with stories and felt dolls and dandelions. This anti-life egregore is nothing you can disarm by military force. Fritz Kunz and Piritim Sorokin were searching for the power of eros, the creative force of the universe. I’ll settle for a tonic of philia, affectionate love, appropriate to Philadelphia.

My significant other regularly points out this institution, one from which we both hold degrees, is not a monolithic presence. Rather it is more like a fractious collection of feuding fiefdoms. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, which is exactly how systems of power like it. University culture is a civilizing force that rewards deep, narrow, often polarizing inquiry. Academic pecking orders are determined by books published, conference papers given, grants secured, patents filed, the robustness of one’s network. Virtuosos of cultivated ignorance are lauded; plausible deniability abounds. Behind ivy-covered walls chosen ones are conditioned to look to experts to define the contours of their character even as the system guts them and hollows their minds to make room for infusions of submission coding.

Look everywhere but inside your heart where you might unearth your moral compass. Ignore the elephants in the room as the acrid odor of dung fills your nostrils. The war on consciousness and natural life is well underway, but few retain sufficient clarity of thought or a firm enough backbone to call a spade a spade. Their boning knives are so sharp, and the cuts so deft, many victims never realize they’ve been gutted. That was me for decades – the good student, the good mom, the good co-worker, plowing ahead until a lattice of fine cracks began to widen revealing socially conditioned “goodness” to be a flimsy veneer under which a deep psychic wound festered.

And it wasn’t one wound, but many wounds. It was a pervasive network of woundedness, riddled with rot, and papered over with progressive social policy. The prognosis is not good. There’s not yet a cure for chronic domination disorder though symptoms may temporarily be alleviated through superficial social justice performances enacted even as most participants know deep inside nothing is actually meant to change. Cycles of harm run on repeat with increasing intensity, a perpetual gas-lit charade.

On that day, February 20, 2018, Neil Kleiman, NYU professor of “what works” government would be presenting on “A New City O/S.” At the time I was new to Twitter, and I distinctly remember tweeting the question, who decided to put behaviorists in charge of our cities? Who had ordered up this new operating system, which I now understand will be blockchain vending machine e-government tied to digital ID and smart sensor networks?

I grabbed a chair up front to record the presentation and got several pointed questions in at the end about social impact finance. As usual, the self-proclaimed experts seemed to know nothing about what was actually going on, upholding the ruse for an audience who would leave thinking they’d learned something when they were simply being managed through fanciful stories.

A lot more ...

I feel I’ve provided a pretty good tour of the University of Pennsylvania. I hope you have gained an understanding of how I see things – cagey financiers, delusional do-gooders, crafty policy makers, ambitious scientists, and digital storytellers each of whom is living their own drama where they hope to be the hero. So why have I taken you down this winding path? Well, I wanted to let you know that Zane Griffith Talley Cooper is the reason I chose to separate myself from Silicon Icarus.

I’d had some communication failures with Raul the previous month, and when I saw his story highlighting Cooper’s work in Greenland my heart dropped. Not because it wasn’t a well written piece or that rare earth mineral mining wasn’t a concern, but I knew that the Annenberg School of Communication, created by Sir Walter Nixon’s ambassador to England and heir to the Daily Racing Form / TV Guide fortune, was a mouthpiece for social impact propaganda. I’d written about it in 2018, including their push for blockchain media and sham social justice outlets. I’d sent Raul the link to, “Don’t Let the Impact Investors Capture the Non-Profit Activist Media,” a week or so prior to his article coming out.

I asked if we could have a conversation about Cooper, because the nature of his inclusion in the piece didn’t make sense to me. Nor did the shout-out given to him on Twitter. It was not the way Raul normally operated, and I pretty much read and uplifted every piece he’d written over the course of the year. I’m not one to let things fester. You may say I’m blunt or direct or even rude. I’ll own that. But I don’t play games, and people know where I stand.

I never got that conversation. The door was closed, a brief message exchange abruptly ended, and at that point I said I felt we were on different paths and it was probably appropriate to remove me as a contributor. Raul never opened the message I sent saying I hoped our paths would cross again, and that I wish him open pathways on his journey. I’m sure he will continue to do important work. I’d love to think impact finance will be a part of it, but it’s not the first time people I thought understood ended up pulling back and repositioning. As I said in the beginning of this post, this is not about assigning blame. I’m in this machine as deeply as anyone. I even have empathy for Zane Talley Griffith Cooper. It can’t be easy on the soul getting paid to study Web 3 while being expected to be an anti-imperialist in your academic circles. But he did do Beckett naked, so I suspect he’ll probably make it through.

https://www.zanegriffintalleycooper.com/pastzane/when-i-used-to-do-commercials-and-make-movies-sometimes

I stepped away from Silicon Icarus not because Raul interviewed Zane or wrote a piece I felt pulled punches, but because my request to talk about it was rejected. I didn’t have ten pages of thoughts when I made that ask, but there were things on my mind – serious things. To my way of thinking friends, real friends, should have enough trust and respect in one another to do the hard work of being human, which can be messy. Two years of support deserved better than ghosting, but we never know what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes. I know he’s facing challenges. I don’t regret making that ask, because I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t. The hardest part is not knowing if we ever were really friends, and that is the sickness of the Internet folks. It can be a real mind fuck.

But if the past few years have taught me anything, the universe operates according to purposeful if mysterious plans. I’ve had people arrive in my life to teach me and then abruptly leave. Still, we are all connected and so I will end with this passage from Louise Erdrich that I read this past week about waves. The waves are the key – periodicity, cycles, harmony. Edward Dewey knew some things. This paragraph is from “Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country,” page 64.

“Waves – On our way to visit the island and Eternal Sands we experience a confluence of shifting winds and waves. Tobasonakwut shows me how the waves are creating underwaves and counterwaves. The rough swells from the southeast are bouncing against the rocky shores, which he avoids. The wooded lands and shores will absorb the force of the waves and not send them back out to create confusion. Heading towards open water, we travel behind the farthest island, a wave cutter. We slice right into the waves when possible. But we are dealing with yesterday’s wind and a strong north wind and swells underneath the waves now proceeding from the wind that shifted, fresh, to the south. I think if what Tobasonakwut’s father said, “The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake.” The images of complexity and shifting mutability of human nature is very clear today.“

Perfect Louise.

Your words touch my heart.

I wish a wave cutter island for everyone who needs it right now – each and every one.

Hug your people.

You never know what tomorrow will bring.

The World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative has been responsible for seeding many of the ruling elite into positions of power and influence within the worlds of business, civil society and, most importantly, politics. The fall of the Soviet Union soon became the apparent catalyst for the creation of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program, which was the precursor to the Young Global Leaders initiative over a decade later.

However, the supposed mastermind of the project, the WEF’s lifetime leader Klaus Schwab, had himself already been helped into his own influential position by a very similar program run out of Harvard University that was heavily funded by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Harvard initiative in question, often referred to as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, was one of several programs set up by senior members of organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the newly created CIA. In fact, during the post-World War II era, the United States was proactively creating many such programs with the intention of grooming potential young foreign leaders and installing them into positions of power. The main motive behind the establishment of these programs was ostensibly to combat and prevent communist infiltration of foreign states while also assuring that future global leaders would be amenable to US interests.

Originally, the United States created these secretive youth organizations with the aim of targetting potential future European leadership candidates. Yet, soon, no country in the world would be safe from possible CIA-sponsored political infiltration. In this article, we will examine one of the front organizations which used vast amounts of CIA money to fund various Harvard projects including Kissinger’s International Seminar. We will learn who the people were who created these funding platforms, and we’ll also look at other such educational initiatives, some still in existence today, which have helped American intelligence infiltrate governments worldwide.

The American Friends of the Middle East

In 1967, it was Harvard’s own Humphrey Doermann who exposed that certain Harvard Summer School courses and initiatives were actually being funded via CIA conduits. Even though almost a decade of funding throughout the 1950s remained undeclared, it was revealed that, between 1960 and 1966, Kissinger’s International Seminar received funding from three CIA conduits: The Asian Foundation, The Farfield Foundation, and The American Friend’s of the Middle East, the latter being one of the more well-known, influential and successful CIA conduits of the era.

The CIA funded Harvard-based International Seminar, and the conduits which the Central Intelligence Agency used to supply the forum with the necessary funds to run the program, are of great historical significance.

The American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) was not just a simple front organization used to funnel secret CIA money into their various projects, in fact, there were some very big names attached to this prominent post-war organization. The AFME was considered to be an “international educational organization” and was formed the same year that Henry Kissinger launched the International Seminar at Harvard, in 1951. There were 27 men and women who made up the AFME, which was led by Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of former-American President Theodore Roosevelt. The CIA had been formed in 1947 from what was originally the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Kermit Roosevelt Jr. was extremely influential in the early years of both organizations.

Kermit Roosevelt had been recruited by the mastermind behind the OSS, General William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, in 1941 and he was soon placed into the newly-created Office of the Co-ordinator of Information— the precursor to the OSS—as a special assistant to Dean Acheson. Working out of the State Department, Acheson, who was then Assistant Secretary of State, had been tasked during World War II with implementing President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of undermining Axis powers while at the same time supplying economic aid to Great Britain. Kermit Roosevelt, who was distantly related to the president, had had an affinity with the Middle East from a very young age with the Daily Mail of Hagerstown in Maryland reporting in September 1948 that: “Mr. [Kermit] Roosevelt’s career as a writer began when he was a child with the composing of a prophetic poem, ‘The Lure of the East,’ for the ‘American Boy’ magazine. He was eleven at the time.” Kermit’s father, also named Kermit, had been in the “shipping business,” as mentioned in the latter article. This had meant that Kermit Jr. had travelled around the world at an early age.

A 1950 photo of Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of US President Theodore Roosevelt, and a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Source: National Security Archive, GWU

Kermit spent the war years serving in the Middle East and Italy, travelling extensively throughout the war and was reported to have toured Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Iran and Ethiopia. His father, had spent the war fighting mainly in Norway and Finland, but also served briefly in Egypt, and died tragically in Alaska in 1943. The Abilene Reporter newspaper reported on Sunday 6 June 1943 that Kermit Sr. had passed away in Alaska the day before the article was published, with the paper noting: “Ordinarily, the phrase ‘killed in action’ is used to report a death in combat.” It was later confirmed that he had actually committed suicide. By this time, Kermit Jr. had already been recruited by the OSS. Kermit Jr. continued to work for the OSS as a Middle East expert once the war had ended and he also began writing and editing the history of the secretive organization. By 1947, the OSS had become the CIA and Kermit was on the forefront of designing projects and programs for the newly-founded intelligence agency. He also seemed genuinely concerned for the situation in the Middle East, and soon took part in a lecture tour. That tour, whether sponsored by the CIA or not, saw Kermit argue passionately on behalf of those who were suffering in Palestine.

In December 1947, Kermit began a lecture tour on a paper he had written concerning the Middle East, entitled, “The Arabs Live There Too,” which discussed the “Palestinian problem” and looked at the basic issues between the Arabs and Jews who inhabited the region. The report, which was published in the Evening Post, warned that the situation deserves “more than a cursory glance from Americans.” Kermit described Palestine as “the UN’s baby” and stated that America had taken over the job as “nurse and governess” of the region. The lecture tour was advertised in the Waukesha Daily Freeman on 22 December 1947, with Roosevelt stating within the articles: “Applying the principle of one of their proverbs, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ the Arabs might move into closer alignment with the Soviet Union,” going on to warn that “Arabs will not blame Russia (who voted for partition in the UN) half as much as they will blame Britain and the United States.” Kermit Roosevelt believed that the Arab league would stop short of all out war, describing an official declaration of war by any of the seven Arab nations as being “extremely unlikely.”

Roosevelt was eventually proved correct about the Arab nations not declaring war immediately and predicted instead that: “Any time the Arabs felt themselves strong enough, they would surely try to recover Palestine.” Before Kermit began his first covert operation in an Arabic country, he had been initially sent to Tibet by then-President Harry Truman to help ward off communist influence. The Delta Democrat Times of Mississippi reported on 9 April 1950 that: “Kermit Roosevelt, son of a G.O.P. President, is also being used on a confidential mission to block Communism in Tibet.”

Kermit Roosevelt believed that forming alliances with Arab countries as they emerged from British and French rule would pay dividends for America while also preventing Soviet infiltration of Arabic nations. However, that strategy would rely on the Western powers’ ability to keep Arab nationalism at bay, whether by diplomacy or subterfuge.

During 1943, Kermit worked for the State Department in Cairo and this was one of the first Middle East countries in the post-war years to experience a CIA-backed coup d’etat. At the same time as Kissinger was commencing the pilot of the Harvard International Seminar in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt was deeply involved in overthrowing the ruling Egyptian regime, running a special covert operation which was gingerly named “Operation Fat Fucker”, normally referred to as simply “Operation FF.”

Egypt, at the turn of the 50s, was ruled by King Farouk, a notorious ruler who was already seen as corrupt in the eyes of most Egyptians. The project to depose him was led by the CIA’s then-director Allen Dulles, alongside CIA Station Chief in Cairo, Miles Copeland, Jr.; Secretary of State, Dean Acheson; and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.—who was officially a CIA Operative at that time—with the original aim of applying pressure on Farouk to enact certain political reforms within his country. When the initial “pressure” phase had failed, resulting in Farouk rejecting the American proposals, Kermit Roosevelt came up with an idea of how to orchestrate a peaceful revolution which would see both the required reforms enacted and the country more open to “American control,” as historian Matthew F. Holland puts it.

Roosevelt met in secret with the Free Officers Movement, a nationalist revolutionary group, which was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Naguib, and which was already planning to overthrow the government. On 23 July 1952, the coup d’etat, which had been the brainchild of Roosevelt, saw Farouk forced into abdicating power and he was sent into exile in Italy. The CIA-led coup had successfully installed a new government, which they believed would be more amenable to further American infiltration. The CIA would then help the newly installed Egyptian government to establish the General Intelligence Agency, Egypt’s own CIA clone organization.

The following year, in March 1953, the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, directed the CIA, which was still headed by his brother, Allen Dulles, to begin preparing a similar coup in Iran. The same people who had successfully installed Nasser in Egypt were given $1 million in funds—equivalent to $12,128,464.73 in 2022—which were to be used to bring about the fall of the Iranian leader Mohammed Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh was successfully deposed on 19 August 1953 in a coup orchestrated by both the CIA and MI6, again led by AFME’s Kermit Roosevelt Jr., in a project entitled “Operation Ajax.” The successful coups in Egypt and Iran were not spontaneous events but were instead well executed and intricately planned operations. However, the Americans were soon to learn that, if they were to continue to overthrow governments, they would first need to have effective American-aligned leaders already trained-up and ready to install into their target countries.

Before the newly-created CIA had begun to enact the aforementioned coups in Egypt and Iran, Roosevelt had founded the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land with many of the same people who would later make up the American Friends of the Middle East. The Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land was formed in February 1948 by Roosevelt and a woman named Virginia Gildersleeve whose sympathies, according to historian Robert Moats Miller, “were indeed overwhelmingly with the Arabs,” and was a leading figure in the Christian opposition to the creation of the Israeli state.

Gildersleeve had been the long-term dean of Barnard College, but—in 1947—she had stepped down from her position to concentrate on other activities. In February 1948, the New York Times reported that she led a group opposed to the creation of a UN police force in Palestine. The article, entitled 7 Leaders Propose Truce in Palestine, also stated that the group’s members were: “Terming the present conflict in Palestine far more dangerous to world peace than most Americans realize,” with the group stating: “We feel a moral and civic obligation to urge that the most serious attention be given to our national policy with respect to Palestine,” with that statement also being cosigned by Kermit Roosevelt. Also prominent alongside Gildersleeve and Roosevelt in the creation of the AFME was Harry Emerson Fosdick, an American pastor described as an “active anti-Zionist” and who later became a major influence to Martin Luther King Jr.

Another notable member of the AFME was the controversial Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster who had the honour of being the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Thompson was described in a 1939 Time magazine piece as being equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt and was often referred to as the “First Lady of American Journalism.” However, Thompson also held extreme views concerning America’s black voting population, describing them as: “Notoriously venal. Ignorant and illiterate, the vast mass of Negroes are like the lower strata of the early industrial immigrants, and like them are ‘bossed’ and ‘delivered’ in blocs by venal leaders, white and black.”

Thompson was a vocal anti-Zionist, coming to the conclusion that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war. But, even though Roosevelt, Gildersleeve and Thompson all publicly opposed Zionism, the CIA in general would reap many benefits by creating a world which, if not in a state of perpetual war, was nearly always on the brink of perpetual war. The AFME included some of the key people who were moulding and influencing the post-war intelligence push. Even though we could find many interesting facts in studying all 27 members of the AFME, we now know that their interests focused on education and eventually resulted in the funding of a specific Harvard project that would create cadres of future international leaders who were amenable to America’s political interests and desires, including Klaus Schwab.

Just after World War II, there were many differing opinions within the American political establishment concerning what should be done about the “Palestinian problem.” Although many of the members of the AFME may have been publicly anti-Zionist, an upsurge in Arab nationalism had been triggered by the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948. This initially resulted in a divide in public opinion, with many Americans eventually siding with the newly founded Israeli state and their occupying force.

Popular opinion among the Arabic countries was much less divided. The Arab League closed their offices in Washington DC—referred to as the Arab Office—in 1947, stating publicly that the United States had shown a “complete and arrogant disregard for Arab rights, Arab interests, and Arab feelings.” At this time, the United States were still heavily dependant on Arab oil and the supply of this oil also relied on America having good relations with the Arabic world. The US oil consortium ARAMCO could only continue benefiting from Arab petroleum if the US stayed on good terms with the Saudi king, Ibn Saud, who was an extreme anti-Zionist. ARAMCO soon setup an office in Washington so as to lobby government on behalf of the Arabs while also putting funds into educational institutions such as the Middle East Institute. Yet, it wasn’t only the Arab contingent of the American population who were concerned about the rise of Zionism, with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) objecting to Zionism because they believed that it conflated religion and nationality. Rabbi Elmer Berger of Michigan, who was an ACJ leader at the time, campaigned for American Jews to stop supporting the creation of the state of Israel. At the time, the State Department had also been worried about throwing their lot in with the Zionists. They were mainly concerned with the potential for the growth of communist influence in Arab countries if the US showed too much support for the newly created state of Israel.

According to historian Hugh Wilford, it was to be the Cairo-based former-OSS members who acted as “the nexus of the network that would become the American Friends of the Middle East” as he makes note of in his paper entitled, American Friends of the Middle East: The CIA, US Citizens, and the Secret Battle for Public Opinion in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1967. Wilford also points out that Kermit Roosevelt associated with many anti-Zionists of the period. For example, he was actually under the command of an anti-Zionist descendent of missionaries named Stephen B. L. Penrose Jr. Roosevelt had also shared a room with George L. Levison, a State Department officer of Jewish descent who later introduced Roosevelt to such leaders as the aforementioned Elmer Berger. Roosevelt, Levison and Berger all became close friends, with Levison eventually being godparent to one of Roosevelt’s children.

Roosevelt was not only vital in setting up the original iteration of the AFME, the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, he also ran the organization out of his Washington home alongside the organization’s secretary, Garland Evans Hopkins. Eventually the anti-Zionist activists within the government failed in their efforts to prevent the creation of the state of Israel when President Harry Truman officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty. Roosevelt continued to undermine future support for Israel and, a year after Truman’s recognition of the country, Roosevelt and others formed the Holy Land Emergency Liaison Program (HELP), which was to coordinate aid for displaced Arabs in the region while also working to, as Hugh Wilford puts it: “Reduce US support for Israel.” It is also around this time where Dorothy Thompson and others began to raise the profile of Roosevelt’s organization.

The Battle for the Hearts, Minds and Souls of the Future Global Leaders

The Harvard Summer School had been running for over 75 years by the time Henry Kissinger was finishing his studies at the university. In 1950, Kissinger achieved his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and, during his studies, he received much attention from some very powerful Harvard grandees. In 1951, Kissinger launched the Harvard magazine entitled “Confluence,” which was to run alongside the International Seminar, and became the publication’s editor. This quarterly magazine was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and received contributions from others who were described as “various luminaries who had previously been lecturers or students at the Summer School.”

The International Seminar was later boosted by extra funding totalling at least $135,000—$1,637,342.74 in 2022—by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1960 and 1966 alone, with any previous CIA funding since the seminar’s creation in 1950 being left undeclared. Harvard Summer School’s International Seminar Forum had originally been the brainchild of William Yandell Elliott, an important mentor of Kissinger who took a back seat and remained out of the public eye. After the pilot event for the International Seminar Forum in 1951, the young Kissinger wrote to William Yandell Elliott, saying: “I was very much embarrassed to hear myself described as the guiding genius of the Seminar,” going on to say: “I, for one, have no illusions on this score.” Subsequently, the majority of participants would recall the influence of Kissinger rather than Elliott, with the forum eventually being commonly referred to as “Kissinger’s International Seminar.”

The CIA money for what was described as the “foreign seminar” came via a known CIA conduit, the aforementioned Kermit Roosevelt’s American Friends of the Middle East. Kissinger and his biographers would claim that he was unaware of the organization’s intelligence ties, describing Kissinger as “flying into a rage” upon learning that the AFME was actually a front for the CIA. However, Kissinger’s letters to H. Gates Lloyd during this period told a different story. They show that Kissinger had carefully itemized the expenses of the Summer School. Other documents within William Yandell Elliott’s papers also revealed that Kissinger may have even acted as a contract consultant for the Office for Policy Coordination (OPC) which was the covert operation wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, Elliott had written a letter to Lloyd on 15 November 1950, which urged progress with the Summer School proposal and the creation of Kissinger’s International Seminar. With that letter came certain papers directed to Kissinger himself which showed he had discussed the proposals with Cleveland Cram, an infamous and powerful early member of the Central Intelligence Agency. Cram had originally sought a career in academia but was recruited by the CIA in 1949. He was soon liaising with Yandell Elliott and Kissinger concerning the Harvard Summer School project and, after it was up-and-running, Cram was sent to London to become the Deputy Station Chief and the official liaison between the CIA, MI5 and MI6. In this CIA/Harvard nexus of the late 1940s and early 1950s, came the formation of what would, a generation later, evolve into the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader initiative.

One of the original reasons for the creation of the CIA had been to counter Soviet influence in foreign countries and they used multi-pronged attack strategies to achieve their aims. While Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt Jr., and their secret army, were organizing and enacting coup d’etats in country after country, other CIA-linked organizers and contributors were beginning to create the infrastructure that would allow them to recruit, train and install young European leaders into positions of power, leaders who they believed were unlikely to be susceptible to potential Soviet influence. Harvard was not alone in its funding of such projects. In fact, as Hugh Wilford noted in his fascinating and informative book The Mighty Wurlitzer, Yale was: “The single most fertile recruiting ground for the Agency in its first years, yielding among others Cord Meyer and two of the brightest stars of the ‘Golden Age’ of covert operations, Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes.” Also noted by Wilford are Yale’s James J. Angleton and Norman Holmes Pearson. The latter, Wilford notes, had graduated from Yale before serving in the OSS and returned to the university after the war in order to set up his “American Studies” program. The CIA were essentially trying to win the hearts and minds of young foreigners in direct competition with the Soviet Union.

The communists had already been busy targetting the impressionable youth for over 25 years before the end of WWII with Wilhelm “Willi” Münzenberg, a German-born communist activist, being the first leader of the Young Communist International (Comintern) as early as 1919. In 1945, a conference took place in London which saw the launch of the anti-imperialist World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). The following year saw the founding of other groups with some members sympathetic to communist ideals such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the International Union of Students (IUS). The latter had been created in Prague and saw a 25 member intelligence-linked US delegation attend.

As these entities were created, they each became virtual battlegrounds for East vs West ideology and the clash of Rhodesian Imperialist Capitalism and Soviet Communism. In fact, the World Federation of Democratic Youth saw Cold War rifts in their organizations soon fester and, by 1949, the non-communists had publicly withdrawn from the group, going on to create the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions instead. These sorts of organizations were valuable instruments for spreading communist propaganda and had been defined by Lenin as “levers” or “transmission belts” because of the way they can connect the Communist Party with the masses and were often referred to as “democratic” or “mass” organizations in Communist Jargon, as a pamphlet entitled, Facts About International Communist Front Organisations described in April 1957. In that particular pamphlet a quote from Lenin, which also appeared in Lawrence and Wishart’s 1947 book, The Essentials of Lenin, volume II, states: “Every sacrifice must be made, the greatest obstacles must be overcome, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly and patiently, precisely in those institutions, societies and associations—even the most reactionary—to which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses belong.” In essence, the CIA’s creation and funding of youth organizations and their wider infiltration of American universities was a strategy that essentially came straight out of Lenin’s own play book.

Before the CIA’s involvement, the British had been the ones taking the initiative by targetting the youth of Europe with the aim of countering Communist Party infiltration. The Cultural Relations Department was tasked with developing strategies relevant to Western-aligned youth groups, organizations and conferences. The first of such groups was the World Assembly of Youth (WAY) which had been given a draft charter in England in February 1949. All youth related member organizations of the United Nations were invited to attend an international conference held at Westminster Hall in August the same year. Here, they officially established WAY and elected their first president, Mr. Maurice Sauvé of Canada. It was around this time that the Americans first began organising their own efforts to “educate the youth,” which eventually led to such initiatives as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar. At Harvard, the International Affairs Committee (HIACOM) began gathering a group of young veterans who had worked within intelligence during World War II, in an effort to rival the much more advanced communist propaganda efforts.

In December 1946, HIACOM officers were involved in organising a meeting in Chicago which discussed the idea of creating a national body to represent American students, as well as wider American interests, at international events. As a result, by the summer of 1947, the United States National Student Association was born. For the two years prior to the launch of Kissinger’s International Seminar, Harvard students had conducted surveys of international student opinion in order to identify potential anti-communist allies overseas while also poaching potential members from rival organizations such as the International Union of Students.

The National Student Association had their second survey funded by two very interesting private donors via the Office for Policy Coordination. The Chicago lawyer and President of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Laird Bell, and a Wilmington industrialist named Thomas Brittingham, each provided the princely sum of $6000 to the organization specifically to carry out the survey. Laird Bell was an extremely influential and well-connected lawyer who had found himself frequently visiting Nazi Germany just before World War II in order to represent the interests of US bondholders who had lost more than $1 billion to the German Reichsbank. Bell would not be alone while working in pre-war Nazi Germany, as his co-counsel for these cases was John Foster Dulles, who was representing the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. By 1945, Bell was officially serving in post-war occupied Germany, and Eisenhower soon appointed him as a delegate to the United Nations. In 1948, Laird Bell became an “Overseer” of Harvard College, where he stayed until 1954, throughout the creation of the International Seminar.

Thomas Brittingham was extremely important in the development of America’s effort to win over sceptical foreign youth, especially in Northern Europe. Setting up “The Brittingham Scholarships” just after the war, he targeted the youth in Scandinavian countries. Also referred to as the “Viking students,” he would attract young men to his collection of scholarship programs which would eventually become named the “Brittingham Viking Scholarships” and which were run out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of “Tom’s Vikings”—as they were also called—would become successful in organizations that the program’s current website describes as: “their various industries, academic fields, and politics.”

Although there were many different youth groups throughout the various educational establishments across the United States, Kissinger’s International Seminar at Harvard’s Summer School was a very unique project. It was a focused event with a limited number of participants who were carefully chosen by a select few. The Harvard Crimson reported on 1 February 1956 that: “A group of approximately 50 men and a few women from the Orient, Middle East, and Europe, including members of various parliaments, editors, artists, writers, and other cultural leaders will once more come together to form the International Seminar, a regular feature of the Summer School.” This was a special elite group, selected, groomed and trained for powerful positions, with their allegiances forever tied to the interests of the United States government, and those interests would soon begin to fluctuate wildly over the following decades.

The Kissinger Continuum

By 1992, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the education of Schwab’s specially selected globalist politicians of the future was just about to begin. During this time of great political change, Schwab’s World Economic Forum had become a powerful globalist entity and Schwab was ready to begin following the model first established by Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. As Herman Kahn and his Hudson Institute colleagues had mapped out in a 1967 document entitled, _Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Center Program. Final Report,_ training a comprehensive future leadership group outside of the normal educational frameworks was of the highest priority. As previously reported, Kahn was yet another mentor to Klaus Schwab.

The first iteration of the WEF’s Young Global Leader program, called “Global Leaders for Tomorrow,” was launched in 1992 and was described as “a new community” which saw its first gathering of future leadership candidates take place in 1993. Some of the people who attended this first event were soon placed into top positions of power in their respective countries. For example, Tony Blair was a participant in the first event and, only 4 years later, he began his decade long rule of the UK. Gordon Brown also attended in 1993 and then served alongside Tony Blair, eventually becoming Prime Minister directly afterwards. This initial group was full to the brim with other future leaders with many members who were destined to soon become heads of states in their respective countries. Well-known leaders who attended include Angela Merkel [Germany], Victor Orban [Hungary], Nicholas Sarkozy [France], Guy Verhofstadt [Belgium], Lee Hsien Loong [Singapore], Cyril Ramaphosa [South Africa] and José Maria Aznar [Spain]. Alongside the politicians in this first group, there were also notable business leaders in attendance, such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Summers and Edgar Bronfman. In total, the first year of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program was comprised of 200 potential candidates who were all under 43 years-old at the time. For over a decade, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program trained various leaders who often found themselves subsequently installed into various positions of power, including many elected officials. In 2004, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program was rebranded as the Forum of Young Global Leaders and was re-launched after Schwab found funding from an old friend.

The Harvard Kennedy Magazine of Summer 2009 starts their lead article by stating: “Through Alumni and Teaching Harvard Kennedy School plays a central role in the Forum of Young Global Leaders Program,” with the author, Steve Nadis writing: “In 2004, Klaus Schwab MC/MPA 1967, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who founded the World Economic Forum (WEF), won a $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation and tried to think of the best use to which he could put that money. Schwab decided to start a WEF-affiliated program called the Forum of Young Global Leaders (YGL), which, as the name implies, would bring together a new generation of leaders from across the globe and turn them loose on the biggest problems of the day.” Astoundingly, the Tel Aviv-based Dan David Foundation that awarded Schwab the $1 million which was directly used to create the Young Global Leaders program had one extremely significant member of note on their board, Henry A. Kissinger.

Harvard’s International Seminar and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders initiative were created to be extremely powerful vehicles for training and installing world leaders who would be sympathetic to a Kissinger-style globalist government. They were also both made possible by organizing assistance and funding from Kissinger himself. It isn’t a surprise that Schwab’s links with Kissinger prevailed throughout both their lifetimes, Schwab was a student of Henry Kissinger and the two men also appeared to share many similar views.

Yet, what is really notable about Harvard’s Summer School, and Kissinger’s International Seminar in particular, is that the programs, conferences and the basic elements involved were very similar to what the World Economic Forum still presents to their members annually to this day. They are extremely similar projects aimed at achieving similar agendas. When the World Economic Forum began their Global Leaders for Tomorrow initiative in the early 1990s, Klaus Schwab’s organization implemented a program of recruitment and training for global leaders which was almost indistinguishable from Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. Schwab was treading in the footsteps of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, and it was the Dan David Foundation, while Kissinger was seated on their board, which eventually awarded Schwab with the initial funding required to create the current iteration of the program, the Forum for Young Global Leaders.

Klaus Schwab and others board a flight to Ukraine for the 1993 World Economic Forum annual meeting, Source: WEF

The World Economic Forum has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers, business leaders, entrepreneurs and other powerful actors, through their Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders initiatives. Schwab has even spoken openly on how his organization has gone on to “penetrate the cabinets” of supposedly sovereign states, and we should not be naive, as he has been planning on doing exactly this for at least three decades. However, it isn’t the thousands of participants who have completed these programs who we should be most concerned about. Our real concern should be with the billions of democratic voters who have been tricked into believing that any of the leaders produced by either Schwab or Kissinger have their best interests at heart.

Klaus Schwab became the heir to Henry Kissinger’s most important project, the infiltration of individuals and organizations in countries around the world with the aim of creating globalist-aligned governments built within the framework of an outdated and soulless conceptualization of American imperialism. Klaus Schwab’s activities since his time at Harvard can be seen as simply a direct continuation of Kissinger’s work during the 1950s and 1960s, and it would be naive of us to believe that there is not someone else, already groomed and trained, who is ready and willing to pick up Kissinger’s political baton from Schwab and continue in their joint mission towards globalist governance.

You’ve probably heard some of the fuss around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This article is neither a fiery condemnation (that would be too easy) nor a technical explanation, nor anything in between. I will briefly explain what they are, describe their attractions and dangers, and then explore some seldom-discussed foundational questions.

What is a central bank currency—digital or otherwise? It is money issued by a central bank such as the Federal Reserve that either circulates as cash or is held in accounts at the central bank. Today, the only entities that have accounts at the Fed are banks and other financial institutions. Private citizens and businesses can’t open an account at the Fed. I tried, but they put me on hold.

Here is a simplified version of how it works, accurate enough for the present purpose. Acme Bank has reserves of $100 million at the Fed. During the course of the day, it makes loans and takes deposits. The loans end up as deposits in other banks. At the end of the day, all these transfers are “cleared,” meaning that if Acme lent a total of $20 million and received a total of $15 million, its account balance at the Fed would fall by $5 million, and other banks in the system would see their balance rise by a total of $5 million also.

I hope you didn’t tune out as soon as you saw numbers. Basically what is happening is that central bank money moves from one bank’s account to another to settle accounts with other banks.

Obviously, these bank reserves at the Fed do not take the form of piles of hundred-dollar bills. They are digital already. So what is new about CBDCs?

The novelty stems from the fact that the money you and I spend (with the exception of cash) is not central bank money at all. It exists only in the ledger of your commercial bank or other institution. If I Paypal you $1000, my Paypal balance and your Paypal balance change, but nothing happens in the central bank. Same is true if Alice, who banks at Acme, writes a $1000 check to Bob, who deposits it in XYZ Bank, and then Carol, who also banks at XYZ, writes a $1000 check to Dave who deposits it in Acme. These individuals’ account balances go up and down, but their banks are even with each other and the Fed is not involved at all.

A central bank digital currency essentially allows private individuals and businesses to have accounts at the central bank. It would function just like (and ultimately replace) cash, requiring no intermediary, no bank, no credit card company, and no transaction fee. If I buy a coffee at your cafe, an app or card reader sends a message to automatically credit your account and debit mine. The user experience would be the same as today, but there would be no fee and no lag time. Normally, paying by debit or credit card involves a 3% fee and a day or two for the funds to become available to the seller.

Attractions and Dangers of CBDCs

Now I’ll list some other benefits and advantages of CBDCs. You might notice that with a mere twist of the lens, many of these advantages take on an ominous hue. But let’s start with the positive:

• As mentioned, CBDCs can remove what is essentially a 3% tax on most consumer-level transactions, allowing swift, frictionless transactions and transfers of money.

• Unlike with physical cash, all CBDC transactions would have an electronic record, offering law enforcement a powerful weapon against money laundering, tax evasion, funding of terrorism, and other criminal activity.

• The funds of criminals and terrorists could be instantly frozen, rendering them incapable of doing anything requiring money such as buying an airplane ticket, filling up at a gas station, paying their phone or utility bills, or hiring an attorney.

• CBDCs are programmable, allowing authorities to limit purchases, payments, and income in whatever ways are socially beneficial. For example, all products could have a carbon score, and consumers could be limited in how much they are allowed to buy. Or, if rationing becomes necessary, authorities could impose a weekly limit on food purchases, gas purchases, and so on.

• With programmable currency, citizens could be rewarded for good behavior: for eating right and exercising, for doing good deeds that are reported by others, for staying away from drugs, for staying indoors during a pandemic, and for taking the medications that health authorities recommend. Or they could be penalized for bad behavior.

• Taxation and wealth redistribution could be automated. Universal basic income, welfare payments, stimulus payments, or racial reparations could be implemented algorithmically as long as CBDC accounts were firmly connected with individual’s identities, medical records, racial status, criminal histories, and so forth.

Basically, beyond facilitating transactions, CBDCs offer an unprecedented opportunity for social engineering. Assuming that those in control are beneficent and wise, this is surely a good thing. But if, as many of us now believe, our authorities are foolish, incompetent, corrupt, or are merely fallible human beings incapable of handling too much power, then CBDCs can easily become instruments of totalitarian oppression. They allow authorities:

• To freeze the funds not only of terrorists and evil-doers, but dissidents, thought criminals, and scapegoated classes of people.

• To program money so it can only go to approved vendors, corporations, information platforms, and so forth. Those that fail to toe the party line can be “demonetized,” with consequences far beyond what befalls the hapless YouTuber who utters heresies about Covid, Ukraine, climate change, etc.

• Under the guise of rewarding good behavior and penalizing bad, to control every aspect of life so that it conforms to the interests of elite corporate and political institutions.

• To nip in the bud any opposition political movement by demonetizing its leaders and activists, either with no explanation at all, or under flimsy pretexts that their victims would have no way to contest.

It boggles my mind that the public could accept such a momentous transfer of power to central authorities, with nary a whisper of democratic process. Something this significant should require explicit public approval in the form of a referendum, constitutional amendment, or the like, after long and considered public debate. Instead, elites discuss it as if it were an inevitability.

Art credit: Rachel Herbert

The Ideology of Progress

The elites who are preparing CBDCs are well aware of their totalitarian potential. I know this from reading their speeches and documents. Moreover, this awareness is not in the sense of a fiendish secret plot to gain totalitarian control and oppress the masses. Their internal narrative (among themselves and in their own minds) is more like the following:

Sure, this technology could be abused if it falls into the wrong hands. Thankfully though, it will remain in our hands: the hands of smart, rational, sophisticated people, well-educated in the best schools, who have advanced to the top of a meritocratic system. In fact, the Fourth Industrial Revolution that includes digital currencies and high-tech biometrics and surveillance will ensure that the good, smart, rational people will remain in power. These technologies will allow us to safeguard the world from irrational, anti-science, undereducated, psychopathic charlatans and demagogues who would mislead the masses and usurp the rule of science, reason, and technological progress. CBDCs will vastly expand our ability to rationally administer society for the net benefit of all.

As long as this way of thinking is firmly in place, then it matters little if Klaus Schwab and the elites are fiendish totalitarian plotters, or merely bland bureaucrats. The results will be the same. This ideology, whether they wield it as a cynical pretext or serve it with whole-hearted sincerity, will drive them to bring the whole world under their control.

We must understand CBDCs as part of a more sweeping ideology of progress, which celebrates any new extension of material and informational control. In that ideology, progress means improvements in our ability to capture the world through data, and to then manipulate the world accordingly. The more accurate and complete the data set, the better able we will be to improve human life. The old policy-making standard of the cost-benefit analysis can be automated through AI algorithms that maximize whatever the smart people in charge choose as the appropriate metric of well-being.

“The more accurate and complete the data set, the better able we will be to improve human life.” Thus it is that CBDC scenarios normally include the ideal of a cash-free society. Cash transactions are outside the data set. They are hard to monitor or control. For CBDCs to fit into social engineers’ paradise of total control, they must accompany the elimination of cash.

This whole program depends on unconscious assumptions: that everything important can be measured, that everything real can be quantified, that every causal principle can be known. The program’s operators seldom consider what—and who—gets left out of the metrics.

Beyond the Binaries

Returning now to matters of currency, I’d like to add some complexity to the dystopian possibility I’ve described. Under apparently binary distinctions like centralization/decentralization, freedom/control, and politics/economy, other principles lurk unnoticed.

Art credit: Natasza Zurek, Dualistic Nature

It may look like CBDCs are qualitatively different from money today; that they are more like rations stamps. Real money, one supposes, can be spent on whatever one likes. Real money, one supposes, is fully alienable from its owner. My dollar is the same as your dollar, and it bears no trace of its origin. All that is true of cash, but is not necessarily of programmable currency. Is it money at all?

The notion of money being free from political interference brings up a more general issue: the relationship between the economic and political realm. Communism obliterates the distinction and unifies the two. Libertarianism seeks the reverse, to banish politics from economics. In practice, the two have never been fully united nor fully separate. Both money and government are modes of human agreement.

The libertarian ideal of money that is outside political interference is based on a misunderstanding of money’s historical origins. Long before the first coins were minted in Lydia and Greece, complex societies kept tallies of contributions to granaries and temples, tallies which could then be used as the basis of lending or exchange. In other words, money originated as credit, not cash. It originated as a social recognition of contribution, not as fungible commodities replacing barter.

Even after the advent of coinage, many or most transactions were settled via credit. In the Middle Ages, records of who owed what to whom were kept on ledgers and tally sticks, and settled only occasionally with coinage. In that context, one person’s thaler or shilling was not equal to another’s. Merchants were much more likely to accept the IOUs of people of “good account” than they were of the town drunkard. One might have good credit in some quarters and poor credit in others. In that sense, money was similar to certain CBDC proposals: It could not always be spent equally everywhere, and was not fully alienable from its source.

Do not interpret the above as an endorsement of CBDCs. There is nothing wrong with social accountability in money, but it needn’t come from central banks and governments. Two issues are at stake here: the degree of political influence over the economy, and the agent of that influence. The degree ranges from an individualistic free-for-all at one extreme, and minute control over all earning, investing, and spending on the other. The agent of the influence could be a centralized state, or it could be some other social structure(s).

Money bearing the characteristics of cash (anonymity, alienability) inherently curtails the power of government, and indeed any form of social control. Not all societies hold limited government to be a good thing, but the United States was founded on it as an ideal. One way to limit government’s power is through a system of checks and balances. Another, complementary, way is to keep realms of human life outside government purview—to maintain a realm that is unregulated, non-juridical, undefined. This does not leave it as an individualistic free-for-all. It allows the operation of other modes of human social regulation. These include community, morality, consensus, extended family, custom, tradition, and cultural normativity.

In classical leftist thinking, the state is distinguished by its monopoly on violence. In a court of law, the losing side must abide by the court’s decision, or ultimately armed officers will enforce it. The colonization of community and informal culture by law is in that sense a colonization of life by violence. It shifts more and more of the edifice of culture onto the foundational bedrock of violence.

How Healthy Societies Constrain Money

The modern decline of non-monetized modes of social organization (community, morality, tradition, extended family, etc.) leaves only the legal system to check the wanton abuse of money power. From ancient times until quite recently there were extra-legal social limits on the free spending of money. The wealthy would suffer social pressure if they were too ostentatious or failed to uphold civic responsibilities. As communities weakened, so did these social pressures.

I remember a story I read as a child from one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Deep snow had cut off the frontier town from the outside, and its grain supplies were running low. Finally, someone managed to make a run through a blizzard to bring in a cartload of wheat on behalf of a local merchant, who for a few weeks became the town’s only supplier. At first, he tried selling the grain at a huge markup, but when the citizens indignantly explained to him that he would be shunned forever more, he relented and sold it at cost.

In those days, people depended on each other in a network of gifts, favors, and obligations. An intangible civic currency circulated along with the financial currency. It enabled people to hold each other accountable. Money would not have done the merchant much good if the town’s doctor, laborers, carpenters, teamsters, and so on bore him ill will and refused him service. That is what might happen to those who offended local mores.

Not to idealize those times, one must also point out that these mores also encoded all manner of racist and sexist attitudes. Even people who bore no racism themselves might still participate in redlining, segregation, and other forms of discrimination, because the social consequences of flouting these conventions were severe. Racist laws were but one layer of the edifice of Jim Crow. But I digress. My point here is that state power was not the only limit to financial power.

Just as checks on government power are essential to a wholesome society, so also are checks on economic power. In the modern age, little remains to check it outside the state (or more precisely, centralized authority). State and money together have usurped nearly every other mode of social organization. When centralized authority subjugates money and property, we have communism. When money and property subjugate the state, we have oligarchy or fascism. Both lead to the same end: the fusion of economic and political power, and the totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.

Those who quite rightly criticize CBDCs for their totalitarian potential must understand that anonymous, trustless money (cash, and today, certain cryptocurrencies) is also antagonistic to a healthy society. I personally would prefer it to total state control, but there is a reason why drug dealers, child pornographers, extortionists, and other criminals use it. It allows them to violate social norms. Historically, cash prevails during times of war and social turmoil, when social structures have ruptured, strangers show up, and people don’t trust each other. (See David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years for a compelling argument.) When things settle down and durable social structures emerge, then cash gives way by degrees to credit.

The problem today is not, as the central authorities see it, that too much economic activity lies outside their ability to track and control it. Nor is it as libertarians see it: that individual freedom is eroding away. As in most polarized debates, both sides tacitly accept the very circumstance that generates the conflict to begin with: the erosion of civil society structures that hold people accountable for their actions.

In fact, most people do not want the kind of freedom that is oblivious to the effect of their choices on other people. How do we know whether our economic choices do good or ill? In a healthy society, a myriad of feedback loops inform us how our choices land on others, and so help us navigate life. The CBDC vision relies instead on central authorities to tell us, and to program that information into money so that, for example, products with high embodied carbon become more expensive.

If this were the only conceivable source of social and ecological accountability, then maybe we ought accept the central control and do our best to improve its character. But there is an alternative to subjecting ourselves to the dubious wisdom of an (at best) paternalistic or (at worst) predatory state. We can build and rebuild other systems of social accountability.

In other words, the answer to the threat of centralized totalitarianism is to build community: traditional place-based community as well as online community.

Here we come to the issue of decentralized digital currencies. But before commenting on them, I want to clarify that an economy is not the same as a community, and a community is more than a network of people. A community is a group of people who need each other. Obligation and gratitude, giving and receiving bind them together. Community wanes as financial affluence waxes. If you can pay for everything, you don’t need anyone. The more we meet needs through money, the more vulnerable we are to financial collapse and to control though CBDCs. If the government cuts off my access to money (for example, because I post “disinformation” on my Substack channel), I will be incapacitated if I’m completely dependent on that money to meet my needs. But if I am well embedded in networks of gift and trade, if I grow some of my own food, if I have shared generously over the years, if I have people around me whom I needn’t pay to meet my needs for food, child education, music-making, home repairs, medicine, and care when I grow old, then I will be at least partially insulated from state power. This is a kind of autonomy that alarms fascists and communists both (both flavors of totalitarian are deeply suspicious of any form of social organization outside their purview). Yet it seldom occurs to libertarians either, who normally think in terms of autonomous individuals.

Well, there is no such thing as an autonomous individual. The true nature of the human being—indeed, of being itself—is relationship. Only a system built upon that metaphysical understanding can hope to durably fulfill the hopes that we invest in it.

There is no such thing as an autonomous individual. We are creatures of dependency to the core. Let us not speak, then, of freedom from social constraint. Let us ask instead how we should be constrained, and by whom. To whom should we be accountable, to whom should we be in debt, on whom should we depend in our neediness?

Society as Organism

In addition to non-monetary structures of mutual support, other forms of money also grant a degree of insulation from CBDC control. CBDCs are not so scary if they are not the exclusive permitted form of money. If only a portion of economic activity is transacted in CBDCs, the situation is little different than it is today. Already banks and other financial institutions do the government’s bidding in terms of providing transaction records or freezing bank accounts, as the demonetization of Wikileaks demonstrated already in 2014. In the dreams of totalitarian idealists, no financial activity exists outside their surveillance and control. That is why governments around the world are pushing to eliminate cash and outlaw, or at least regulate, cryptocurrencies.

In fact, cryptocurrencies already provide some of the advantages of CBDCs. For example, second- and third-generation cryptos allow instantaneous transfer of funds at nearly zero cost (and low energy consumption). The technical challenges of transaction time, scaling, and energy use have largely been solved. The socio-political questions have not, and here is fertile soil for the cultivation of new forms of social accountability and new ways to infuse values into money.

Bitcoin maximalists criticize other cryptocurrencies for not being truly decentralized. In most cases, the currency’s founders or a small group of nodes and developers wield strong influence over policy decisions, such as whether to modify the protocol. Theoretically, this leaves them vulnerable to government pressure. A fully decentralized crypto is like cash in the age of precious metal coinage. No one is in charge of it. No organization or group has a determining influence on it. Its value is (supposedly) independent of human politics.

Is that a good thing, though? If the only consideration is government interference, then yes. If we would like to encode money with social, moral, or ecological values, then no. Many newer currencies make a virtue out of their semi-centralization by building some form of community governance into the protocol. Yes, this might make them vulnerable to manipulation by central government authorities; on the other hand, they can nucleate the formation of new centers, parallel structures outside the state.

In a corrupt age, it is tempting to cede control over money to an impartial, impersonal algorithm to insulate it from the messiness of human politics. Ultimately though, politics (in the broad sense of agreements among the human collective) must subordinate money, and values must subordinate value. Do we really want to create money that we cannot change, and risk loosing a Frankensteinian monster upon the world?

It is much better to build governance of money into money itself. Instead of pure decentralization, in which there are no power centers at all, we might think more fruitfully in terms of multiple centers in an organic structure. An organism does not a have a single command-and-control center. Yet, neither is it a mass of undifferentiated co-equal cells. The brain, the heart, the endocrine organs each have systemic influence, but none supersedes the others. They are mutually influencing and mutually dependent. There is a reason that bodies (and ecosystems) grow that way: It makes them adaptable and resilient.

The main threat of CBDCs does not lie in those currencies per se. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with socio-political influence over money. The danger is that they will become the only money, as power-hungry central institutions ban cash and cryptocurrencies to fulfill their dreams of total control. We need other centers of power, other centers of social influence, accountability, and agreement, and other financial organs. Without them, tyranny is inevitable, CBDCs or no, and ideals of individual freedom will not stop it.

We cannot rely on the state to create other centers for us; we must create them ourselves, and protect them from central institutions.

These new structures can embody positive values. In the last few years lots of crypto projects have come across my desk that attempt to integrate social and ecological values into their design. Some are already doing some of the things that CBDC planners envision, such as incentivizing certain behavior. It could be participation in a community, engaging in climate action, or removing plastic from the ocean. At least one cryptocurrency, Celo, is carbon-negative by design (through investing its funds in ecological protection and restoration). It is also part of a growing ecosystem of protocols that support community-building and the development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Many of these also incorporate various kinds of democratic decision-making and self-governance into their protocols.

Crypto is still an immature technology, a technological experiment, used by perhaps one percent of the population. It is rife with greed, deception, and get-rich-quick schemes, often disguised in lofty ideals. Some of the issuers who claim ecological values are merely engaging in ecological virtue signaling. Nonetheless, for all their problems, cryptocurrencies and their surrounding technologies illustrate the possibility of incorporating social values into money and developing participatory social structures that are independent of the state.

To fight the system is futile if one cannot offer an inspiring alternative. What is the alternative to a machine-like society centered around an all-seeing, all-powerful CPU? It is society as organism, society as ecosystem.

For that, we need to grow new organs and revitalize those that have withered. The withered ones include place-based communities, local economic structures and civic organizations, a culture of reciprocity and mutual aid, local earth-based skills held collectively and generationally, and extra-legal practices of conflict resolution. By revitalizing the in-person and the place-based, we become resilient to the encroachment of technology and all things digital. Secondly (and, I would say, secondarily) we can grow new organs in the digital realm.

The stronger these new and revitalized organ systems are, the less CBDCs will matter, as money and power devolve away from the center. The ultimate goal cannot be to eliminate national and global scale governance entirely. After all, some of our problems and creative possibilities are national or global in scope. However, because economic and political power is presently far too centralized, we should halt the rush toward CBDCs and focus our attention on other organs: the local, the bottom-up, the informal, the peer-to-peer.

What is really at stake here is the reclamation of something we could actually call a society. Indulge me while I exercise a special sense of the word. A true society is not a collection of atomic individuals ordered and directed by a central power. Originally, the word connoted fellowship, companionship, alliance, and friendship. Central authorities, however beneficent, cannot grant that to us. Their intervention may, arguably, be necessary if life devolves into a war of each against all. CBDCs and the rest of the surveillance state are symptoms of devolution as much as they are causes. It is up to us to reverse it. It is up to us to begin walking the long road back to fellowship.

The World Economic Forum’s recorded history has been manufactured to appear as though the organisation was a strictly European creation, but this isn’t so. In fact, Klaus Schwab had an elite American political team working in the shadows that aided him in creating the European-based globalist organisation. If you have a decent knowledge of Klaus Schwab’s history, you will know that he attended Harvard in the 1960s where he would meet then-Professor Henry A. Kissinger, a man with whom Schwab would form a lifelong friendship. But, as with most information from the annals of the World Economic Forum’s history books, what you’ve been told is not the full story. In fact, Kissinger would recruit Schwab at the International seminar at Harvard, which had been funded by the US’ Central Intelligence Agency. Although this funding was exposed the year in which Klaus Schwab left Harvard, the connection has gone largely unnoticed – until now.

My research indicates that the World Economic Forum is not a European creation. In reality, it is instead an operation which emanates from the public policy grandees of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixonian eras of American politics; all of whom had ties to the Council on Foreign Relations and the associated “Round Table” Movement, with a supporting role played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

There were three extremely powerful and influential men, Kissinger among them, who would lead Klaus Schwab towards their ultimate goal of complete American Empire-aligned global domination via the creation of social and economic policies. In addition, two of the men were at the core of manufacturing the ever present threat of global thermonuclear war. By examining these men through the wider context of the geopolitics of the period, I will show how their paths would cross and coalesce during the 1960s, how they recruited Klaus Schwab through a CIA-funded program, and how they were the real driving force behind the creation of the World Economic Forum.

Henry A. Kissinger

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Bavaria, Germany, on 27 May 1923 to Paula and Louis Kissinger. The family had been one of many Jewish families fleeing the persecution in Germany to arrive in America in 1938. Kissinger would change his first name to Henry at 15 years old when arriving in America by way of a brief emigration to London. His family would initially settle in Upper Manhattan with the young Henry Kissinger attending George Washington High School. In 1942, Kissinger would enroll in the City College of New York, but, in early 1943, was drafted into the US Army. On 19 June 1943, Kissinger would become a naturalised US citizen. He would soon be assigned to the 84th Infantry Division where he would be recruited by the legendary Fritz Kraemer to work in the military intelligence unit of the division. Kraemer would fight along Kissinger during the Battle of the Bulge and would later become extremely influential in American politics during the postwar era, influencing future politicians such as Donald Rumsfeld. Henry Kissinger would describe Kraemer as being “the greatest single influence on my formative years”, in a New Yorker article entitled, The Myth of Henry Kissinger, written in 2020.

The writer of that article, Thomas Meaney, describes Kraemer as:

“A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar years fighting both Communists and Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets. He had doctorates in political science and international law, and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the US in 1939. He warned Kissinger not to emulate “cleverling” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.””

Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab and Ted Heath at the 1980 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

During World War II, whilst Kissinger was serving in the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, he would be promoted to the rank of sergeant and would go on to serve in the Military Intelligence Reserve for many years after peace was declared. During that period, Kissinger would take charge of a team hunting down Gestapo officers and other Nazi officials who had been labeled as “saboteurs”. After the war, in 1946, Kissinger would be reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School, a position he would continue to work in as a civilian after officially leaving the army.

In 1950, Kissinger would graduate from Harvard with a degree in political science where he would study under William Yandell Elliott, who would eventually be a political advisor to six US presidents and would also serve as a mentor to Zbigniew Brzezinski and Pierre Trudeau, among others. Yandell Elliott, along with many of his star pupils, would serve as the key connectors between the American national security establishment and the British “Round Table” movement, embodied by organisations such as Chatham House in the UK and the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. They would also seek to impose global power structures shared by Big Business, the political elite and academia. Kissinger would continue to study at Harvard, gaining his MA and PhD degrees at the prestigious university, but he was also already trying to forge a career path in intelligence, reportedly seeking recruitment as an FBI spy during this period.

In 1951, Kissinger would be employed as a consultant for the Army’s Operations Research Office, where he would be trained in various forms of psychological warfare. This awareness of psyops was reflected in his doctoral work during the period. His work on the Congress of Vienna and its consequences invoked thermonuclear weapons as its opening gambit, which also made an otherwise dull piece of work a little more interesting. By 1954, Kissinger was hoping to become a junior professor at Harvard but, instead, the dean of Harvard at the time, McGeorge Bundy – another pupil of William Yandell Elliott, recommended Kissinger to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). At the CFR, Kissinger would start managing a study group on nuclear weapons. From 1956 to 1958, Kissinger also became the Director of Special Studies for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (David Rockefeller was vice-president of the CFR during this period), as well as going on to direct multiple panels to produce reports on national defense, which would gain international attention. In 1957, Kissinger would seal his place as a leading Establishment figure on thermonuclear war after publishing, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a book published for the Council on Foreign Relations by Harper & Brothers.

In December of 1966, The Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, John M Leddy, announced the formation of a 22-man panel of advisors to help “shape European policy”. The five most prominent actors of this panel of advisors included: Henry A Kissinger representing Harvard, Robert Osgood of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research (funded by Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie money), Melvin Conant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Warner R Schilling of Columbia University, and Raymond Vernon who was also of Harvard. The other people on the panel included four members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Shepard Stone of the Ford Foundation, with the rest being a mix of representatives from leading American universities. The forming of this panel could be considered the laying of the proverbial foundation stone marking the American branch of the “Round Table” establishment’s intent to create an organisation such as the World Economic Forum, whereby Anglo-American imperialists would mold European policies as they saw fit.

Post-war Europe was at a vital stage of its development and the powerful American Empire was beginning to see opportunities in the rebirth of Europe and the emerging identity of its younger generation. In late December of 1966, Kissinger would be one of the twenty-nine “American authorities on Germany” to sign a statement declaring that “recent state elections in West Germany do not indicate a rebirth of Nazism”. The document, also signed by the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, was meant to signal that Europe was starting afresh and was meant to begin putting the horrors of European wars in the past. Some of the people involved in creating the aforementioned document were those who had already been externally influencing European policy from abroad. Notably, one of the signatures alongside Kissinger and Eisenhower was Prof. Hans J Morgenthau who was also representing the Council on Foreign Relations at the time. Morgenthau had famously written a paper entitled, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, and argued against an “overreliance on science and technology as solutions to political and social problems”.

In February 1967, Henry Kissinger would target European policy making as having been the reason for a century of war and political turmoil on the continent. In a piece entitled, Fuller Investigation, printed in the New York Times, Kissinger would state that a work by Raymond Aron, Peace and War. A Theory of International Relations, had remedied some of these issues.

In this article, Kissinger would write:

“In the United States the national style is pragmatic; the tradition until World War II was largely isolationist; the approach to peace and war tended to be absolute and legalistic. American writing on foreign policy has generally tended to fall into three categories: analyses of specific cases or historical episodes, exhortations justifying or resisting greater participation in international affairs, and investigations of the legal bases of world order.”

It was clear that Prof Henry A Kissinger had identified American involvement in European policy creation as being vital in the future peace and stability of the world. At this time, Kissinger was based at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here, the future founder of the World Economic Forum, a young Klaus Schwab, would catch the eye of Henry A Kissinger.

Kissinger was the executive director of the International seminar, which Schwab often mentions when recollecting his time spent at Harvard. On 16 April 1967, it would be reported that various Harvard programs had been receiving funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This included $135,000 of funding for Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, funding which Kissinger claimed he was unaware had come from the US intelligence agency. The CIA’s involvement in funding Kissinger’s international seminar was exposed in a report by Humphrey Doermann, the assistant to Franklin L Ford, who was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Humphrey Doermann’s report, written in 1967, only centred on the CIA funding from between 1961 to 1966, but Kissinger’s International seminar, which had received the most funding out of all the CIA-funded Harvard programs, would still run through 1967. Klaus Schwab arrived at Harvard in 1965.

On 15 April 1967, The Harvard Crimson would publish an article, attributed to no author, concerning Doermann’s report that stated, “There were no strings attached to the aid, so the government could not directly influence research or prevent its results from being published.” The dismissive article, entitled, CIA Financial Links, nonchalantly closes out by stating,”In any case, were the University to refuse to accept CIA research grants, the shadowy agency would have little trouble channeling its offers through another agrecy.” (agrecy being a pun meaning a form of intelligence).

The evidence points to Klaus Schwab having been recruited by Kissinger into his circle of “Round Table” imperialists via a CIA funded program at Harvard University. In addition, the year he graduated would also be the year in which it was revealed to have been a CIA-funded program. This CIA-funded seminar would introduce Schwab to the extremely well-connected American policy-makers who would help him create what would become the most powerful European public policy institute, the World Economic Forum.

By 1969, Kissinger would be sitting as the head of the US National Security Council, of which the sitting president, Richard Nixon would “enhance the importance of” during his administration. Kissinger was Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs between 2 December 1968 to 3 November 1975, serving concurrently as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State from 22 September 1973. Kissinger would dominate the making of US foreign policy during the Nixon era and the system he would bring to the National Security Council would seek to combine features of the systems previously implemented by Eisenhower and Johnson.

Henry Kissinger, who had been one of the people to manufacture tensions between thermonuclear powers over the previous two decades, was now to act as “peacemaker” during the Nixon period. He would turn his focus to the European stand-off and would seek to relax the tensions between the West and Russia. He negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (culminating in the SALT I treaty) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Kissinger was attempting to rebrand himself as a trusted statesman and diplomat.

In the second term of President Richard Nixon’s administration, their attention would turn to relations with Western Europe. Richard Nixon would describe 1973 as being the “Year of Europe”. The United States’ focus would be on supporting the states of the European Economic Community (EEC) which had become economic rivals to the US by the early 1970s. Kissinger grasped the “Year of Europe” concept and pushed an agenda, not only of economic reform, but also arguing to strengthen and revitalise what he considered to be the “decaying force”, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Throughout this period, Kissinger would also promote global governance.

Years later, Henry Kissinger would make the opening address of the World Economic Forum’s 1980 conference, telling the elites at Davos: “For the first time in history, foreign policy is truly global”.

John K. Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith (often referred to as Ken Galbraith) was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public policy maker, and Harvard intellectual. His impact on American history is extraordinary and the consequences of his actions in the late 1960s alone are still being felt around the world today. In September 1934, Galbraith would initially join the faculty at Harvard University as an instructor with a salary of $2,400 per year. In 1935, he would be appointed a tutor at John Winthrop House (commonly known as Winthrop House) which is one of twelve undergraduate residential houses at Harvard University. In that same year, one of his first students would be Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, with John F. Kennedy arriving two years later, in 1937. Soon after, the Canadian Galbraith would become naturalised as a US citizen on 14 September 1937. Three days later, he would marry his partner, Catherine Merriam Atwater, a woman who, a few years before, had been studying at the University of Munich. There, she had lived in the same rooming house-dormitory as Unity Mitford, whose boyfriend was Adolf Hitler. After marrying, Galbraith would travel extensively in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Italy, France, but also Germany. Galbraith had been due to spend a year as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge under famed economist John Maynard Keynes, but Keynes’ sudden heart attack would see Galbraith’s new wife persuade him to study in Germany instead. During the summer of 1938, Galbraith would study German land policies under Hitler’s government.

The following year, Galbraith found himself involved in what was termed at the time, “the Walsh-Sweezy affair” – a US national scandal involving two radical instructors who had been terminated from Harvard. Galbraith’s connections with the affair would result in his appointment at Harvard not being renewed.

Still from Galbraith’s interview with Charlie Rose

Galbraith would take a demotion to work at Princeton, where he would soon after accept an invitation from the National Resource Planning Board to be part of a review panel into New Deal spending and employment programs. It is this project which would see him first meet Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1940, as France fell to Nazi forces, Galbraith would join the staff of the National Defense Advisory Committee, at the request of FDR’s economic advisor, Lauchlin Curry. Although that committee would be swiftly dissolved, Galbraith soon found himself appointed to the Office of Price Administration (OPA), heading up the division tasked with price control. He would be dismissed from the OPA on 31 May 1943. Fortune Magazine had already been trying to headhunt Galbraith since as early as 1941, and would soon scoop him up to join their staff as a writer.

The biggest shift in focus for Galbraith happened in 1945, the day after the death of Roosevelt. Galbraith would leave New York for Washington, where he would be duly sent to London to assume a division directorship of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, tasked with evaluating the overall economic effects of the wartime bombing. By the time he had arrived at Flensburg, Germany had already formally surrendered to the Allied forces and Galbraith’s initial task would change. He would accompany George Ball and be part of the interrogation of Albert Speer. In this one move, Galbraith had gone from being a policy advisor dealing with statistics and projections concerned with pricing, to the co-interrogator of a high-ranking Nazi war criminal. Speer had been in various important positions during the war, including as the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, one of the key men behind the organisation, maintenance and arming of every part of the Nazi Wermacht.

Soon after, Galbraith would be sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to evaluate the effects of the bombing. In January 1946, John Kenneth Galbraith was involved in one of the defining moments of American economic history. He would take part in the American Economic Association meetings in Cleveland, where, alongside Edward Chamberlin of Harvard and Clarence Ayres of Texas, he would debate Frank Knight and other leading proponents of classical economics. This event marked the coming-out of Keynesian economics, which would come to dominate post-war America.

In February 1946, Galbraith would return to Washington, where he would be appointed director of the Office of Economic Security Policy. It is here, in September of 1946, where Galbraith was tasked with drafting a speech for the Secretary of State, William Byrnes, outlining American policy towards German reconstruction, democratisation, and eventual admission into the United Nations. Galbraith, who opposed the group of politicians at the time referred to as “the Cold Warriors”, would resign from his position in October of 1946, returning to Fortune Magazine. He would also be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year. In 1947, Galbraith would co-found the organisation, Americans for Democratic Action, alongside others including Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Ronald Reagan. In 1948, Galbraith would return to Harvard as a lecturer in Agricultural Forestry and Land-Use Policy. Soon after, he would be installed as a Professor at Harvard.

By 1957, Galbraith was beginning to form a closer relationship with his former student John F. Kennedy, who was by then junior senator for Massachusetts. The following year, JFK would publicly declare Galbraith as the “Phileas Fogg of the academic world” after receiving a copy of Galbraith’s book, A Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia, where he examined socialist planning up close. It is also in 1958 where Galbraith published “The Affluent Society” to critical acclaim, where he coined terms such as “conventional wisdom” and the “dependence effect”. It is around this time when Galbraith became the Paul M. Warburg Chair in economics at Harvard. This is the same position he would hold when he would first be introduced to a young Klaus Schwab.

By 1960, John Kenneth Galbraith had become an economic advisor to the Kennedy campaign. After Kennedy was elected President, Galbraith began staffing the new administration, famously being the man who recommended Robert S. McNamara for Secretary of Defense. In 1961, Kennedy would name Galbraith as ambassador to India and, later in the year, Galbraith would travel to Vietnam, at the behest of the President, to give a second opinion on the Taylor-Rostow report. On Galbraith’s advice, Kennedy would begin to withdraw troops from Vietnam.

In 1963, Galbraith would return to the United States, refusing an offer from Kennedy to take up an ambassadorship in Moscow, so as to return to Harvard. On the day Kennedy was assassinated, Galbraith was in New York with the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham. Galbraith would go straight to Washington and would be the man who drafted the original version of the new President’s speech to the joint session of congress. The year following JFK’s assassination, Galbraith would return to Harvard to develop a famous and highly popular course in Social Science that he would go on to teach for the following decade. He would still retain his position as an advisor to President Johnson, but would spend the rest of the year writing his final academic journals exclusively in economics.

By 1965, Galbraith had become increasingly louder in his opposition to the war in Vietnam, writing speeches and letters to the President. This rift would persist between Galbraith and Johnson, with Galbraith finally assuming the presidency of Americans for Democratic Action and going on to launch a national campaign against the Vietnam War entitled, “Negotiations Now!” In 1967, the rift between Galbraith and Johnson would only become wider when Senator Eugene McCarthy was persuaded by Galbraith to run against Johnson in the coming primary elections. Robert F. Kennedy was also hoping to recruit Galbraith to his own campaign but, although Galbraith had formed a close bond with the late JFK, he had not been so keen on Robert F. Kennedy’s distinctive style.

By the late 1960s, John K. Galbraith and Henry A. Kissinger were both considered to be two of the foremost lecturers, authors and educators in America. They were also both grandees at Harvard, Galbraith as the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, and Kissinger as a Professor of Government, and the two men were focused on the creation of foreign policy for both America and the emerging new Europe. It was announced on 20 March 1968 that Kissinger and Galbraith would be the first speakers of the spring session of what was referred to as the “Mandeville Lectures series”, due to take place at the University of California, San Diego. Galbraith’s speech would be entitled, “Foreign Policy: The Cool Dissent”, whilst Kissinger’s speech was called “America and Europe: A New Relationship”.

Kissinger would introduce Klaus Schwab to John Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard and, as the 1960’s came to a close, Galbraith would help Schwab make the World Economic Forum a reality. Galbraith would fly over to Europe, along with Herman Kahn, to help Schwab convince the European elite to back the project. At the first European Management Symposium/Forum (the original name/s of the WEF), John Kenneth Galbraith would be the keynote speaker.

Herman Kahn

Herman Kahn was born in Bayonne, New Jersey on 15 February 1922 to Yetta and Abraham Kahn. He was brought up in the Bronx with a Jewish upbringing, but would later become atheistic in his beliefs. Throughout the 1950s, Khan would write various reports at the Hudson Institute on the concept and practicality of nuclear deterrence, which would subsequently become official military policy. He would also compile reports for official hearings, such as the Subcommittee on Radiation. It is in the primordial hysteria of the earliest years of the Cold War where Kahn would be given the intellectual, and some may say ethical and moral, space to “think the unthinkable”. Khan would apply game theory – the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents – to wargame potential scenarios and outcomes concerning thermonuclear war.

In 1960, Kahn would publish, The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence, which studied the risks and subsequent impact of a thermonuclear war. The Rand Corporation sums up the kinds of deterrents discussed in Kahn’s work as: the deterrence of a direct attack, the use of strategic threats to deter an enemy from engaging in very provocative acts other than a direct attack on the United States, and, lastly, the acts that are deterred because the potential aggressor is afraid that the defender or others will take limited actions, military or non-military, to make the aggression unprofitable.

Herman Kahn (left) with Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld

The following year, Princeton University Press would first publish Herman Kahn’s seminal work, On Thermonuclear War. This book would have an enormous impact on the near and distant future of global politics and would drive American Establishment politicians to create foreign policy specifically designed to counter the potential worst case thermonuclear scenario. On the release of Kahn’s terrifying work, the Israeli-American sociologist and “communitarian”, Amitai Etzioni, would be quoted as saying, “Kahn does for nuclear arms what free-love advocates did for sex: he speaks candidly of acts about which others whisper behind closed doors”.

Khan’s complex theories have often been erroneously paraphrased, with most of his work being impossible to sum up in just a sentence or two, and this is emblematic of his ideas concerning thermonuclear war. Kahn’s research team were studying a multitude of different scenarios, a constantly evolving, dynamic, multipolar world, and many unknowns.

On Thermonuclear War had an instant and lasting impact, not only on geopolitics, but also on culture, expressed within a few years by a very famous movie. 1964 saw the release of the Stanley Kubrick classic, Dr Strangelove, and from the moment of its release, and ever since, Khan has been referred to as the real Dr. Strangelove. When quizzed about the comparison, Khan would tell Newsweek, “Kubrick is a friend of mine. He told me Dr. Strangelove wasn’t supposed to be me.” But others would point out the many affinities between Stanley Kubrick’s classic character and the real life Herman Kahn.

In an essay written for the Council on Foreign Relations in July 1966, entitled, Our Alternatives in Europe, Kahn states:

“Existing U.S. policy has generally been directed to the political and economic as well as the military integration or unification of Western Europe as a means to European security. Some have seen unification as a step toward the political unity of the West as a whole, or even of the world. Thus, the achievement of some more qualified form of integration or federation of Europe, and of Europe with America, has also been held to be an intrinsically desirable goal, especially as national rivalries in Europe have been seen as a fundamentally disruptive force in modern history; hence their suppression, or accommodation in a larger political framework, is indispensable to the future stability of the world.”

This statement suggests that the preferred solution for future European/American relations would be the creation of a European union. Even more preferable to Kahn was the idea of creating a unified American and European superstate.

In 1967, Herman Kahn would write one of the most important futurist works of the 20th century, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. In this book, co-authored by Anthony J Wiener, Khan and company predicted where we would be technologically at the end of the millennium. But there was another document released soon after Kahn’s The Year 2000, which had been written simultaneously. That document entitled, Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Program: Final Report, was to map out how to achieve the future society Kahn’s work in The Year 2000 had envisaged.

Under a section titled “Special Educational Needs of Decision-Makers”, the paper states: “The desirability of explicitly educated decision-makers so that they are better able, in effect, to plan the destiny of the nation, or to carry out the plans formulated through a more democratic process, should be very seriously considered. One facet of this procedure would be the creation of a shared set of concepts, shared language, shared analogies, shared references…” He goes on to state in the same section that: “Universal re-teaching in the spirit of the humanistic tradition of Europe – at least for its comprehensive leadership group – might be useful in many ways.”

When you study the previously mentioned rhetoric and decipher what it means, in this document Herman Kahn suggests subverting democracy by training only a certain group in society as potential leaders, with those pre-selected few who are groomed for power being able to define what our shared values as a society should be. Maybe Herman Kahn would agree with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader scheme, which is the exact manifestation of his original suggestion.

In 1968, Herman Kahn would be asked by a reporter what they do at the Hudson Institute. He would say, “We take God’s view. The President’s view. Big. Aerial. Global. Galactic. Ethereal. Spatial. Overall. Megalomania is the standard occupational hazard.” This was reportedly followed by Herman Kahn rising out of his chair, pointing his finger towards the sky and suddenly shouting out: ‘Megalomania, zoom!'”

In 1970, Kahn would travel to Europe with Galbraith to support Klaus Schwab’s recruitment drive for the first European Management Symposium. In 1971, Kahn would be sitting centre stage to watch John Kenneth Galbraith’s keynote speech at the historic first session of the policy making organisation which would eventually become the World Economic Forum.

In 1972, the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth”, which cautioned that the needs of the global population would exceed available resources by the year 2000. Kahn spent much of his final decade arguing against this idea. In 1976, Khan would publish a more optimistic view of the future, The Next 200 Years, which claimed that the potentials of capitalism, science, technology, human reason, and self-discipline were boundless. The Next 200 Years would also dismiss pernicious Malthusian ideology by predicting that the planet’s resources set no limits to economic growth, but rather, human beings would “create such societies everywhere in the solar system and perhaps to the stars as well.”

Schwab’s Three Mentors

Kahn, Kissinger and Galbraith had become three of the most influential people in America with regards to thermonuclear deterrence, foreign policy creation, and public policy making, respectively. Most of the focus throughout these men’s career had been on Europe and the Cold War. However, their varying roles in other important events of the period all have the potential to easily distract researchers from other more subversive and well hidden events.

These three powerful Americans were all linked with each other in various ways, but one interesting and notable thread in particular ties these men together during the period between 1966, with the creation of the Kissinger-led 22 man panel of advisors to help “shape European policy”, through to 1971, and the founding of the World Economic Forum. All three men were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American branch of the Anglo-American imperialist “Round Table” movement. Kissinger already had deep ties to the CFR, having been recruited by them straight after graduation. Galbraith had reportedly resigned his membership of the CFR in a “highly public way” in 1972, stating that the CFR was boring and telling a journalist, “Most of the proceedings involve a level of banality so deep that the only question they raise is whether one should sit through them.” Although there is no public date of when Galbraith became a member of the CFR, he had written for their publications from as early as July 1958 with “Rival Economic Theories in India,” being printed in Foreign Affairs, the official CFR journal/magazine. Khan could also be found publishing some of his essays through the CFR, writing the piece “Our Alternatives in Europe” in July 1966, and “If Negotiations Fail” in July 1968, both whilst working as an official advisor to the State Department.

Before the 1960s, these three extremely influential American intellectuals had each been deeply involved in trying to understand the problems of a postwar Europe, and mapping out the future of the war-stricken continent. Galbraith had traveled extensively throughout Europe, including studying policies in Germany during the Third Reich, and, after the collapse of Hitler’s Germany, Galbraith would go on to study the Soviet systems in much the same way. Galbraith’s influence over the future president, John F. Kennedy, from a very early age cannot be understated, and Galbraith was powerful enough to see JFK begin withdrawing troops from Vietnam on his recommendation. When Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Galbraith would be the man to draft the incoming president’s initial address to the nation, but Galbraith was soon to be pushed off to the sidelines. During the turmoil of the 1960s, Galbraith would be close with Henry Kissinger, both men being Harvard Professors, members of the CFR, and both men having the same goal of making Europe stable so that the Continent was well defended against any potential Soviet aggression.

To Galbraith and Kissinger, and also to the wider American political Establishment, Europe was the main threat to not only global stability, but also to the prevailing American hegemony in general. The relative stability in Europe during the postwar period was perceived as being due to the thermonuclear stand-off, and, from very early-on, Kissinger identified this dynamic and began to manipulate the situation for the benefit of American supremacy. Henry Kissinger was not alone in trying to understand the complex dynamics at play in relation to thermonuclear deterrence and how it affected policy making. Herman Kahn was the leading figure on thermonuclear strategic planning during the same period and Kissinger’s work concerning the same subject matter from the mid-50s onwards would see him cross paths with Kahn on many occasions.

Kahn offered Kissinger something which all politicians and policy makers crave, the ability to predict future events with relative accuracy. Kahn was a veritable prophet concerning the technological advancements of the not-so-distant future, and his work, although often stoic and bereft of human emotion, has stood up very well to the test of time. Kahn and Kissinger’s goals would overlap during the mid and late 1960s, and as the threat assessments Kahn made during this period became more optimistic, Kissinger would see Kahn’s work as being fundamental in offering a new future to the people of the world.

However, Henry Kissinger’s vision of the future was not of a free and fair society advancing into a “brave new world” together, but rather, Kissinger intended to create an image of the world which had been skewed by his own CFR-driven Establishment perspective. Although he would attempt to rebrand himself as a true statesman, Kissinger would continue to subvert not only foreign democratic processes, but also to undermine the American system for the eventual benefit of a globalist agenda. When Schwab was first recognised by Kissinger as a potential future globalist leader, the relatively young German would soon be introduced to Galbraith and Kahn. This would coincide with Kahn’s work identifying the need to specifically train individuals with leadership potential separately from those who attend the prevailing standard educational models.

Klaus Schwab speaking at the inaugural meeting of the World Economic Forum, 1971

In the year Klaus Schwab left Harvard, he was approached by Peter Schmidheiny, who had just sold Escher Wyss to the Sulzer Group. Escher Wyss’ Ravensberg factory during World War II had been managed by Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, and had been involved in making heavy water turbines for the secretive Nazi atomic bomb effort. Schwab speaks in one interview about the moment Schmidheiny called him up, saying, “You come from Harvard now and know modern management methods, help to make the integration a success”. What Klaus wouldn’t mention in that interview is that he would help Sulzer and Escher Wyss to merge, resulting in a new company called Sulzer AG. That company, where Schwab would serve as director, which would go on to break international law by aiding the South African apartheid regime in its illegal thermonuclear bomb program.

Klaus Schwab had only just left the sphere of influence of some of the most significant experts in thermonuclear war, and within the same year as leaving Harvard, he would head up the merger of a company dealing in the propagation thermonuclear bomb technology to despotic regimes.

For many of us who don’t map out terrifying extinction scenarios, we may be left believing that apartheid South Africa gaining the nuke at this point in history would be one of the worst things that could’ve happened. But, Herman Kahn’s thermonuclear disaster scenarios had led the rotund genius to believe that, barring a disaster, sabotage, or an accident, no major nuclear power would dare fire a thermonuclear weapon as an act of aggression for the foreseeable future. In fact, the Establishment thinking had changed significantly, to the point where Herman Kahn and others were advising that, in certain scenarios, making a country such as France a nuclear power could have significant benefits to security both regionally and globally, whilst also helping to reduce US defence spending.

Thermonuclear war was no longer the be all and end all of strategic defence policy, and it was in the dying embers of the 1960s where the same people who had caused all of the fear of a thermonuclear apocalypse, really did stop worrying and learnt to love the bomb.

Caution: Fallible Humans Ahead

Is Klaus Schwab the real brains behind the formation of the World Economic Forum? What are we to make of the CIA involvement in the seminar Kissinger used to recruit Schwab? Were the powers that lurk behind organisations like the CFR the real founders of the globalist policy making organisation? Was the World Economic Forum meant to simply unite Europe? Or was it then actually meant to go on to unite Europe with America, followed by the remaining superstates, into a New World Order designed by powerful CFR grandees like Kissinger, Khan and Galbraith?

These three powerful men each saw in Schwab a reflection of their own intellectual desires. Klaus had been born in the latter half of the same decade in which the technocratic movement had begun and he would come from the first generation to have their formative years in a post-war world. Khan’s predictions for the future had not only been an exercise in human wonder, it had also been a project to make these predictions a reality as quickly as possible and regardless of the consequences.

In 1964, Klaus Schwab would be trying to decide what he was going to do with his career. He was 26 years old and looking for direction and he would find that direction from a familial source. His father, Eugen Schwab, had been on the wrong side of history during World War II, and had been involved in the Nazi atomic bomb effort. Eugen Schwab would tell his son that it will only be at Harvard where he’d truly be able to flourish. In a divided postwar Germany, the intense fear which came from the ever impending and well dramatised threat of thermonuclear war had become an everyday part of people’s psyche. Harvard was well known at the time for playing a central role in Cold War policy-making targeting European affairs and Klaus Schwab would put himself right in amongst the main movers and shakers on the thermonuclear disaster scene.

Whilst at Harvard, Schwab would attend Kissinger’s “International seminar” which was funded by the CIA via a known conduit. Through this process, Klaus Schwab would be introduced to a group of men who were actively trying to influence European public policy by any and all methods, including using the fear of impending nuclear doom. They would recognise his potential straight away, so much so that they would be there for Schwab all through the founding of the World Economic Forum, with Kahn, Kissinger and Galbraith bringing perceived credibility to the project. It was not easy for Schwab alone to explain to European elites what he intended to do, so he would bring Kahn and Galbraith to Europe to persuade other important players to become part of the project. Galbraith would be the first Keynote Speaker at the forum, with Kahn’s presence also drawing significant interest, but the second World Economic Forum would stall without the presence of the bigger names and Klaus Schwab knew he would need something to draw in the crowds for the third installment of his forum’s annual meeting.

In 1972, the Club of Rome’s founder Aurelio Peccei had published his controversial book “The Limits to Growth”, a book that had been commissioned by the Club of Rome and which took a Malthusian approach to overpopulation. The book would call into question the sustainability of global economic growth and Peccei would be invited by Schwab to make the keynote speech at the 1973 World Economic Forum. This risqué public relations strategy paid dividends for Schwab and his organisation. From that point on, the forum would grow in size, scale and power. But it all began with a CIA-funded course run by Henry Kissinger at Harvard.

Aurelio Peccei (far right) at a 1975 Club of Rome meeting in Paris

Schwab has become more than just a technocrat. He has been very vocal on his intention to fuse his physical and biological identities with future technology. He has become a living caricature of an evil bond-like villain, conducting secretive meetings with the elites, high up in the mountain-top chalets of Switzerland. I do not think that the image we have of Schwab is an accident. In the postwar years, something very unique happened in Western culture, when the government began using mainstream media as a tool to target the public with military grade psychological operations. The ruling Establishment would discover that marrying the drama of conflict scenarios with media such as film would be extremely useful, almost akin to creating self-propagating propaganda in some cases. Films like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove were fantastic vehicles for people to understand the absurdity of thermonuclear disaster scenario planning.

If people perceive you as an all powerful evil villain then you may not gain the support of the common man, but you will gain the attention from those who seek power and wealth, or, how Klaus Schwab would refer to them, the “stakeholders” in society. This is very important to understand – the projection of extreme wealth and power will attract and bring the “stakeholders” of society to the World Economic Forum’s table. With those “stakeholders” on board, Klaus Schwab’s main ideological product, “stakeholder capitalism”, will see the transfer of power away from true democratic processes and onto a system of governance by a small preselected leadership group, who will be trained to continue the agenda set for them by the previous generation, as predicted by Herman Kahn. They will hold all the cards, whilst the common people will be left with just illusory pseudo-democratic processes, poverty, and constant absurd psychological operations to distract us all constantly. Klaus Schwab would soon become everything Herman Kahn had feared during his most pessimistic predictions. When the Club of Rome produced “The Limits to Growth” report, Herman Kahn would refute its findings and rally against its pessimism, whilst, at the same time, Klaus Schwab would make it central to his machinations and have their founder be the keynote speaker at his forum in Davos.

Our current geopolitical situation is seemingly regressing back towards the East vs West dynamic of the Cold War era. Again, with recent events in Ukraine, the mainstream media is regurgitating nuclear talking points which are completely paralleled to those of 60 to 70 years ago. I believe that there is a very obvious reason for our return to Cold War rhetoric – it’s a very obvious sign that Klaus Schwab and his backers are out of ideas. They appear to be returning to a geopolitical paradigm in which they feel safer and, most importantly, which will cause mass fear of thermonuclear war. This rinse and repeat cycle will always happen once an ideological movement is running out of original ideas. Since the late 1960s, Klaus Schwab has been trying to create the world which Herman Kahn predicted. But Kahn’s vision of the future, even though pretty accurate, is over half a century old. Schwab’s technocratic movement depends on the successful development of innovative technologies which will advance us towards a vision largely manufactured in 1967. Just by studying a more refined list of Kahn’s predictions, you can see every idea which Schwab promotes is almost entirely based on Kahn’s “Year 2000” and that documents vision of what our future may look like, predictions dating back to the late 60’s. But, what Schwab appears to ignore, whilst forcing this futuristic agenda on us all, is that many of Kahn’s predictions were also combined with warnings of the dangers which will be created from future technological advancements.

As Schwab reaches the end of his life, he appears to be desperate to push forward a radical futurist agenda with the obvious potential for global disaster. I believe that the World Economic Forum is reaching its maximum level of expansion before its inevitable collapse, because eventually those people who love their own national identities will stand up against the immediate threat to their specific cultures and they will fight back against the globalist rule. Quite simply, you cannot make everyone a globalist, no matter how much brainwashing is applied. There is a natural contradiction between national freedom and globalist rule, which make the two completely incompatible.

As a very pertinent final thought, Herman Kahn would write something extremely significant during the same year in which Schwab would leave Harvard. In the aforementioned Hudson Institute document of 1967 entitled, Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Program: Final Report, Khan writes:

“It has become increasingly clear that our technological and even our economic achievements are mixed blessings. Through progress issues arise such as the accumulation, augmentation, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the loss of privacy and solitude; the Increase of governmental and/or private power over individuals; the loss of human scale and perspective and the dehumanization of social life or even of the psychobiological self; the growth of dangerously, vulnerable, deceptive, or degradable centralizations of administrative or technological systems; the creation of other new capabilities, so inherently dangerous as to seriously risk disastrous abuse; and the acceleration of changes that are too rapid or cataclysmic to permit successful adjustment. Perhaps most crucial, choices are posed that are too large, complex, important, uncertain, or comprehensive to be safely left to fallible humans.”

Swiss Policy Research (SPR), founded in 2016, is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda. SPR is composed of independent academics and receives no external funding other than reader donations. Our analyses have been published by numerous independent media outlets and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.

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Nothing is lost with peace. All can be lost with war. Let men return to understanding. Let them resume negotiating. Negotiating with good will and with respect for each other’s rights, let them realize that an honorable success is never precluded when there are sincere and active negotiations. And they will feel great – with true greatness – if imposing silence on the voices of passion, whether collective or private, and leaving reason to its proper domain, they will spare their brothers bloodshed and their homeland ruin.

Thus it was that on August 24, 1939, Pius XII addressed both rulers and peoples as war was imminent. These were not words of empty pacifism, nor of complicit silence about the multiple violations of justice that were being carried out in many quarters. In that radio message, which some people still remember hearing, the appeal of the Roman Pontiff invoked “respect for each other’s rights” as a prerequisite for fruitful peace negotiations.

The Media Narrative

If we look at what is happening in Ukraine, without being misled by the gross falsifications of the mainstream media, we realize that respect for each other’s rights has been completely ignored; indeed, we have the impression that the Biden Administration, NATO and the European Union deliberately want to maintain a situation of obvious imbalance, precisely to make impossible any attempt at a peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, provoking the Russian Federation to trigger a conflict. Herein lies the seriousness of the problem. This is the trap set for both Russia and Ukraine, using both of them to enable the globalist elite to carry out its criminal plan.

It should not surprise us that pluralism and freedom of speech, so praised in countries that claim to be democratic, are daily disavowed by censorship and intolerance towards opinions not aligned with the official narrative. Manipulations of this kind have become the norm during the so-called pandemic, to the detriment of doctors, scientists and dissenting journalists, who have been discredited and ostracized for the mere fact of daring to question the effectiveness of experimental serums. Two years later, the truth about the adverse effects and the unfortunate management of the health emergency has proven them right, but the truth is stubbornly ignored because it does not correspond to what the system wanted and still wants today.

If the world media have so far been able to lie shamelessly on a matter of strict scientific relevance, spreading lies and hiding reality, we should ask ourselves why, in the present situation, they should suddenly rediscover that intellectual honesty and respect for the code of ethics widely denied with Covid.

But if this colossal fraud has been supported and disseminated by the media, it must be recognized that national and international health institutions, governments, magistrates, law enforcement agencies and the Catholic Hierarchy itself all share responsibility for the disaster – each in its own sphere by actively supporting or failing to oppose the narrative – a disaster that has affected billions of people in their health, their property, the exercise of their individual rights and even their very lives. Even in this case, it is difficult to imagine that those who have been guilty of such crimes in support of a pandemic that was intended and maliciously amplified could suddenly have a jolt of dignity and show solicitude for their citizens and their homeland when a war threatens their security and their economy.

These, of course, can be the prudent reflections of those who want to remain neutral and look with detachment and almost disinterest at what is happening around them. But if we deepen our knowledge of the facts and document them, relying on authoritative and objective sources, we discover that doubts and perplexities soon become disturbing certainties.

Even if we only want to limit our investigation to the economic aspect, we understand that news agencies, politics and public institutions themselves depend on a small number of financial groups belonging to an oligarchy that, significantly, is united not only by money and power, but by the ideological affiliation that guides its action and interference in the politics of nations and the whole world. This oligarchy shows its tentacles in the UN, NATO, the World Economic Forum, the European Union, and in “philanthropic” institutions such as George Soros’ _Open Society_and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

All these entities are private and answer to no one but themselves, and at the same time they have the power to influence national governments, including through their own representatives who are made to be elected or appointed to key posts. They admit it themselves, when they are received with all the honors by Heads of State and world leaders, beginning with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi (here), respected and feared by these leaders as the true masters of the fate of the world. Thus, those who hold power in the name of the “people” find themselves trampling on the people’s will and restricting their rights, in order to be obedient like courtiers to masters whom nobody has elected but who nevertheless dictate their political and economic agenda to the nations.

We come then to the Ukraine crisis, which is presented to us as a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist arrogance towards an independent and democratic nation over which he is trying to claim absurd rights. The “warmonger Putin” is said to be massacring the defenseless population, who have courageously arisen to defend the soil of their homeland, the sacred borders of their nation and the violated freedoms of the citizens. The European Union and the United States, “defenders of democracy,” are therefore said to be unable not to intervene by means of NATO to restore Ukraine’s autonomy, drive out the “invader” and guarantee peace. In the face of the “tyrant’s arrogance,” it is said that the peoples of the world ought to form a common front, imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation and sending soldiers, weapons and economic aid to “poor” President Zelensky, “national hero” and “defender” of his people. As proof of Putin’s “violence,” the media spread images of bombings, military searches, and destruction, attributing responsibility to Russia. And there’s still more: precisely in order to guarantee a “lasting peace,” the European Union and NATO are opening wide their arms to welcome Ukraine as members. And in order to prevent “Soviet propaganda”, Europe is now blacking out Russia Today and Sputnik, in order to ensure that information is “free and independent.”

This is the official narrative, to which everyone conforms. Being at war, dissent immediately becomes desertion, and those who dissent are guilty of treason and deserving of more or less serious sanctions, starting with public execration and ostracism, well experienced with Covid against those who are “un-vaxxed”. But the truth, if you want to know it, allows us to see things differently and to judge the facts for what they are and not for how they are presented to us. This is a true and proper unveiling, as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word ἀλήθεια. Or perhaps, with an eschatological gaze, a revelation, an ἀποκάλυψις.

The expansion of NATO

First of all, it is necessary to remember the facts, which do not lie and are not susceptible to alteration. And the facts, however irritating they are to recall to those who try to censor them, tell us that since the fall of the Berlin Wall the United States has extended its sphere of political and military influence to almost all the satellite states of the former Soviet Union, even recently, annexing into NATO Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary (1999); Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania (2004); Albania and Croatia (2009); Montenegro (2017); and North Macedonia (2020). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is preparing to expand to Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Practically speaking, the Russian Federation is under military threat – from weapons and missile bases – just a few kilometers from its borders, while it has no military base in similar proximity to the United States.

To be considering the possible expansion of NATO into Ukraine, without thinking that it will arouse Russia’s legitimate protests, is nothing short of puzzling, especially given the fact that in 1991 NATO pledged to the Kremlin not to expand further. Not only that: at the end of 2021, Der Spiegel published drafts of a treaty with the United States and an agreement with NATO on security guarantees (here, here and here). Moscow demanded legal guarantees from its Western partners that would prevent NATO from further eastward expansion by adding Ukraine to the alliance and also from establishing military bases in post-Soviet countries. The proposals also contained a clause on the non-deployment of offensive weapons by NATO near Russia’s borders and on the withdrawal of NATO forces in Eastern Europe back to their 1997 positions.

As we can see, NATO has failed to keep its commitments to Russia, or has at least forced the situation at a very delicate moment for geopolitical balances. We should ask ourselves why the United States – or rather the American _deep state_which regained power after the electoral fraud that brought Joe Biden to the White House – wants to create tensions with Russia and involve its European partners in the conflict, with all the consequences we can imagine.

As General Marco Bertolini, former commander of the Joint Summit Operational Command, has lucidly observed: “The United States did not just win the Cold War but also wanted to humiliate [Russia] by taking everything that in a certain sense fell within its area of influence. [Putin] bore with the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria [joining NATO]. Faced with Ukraine [joining NATO], which would have taken away any possibility of access to the Black Sea, he reacted” (here). And he adds: “There is a problem of the regime’s stability, a situation has arisen with a fairly unlikely prime minister [Zelensky], one who comes from the world of entertainment.” The general does not fail to recall, in the case of a US attack on Russia, that “the Global Hawks flying over Ukraine depart from Sigonella [Italy]; Italy is an American military base in large part. The risk is there, it is present and real” (here).

Interests arising from the blockade of Russian gas supplies

We should also ask ourselves whether, behind the destabilization of the delicate balance between the European Union and Russia, there are also economic interests, deriving from the need of EU countries to obtain American liquid gas (for which we also need the regasification plants which many nations are deprived of, and for which in any case we will have to pay much more) instead of Russian gas (which is more ecological).

The decision of Italian oil and gas company ENI to suspend investments in Gazprom’s Blue Stream pipeline (from Russia to Turkey) also entails the deprivation of an additional source of supply, since it feeds the Trans-Atlantic Pipeline (from Turkey to Italy).

It therefore does not sound like a coincidence if, in August 2021, Zelensky declared that he considered the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany as “a dangerous weapon, not only for Ukraine but for all of Europe” (here): bypassing Ukraine, it deprives Kiev of about one billion euros per year in revenue from transit tariffs. “We view this project exclusively through the prism of security and consider it a dangerous geopolitical weapon of the Kremlin”“ the Ukrainian president said, agreeing with the Biden administration. American Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said: “If Russia invades Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 will not go forward.” And so it has happened, not without serious economic damage to German investments.

The Pentagon’s virological laboratories in Ukraine

Still on the subject of American interests in Ukraine, it is worth mentioning the virological laboratories located in Ukraine which are under the control of the Pentagon and where it seems that only US specialists with diplomatic immunity are employed directly under the American Ministry of Defense.

We should also remember the complaint made by Putin regarding the collection of genomic data about the population, which can be used for bacteriological weapons with genetic selection (here, here and here). Information about the activity of laboratories in Ukraine is obviously difficult to confirm, but it is understandable that the Russian Federation considered, not without reason, that these laboratories could constitute an additional bacteriological threat to the safety of the population. The U.S. Embassy has removed all files related to the Biological Threat Reduction Program from its website (here).

Maurizio Blondet writes: “Event 201, which simulated the pandemic explosion a year before it happened, was attended (along with the usuals, Bill and Melinda) by the apparently inoffensive John Hopkins University with its blessed Center for Health Security. The humanitarian institution had for a long time a less innocent name: it was called Center for Civilian Biodefence Strategies and did not deal with the health of Americans, but rather with its opposite: the response to military attacks of bio-terrorism. It was practically a civil-military organization. When it held its first conference in February 1999 in Crystal City in Arlington [Virginia], where the Pentagon is located, it brought together 950 doctors, military personnel, federal officials and health officials to participate in a simulation exercise. The aim of the simulation is to counter an imagined “militarized” smallpox attack. It is only the first of the exercises that will blossom in Event 201 and in the Pandemic Imposture” (here).

Experiments also emerge on the Ukrainian military (here) and interventions by the American Embassy regarding the Ukrainian Prosecutor Lutsenko in 2016 so that he would not investigate “a billionaire round of funds between G. Soros and B. Obama” (here).

An indirect threat to China’s expansionist ambitions on Taiwan

The current Ukrainian crisis entails secondary, but no less serious, consequences on the geopolitical balance between China and Taiwan. Russia and Ukraine are the only producers of palladium and neon, which are indispensable for the production of microchips.

“Moscow’s possible retaliation has attracted more attention in recent days after market research group Techcet published a report highlighting the dependence of many semiconductor manufacturers on materials of Russian and Ukrainian origin such as neon, palladium and others. According to Techcet’s estimates, more than 90% of U.S. supplies of semiconductor neon come from Ukraine, while 35% of U.S. palladium comes from Russia. […] According to the US International Trade Commission, neon prices rose by 600% before Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, because chip companies relied on some Ukrainian companies” (here).

“If it is true that a Chinese invasion of Formosa would put the global technology supply chain at risk, it is also true that a sudden shortage of raw materials from Russia could stop production, so as to make the island lose the “microchip shield” and induce Beijing to attempt the annexation of Taipei.”

The Biden’s’ conflict of interest in Ukraine

Another issue that we tend not to analyze in depth is that related to Burisma, an oil and gas company operating on the Ukrainian market since 2002. Recall that “during the American presidency of Barack Obama (from 2009 to 2017) his right hand man with a “delegation” to handle international politics was Joe Biden, and it is since then that the “protection’ offered by the Democrat US leader was given to Ukrainian nationalists, a line that created the irreconcilable disagreement between Kiev and Moscow. […] It was Joe Biden in those years who carried out the policy of bringing Ukraine closer to NATO. He wanted to take away political and economic power from Russia. […] In recent years, Joe Biden’s name has also been associated with a scandal over Ukraine that had also shaken his candidacy. […] It was April 2014 when Burisma Holdings, the largest energy company in Ukraine (active in both gas and oil), hired Hunter Biden as a consultant […] with a salary of $50,000 a month. All transparent, except that during those months Joe Biden continued the American policy aimed at regaining possession by Ukraine of those areas of the Donbass that have now become Republics recognized by Russia. The Donetsk area is believed to be rich in unexplored gas fields that have been targeted by Burisma Holdings. An international policy intertwined with the economic one that made the American media turn up their noses in those years” (here).

Democrats claimed that Trump had created a media scandal to harm Biden’s campaign, but his accusations turned out to be true. Joe Biden himself, during a meeting at the Rockefeller Council for Foreign Relations, admitted to having intervened on then-President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arsenij Yatseniuk to prevent investigations into his son Hunter by Procurator General Viktor Shokin. Biden had threatened “to withhold a billion dollars loan guarantee in the United States during a December 2015 trip to Kiev,” reports the New York Post. (here). “If [the Procurator General Shokin] is not fired, you will not have the money” (here e here). And the Prosecutor was effectively fired, saving Hunter from further scandal, after those involving him.

Biden’s interference in Kiev politics, in exchange for favors to Burisma and corrupt oligarchs, confirms the current US President’s interest in protecting his family and image, fueling disorder in Ukraine and even a war. How can a person who uses his role to take care of his own interests and cover up the crimes of his family members govern honestly and without being subject to blackmail?

The Ukrainian nuclear question

Finally, there is the issue of Ukrainian nuclear weapons. On February 19, 2022, at a conference in Munich, Zelensky announced his intention to end the Budapest Memorandum (1994), which prohibits Ukraine from developing, proliferating and using atomic weapons. Among the other clauses of the Memorandum, there is also the one that obliges Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to refrain from using economic pressure on Ukraine to influence its policy: the pressure of the IMF and the United States to grant economic aid in exchange for reforms consistent with the Great Reset represent a further violation of the agreement.

The Ukrainian Ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, argued on Deutschlandfunk radio in 2021 that Ukraine needed to regain nuclear status if the country failed to join NATO. Ukraine’s nuclear power plants are operated, rebuilt and maintained by the state-owned enterprise NAEK Energoatom, which completely ended its relationship with Russian companies between 2018 and 2021. Its main partners are companies that can be traced back to the US government. It is easy to understand how the Russian Federation considers the possibility of Ukraine acquiring nuclear weapons as a threat and demands Kiev’s adherence to the non-proliferation pact.

The color revolution in Ukraine and the independence of Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk

Another fact. In 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych decided to suspend the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union and to forge closer economic relations with Russia, a series of protest demonstrations known as Euromaidan began, which lasted several months and culminated in the revolution that overthrew Yanukovych and led to the installation of a new government. It was an operation sponsored by George Soros, as he candidly told CNN: “I have had a foundation in Ukraine since before it became independent of Russia; this foundation has always been in business and has played a decisive role in today’s events” (here, here and here). This change of government provoked the reaction of Yanukovych’s supporters and of a part of the Ukrainian population opposed to the pro-Western shift of Ukraine, which had not been wanted by the population but was obtained by a color revolution, of which there had been general rehearsals in previous years in Georgia, Moldova and Belarus.

Following the clashes of May 2, 2014, in which nationalist paramilitary fringes (including those of Pravyi Sektor) also intervened, there was also the massacre in Odessa. The Western press also spoke of these terrible events in a scandalized way; Amnesty International (here) and the UN denounced these crimes and documented their brutality. But no international court initiated any proceedings against those responsible, as is intended to be done today against the alleged crimes of the Russian army.

Among the many agreements not respected is also the Minsk Protocol, signed on September 5, 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, composed of representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic. Among the points of the agreement was also the removal of armed illegal groups, military equipment, as well as fighters and mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under the supervision of the OSCE and the disarmament of all illegal groups. Contrary to what was agreed, neo-Nazi paramilitary groups are not only officially recognized by the government, but their members are even given official assignments.

Also in 2014, Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence from Ukraine – in the name of self-determination of peoples recognized by the international community – and declared themselves annexed to the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian government still refuses to recognize the independence of these regions, sanctioned by popular referendum, and leaves the neo-Nazi militias and the regular military forces themselves free to rage against the population, since it considers these entities as terrorist organizations. It is true that the two referendums of November 2, 2014 constitute a stretching of the Minsk Protocol, which provided only for a decentralization of power and a form of special status for the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

As Professor Franco Cardini recently pointed out, “on February 15, 2022, Russia delivered to the United States a draft of a treaty to end this situation and defend the Russian-speaking populations. Wastepaper. This war began in 2014” (here and here). And it was a war in the intentions of those who wanted to fight the Russian minority of Donbass: “We will have a job and pensions, and they will not. We will receive bonuses for having children, and they will not. Our children will have schools and kindergartens; their children will stay in the basements. In this way we will win this war,” said President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 (here). It will not escape notice that these measures are similar to the discrimination against the so-called “un-vaxxed,” who have been deprived of work, pay and education. Eight years of bombing in Donetsk and Lugansk, with hundreds of thousands of victims, 150 dead children, and very serious cases of torture, rape, kidnapping and discrimination (here).

On February 18, 2022 the Presidents of Donetsk and Lugansk, Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik, ordered the evacuation of the civilian population of their provinces into the Russian Federation due to the ongoing clashes between the Donbass People’s Militia and the Ukrainian Armed Forces. On February 21, the State Duma (Lower House of the Russian Parliament) unanimously ratified the treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance introduced by President Putin with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. At the same time, the Russian President ordered the sending of troops from the Russian Federation to restore peace in the Donbass region.

Here one may wonder why, in a situation of blatant violation of human rights by neo-Nazi military forces and paramilitary apparatuses (who fly flags bearing swastikas and display the effigy of Aldolf Hitler) against the Russian-speaking population of the independent republics, the international community feels obliged to consider the intervention of the Russian Federation worthy of condemnation, and indeed to blame Putin for the violence. Where is the much-vaunted right of the people to self-determination, which was held valid on August 24, 1991 for the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence and recognized by the international community? And why are we scandalized today by a Russian intervention in Ukraine, when NATO carried out the same sort of thing in Yugoslavia (1991), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), and in Libya and Syria (2011), without anyone raising any objections? Not to mention that in the last ten years Israel has repeatedly hit military targets in Syria, Iran and Lebanon to prevent the creation of a hostile armed front on its northern border, and yet no nation has proposed imposing sanctions on Tel Aviv.

It is dismaying to see with what hypocrisy the European Union and the United States – Brussels and Washington – are giving their unconditional support to President Zelensky, whose government for eight years now has continued to persecute Russian-speaking Ukrainians with impunity (here), for whom it is even forbidden to speak in their own language, in a nation that includes numerous ethnic groups, of which those who speak Russian represent 17.2%. And it is scandalous that they are silent about the use of civilians as human shields by the Ukrainian army, which places anti-aircraft positions inside population centers, hospitals, schools and kindergartens precisely so that their destruction can cause deaths among the population.

The mainstream media is careful not to show images of Russian soldiers helping civilians reach safe positions (here and here) or organizing humanitarian corridors, which Ukrainian militias fire upon (here and here). Just as it is also silent about the settling of scores, massacres, violence and theft by fringes of the civilian population, to whom Zelensky has given weapons: the videos that can be seen on the internet give an idea of the climate of civil war that has been artfully fueled by the Ukrainian Government. To this we may also add the convicts released to be drafted into the Army and also the volunteers of the foreign legion: a mass of fanatics without rules and without training that will contribute to worsening the situation, making it unmanageable.

President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky

As has been pointed out by many parties, the candidacy and election of Ukrainian President Zelensky corresponds to that recent cliché, inaugurated in recent years, of a comic actor or entertainment personality being lent to politics. Do not believe that being without a suitable cursus honorum is an obstacle to the rising to the top of institutions; on the contrary: the more a person is apparently a stranger to the world of political parties, the more it is to be assumed that his success is determined by those who hold power. Zelensky’s performances in drag are perfectly consistent with the LGBTQ ideology that is considered by its European sponsors as an indispensable requirement of the “reform” agenda that every country ought to embrace, along with gender equality, abortion and the green economy. No wonder Zelensky, a member of the WEF (here), was able to benefit from the support of Schwab and his allies to come to power and ensure that the Great Reset would also be carried out in Ukraine.

The 57-part television series that Zelensky produced and starred in, demonstrates that the media planned his candidacy for President of Ukraine and his election campaign. In the fiction show The Servant of the People he played the part of a high school teacher who unexpectedly became President of the Republic and fought against the corruption of politics. It is no coincidence that the series, which was absolutely mediocre, still won the WorldFest Remi Award (USA, 2016), came among the top four finalists in the category of comedy films at the Seoul International Drama Awards (South Korea) and was awarded the Intermedia Globe Silver award in the entertainment TV series category at the World Media Film Festival in Hamburg.

The media stir obtained by Zelensky with the television series brought him over 10 million followers on Instagram and created the premise for the establishment of the homonymous Servant of the People political party, of which Ivan Bakanov, General Manager and shareholder (along with Zelensky himself and the oligarch Kolomoisky) of Kvartal 95 Studio, and the owner of the TV 1+1 television network, is also a member. Zelensky’s image is an artificial product, a media fiction, an operation of manipulation of consensus that has managed to create the political character in the Ukrainian collective imagination that in reality, and not in fiction, has conquered power.

“Just one month before the 2019 elections that saw him win, Zelensky sold the company [Kvartal 95 Studio] to a friend, still finding a way to get the proceeds of the business he had officially renounced to his family. That friend was Serhiy Shefir, who was later appointed Councilor to the Presidency. […] The sale of the shares took place for the benefit of Maltex Multicapital Corp., a company owned by Shefir and registered in the British Virgin Islands” (here).

The current Ukrainian President promoted his election campaign with a commercial that was disturbing, to say the least (here), in which, holding two machine guns, he fired on members of Parliament, pointed out as corrupt or subservient to Russia. The fight against corruption trumpeted by the Ukrainian President in the role of “servant of the people” does not correspond, however, to the picture that emerges of him from the so-called Pandora papers, in which 40 million dollars appear to have been paid to him on the eve of the elections by the Jewish billionaire Kolomoisky[1] through offshore accounts (here, here and here).[2] In his homeland, many accuse him of having taken power away from the pro-Russian oligarchs not to give it to the Ukrainian people, but rather to strengthen his own interest group and at the same time remove his political adversaries: “He liquidated the ministers of the old guard, first of all the powerful Minister of the Interior, [Arsen] Avakov. He rudely retired the president of the Constitutional Court who was acting as a check on his laws. He closed seven opposition TV channels. He arrested and accused of treason Viktor Medvedcuk, a pro-Russian sympathizer but above all the leader of the Platform of Opposition – For Life party, the second party of the Ukrainian Parliament after his Servant of the People party. He is also placing on trial for treason former President Poroshenko, who was suspicious of everyone except for those who got along with the Russians or their friends. The mayor of Kiev, the popular former world boxing champion Vitaly Klitchko, has already been subjected to several searches and seizures. In short, Zelensky seems to want to make a clean sweep of anyone who is not aligned with his politics” (here).

On April 21, 2019, Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine with 73.22% of the votes, and on May 20 he was sworn in. On May 22, 2019 he appointed Ivan Bakanov, Director General of Kvartal 95, as First Deputy Head of the Security Services of Ukraine and Head of the Main Directorate for the Fight against Corruption and Organized Crime of the Central Directorate of the Security Service of Ukraine. Along with Bakanov, it is worth mentioning Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice President and Minister of Digital Transformation, a member of the World Economic Forum (here). Zelensky himself has admitted to having as his inspiration the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau (here and here).

Il 21 aprile 2019 è eletto Presidente dell’Ucraina con il 73,22% dei voti e il 20 maggio presta giuramento; il 22 maggio 2019 nomina Ivan Bakanov, Direttore Generale della Kvartal 95, primo vicecapo dei Servizi di Sicurezza dell’Ucraina e Capo della Direzione principale per la lotta contro la corruzione e il crimine organizzato della Direzione centrale del Servizio di Sicurezza dell’Ucraina. Assieme a Bakanov, è da menzionare Mykhailo Fedorov, Vicepresidente e Ministro della Trasformazione Digitale, membro del World Economic Forum (qui). Lo stesso Zelenskyj ha ammesso di avere come proprio ispiratore il Primo Ministro del Canada Justin Trudeau (qui e qui).

Zelensky’s relations with the IMF and the WEF

As Greece’s tragic precedent has shown, national sovereignties and the popular will expressed by parliaments are de facto erased by the decisions of international high finance, which interferes with government policies by means of blackmail and outright extortion of an economic nature. The case of Ukraine, which is one of the poorest countries in Europe, is no exception.

Shortly after Zelensky’s election, the International Monetary Fund threatened not to grant Ukraine a $5 billion loan if he did not comply with their demands. During a telephone conversation with the CEO of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, the Ukrainian President was rebuked for replacing Yakiv Smolii with a man he trusted, Kyrylo Shevchenko, who was less inclined to comply with the diktats of the IMF. Anders Åslund writes at Atlantic Council: “The problems surrounding the Zelensky government are mounting alarmingly. First of all, since March 2020, the President has led a reversal not only of the reforms pursued under him, but also those initiated by his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Second, his government has not presented plausible proposals to resolve IMF concerns about Ukraine’s unfulfilled commitments. Third, the President appears to no longer have a ruling parliamentary majority, and he seems disinterested in forming a reformist majority (here).

It is evident that the IMF’s interventions are aimed at obtaining the Ukrainian government’s commitment to align itself with the economic, fiscal and social policies dictated by the globalist agenda, beginning with the “independence” of the Central Bank of Ukraine from the government: a euphemism with which the IMF calls on the Kiev government to renounce legitimate control over its Central Bank, which is one of the ways in which national sovereignty is exercised, along with the issuance of money and the management of public debt. On the other hand, just four months earlier Kristalina Georgieva had launched the Great Reset together with Klaus Schwab, Prince Charles and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

What had not been possible with previous governments was brought to completion under the presidency of Zelensky, who entered the good graces of the WEF (here) along with the new Governor of the BCU, Kyrylo Shevchenko. Less than a year later, in order to prove his subjection, Shevchenko wrote an article for the WEF entitled Central banks are the key to countries’ climate goals and Ukraine is showing the way (here). Thus the Agenda 2030 is implemented, under blackmail.

There are also other Ukrainian companies that have ties to the WEF: the State Savings Bank of Ukraine (one of the largest financial institutions in Ukraine), the DTEK Group (an important private investor in the Ukrainian energy sector) and Ukr Land Farming (an agricultural leader in cultivation). Banks, energy and food are sectors perfectly in line with the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution theorized by Klaus Schwab.

On February 4, 2021, the Ukrainian president shut down seven television stations, including ZIK, Newsone and 112 Ukraine, all guilty of not supporting his government. As Anna Del Freo writes: “A harsh condemnation of this liberticidal act has arrived, among others, also from the European Federation of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, who have asked for the immediate lifting of the veto. The three broadcasters will no longer be able to broadcast for five years: they employ about 1500 people, whose jobs are now at risk. There is no real reason why the three networks should be shut down, except for the arbitrariness of the Ukrainian political apex, which accuses them of threatening information security and being under “malign Russian influence.” A strong reaction also comes from NUJU, the Ukrainian journalists’ union, which speaks of a very heavy attack on freedom of speech, given that hundreds of journalists are being deprived of the opportunity to express themselves and hundreds of thousands of citizens are being deprived of the right to be informed. As we can see, what Putin is accused of was actually carried out by Zelensky and, more recently, by the European Union, with the complicity of social media platforms. “Shutting down television broadcasters is one of the most extreme forms of restriction of the freedom of the press,” said EFJ Secretary General Ricardo Gutierrez. “Nations have an obligation to ensure effective pluralism of information. It is clear that the presidential veto is not at all in line with international standards on freedom of expression” (here).

It would be interesting to know what statements were made by the European Federation of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists after the blackout of Russia Today and Sputnik in Europe.

Neo-nazi and extremist movements in Ukraine

A country that calls for humanitarian aid from the international community to defend its population from Russian aggression should, in the collective imagination, stand out for respect for democratic principles and for legislation that prohibits activities and the spread of propaganda by extremist ideologies.

Neo-Nazi movements engaged in military and paramilitary actions operate freely in Ukraine, often with the official support of public institutions. These include the following: Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a movement with a Nazi, anti-Semitic and racist matrix already active in Chechnya and which is part of the Right Sector, an association of far-right movements formed at the time of the Euromaidan coup in 2013/2014; the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA); the UNA/UNSO, paramilitary wing of the far-right political party Ukraine National Assembly; the Korchinsky Brotherhood, which offered protection in Kiev to ISIS members (here); Misanthropic Vision (MD), a neo-Nazi network spread across 19 countries that publicly incites terrorism, extremism and hatred against Christians, Muslims, Jews, Communists, homosexuals, Americans and people of color (here).

It should be remembered that the government has given explicit support to these extremist organizations both by sending the presidential guard to the funerals of their representatives, as well as by supporting the Azov Battalion, a paramilitary organization that is officially part of the Ukrainian Army under the new name of Azov Special Operations Regiment and organized into the National Guard. The Azov Regiment is financed by the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, the former governor of Dnepropetrovsk, who is also thought to be the financier of the nationalist militias of Pravyi Sektor, which are considered responsible for the Odessa massacre. We are talking about the same Kolomoisky mentioned in the Pandora Papers as a sponsor of President Zelensky. The battalion has relations with several far-right organizations in Europe and the United States.

Amnesty International, after a meeting on September 8, 2014 between Secretary General Salil Shetty and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, called on the Ukrainian Government to end the abuses and war crimes committed by the volunteer battalions that operate together with the Kiev Armed Forces. The Ukrainian government has opened an official investigation into the matter, declaring that no officers or soldiers of the Azov Battalion appear to be under investigation.

In March 2015, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Battalion would be one of the first units to be trained by US Army troops, as part of their Operation Fearless Guard training mission. US training was discontinued on June 12, 2015, when the US House of Representatives passed an amendment banning all aid (including weapons and training) to the battalion because of its neo-Nazi past. The amendment was then revoked under pressure from the CIA (here and here) and the soldiers of the Azov Battalion were trained in the United States (here and here): “We have been training these guys for eight years now. They are really good fighters. That’s where the Agency’s program could have a serious impact.”

In 2016, an OSCE report [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] found that the Azov Battalion was responsible for the mass killing of prisoners, the concealment of corpses in mass graves and the systematic use of physical and psychological torture techniques. Just a few days ago the Deputy Commander of the Battalion, Vadim Troyan, was appointed Chief of Police of the Oblast Region by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

These are the “heroes” fighting together with the Ukrainian Army against the Russian soldiers. And these heroes of the Azov Battalion, instead of protecting their children, dare to make their own flesh into meat for slaughter, enlisting boys and girls (here and here), in violation of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (here), concerning the involvement of minors in armed conflicts: an ad hoc legal instrument that establishes that no child under 18 is to be forcibly recruited or used directly in hostilities, either by the armed forces of a state nor by armed groups.

Inevitably, the lethal weapons provided by the EU, including Draghi’s Italy, with the support of “anti-fascist” political parties, are destined to be used against these children.

The Ukrainian war in the plans of the NWO

The censorship being imposed against Russian broadcasters is clearly aimed at preventing the official narrative from being disproven by the facts. But while the Western media shows images of the video game War Thunder (here), frames from the movie Star Wars (here), explosions in China (here), videos of military parades (here), footage from Afghanistan (here), the Rome metro (here) or images of mobile crematoria (here) by passing them off as real and recent scenes of the war in Ukraine, reality is ignored because it has already been decided to provoke a conflict as a weapon of mass distraction that legitimizes new restrictions of freedoms in Western nations, according to the plans of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.

It is evident that the Ukrainian people, beyond the issues that diplomacy can resolve, are victims of the same global coup d’état being carried out by supranational powers that intend, not peace between nations, but rather the establishment of the tyranny of the New World Order. Just a few days ago, Ukrainian parliamentarian Kira Rudik told Fox News, while holding a kalashnikov: “We know that we are not only fighting for Ukraine, but also for the New World Order.”

The human rights violations in Ukraine and the crimes of the neo-Nazi militias repeatedly denounced by Putin could not find a political solution because they were planned and fomented by the globalist elite, with the collaboration of the European Union, NATO and the American deep state, with an anti-Russian tone intended to make inevitable a war whose goal is to impose, primarily in Europe, the forced adoption of energy rationing (here),[3] travel restrictions, the replacement of paper money with electronic money (here and here) and the adoption of digital ID (here and here). We are not talking about theoretical projects. These are decisions that are about to be taken concretely at the European level as well as in individual countries.

Respect for the Law and Standards

The intervention in Ukraine by NATO, the United States, and the European Union does not appear to have any legitimacy. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and as such it should not benefit from the assistance of an entity whose purpose is the defense of its member nations. The same can be said of the European Union, which just a few days ago invited Zelensky to join it. In the meantime, Ukraine has received $2.5 billion from the United States since 2014 and another $400 million in 2021 alone (here), plus other funds for a total of $4.6 billion dollars (here). For his part, Putin has given $15 billion in loans to Ukraine to save it from bankruptcy. The European Union, for its part, has sent $17 million in funding, in addition to funding sent from various individual nations. But this assistance has benefitted the Ukrainian population only minimally.

Furthermore, by intervening in the war in Ukraine in the name of the European Union, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is violating articles 9, 11, and 12 of the Treaty of Lisbon. The competence of the European Union in this area belongs to the European Council and the High Representative. In no case does it belong to the Commission President. In what capacity does President von der Leyen presume to act as if she were the head of the European Union, usurping a role that does not belong to her? Why does no one intervene, especially considering the danger to which European citizens are being exposed due to the possibility of Russian retaliation?

Furthermore, in many cases the constitutions of the nations that are today sending support and weapons to Ukraine do not provide for the possibility of entering into a conflict. For example, article 11 of the Italian Constitution states: “Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offense for the liberty of other peoples and as a means of resolving international controversies.” Sending weapons and soldiers to a nation that is not a part of either NATO or the European Union constitutes a de facto declaration of war on the nation belligerent with it (in this case, Russia), and should therefore require the prior deliberation of declaring war, as is foreseen by article 78 of the Italian Constitution: “The Chambers [of Parliament] deliberate on the state of war and confer the necessary powers on the government.” It does not appear that to date the Chambers have been called upon to express themselves in this sense, or that the President of the Republic has intervened to demand compliance with the constitutional provision. Prime Minister Draghi, appointed by the globalist cabal for the destruction of Italy and its definitive enslavement to supranational powers, is one of the many Heads of national governments who considers the will of the citizens as an annoying obstacle to the execution of the agenda of the World Economic Forum. After two years of systematic violations of fundamental rights and of the Constitution, it is difficult to believe that he will want to place the interests of the Italian nation ahead of the interests of those who have placed him in power. On the contrary: the more disastrous are the effects of the sanctions adopted by his government, the more he can consider himself appreciated by those who have given him power. The coup perpetrated by means of the psychopandemic emergency proceeds today with new unfortunate decisions, ratified by a Parliament without a spine.

It is also a violation of article 288 of the Italian Penal Code to permit Italian citizens – and even members of the majority in the Government and political leaders – to respond to the appeal of the Ukrainian Ambassador for enrollment in the foreign legion: “Anyone in the territory of [Italy] who without government approval enlists or arms citizens to serve [in the military] in favor of a foreign nation, is to be punished with imprisonment for a period of 4 to 15 years.” No magistrate, at least for the time being, has intervened to punish those responsible for this crime.

Another violation is found in the activity of transferring children from Ukraine to Italy (and presumably also to other nations) who have been obtained via surrogate motherhood, ordered by Italian couples in violation of Law 40/2004, without any penalty being imposed on those guilty of this crime, as well as their accomplices.

It should also be remembered that the utterances of members of the Government or of political leaders with regard to the Russian Federation and its President, along with the sanctions that have been adopted against Russia and the repeated instances of arbitrary discrimination against Russian citizens, companies, artists, and sports teams for the sole fact of being Russian, are not only provocations that ought to be avoided in order to allow for a serene and peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, but also place the safety of Italian citizens in very serious danger (as well as the safety of citizens of other nations who are adopting a similar stance toward Russia). The reason for such rash temerity is incomprehensible, unless there is an intentional desire to trigger reactions from the opposing party.

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a very dangerous trap that has been set against Ukraine, Russia, and the nations of Europe.

Ukraine is the latest victim of accomplished executioners

The Russian-Ukrainian crisis did not suddenly erupt a month ago. It has been prepared and fomented for a long time, certainly beginning with the 2014 white coup that was desired by the American deep state in an anti-Russian key. This is demonstrated, among other incontestable facts, by the training of the Azov Battalion by the CIA “to kill Russians” (here), with the CIA forcing the revocation of the amendment banning aid to the battalion made by Congress in 2015. The interventions made by Joe and Hunter Biden have gone in the same direction. Thus there is evidence of long-term premeditation, consistent with NATO’s relentless expansion towards the East. The Color Revolution of Euromaidan, as well as the establishment of a pro-NATO government composed of homines novi trained by the _World Economic Forum_and George Soros, was intended to create the conditions for the subordination of Ukraine to the NATO bloc, removing it from the influence of the Russian Federation. To this end, the subversive action of the Hungarian philanthropist’s NGOs, supported by media propaganda, has kept silent about the crimes of neo-Nazi paramilitary organizations, financed by the same people who sponsor Zelensky.

But if the brainwashing carried out by the mainstream media in Western nations has succeeded in conveying a completely distorted narrative of reality, the same cannot be said for Ukraine, where the population is well aware of the corruption of the political class in power as well as of its remoteness from the real problems of the Ukrainian nation. We in the West believe that the “oligarchs” are only in Russia, while the reality is that they are present above all throughout the entire galaxy of nations that formerly composed the Soviet Union, where they can accumulate wealth and power simply by placing themselves at the disposition of foreign “philanthropists” and multinational corporations. It matters little if their offshore accounts are the primary cause of the poverty of the citizens of these nations, the backwardness of the health care system, the excessive power of the bureaucracy, the almost total absence of public services, foreign control of strategic companies, and the progressive loss of sovereignty and national identity: the important thing is to “make money” and be immortalized along with political personalities, bankers, arms dealers, and those who starve the people. And then to come to the fashionable resorts of Versilia or the Amalfi Coast to flaunt their yachts and platinum cards to the waiter from Odessa or the cleaning lady from Kiev who send their paltry wages to their relatives back home. These Ukrainian billionaires wearing kippahs are those who are selling out Ukraine to the corrupted and corrupting West, trading their own well-being for the enslavement of their compatriots to the usurers who are taking over the world, using the same ruthless and immoral systems everywhere. In the past they cut the salaries of workers in Athens and Thessaloniki; today they have simply enlarged their horizons to the whole of Europe, where the population still looks on incredulously while first a health dictatorship and then an environmental dictatorship is being imposed.

On the other hand, without the pretext of a war, how would they have been able to justify the soaring price of gas and fuels, forcing the process of an “ecological” transition imposed from on high in order to control the impoverished masses? How could they have made the peoples of the Western world swallow the establishment of the tyranny of the New World Order, when the pandemic farce was unraveling and bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by BigPharma?

And while the EU and heads of government blame Russia for the impending disaster, the Western elites demonstrate that they even want to destroy agriculture, in order to apply the horrors of the Holodomor on a global scale (here). On the other hand, in many nations (including Italy) the privatization of waterways is being theorized – and water is an inalienable public good – for the advantage of multinationals and with the aim of controlling and limiting agriculture activities. The pro-NATO government of Kiev did not behave much differently: for eight years the Crimea was deprived of water from the Dnieper River in order to prevent the irrigation of the fields and starve the people. Today, in light of the sanctions being imposed on Russia and the huge reduction of grain supplies, we can understand Bill Gates’ enormous investments in agriculture (here), following the same ruthless profit-making logic already experienced with the vaccine campaign.

The Ukrainian people, regardless of what ethnic group they may belong to, are merely the latest unwitting hostages of the supranational totalitarian regime that brought the national economies of the entire world to their knees through the Covid deception, after publicly theorizing about the need to decimate the world population and transform the survivors into chronically ill patients who have irreparably compromised their immune systems.

The Ukrainian people should think hard about calling upon the intervention of NATO or the EU, provided that it is really the Ukrainian people who do it and not rather their corrupt rulers aided by racist mercenaries and neo-nazi groups in the pay of hierarchs. Because while they are promised freedom from the invader – with whom they share the common religious and cultural heritage of having once been part of Great Russia – in reality what is cynically being prepared is their definitive cancellation, their enslavement to the Great Reset that foresees everything except the protection of their identity, their sovereignty, and their borders.

Let the Ukrainian people look at what has happened to the nations of the European Union: the mirage of prosperity and security is demolished by the contemplation of the rubble left by the euro and the lobbies of Brussels. Nations invaded by illegal immigrants who feed crime and prostitution; destroyed in their social fabric by politically correct ideologies; knowingly brought to bankruptcy by reckless economic and fiscal policies; led towards poverty by the cancellation of labor and social security protections; deprived of a future by the destruction of the family and the moral and intellectual corruption of the new generations.

What were once prosperous and independent nations, diverse in their respective ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious specificities, have now been transformed into a shapeless mass of people without ideals, without hopes, without faith, without even the strength to react against the abuses and crimes of those who govern them. A mass of corporate customers, slaves of the system of detailed control imposed by the pandemic farce, even in the face of evidence of the fraud. A mass of persons without individual identity, marked with QR codes like animals on an intensive farm, like products of a huge shopping center. If this has been the result of the renunciation of national sovereignty for all the nations – every single one, without exception! – that have entrusted themselves to the colossal scam of the European Union, why would Ukraine be any different?

Is this what your fathers wanted, what they hoped for, what they desired, when they received Baptism along with Vladimir the Great on the banks of the Dnieper?

If there is a positive aspect that each of us can recognize in this crisis, it is that it has revealed the horror of the globalist tyranny, its ruthless cynicism, its capacity to destroy and annihilate everything it touches. It is not the Ukrainians who ought to enter the European Union or NATO, it is rather the other nations who ought to finally be jolted by pride and courage to leave them, shaking off this detestable yoke and rediscovering their own independence, sovereignty, identity, and faith. Their own souls.

To be clear: the New Order is not an inescapable destiny, and it can be subverted and denounced, if only the peoples of the world realize that they have been deceived and swindled by an oligarchy of clearly identifiable criminals, who one day will have to answer for those sanctions and those blocks of funds that today they apply with impunity to anyone who does not bend the knee before them.

An appeal to the Third Rome

For Russia too, this conflict is a trap. This is because it would fulfill the dream of the American deep state to definitively oust Russia from the European context in its commercial and cultural relations, pushing it into the arms of China, perhaps with the hope that the dictatorship in Beijing can persuade the Russians to accept the system of social credit and other aspects of the Great Reset that thus far Russia has been able to avoid, at least in part.

It is a trap, not because Russia is wrong in wanting to “denazify” Ukraine of its extremist groups and guarantee protection to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but because it is precisely these reasons – theoretically tenable – that were created specifically to provoke it and induce it to invade Ukraine, in such a way as to provoke the NATO reaction that has been prepared for some time by the deep state and the globalist elite. The casus belli was deliberately planned by the real perpetrators of the conflict, knowing that it would obtain exactly that response from Putin. And it is up to Putin, regardless of whether he is right, not to fall into the trap, and to instead turn the tables, offering Ukraine the conditions of an honorable peace without continuing the conflict. Indeed, the more Putin believes he is right, the more he needs to demonstrate the greatness of his nation and his love for his people by not giving into provocations.

Permit me to repeat the words of the Prophet Isaiah: Dissolve colligationes impietatis, solve fasciculos deprimentes, dimitte eos qui confracti sunt liberos, et omne onus dirumpe; frange esurienti panem tuum, et egenos vagosque induc in domum tuam; cum videris nudum, operi eum, et carnem tuam ne despexeris. Tunc erumpet quasi mane lumen tuum; et sanitas tua citius orietur, et anteibit faciem tuam justitia tua, et gloria Domini colliget te.

Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you. (Is 58:6-8).

The world crisis with which the dissolution of traditional society is being prepared has also involved the Catholic Church, whose Hierarchy is held hostage by apostates who are courtiers of power.[4] There was a time in which Popes and Prelates confronted Kings without concern for human respect, because they knew they spoke with the voice of Jesus Christ, the King of kings. The Rome of the Caesars and Popes is now deserted and silent, just as for centuries the Second Rome of Constantinople has also been silent. Perhaps Providence has ordained that Moscow, the Third Rome, will today in the sight of the world take on the role of κατέχον (2 Thess 2:6-7), of eschatological obstacle to the Antichrist. If the errors of communism were spread by the Soviet Union, even to the point of imposing themselves within the Church, Russia and Ukraine can today have an epochal role in the restoration of Christian Civilization, contributing to bringing the world a period of peace from which the Church too will rise again purified and renewed in her Ministers.

The United States of America and the European nations should not marginalize Russia, but rather form an alliance with her, not only for the restoration of trade for the prosperity of all, but in view of the reconstruction of a Christian Civilization, which alone can save the world from the globalist techno-health transhuman monster.

Final Considerations

There is great concern that the destinies of the peoples of the world is in the hands of an elite that is not accountable to anyone for its decisions, that does not recognize any authority above itself, and that in order to pursue its own interests does not hesitate to jeopardize security, the economy, and the very lives of billions of people, with the complicity of politicians in their service and the mainstream media. The falsification of facts, the grotesque adulterations of reality, and the partisanship with which the news is spread stand alongside the censorship of dissenting voices and leads to forms of ethnic persecution against Russian citizens, who are discriminated against precisely in the countries that say they are democratic and respectful of fundamental rights.

I earnestly hope that my appeal for the establishment of an Anti-Globalist Alliance that unites the peoples of the world in opposition against the tyranny of the New World Order will be accepted by those who have at heart the common good, peace between nations, concord among all peoples, freedom for all citizens and the future of the new generations. And even before that, may my words – along with those of many intellectually honest people – contribute to bringing to light the complicity and corruption of those who use lies and fraud to justify their crimes, even in these moments of great apprehension about the war in Ukraine.

“May the strong listen to us, so as not to become weak in injustice. May the powerful listen to us, if they want their power not to be destruction but support for the peoples and protection for tranquility in order and work” (Pius XII, Radio message to Heads of State and Peoples of the World in Imminent Danger of War, August 24, 1939).

May Holy Lent lead all Christians to ask pardon from the Divine Majesty for the sins of those who trample His Holy Law. May penance and fasting move the Lord God to mercy, while we repeat the words of the Prophet Joel: Parce, Domine: parce populo tuo; et ne des hæreditatem tuam in opprobrium, ut dominentur eis nationes. Forgive your people, Lord, and do not expose your inheritance to reproach, to the derision of the nations (Jl 2:17).

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop,

Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

March 6, 2022

First Sunday of Lent

[1] In 2011, Kolomoisky was one of the co-founders of the Jewish European Parliament, along with billionaire Vadim Rabinovich. Cf. http://ejp.eu/. Note that Rabinovich is a member of the Opposition Platform – For Life, the Ukrainian pro-Russian political party whose leader Viktor Medvedcuk was arrested by Zelensky.

[2] According to Russian politician Viktor Vladislavovich Zubarev, a member of the State Duma, Zelensky is also said to have $1.2 billion deposited at Dresdner Bank in Costa Rica and a villa in Miami purchased for $34 million (here). For a more comprehensive picture, see the investigation by Slidstvo-info, an independent Ukrainian agency of investigative journalism (here).

[3] It should be noted that the Italian Minister of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, decided a few days ago to sell a share of oil stocks to Ukraine “as a concrete aid also on the energy front,” exactly as during the pandemic he gave away millions of masks to China, only to then buy them back from Beijing shortly thereafter (here).

[4] In its March 6 issue, Famiglia Cristiana has a headline, commenting on an article by the founder of the Sant’Egidio Community, Andrea Riccardi: “Let’s stop the war and build a new world order” (here).

§§§

As I've stated before, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is of utmost importance that we all "follow the money". It's the only way to unravel the ever-complicated narrative that has evolved over the past 16 months. One of the key aspects of the issue is to track the allegiances and connections that key players have to each other. As you will see in this posting, a prime example can be found simply by looking at the connections that the Members of the Board of Directors at Pfizer have to other key players in the "COVID game".

Here is a graphic showing the Board as a whole

Now, let's focus on three members:

1.) Noting that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the gatekeeper that stands between our safety and the products being promoted by Big Pharma, here is the CV for Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb:

2.) Noting that Bill Gates, the world's pre-eminent untrained vaccinologist and epidemiologist, has the goal to vaccinate the entire world, hasn't yet seen a health condition that a vaccine couldn't fix and that he is the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the second largest financial supporter of the World Health Organization, that the World Economic Forum is the architect and promoter of the dystopic post-pandemic Great Reset and that Facebook has been one of the gatekeepers of the pro-vaccine narrative, here is the CV for Pfizer board member Susan Desmond-Hellmann:

3.) Noting that the mainstream media has essentially been the mouthpiece of governments during the pandemic, that they have taken it upon themselves to create and disseminate COVID-19 fear porn and promote experimental COVID-19 vaccines 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and that Thompson Reuters is the world's leading provider of news and claims to be one of the "world's most trusted providers of answers", here is the CV for Pfizer board member James Smith:

Piece by piece, the puzzle comes together. While I am well aware that most major corporations want to attract board "talent" that will assist in promoting their business, the links between three of Pfizer's board members, the FDA, Facebook, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF and Thompson Reuters is what can only be termed "an amazing coincidence".

A UK nonprofit with ties to global corruption throughout the COVID-19 crisis as well as historical and current ties to the UK eugenics movement launched a global health-focused DARPA equivalent last year. The move went largely unnoticed by both mainstream and independent media.

The Wellcome Trust, which has arguably been second only to Bill Gates in its ability to influence events during the COVID-19 crisis and vaccination campaign, launched its own global equivalent of the Pentagon’s secretive research agency last year, officially to combat the “most pressing health challenges of our time.” Though first conceived of in 2018, this particular Wellcome Trust initiative was spun off from the Trust last May with $300 million in initial funding. It quickly attracted two former DARPA executives, who had previously served in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley, to manage and plan its portfolio of projects.

This global health DARPA, known as Wellcome Leap, seeks to achieve “breakthrough scientific and technological solutions” by or before 2030, with a focus on “complex global health challenges.” The Wellcome Trust is open about how Wellcome Leap will apply the approaches of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms to the health and life science sector. Unsurprisingly, their three current programs are poised to develop incredibly invasive tech-focused, and in some cases overtly transhumanist, medical technologies, including a program exclusively focused on using artificial intelligence (AI), mobile sensors, and wearable brain-mapping tech for children three years old and younger.

This Unlimited Hangout investigation explores not only the four current programs of Wellcome Leap but also the people behind it. The resulting picture is of an incredibly sinister project that poses not only a great threat to current society but to the future of humanity itself. An upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation will examine the history of the Wellcome Trust along with its role in recent and current events.

Leap’s Leadership: Merging Man and Machine for the Military and Silicon Valley

Regina Dugan’s Keynote at Facebook F8 2017. Source: YouTube

The ambitions of the Wellcome Leap are made clear by the woman chosen to lead it, former director of the Pentagon’s DARPA, Regina Dugan. Dugan began her career at DARPA in 1996; she led a counterterrorism task force in 1999 before leaving DARPA about a year later. After departing DARPA, she cofounded her own venture capital firm, Dugan Ventures, and then became special adviser to the US Army’s vice chief of staff from 2001 to 2003, which coincided with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2005, she created a defense-focused tech firm called RedXDefense, which contracts with the military and specifically for DARPA.

In 2009, under the Obama administration, Dugan was appointed director of DARPA by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Much was made over her being the first female director of the agency, but she is best remembered at the agency for her so-called “Special Forces” approach to innovation. During her tenure, she created DARPA’s now defunct Transformational Convergence Technology Office, which focused on social networks, synthetic biology, and machine intelligence. Many of the themes previously managed by that office are now overseen by DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which was created in 2014 and focuses on everything “from programmable microbes to human-machine symbiosis.” The Biological Technologies Office, like Wellcome Leap, pursues a mix of “health-focused” biotechnology programs and transhumanist endeavors.

Right before leaving the top role at DARPA, Dugan greenlighted the agency’s initial investments in mRNA vaccine technology, which led to DARPA’s investments in Pfizer and Moderna shortly thereafter. The DARPA scientist who lobbied Dugan to back the program, Dan Wattendorf, now works as the director of Innovative Technology Solutions at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

While Dugan’s efforts at DARPA are remembered fondly by those in the national-security state, and also by those in Silicon Valley, Dugan was investigated for conflicts of interest during her time as DARPA’s director, as her firm RedXDefense acquired millions in Department of Defense contracts during her tenure. Though she had recused herself from any formal role at the company while leading DARPA, she continued to hold a significant financial stake in the company, and a military investigation later found she had violated ethics rules to a significant degree.

Instead of being held accountable in any way, Dugan went on to become a top executive at Google, where she was brought on to manage Google’s Advanced Technology and Products Group (ATAP), which it had spun out of Motorola Mobility after Google’s acquisition of that company in 2012. Google’s ATAP was modeled after DARPA and employed other ex-DARPA officials besides Dugan.

At Google, Dugan oversaw several projects, including what is now the basis of Google’s “augmented reality” business, then known as Project Tango, as well as “smart” clothing in which multitouch sensors were woven into textiles. Another project that Dugan led involved the use of a “digital tattoo” to unlock smartphones. Perhaps most controversially, Dugan was also behind the creation of a “digital authentication pill.” According to Dugan, when the pill is swallowed, “your entire body becomes your authentication token.” Dugan framed the pill and many of her other efforts at Google as working to fix “the mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics” by producing technology that merges the human body with machines to varying degrees. While serving in this capacity at Google, Dugan chaired a panel at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative called “Game-Changers in Technology” and attended the 2015 Bilderberg meeting where AI was a main topic of discussion.

In 2016, Dugan left Google for Facebook where she was chosen to be the first head of Facebook’s own DARPA-equivalent research agency, then known as Building 8. DARPA’s ties to the origins of Facebook were discussed in a recent Unlimited Hangout report. Under Dugan, Building 8 invested heavily in brain-machine interface technology, which has since produced the company’s “neural wearable” wristbands that claim to be able to anticipate movements of the hand and fingers from brain signals alone. Facebook showcased prototypes of the project earlier this year.

Dugan left Facebook just eighteen months after joining Building 8, announcing her plans “to focus on building and leading a new endeavor,” which was apparently a reference to Wellcome Leap. Dugan later said it was as if she had been training for her role at Wellcome Leap ever since entering the workforce, framing it as the pinnacle of her career. When asked in an interview earlier this year who the clients of Wellcome Leap are, Dugan gave a long-winded answer but essentially responded that the project serves the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, international organizations such as the UN, and public-private partnerships.

In addition to her role at Wellcome, Dugan is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored taskforce on US Technology and Innovation policy, which was formed in 2019. Other members include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, McKinsey Institute Global Chairman James Manyika, former head of Google Eric Schmidt and President Biden’s controversial top science adviser Eric Lander.

The other executive at Wellcome Leap, chief operating officer Ken Gabriel, has a background closely tied to Dugan’s. Gabriel, like Dugan, is a former program manager at DARPA, where he led the agency’s microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) research from 1992 to 1996. He served as deputy director of DARPA from 1995 to 1996 and became director of the Electronics Technology Office from 1996 to 1997, where he was reportedly responsible for about half of all federal electronics-technology investments. At DARPA, Gabriel worked closely with the FBI and the CIA.

Ken Gabriel – COO of Wellcome Leap. Source: Wellcome Leap

Gabriel left DARPA for Carnegie Mellon University, where he was in charge of the Office for Security Technologies in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. That office was created after 9/11 specifically to help meet the national-security needs of the federal government, according to Carnegie Mellon’s announcement of the program. Around that same time, Gabriel became regarded as “the architect of the MEMS industry” due to his past work at DARPA and his founding of the MEMS-focused semiconductor company Akustica in 2002. He served as Akustica’s chairman and chief technology officer until 2009, at which time he returned to work at DARPA where he served as the agency’s deputy director, working directly under Regina Dugan.

In 2012, Gabriel followed Dugan to Google’s Advanced Technology and Products Group, which he was actually responsible for creating. According to Gabriel, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tasked Gabriel with creating “a private sector ground-up model of DARPA” out of Motorola Mobility. Regina Dugan was placed in charge, and Gabriel again served as her deputy. In 2013, Dugan and Gabriel co-wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review about how DARPA’s “Special Forces” innovation approach could revolutionize both the public and private sectors if more widely applied. Gabriel left Google in 2014, well before Dugan, to serve as the president and CEO of Charles Stark Draper Laboratories, better known as Draper Labs, which develops “innovative technology solutions” for the national-security community, with a focus on biomedical systems, energy, and space technology. Gabriel held that position until he abruptly resigned in 2020 to co-lead Wellcome Leap with Dugan.

In addition to his role at Wellcome, Gabriel is also a World Economic Forum “technology pioneer” and on the board of directors of Galvani Bioelectronics, a joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline, which is intimately linked to the Wellcome Trust, and the Google subsidiary Verily. Galvani focuses on the development of “bioelectronic medicines” that involve “implant-based modulation of neural signals” in an overt push by the pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley to normalize transhumanist “medicines.” The longtime chairman of the board of Galvani, on which Gabriel serves, was Moncef Slaoui, who led the US COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution program Operation Warp Speed. Slaoui was relieved of his position at Galvani this past March over well-substantiated claims of sexual harassment.

Jeremy Farrar, Pandemic Narrative Manager

While Dugan and Gabriel ostensibly lead the outfit, Wellcome Leap is the brainchild of Jeremy Farrar and Mike Ferguson, who serve as its directors. Farrar is the director of the Wellcome Trust itself, and Ferguson is deputy chair of the Trust’s board of governors. Farrar has been director of the Wellcome Trust since 2013 and has been actively involved in critical decision making at the highest level globally since the beginning of the COVID crisis. He is also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum and cochaired the WEF’s Africa meeting in 2019.

Farrar’s Wellcome Trust is also a WEF strategic partner and cofounded the COVID Action Platform with the WEF. Farrar was more recently behind the creation of Wellcome’s COVID-Zero initiative, which is also tied to the WEF. Farrar has framed that initiative as “an opportunity for companies to advance the science which will eventually reduce business disruption.” Thus far it has convinced titans of finance, including Mastercard and Citadel, to invest millions in research and development at organizations favored by the Wellcome Trust.

Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar with NTI Co-Chairman Sam Nunn, who led the 2001 Dark Winter exercise.
Source: NTI.com

Some of Wellcome’s controversial medical-research projects in Africa, as well as its ties to the UK eugenics movement, were explored in a December article published at Unlimited Hangout. That report also explores the intimate connections of Wellcome to the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the use of which has now been restricted or banned in several countries. As mentioned in the introduction, the Wellcome Trust itself is the subject of an upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation (Part 2).

Jeremy Farrar, who was born in Singapore in 1961, had previously been director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, beginning in 1998. During that time, he authored numerous epidemiological research papers. He claimed in a 2014 Financial Times article that his decision to move to Vietnam was due to his disdain for conference halls full of white men. Southeast Asia was obviously a much less regulated environment for someone in the medical-research industry wishing to indulge in groundbreaking research. Although based in Vietnam, Farrar was sent by Oxford to various locations around the globe to study epidemics happening in real time. In 2009, when swine flu was wreaking havoc in Mexico, Farrar jumped on a plane to dive right into the action, something he also did for subsequent global outbreaks of Ebola, MERS, and avian flu.

Over the past year, many questions have arisen regarding exactly how much power Farrar wields over global public health policy. Recently, the US president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, was forced to release his emails and correspondence from March and April 2020 at the request of the Washington Post. The released emails reveal what appears to be a high-level conspiracy by some of the top medical authorities in the US to falsely claim that COVID-19 could only have been of zoonotic origin, despite indications to the contrary. The emails were heavily redacted as such emails usually are, supposedly to protect the information of the people involved, but the “(b)(6)” redactions also protect much of Jeremy Farrar’s input into these discussions. Chris Martenson, economic researcher and post-doctorate student of neurotoxicology and founder of Peak Prosperity, has had some insightful comments on the matter, including asking why such protection has been offered to Farrar given that he is the director of a “charitable trust.” Martenson went on to question why the Wellcome Trust was involved at all in these high-level discussions.

One Fauci email, dated February 25, 2020, and sent by Amelie Rioux of the WHO, stated that Jeremy Farrar’s official role at that time was “to act as the board’s focal point on the COVID-19 outbreak, to represent and advise the board on the science of the outbreak and the financing of the response.” Farrar had previously chaired the WHO’s Scientific Advisory Council. The emails also show the preparation, within a ten-day period, of the SARS-CoV-2 “‘origins” paper, which was entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and was accepted for publication by Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. The paper claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could only have come from natural origins as opposed to gain-of-function research, a claim once held as gospel in the mainstream but which has come under considerable scrutiny in recent weeks.

Shaping the presentation of an origin story for a virus of global significance is something Farrar has been involved with before. In 2004–5, it was reported that Farrar and his Vietnamese colleague Tran Tinh Hien, the vice director at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, were the first to identify the re-emergence of the avian flu (H5N1) in humans. Farrar has recounted the origin story on many occasions, stating: “It was a little girl. She caught it from a pet duck that had died and she’d dug up and reburied. She survived.” According to Farrar, this experience prompted him to found a global network in conjunction with the World Health Organization to “improve local responses to disease outbreaks.”

An article published by Rockefeller University Press’s Journal of Experimental Medicine in 2009 is dramatically titled, “Jeremy Farrar: When Disaster Strikes.” Farrar, when referring to the H5N1 origin story stated: “The WHO people—and this is not a criticism—decided it was unlikely that the child had SARS or avian influenza. They left, but Professor Hien stayed behind to talk with the child and her mum. The girl admitted that she had been quite sad in the previous days with the death of her pet duck. The girl and her brother had fought over burying the duck and, because of this argument, she had gone back, dug up the duck, and reburied it—probably so her brother wouldn’t know where it was buried. With that history, Professor Hien phoned me at home and said he was worried about the child. He took some swabs from the child’s nose and throat and brought them back to the hospital. That night the laboratory ran tests on the samples, and they were positive for Influenza A.”

With Farrar now having been revealed as an instrumental part of the team that crafted the official story regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, his previous assertions about the origin of past epidemics should be scrutinized.

As the director of a “charitable trust,” Jeremy Farrar is almost completely unaccountable for his involvement in crafting controversial narratives related to the COVID crisis. He continues to be at the forefront of the global response to COVID, in part by launching the Wellcome Leap Fund for “unconventional projects, funded at scale” as an overt attempt to create a global and “charitable” version of DARPA. Indeed, Farrar, in conceiving Wellcome Leap, has positioned himself to be just as, if not more, instrumental in building the foundation for the post-COVID era as he was in building the foundation for the COVID crisis itself. This is significant as Wellcome Leap CEO Regina Dugan has labeled COVID-19 this generation’s “Sputnik moment” that will launch a new age of “health innovation,” much like the launching of Sputnik started a global technological “space age.” Wellcome Leap fully intends to lead the pack.

“Rulers” of the Gene-Sequencing Industry

In contrast to the overt DARPA, Silicon Valley, and Wellcome connections of the others, the chairman of the board of directors of Wellcome Leap, Jay Flatley, has a different background. Flatley is the long-time head of Illumina, a California-based gene-sequencing hardware and software giant that is believed to currently dominate the field of genomics. Though he stepped down from the board of Illumina in 2016, he has continued to serve as the executive chairman of its board of directors. Flatley was the first to be chosen for a leadership position at Wellcome Leap, and he was responsible for suggesting Regina Dugan for the organization’s chief executive officer, according to a recent interview given by Dugan.

Illumina Campus. Source: Glassdoor

As a profile on Illumina in the business magazine Fast Company notes, Illumina “operates behind the scenes, selling hardware and services to companies and research institutions,” among them 23andMe. 23andMe’s CEO, Anne Wojcicki, the sister of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, told Fast Company, _“_It’s crazy. Illumina is like the ruler of this whole universe and no one knows that.” The report notes that 23andMe, like most companies that offer DNA sequencing and analysis to consumers, uses machines produced by Illumina.

In 2016, Illumina launched an “aggressive” five-year plan to “bring genomics out of research labs and into doctors’ offices.” Given the current state of things, particularly the global push toward gene-focused vaccines and therapies, that plan, which concludes this year, could not have been any better timed. Illumina’s current CEO, Francis DeSouza, previously held key posts at Microsoft and Symantec. Also in 2016, Illumina’s executive teams forecast a future in which humans are gene tested from birth to grave for both health and commercial purposes.

Whereas most companies have struggled financially during the coronavirus pandemic, some have seen a massive increase in profits. Illumina has witnessed its share price double since the start of the COVID crisis. The company’s $1 billion plus in profits during the last tax year was obviously helped by the quick approval of the NovaSEQ 6000 machines, which can test a large number of COVID samples more quickly than other devices. An individual machine has a hefty price tag of almost $1 million, and thus they are mostly found at elite facilities, private labs, and top-tier universities.

Jay Flatley, Executive Chairman, Illumina, speaking at World Economic Forum in Davos 2018. Source: WEF

In addition to his long-standing leadership role at Illumina, Jay Flatley is also a “digital member” of the World Economic Forum as well as the lead independent director of Zymergen, a WEF “tech pioneer” company that is “rethinking biology and reimagining the world.” Flatley, who has also attended several Davos meetings, has addressed the WEF on the “promise of precision [i.e., gene-specific] medicine.” At another WEF panel meeting, Flatley, alongside UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, promoted the idea of making genomic sequencing of babies at birth the norm, claiming it had “the potential to shift the healthcare system from reactive to preventative.” Some at the panel called for the genomic sequencing of infants to eventually become mandatory.

Aside from Flatley as an individual, Illumina as a company is a WEF partner and plays a key role in its platform regarding the future of health care. A top Illumina executive also serves on the WEF’s Global Future Council on Biotechnology.

A New HOPE

Wellcome Leap currently has four programs: Multi-Stage Psych, Delta Tissue, 1KD, and HOPE. HOPE was the first program to be announced by Wellcome Leap and stands for Human Organs, Physiology and Engineering. According to the full program description, HOPE aims “to leverage the power of bioengineering to advance stem cells, organoids, and whole organ systems and connections that recapitulate human physiology in vitro and restore vital functions in vivo.”

Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/hope/

HOPE consists of two main program goals. First, it seeks to “bioengineer a multiorgan platform that recreates human immunological responses with sufficient fidelity to double the predictive value of a preclinical trial with respect to efficacy, toxicity and immunogenicity for therapeutic interventions.” In other words, this bioengineered platform mimicking human organs would be used to test the effects of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines, which could create a situation in which animal trials are replaced with trials on gene-edited and farmed organs. Though such an advance would certainly be helpful in the sense of reducing often unethical animal experimentation, trusting such a novel system to allow medical treatments to go straight to the human-testing phase would also require trusting the institutions developing that system and its funders.

As it stands now, the Wellcome Trust has too many ties to corrupt actors in the pharmaceutical industry, having originally begun as the “philanthropic” arm of UK drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, for anyone to trust what they are producing without actual independent confirmation, given the histories of some of their partners in fudging both animal and human clinical trial data for vaccines and other products.

The second goal of HOPE is to open up the use of machine-human hybrid organs for transplantation into human beings. That goal focuses on restoring “organ functions using cultivated organs or biological/synthetic hybrid systems” with the later goal of bioengineering a fully transplantable human organ after several years.

Later on in the program description, however, the interest in merging the synthetic and biological becomes clearer when it states: “The time is right to foster synergies between organoids, bioengineering and immunoengineering technologies, and advance the state-of-the-art of in vitro human biology . . . by building controllable, accessible and scalable systems.” The program description document also notes the interest of Wellcome in genetic-engineering approaches for the “enhancement of desired properties and insertion of traceable markers” and Wellcome’s ambition to reproduce the building blocks of the human immune system and human organ systems through technological means.

Transhumanist Toddlers?

The second program to be pursued by Wellcome Leap is called “The First 1000 Days: Promoting Healthy Brain Networks,” which is abbreviated as 1KD by the organization. It is arguably the most unsettling program because it seeks to use young children, specifically infants from three months to three-year-old toddlers, as its test subjects. The program is being overseen by Holly Baines, who previously served as strategy development lead for the Wellcome Trust before joining Wellcome Leap as the 1KD program leader.

Source: Wellcome Leap, [https://wellcomeleap.org/1kd/](http:// https://wellcomeleap.org/1kd/)

1KD is focused on developing “objective, scalable ways to assess a child’s cognitive health” by monitoring the brain development and function of infants and toddlers, allowing practitioners to “risk-stratify children” and “predict responses to interventions” in developing brains.

The program description document notes that, up to this point in history, “our primary window into the developing brain has been neuroimaging techniques and animal models, which can help identify quantitative biomarkers of [neural] network health and characterise network differences underlying behaviours.” It then states that advances in technology “are opening additional possibilities in young infants.”

The program description goes on to say that artificial neural networks, a form of AI, “have demonstrated the viability of modelling network pruning process and the acquisition of complex behaviours in much the same way as a developing brain,” while improvements in machine learning, another subset of AI, can now be used to extract “meaningful signals” from the brains of infants and young children. These algorithms can then be used to develop “interventions” for young children deemed by other algorithms to be in danger of having underdeveloped brain function.

The document goes on to note the promise of “low-cost mobile sensors, wearables and home-based systems” in “providing a new opportunity to assess the influence and dependency of brain development on natural physical and social interactions.” In other words, this program seeks to use “continuous visual and audio recordings in the home” as well as wearable devices on children to collect millions upon millions of data points. Wellcome Leap describes these wearables as “relatively unobtrusive, scalable electronic badges that collect visual, auditory and motion data as well as interactive features (such as turn-taking, pacing and reaction times).” Elsewhere in the document there is a call to develop “wearable sensors that assess physiological measures predictive of brain health (e.g., electrodermal activity, respiratory rate, and heart rate) and wireless wearable EEG or eye-tracking technology” for use in infants and children three and under.

Like other Wellcome Leap programs, this technology is being developed with the intention of making it mainstream in medical science within the next five to ten years, meaning that this system—although framed as a way to monitor children’s brain functioning to improve cognitive outcomes—is a recipe for total surveillance of babies and very young children as well as a means for altering their brain functioning as algorithms and Leap’s programmers see fit.

1DK has two main program goals. The first is to “develop a fully integrated model and quantitive measurement tools of network development in the first 1000 days [of life], sufficient to predict EF [executive function] formation before a child’s first birthday.” Such a model, the description reads, “should predict contributions of nutrition, the microbiome and the genome” on brain formation as well as the effects of “sensimotor and social interactions [or lack thereof] on network pruning processes” and EF outcomes. The second goal makes it clear that widespread adoption of such neurological-monitoring technologies in young children and infants is the endgame for 1DK. It states that the program plans to “create scalable methods for optimising promotion, prevention, screening and therapeutic interventions to improve EF by at least 20% in 80% of children before age 3.”

True to the eugenicist ties of the Wellcome Trust (to be explored more in-depth in Part 2), Wellcome Leap’s 1DK notes that “of interest are improvements from underdeveloped EF to normative or from normative to well-developed EF across the population to deliver the broadest impact.” One of the goals of 1DK is thus not treating disease or addressing a “global health public challenge” but instead experimenting on the cognitive augmentation of children using means developed by AI algorithms and invasive surveillance-based technology.

Another unsettling aspect of the program is its plan to “develop an in vitro 3D brain assembloid that replicates the time formation” of a developing brain that is akin to the models developed by monitoring the brain development of infants and children. Later on, the program description calls this an “in-silico” model of a child’s brain, something of obvious interest to transhumanists who see such a development as a harbinger of the so-called singularity. Beyond that, it appears that this in-silico and thus synthetic model of the brain is planned to be used as the “model” to which infant and children brains are shaped by the “therapeutic interventions” mentioned elsewhere in the program description.

It should be clear how sinister it is that an organization that brings together the worst “mad scientist” impulses of both the NGO and military-research worlds is openly planning to conduct such experiments on the brains of babies and toddlers, viewing them as datasets and their brains as something to be “pruned” by machine “intelligence.” Allowing such a program to advance unimpeded without pushback from the public would mean permitting a dangerous agenda targeting society’s youngest and most vulnerable members to potentially advance to a point where it is difficult to stop.

A “Tissue Time Machine”

The third and second-most recent program to join the Wellcome Leap lineup is called Delta Tissue, abbreviated by the organization as ΔT. Delta Tissue aims to create a platform that monitors changes in human-tissue function and interactions in real time, ostensibly to “explain the status of a disease in each person and better predict how that disease would progress.” Referring to this platform as a “tissue time machine,” Wellcome Leap sees Delta Tissue as being able to predict the onset of disease before it occurs while also allowing for medical interventions that “are targeted to the individual.”

Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/delta-tissue/

Well before the COVID era, precision medicine or medicine “targeted or tailored to the individual” has been a code phrase for treatments based on patients’ genetic data and/or for treatments that alter nucleic acid (e.g., DNA and RNA) function itself. For instance, the US government defines “precision medicine” as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.” Similarly, a 2018 paper published in Technology notes that, in oncology, “precision and personalized medicine . . . fosters the development of specialized treatments for each specific subtype of cancer, based on the measurement and manipulation of key patient genetic and omic data (transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, etc.).”

Prior to COVID-19 and the vaccine roll outs, the mRNA vaccine technology used by the DARPA-funded companies Moderna and Pfizer were marketed as being precision medicine treatments and were largely referred to as “gene therapies” in media reports. They were also promoted heavily as a revolutionary method of treating cancer, making it unsurprising that the Delta Tissue program at Wellcome Leap would use a similar justification to develop a program that aims to offer tailored gene therapies to people before the onset of a disease.

This Delta Tissue platform works to combine “the latest cell and tissue profiling technologies with recent advances in machine learning,” that is, AI. Given Wellcome Leap’s connections to the US military, it is worth noting that the Pentagon and Google, both former employers of Wellcome Leap CEO Regina Dugan and COO Ken Gabriel, have been working together since last September on using AI to predict disease in humans, first focusing on cancer before expanding to COVID-19 and every disease in between. The Delta Tissue program appears to have related ambitions, as its program description makes clear that the program ultimately aims to use its platform for a host of cancers and infectious diseases.

The ultimate goal of this Wellcome Leap program is “to eradicate the stubbornly challenging diseases that cause so much suffering around the world.” It plans to do this through AI algorithms, however, which are never 100 percent accurate in their predictive ability, and with gene-editing treatments, nearly all of which are novel and have not been well tested. That latter point is important given that one of the main methods for gene-editing in humans, CRISPR, has been found in numerous studies to cause considerable damage to the DNA, damage that is largely irreparable (see here, here and here). It seems plausible that a person placed on such a hi-tech medical treatment path will continue to need a never-ending series of gene-editing treatments and perhaps other invasive hi-tech treatments to mitigate and manage the effects of clumsy gene splicing.

Total Surveillance to Treat “Depression”

Wellcome Leap’s most recent program, launched just this week, is called “Multi-Channel Psych: Revealing Mechanisms of Anhedonia” and is officially focused on creating “complex, biological” treatments for depression.

Source: Wellcome Leap, [https://wellcomeleap.org/mcpsych/](http:// https://wellcomeleap.org/mcpsych/)

Those behind Wellcome Leap frame the problem they aim to tackle with this program as follows:

“We understand that synaptic connections serve as the currency of neural communication, and that strengthening or weakening these connections can facilitate learning new behavioral strategies and ways of looking at the world. Through studies in both animal models and humans, we have discovered that emotional states are encoded in complex neural network activity patterns, and that directly changing these patterns via brain stimulation can shift mood. We also know that disruption of these delicately balanced networks can lead to neuropsychiatric illness.” (emphasis added)

They add that “biologically based treatments” for depression “are not being matched to the biology of the human beings they’re being used in,” and, thus, treatments for depression need to be tailored “to the specific biology” of individual patients. They clearly state that what needs to be addressed in order to make such personal modifications to treatment is to gain “easy access to the biological substrate of depression—i.e. the brain.”

Wellcome Leap’s program description notes that this effort will focus specifically on anhedonia, which it defines as “an impairment in the effort-based reward system” and as a “key symptom of depression and other neuropsychiatric illnesses.” Notably, in the fine print of the document, Wellcome Leap states:

“While there are many definitions of anhedonia, we are less interested in the investigation of reduced consummatory pleasure, the general experience of pleasure, or the inability to experience pleasure. Rather, as per the description above, we will prioritize investigations of anhedonia as it relates to impairments in the effort-based reward system—e.g. reduced motivation to complete tasks and decreased capacity to apply effort to achieve a goal.”

In other words, Wellcome Leap is only interested in treating aspects of depression that interfere with an individual’s ability to work, not in improving an individual’s quality or enjoyment of life.

Leap notes, in discussing its goals, that it seeks to develop models for how patients respond to treatments that include “novel or existing behavior modification, psychotherapy, medication, and neurostimulation options” while also capturing an individual’s “genome, phenome [the sum of an individual’s phenotypic traits], [neural] network connectivity, metabolome [the sum of an individual’s metabolic traits], microbiome, reward processing plasticity levels,” among others. It ultimately aims to predict the relationship between an individual’s genome to how “reward processing” functions in the brain. It implies that the data used to create this model should involve the use of wearables, stating that researchers “should seek to leverage high frequency patient-worn or in-home measurements in addition to those obtained in the clinic, hospital or laboratory.”

One of the main research areas included in the program looks to “develop new scalable measurement tools for reliable and high-density quantification of mood (both subjectively reported and objectively quantified via biometrics such as voice, facial expression, etc.), sleep, movement, reward system functioning, effort/motivation/energy levels, social interaction, caloric intake, and HPA axis output in real-world situations.” The HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis is mentioned throughout the document, and this is significant as it is both a negative and positive feedback system regulating the mechanisms of stress reactions, immunity, and also fertility in the human body. The latter is especially important given the Wellcome Trust’s ties to the UK eugenics movement. It is also worth noting that some commercially available wearables, such as Amazon’s Halo, already quantify mood, sleep, and movement.

The program’s authors go even further than the above in terms of what they wish to monitor in real time, stating, “We specifically encourage the development of non-invasive technology to directly interrogate human brain state.” Examples include “a non-invasive spinal tap equivalent,” “behavioral or biomarker probes of neural plasticity,” and “single-session neural monitoring capabilities that define a treatment-predictive brain state.”

In other words, this Wellcome Leap program and its authors seek to develop “non-invasive” and, likely, wearable technology capable of monitoring an individual’s mood, facial expressions, social interactions, effort and motivation, and potentially even thoughts in order to “directly interrogate human brain state.” To think that such a device would stay only in the realm of research is naive, especially given that WEF luminaries have openly spoken at Davos meetings about how governments plan to use such technology widely on their populations as a means of pre-emptively targeting would-be dissent and ushering in an era of “digital dictatorships.”

The focus on treating only the aspects of depression that interfere with a person’s work further suggests that such technology, once developed, would be used to ensure “perfect worker” behavior in industries where human workers are rapidly being replaced with AI and machines, meaning the rulers can be more selective about which people continue to be employed and which do not. Like other Wellcome Leap programs, if completed, the fruits of the Multi-Channel Psych program will likely be used to ensure a population of docile automatons whose movements and thoughts are heavily surveilled and monitored.

The Last Leap for an Old Agenda

Wellcome Leap is no small endeavor, and its directors have the funding, influence, and connections to make their dreams reality. The organization’s leadership includes the key force behind Silicon Valley’s push to commercialize transhumanist tech (Regina Dugan), the “architect” of the MEMS industry (Ken Gabriel), and the “ruler” of the burgeoning genetic-sequencing industry (Jay Flatley). It also benefits from the funding of the world’s largest medical-research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, which is also one of the leading forces in shaping genetics and biotechnology research as well as health policy globally.

A 1994 Sunday Times investigation into the Trust noted that “through [Wellcome Trust] grants and sponsorships, government agencies, universities, hospitals and scientists are influenced all over the world. The trust distributes more money to institutions than even the British government’s Medical Research Council.”

It then notes:

“In offices on the building’s first floor, decisions are reached that affect lives and health on scales comparable with minor wars. In the conference room, high above the street, and in the meeting hall, in the basement, rulings in biotechnology and genetics are handed down that will help shape the human race.”

Little has changed regarding the Trust’s influence since that article was published. If anything, its influence on research paths and decisions that will “shape the human race” has only grown. Its ex-DARPA officials, who have spent their careers advancing transhumanist technology in both the public and private sectors, have overlapping goals with those off Wellcome Leap. Dugan’s and Gabriel’s commercial projects in Silicon Valley reveal that Leap is led by those who have long sought to advance the same technology for profit and for surveillance. This drastically weakens Wellcome Leap’s claim to now be pursuing such technologies to only improve “global health.”

Regina Dugan’s Keynote at Facebook F8 2017. Source: YouTube

Indeed, as this report has shown, most of these technologies would usher in a deeply disturbing era of mass surveillance over both the external and internal activities of human beings, including young children and infants, while also creating a new era of medicine based largely on gene-editing therapies, the risks of which are considerable and also consistently downplayed by its promoters.

When one understands the intimate bond that has long existed between eugenics and transhumanism, Wellcome Leap and its ambitions make perfect sense. In a recent article written by John Klyczek for Unlimited Hangout, it was noted that the first director general of UNESCO and former president of the UK Eugenics Society was Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism” in his 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine. As Klyczek wrote, Huxley argued that “the eugenic goals of biologically engineering human evolution should be refined through transhumanist technologies, which combine the eugenic methods of genetic engineering with neurotech that merges humans and machines into a new organism.”

Earlier, in 1946, Huxley noted in his vision for UNESCO that it was essential that “the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable,” an astounding statement to make so soon after the end of World War II. Thanks in large part to the Wellcome Trust and its influence on both policy and medical research over the course of several decades, Huxley’s dream of rehabilitating eugenics-infused science in the post–World War II era could soon become reality. Unsurprisingly, the Wellcome Trust hosts the archive of the formerly Huxley-led Eugenics Society and still boasts close ties to its successor organization, the Galton Institute.

The over-riding question is: Will we allow ourselves to continue to be manipulated into allowing transhumanism and eugenics to be openly pursued and normalized, including through initiatives like those of Wellcome Leap that seek to use babies and toddlers as test subjects to advance their nightmarish vision for humanity? If well-crafted advertising slogans and media campaigns painting visions of utopia such as “a world without disease” are all that is needed to convince us to give up our future and our children’s future to military operatives, corporate executives, and eugenicists, then there is little left of our humanity to surrender.

Author’s note: Johnny Vedmore contributed to this report.

Featured photo: Antonio Cabrera for Unlimited Hangout

• Investigative Reports

Wearable “Solutions” and the Internet of Incarceration

A new push is underway to sell wearable devices and sensors as the solution to the opioid and prison crises in the US. However, this “solution” is set to come at a major cost to civil liberties and human freedom in general.

byJeremy Loffredo

May 20, 2021

18 minute read

In recent years, calls for radical prison reform and a solution to the U.S.’ opioid crisis have come to permeate national politics in the United States. With over two million people behind bars and more than 400,000 people dead from opioid misuse in the last two decades, these topics are often on the front page of major newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.

However, at the same time, the marketing of wearable technology, or wearables, as a solution to both of these hot-button issues has become promoted by key players in both the public and private sectors. Especially since COVID-19, these electronic devices that can be worn as accessories, embedded in clothes or even implanted under the skin, are frequently heralded by corporations, academics and influential think tanks as “cost effective”, technological solutions to these deeply rooted problems.

Yet, as will be covered in this article, the shift towards wearables may offer more costs than benefits, particularly when it comes to matters of civil liberties and privacy.

The World Economic Forum and Wearables

Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, Source: Moritz Hager, WEF

On paper, the World Economic Forum (WEF, also known as the International Organization for Public Private Cooperation) is an NGO and think tank “committed to improving the state of the world.” In reality, it’s an international network of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth. The organization is best known for its annual gathering of the (mostly white, European and North American) ruling class. Each year hedge fund managers, bankers, CEOs, media representatives and heads of state gather in Davos to “shape global, regional and industry agendas.” As Foreign Affairs once put it, “the WEF has no formal authority, but it has become a major forum for elites to discuss policy ideas and priorities.”

In 2017, WEF Founder Klaus Schwab put out a book called “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The WEF uses the term Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to denote the current “technological revolution” that is changing the way people “live, work, and relate to one another,” and with implications “unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” The 4IR is characterized by new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, 3D printing, and the “internet of things,” which essentially denotes embedding things with sensors – including human bodies in the form of wearables.

Like the industrial ‘revolutions’ that came before, the main theme for the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it will allow companies to produce more, more quickly and for far less money.

In the book, Schwab positions wearable technology as key to helping companies become organized around remote work by providing one’s employers “with a continuous exchange of data and insights about the things or tasks being worked on.” In a similar vein, Schwab emphasizes the “wealth of information that can be gathered from wearable devices and implantable technologies.”

But unlike the industrial ‘revolutions’ of the past, the WEF’s 4IR aims to blur the distinction between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. And the WEF is a vocal advocate for wearables in their propensity to propel what it calls ‘human enhancement.’

In 2018, Schwab teamed up with WEF’s “Head of Society and Innovation” Nicholas Davis to write a follow up book entitled “Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”Having been with the organization for over a decade, Davis was the obvious choice to co-author this book as he now “lead[s] the theme of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” at the WEF.

Schwab and Davis see wearables as just a stepping stone for the 4IR, writing that wearable devices “will almost certainly become implantable” in the body and the brain. “External wearable devices, such as smart watches, intelligent earbuds and augmented reality glasses, are giving way to active implantable microchips that break the skin barrier of our bodies, creating intriguing possibilities that range from integrated treatment systems to opportunities for human enhancement,” they write.

The authors note the potential to “drive an industry of human enhancement” that would, in turn, enhance “worker productivity.” However, other groups, including those partnered with the WEF, see other potential applications for their use well beyond the workplace.

Wearables, the Opioid Crisis and the War on Drugs

Deloitte, the world’s largest accounting firm and a longstanding partner of the WEF, has promoted wearables as a way to resolve the opioid epidemic. In 2016, Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights put out a report outlining how to fight the opioid crisis. The authors make the case that “technologists” and “innovators” should be part of the solution to the opioid crisis. Then, in 2018, the firm put out an article called “Strategies For Stemming The Opioid Epidemic,” explaining how data analytics could be used to help pharmacy benefit managers chart their course.

Ryan O’Shea, Source: LinkedIn

Other WEF partners are more directly involved in this effort. For example, WEF ‘Global Shaper’ Ryan O’Shea is the co-founder of Behaivior, a company that says it’s creating “technology to predict and prevent addiction relapses” using wearables. O’Shea, in addition to his WEF ties, is also the social media manager for Humanity Plus, formerly the World Transhumanist Association, which received $100,000 from Jeffrey Epstein in 2018 in addition to previous donations from Epstein-linked charities. Epstein also donated significant sums to Humanity Plus’ chair, Ben Goertzel.

According to the Behaivior website, the company’s mission is described as follows:

“We are creating software that can take real-time data streams from wearable devices that detect heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, motion, and galvanic skin response (which is related to stress levels). This data is combined with other digital information about behavior, such as GPS location. As behavior and physiology changes, our software screens users for whether or not they are in a pre-relapse craving state.”

The company markets itself as a solution for governments who want to cut down on costs. “Reducing addiction relapses not only saves lives, but it also saves significant amounts of money by reducing re-arrests, re-incarcerations,” the Behaivior site reads. According to government records, Behaivior has received $533,000 from the NIH since its founding. It also receives support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Science Foundation. Tellingly, the company describes their focus on opioid abuse as the company’s “initial use case,” implying that the technology may soon be applied to other illicit substances. In a section on their website entitled “Market Opportunities”, the company mentions the number of Americans “addicted to drugs and alcohol” and implies it could be used for any sort of substance addiction that people seek treatment for, including substances that are currently legal to purchase and consume.

Behaivior’s funding sources and partnerships- Source: https://www.behaivior.com

Last year, the NIH also gave another company, Emitech, $328,000 to make a “forearm bracelet for rapid, on-site opioid intake monitoring and alerting.” On their website, Emitech states that “our major target users will be law enforcement units”, but adds that they could be used at other facilities such as “drug treatment centers” and “anywhere drug tests are required.”

Not unlike the private companies they are funding, the federal government is also moving money towards wearables being used to detect other criminalized substances as well as ones that are legal in some or all states. The NIH has granted money to a few wearable alcohol sensors as well as a wearable cocaine sensor. Additionally, it’s made a grant available for “the research and development of digital markers for detection of acute marijuana intoxication.”

That the WEF network sees wearables as key to stemming the opioid epidemic is particularly significant given that the Biden admin has signalled that it will focus heavily on this crisis once the COVID-19 crisis subsides.

“The bottom line for the Biden administration is that the [opioid] crisis is going to come into full awareness once covid starts moving into the background, perhaps in the first half of 2021,” the Washington Post quoted a professor saying in December 2020.

From Private Prisons to Wearable Prisons

In a much related manner, the ruling class also seems to be marrying the issue of mass incarceration with the wearables revolution.

“In a digital world with ankle bracelets and GPS devices, there is no reason to believe that physical imprisonment is the only option for those convicted of nonviolent offenses,” Darrell West wrote for the Brookings Institute in 2015. “Compared to incarceration, ankle bracelets and GPS devices seem far more tolerable. They keep offenders in society, are less punitive than prisons, and are much less expensive.”

West frames this digital incarceration as a desirable alternative where governments can cut costs but continue imprisoning the same amount of people as they do now. “Unless we find alternatives to physical imprisonment, the social and economic costs of jails will continue to sky-rocket,” he writes.

Ankle Bracelet maker Corrisoft’s Alternative to Incarceration via Rehabilitation Program, Source: Corrisoft

In 2013, the WEF-partnered Deloitte published an article on what it calls “virtual incarceration.” It envisions an automated monitoring system where parole officers can track people’s locations and an automated system sends “notifications to them when they have impending appointments, if they enter high-crime zones, or if their movements indicate that they are becoming more likely to commit a crime.”

The article also sees the use of this system as extending past the prison industry:

“ … Existing applications can already estimate blood alcohol content nearly as accurately as a breathalyzer—and predict the onset of depression. In the near future, contact with peer support groups, push notifications from case managers, and access to employers and other networks could be available at the touch of a button.”

A 2017 Australian Broadcasting Corporation article introduced something called the Technological Incarceration Project (TIP), a venture created by law professor Dan Hunter. The TIP proposes a form of “home detention” using “electronic sensors that monitor convicted offenders on a 24-hour basis.” This system, which Australian Broadcast Corporation calls an “internet of incarceration,” is meant to replace wardens and physical prisons, instead using advanced AI and machine learning to detect if a crime is about to be committed – and ensure that it doesn’t.

“Offenders would be fitted with an electronic bracelet or anklet capable of delivering an incapacitating shock if an algorithm detects that a new crime or violation is about to be committed,” it explains.

In 2018, Hunter co-wrote an article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology proposing this system as a “major revolution to the prison sector,” arguing that it would “result in the closure of nearly all prisons in the United States” and “end the prison crisis.” According to Swinburne University of Technology, where he is dean, Hunter’s work has been supported by theU.S. Government’s National Science Foundation.

The key to his revolution is an ankle bracelet with GPS tracking and an embedded conducted energy device, to administer the electric shock and incapacitate prisoners until the arrival of the police.

The article outlines the plan for technological incarceration in three components:

“First, offenders would be required to wear electronic ankle bracelets that monitor their location and ensure they do not move outside of the geographical areas to which they would be confined. Second, prisoners would be compelled to wear sensors so that unlawful or suspicious activity could be monitored remotely by computers. Third, conducted energy devices would be used remotely to immobilize prisoners who attempt to escape their areas of confinement or commit other crimes.”

Hunter and his co-authors argue that remote monitoring through wearable sensors is a superior alternative to traditional surveillance cameras. “ … Our proposal requires prisoners to wear a series of remote sensors—including those for sound, video, and movement—that are connected to central computer systems that can detect unauthorized behavior,” they write.

Hunter and his co-authors further insist that the third step, the “remote immobilization of offenders,” would actually make this technological incarceration more secure than a conventional prison, since there is no chance of prisoner escape.

Hunter’s model of incarceration is declared as a “system that can determine whether a prisoner is having a psychotic episode (from speech recognition and audio processing of a prisoner’s emotional states), is threatening another (from audio processing of the emotional states of all the people within the prisoner’s environment and video processing of the prisoner’s behavior), or is seeking to leave a designated zone (from GPS tracking).”

Of note is the fact that several prisons and jails in the US are already using biometric voice identification technology and geolocation tracking on prisoners and the non-prisoners they call on the phone.

Additionally, Hunter’s plan to use wearables to move away from traditional prisons, first outlined a number of years ago, seems closer to coming to fruition than it did a few years ago. For example, in 2019, the DOJ gave a grant to researchers at Purdue University, to help them develop a wearables-based monitoring system for those who would otherwise be in prison. The electronic monitoring system was deployed in Tippecanoe County Corrections in Indiana under a “home detention” program.

What’s more, the other half of Hunter’s plan, utilizing AI to process prisoner communications and prevent crime, is already underway across the U.S.

Amazon now markets its AI transcription services to both prisons and law enforcement. The company’s AI system employs speech-recognition technology and machine learning software to build a database of words. As reported by ABC News, “they then notify law enforcement partners when the system picks up suspicious language or phrasings.”

“A year from now, all that slang could be obsolete – so investigators are constantly feeding new intelligence about prison slang into databases tailored to their unique jurisdiction or regional area,” explained ABC.

“We’ve taught the system how to speak inmate,” said James Sexton, an executive at LEO Technologies, a company using Amazon’s transcription services.

“Solving” Crises By Surveilling Everything

Additionally, due to the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government has adjusted both opioid treatment policy and prison policy to cater more to new, wearables-based solutions.

Under the Trump Administration, the Federal Bureau of Prisons began prioritizing home confinement to limit the spread of COVID-19 in prisons. While those inmates were to report back to prison when the ‘coronavirus emergency’ was over, Biden recently extended the national emergency and the HHS expects the crisis to last at least through December.

Furthermore, also because of the COVID-19 crisis, the US Department of Health and Human Services amended its regulations in 2020 so that treatment for opioid addiction can now be done remotely. “The pandemic has made it possible to see a licensed provider from home,” reported the New York Times.

In addition, the use of these health-tracking wearables has grown by more than 35% during the pandemic. “All of these surveillance technologies, like many other COVID-19 mitigations, are being rolled out rapidly amidst the crisis,” explained the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Several wearable technologies have been marketed specifically as responses to the COVID-19 crisis, with a number focused solely on tracking the location of their users for social distancing or quarantining enforcement. “RightCrowd” is a lanyard employees can wear to help companies enforce social distancing and contact tracing at the office. “SafeZone” is a wearable sensor that emits a light when people get within six feet of one another, and is currently being used by the NFL. And, as reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “Courts in Kentucky and West Virginia have mandated electronic ankle shackles for individuals who refused to submit to quarantine procedures after testing positive for COVID-19.”

The Oura Ring biometric tracker. Source: https://ouraring.com/

Yet many of today’s new wearables are capable of accessing data that goes far beyond one’s location. The Oura Ring, a finger worn sleep tracker, monitors your temperature in order to predict the onset of fever in COVID-19, and is currently being used by the NBA. Amazon’s Halo, a wristband, will soon be able to detect COVID-19 symptoms. Halo scans the user’s body and voice, monitors blood pressure, and is meant to “report back on your emotional state throughout the day.” And, in March 2020, the US FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization to armbands made by a company called Tiger Tech. The bands are designed to monitor blood flow and analyze pulse rate and hypercoagulation, an onset symptom of COVID-19.

Another company, BioIntellisense, calls itself a “new era of wearable devices that are medical grade that will allow doctors and nurses to collect data from patients that are outside of a hospital.” Its first product, the BioSticker, is the “first FDA-cleared single-use device for up to 30 days of continuous vital signs monitoring.” It’s a patch designed to be worn on the chest for what the company calls an “effortless remote data capture” experience. The company received $2.8 million from the DoD in December 2020 to make these wearable products available to both the military and the public.

As the New York Times put it last November, “the hot new covid tech is wearable and constantly tracks you.”

“The necessity to address the pandemic with any means available removed some of the regulatory and legislative impediments related to the adoption of telemedicine,” Klaus Schwab and French economist Thierry Malleret wrote in their book “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” published in July 2020. “In the future, it is certain that more medical care will be delivered remotely. It will in turn accelerate the trend towards more wearable[s],” they continue.

Policy alignment between the WEF and the current Biden administration here is clear. Former Secretary of State John Kerry – Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate – firmly declared in December that the Biden administration will support the Great Reset and that the Great Reset ‘will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.’”

Alignment between the WEF and the U.S. federal government in this area can also be seen at the FDA. In September 2020, the U.S. FDA launched The Digital Health Center of Excellence, with the objective of “innovat[ing] regulatory approaches to provide efficient and least burdensome oversight.”

The head director of this new FDA project is Bakul Patel, who’s been “leading regulatory and scientific efforts related to digital health devices at the FDA since 2010,” according to the FDA.

Like many figures in the US federal government, Patel has close ties to the very industries he’s been tasked with regulating. He currently leads the Scientific Leadership Board of the Medicine Society (DMS), an organization which exemplifies the objective of the ruling class to integrate wearable technology into people’s daily lives. The group recently moderated a WEF panel on the “Wearable Data Trove” and is sponsoring an upcoming conference called “Wearable injectors and Connected Devices.”

The FDA’s Bakul Patel, Source: YouTube

One way the FDA’s new Digital Health Center of Excellence’s propensity towards wearables can be inferred is by examining the activity of some of the DMS’, and thus Patel’s, corporate funders – Deloitte, Takeda, Biogen, and Pfizer – all “strategic partners” of the WEF.

Takeda is piloting an app that functions on consumer wearables that collects cognitive and behavioral data to assess people for depression. Biogen recently began working with Apple to “test the value” of consumer wearables to collect and transmit biometric data on cognitive performance and brain activity to predict future ailments.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla authored an article featured on the WEF site, writing that wearable devices are “poised to become a valuable tool for incentivising healthy behavior,” and citing the examples of ‘smart’ eye contact lenses, skin patches, and “ear worn trackers.”

Bourla also wrote:

“Our Oncology business recently launched a free app, LivingWith, that helps cancer patients connect with loved ones, manage appointments and record how they’re feeling. The app also syncs with fitness wearables, allowing patients to share a more complete portrait of their health with doctors. And for patients with haemophilia, our Rare Disease business developed HemMobile Striiv Wearable, a device for tracking activity and heart rate, and logging infusions and bleeding episodes. Such detailed information will truly allow healthcare providers to deliver personalised care, and also empower patients to assume a more active role in managing their own health.”

In 2019, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer went as far as calling wearable tech a revolution, via sponsored content on STAT News. The company also collaborated with IBM and Amazon to develop an IoT (Internet of Things) system of wearable sensors that can measure patient indicators 24/7 “with the same clinical accuracy that a doctor collects in the office.”

As such, aside from rolling out wearables through programs targeting prisoners and drug users, the ruling class has indicated a desire to “mainstream” wearables by marrying them with the “future of healthcare.” In “COVID-19: The Great Reset,”Schwab and Malleret write that eventually, the use of AI and wearable technology will cause the distinction between public health systems and “personalized health creation systems” to break down.

Digital Serfdom as Prison Reform

Given that industry players like Pfizer and Biogen are at the forefront of the push for wearables, and that these players have traditionally been profit-centric in their motives, the trend towards wearable technology is virtually guaranteed to come at a cost.

Perhaps the most obvious cost will be the further degradation of privacy. Without a doubt, the adoption of these technologies will intensify the tendency for governments and corporations to spy on citizens and consumers.

For some, the ongoing public health crisis has mitigated much of the negative stigma around ‘wearing technology.’ “As tech analyst Rajit Atwal told ZDNET in October, “what may have been a market for this pre-COVID, there’s likely to be a potentially bigger market post-COVID or even during COVID in terms of people wanting to be more active in monitoring their health.”

“Do you give access to what is happening inside your body and brain in exchange for far better healthcare? People will give up their privacy in exchange for healthcare,” said Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor frequently featured at the WEF, in 2018. “And in many places, they won’t have a choice.” However, two years later, at the 2020 annual meeting of the WEF, Harari stated that the mass use of wearables would be a “watershed” moment that would herald the beginning of the era of “digital dictatorships.”

Source: The WEF’s Internet of Bodies Briefing Paper

The potential misuse of wearables by the public and private sectors have led critics to argue that the appeal of monitoring your own health shouldn’t detract from the fact that wearables are essentially wearable trackers. “It should not feel normal to be tracked everywhere or to have to prove your location,” wrote the EFF in June 2020.

From the New York Times:

“Civil rights and privacy experts warn that the spread of such wearable continuous-monitoring devices could lead to new forms of surveillance that outlast the pandemic — ushering into the real world the same kind of extensive tracking that companies like Facebook and Google have instituted online. They also caution that some wearable sensors could enable employers, colleges or law enforcement agencies to reconstruct people’s locations or social networks, chilling their ability to meet and speak freely. And they say these data-mining risks could disproportionately affect certain workers or students, like undocumented immigrants or political activists.”

“It’s chilling that these invasive and unproven devices could become a condition for keeping our jobs, attending school or taking part in public life,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the New York Times.

Furthermore, wearables that track and contain one’s health data carry a particular threat. “Wearable technologies risk generating burdens of anxiety and stigma for their users and reproducing existing health inequalities,” wrote John Owens and Alan Cribb in the journal “Philosophy & Technology” in 2017. “Wearable technologies that subject their users to biomedical and consumerist epistemologies, norms and values also risk undermining processes of genuinely autonomous deliberation.”

What’s more, critics say that while ‘digital incarceration’ may seem like a desirable alternative to ‘mass incarceration,’ it’s simply incarceration by another name.

As author Michelle Alexander wrote in the New York Times in response to similar ‘e-carceration’ models that were popping up in 2018:

“Even if you’re lucky enough to be set “free” from a brick-and-mortar jail thanks to a computer algorithm, an expensive monitoring device likely will be shackled to your ankle — a GPS tracking device provided by a private company that may charge you around $300 per month, an involuntary leasing fee. Your permitted zones of movement may make it difficult or impossible to get or keep a job, attend school, care for your kids or visit family members. You’re effectively sentenced to an open-air digital prison, one that may not extend beyond your house, your block or your neighborhood. One false step (or one malfunction of the GPS tracking device) will bring cops to your front door, your workplace, or wherever they find you and snatch you right back to jail.”

“I find it difficult to call this progress,” Alexander explains. “As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery … If the goal is to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, digital prisons are not an answer. They’re just another way of posing the question.”

Some even see digital incarceration as a system worse than the physical system, in terms of privacy. “At first glance, these alternatives may seem like a win-win,” wrote Maya Schenwar in Truthout. “Instead of taking place in a hellish institution, prison happens “in the comfort of your own home” (the ultimate American ad for anything). However, this change threatens to transform the very definition of ‘home’ into one in which privacy, and possibly ‘comfort’ as well, are subtracted from the equation.”

“In a world of electronic monitors, predictive policing, interagency data sharing, hidden cameras, and registries, imprisonment extends not only beyond the walls of the jail or penitentiary, but beyond any contained space,” Schenwar continues. “In the new world of incarceration, your house is your prison. Your block is your prison. Your school is your prison. Your neighborhood… your city… your state… your country is your prison.”

Surveillance Stakeholder Capitalism

Still from the Wearable Data Troves presentation at the WEF’s Global Technology Governance Summit.

Aside from privacy concerns, a less obvious side-effect of the wearables ‘revolution’ is its potential to fuel and propel the WEF’s broader vision for the future – something it calls stakeholder capitalism.

The WEF is committed to “advancing stakeholder capitalism,” a system in which private corporations are the “trustees of society.” (According to Schwab, the very reason he created the WEF in the first place was to “help business and political leaders implement [stakeholder capitalism].”)

Schwab’s model dictates that corporations should start expanding their definition of “value” away from shareholder returns. As such, the cornerstone to ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is data. In order for corporations to start making decisions that ‘benefit society,’ they need comprehensive metrics on what decisions would prove ‘valuable.’

Naturally, having people walking around wearing technology with one’s location data, medical history, real time vital signs, oral conversations, current emotional state and thus their “behavior” is a dream come true for the model.

And while the most marginalized populations, i.e. those likely to be locked up for drug offenses in the US, will be the first to be hit by this pervasive surveillance, the WEF network sees this as the vision of the future for us all.

Featured image: Still from RAND video “What is the Internet of Bodies”

• biometrics
• WEF

• World Economic Forum

  

Author

Jeremy Loffredo

Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist and researcher based in Washington, DC. He is formerly a segment producer for RT AMERICA and is currently an investigative reporter for Children’s Health Defense.

Transcript of video (45 min) at the website. The video has some specifics specific to Netherlands media and politics, but apart from the names, the exact same processes and relationships exist in all advanced western states. The last section corresponding to "The Danger We are in Now" section on the World Economic Forum is especially important to see in the light of the financial relationships tracing all corporate ownership up to Vanguard, shown in the first part.

If you’ve been wondering how the world economy has been hijacked and humanity has been kidnapped by a completely bogus narrative, look no further than this video by Dutch creator, Covid Lie.

What she uncovers is that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. They all own each other. This means that “competing” brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren’t really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments. This is the case, across all industries. As she says:

“The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen…They are Vanguard and BlackRock. The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.

A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything.

Bloomberg calls BlackRock “The fourth branch of government”, because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. Many BlackRock employees were in the White House with Bush and Obama. Its CEO. Larry Fink can count on a warm welcome from leaders and politicians. Not so strange, if you know that he is the front man of the ruling company but Larry Fink does not pull the strings himself.

BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders. Who are those shareholders? We come to a strange conclusion. The biggest shareholder is Vanguard. But now he gets murky. Vanguard is a private company and we cannot see who the shareholders are. The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig.

Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.

In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution. Why doesn’t everybody know this? Why aren’t there movies and documentaries about this? Why isn’t it in the news? Because 90% of the international media is owned by nine media conglomerates.

Covid Lie asks, “Who sponsors the organization and press agencies that produce our news? With Project Syndicate, we see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. The organizations that bring the news get paid by non-profit organizations, of the same elite that also owns the entire media but also a part of taxpayers money is used to pay them.”

Or, as George Carlin said, “It’s a small club and you ain’t in it.”

So when Lynn Forester de Rothschild wants the United States to be a one-party country (like China) and doesn’t want voter ID laws passed in the US, so that more election fraud can be perpetrated to achieve that end,what does she do?

She holds a conference call with the world’s top 100 CEOs and tells them to publicly decry as “Jim Crow” Georgia’s passing of an anti-corruption law and she orders her dutiful CEOs to boycott the State of Georgia, like we saw with Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball and even Hollywood star, Will Smith. In this conference call, we see shades of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the New World Order.

The UN wants to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth. To achieve this, the UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand new society. For this project, the UN says we need a world government – namely the UN, itself.

And it is clear that the “pandemic” was orchestrated in order to bring this about. This video does an incredible job of explaining how it is all being done.

TRANSCRIPT

As you are watching millions fall into poverty because of the corona measures of the past year, even if the greatest economic crisis in history has not affected you yet, it will only be a matter of time until the rippling effects will hit you, as well

This is not fear-mongering but it’s a harsh reality. I also think we might mitigate the damage and may even do better, provided we are informed correctly about our situation. This is why I would like to show you a few facts you can easily check facts that are of crucial importance.

Less than a handful of big corporations dominate every aspect of our lives. That may seem exaggerated but from the breakfast we eat to the mattress we sleep on and everything we wear and consume in between is largely dependent on these corporations.

Those are huge investment companies that determine the course of money flow. They are the main characters of the play that we are witnessing. I know your time is valuable, so I summarize the most important data.

How does it work?

THE FOOD INDUSTRY

Let’s take Pepsico as an example. It is the parent company of many soda companies and snack companies. The so-called competitive brands are from factories from a few corporations who monopolize the entire industry. In the packaged food industry, there are a few big companies, like Unilever, the Coca-Cola Company, Mondelez and Nestlé.

In the picture, you see that most brands in the food industry belong to one of these corporations. The big companies are on the stock market and have the big shareholders in the board of directors.

On sources like Yahoo Finance, we can see detailed company info, such as who the biggest shareholders actually are. Let’s take Pepsico again, as an example. We see about 72% of stock is owned by no less than 3,155 institutional investors. These are investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.

Who are the biggest institutional investors of Pepsico? As you can see, only 10 of the investors own together nearly one third of the stock. The top 10 of investors together amount to a value of $59 billion dollars but out of those ten, only three own more stock than the other seven. Let’s remember them and look up who owns the most stocks of the Coca-Cola Company, the biggest competitor of Pepsi.

The biggest lump of stock is again owned by institutional investors. Let’s look at the top 10 and start at the bottom six of them. Four of these institutional investors we also saw at the bottom six of Pepsico. These are Northern Trust, JPMorgan-Chase, Geode Capital Management and Wellington Management. Now, let’s look at the four biggest stock owners. They are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These are the world’s biggest investment firms, so Pepsico and Coca-Cola are not competitors, at all.

The other big companies that own a myriad of brand names, like Unilever, Mondelez and Nestlé are from the same small group of investors. But it’s not only in the food industry that their names come up. Let’s find out on Wikipedia, which are the biggest tech companies.

BIG TECH

Facebook is the owner of Whatsapp and Instagram. Together with Twitter, they form the most popular social media platforms. Alphabet is the parent of all Google companies, like YouTube and Gmail but they are also the biggest investor in Android, one of the two operating systems for nearly all smartphones and tablets. The other operating system is Apple’s IOS. If we add Microsoft, we see four companies making the software for nearly all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world.

Let’s see who are the biggest shareholders of these companies. Take Facebook: we see that 80% of the stock is owned by institutional investors. These are the same names that came up in the food industry; the same investors are in the top three. Next, is Twitter. It forms with Facebook and Instagram the top three. Surprisingly, this company is in the hands of the same investors, as well. We see them again, with Apple and even with their biggest competitor, Microsoft.

Also, if we look at other big companies in the tech industry that develop and make our computers, TVs, phones and home appliances, we see the same big investors, that together own the majority of the stock. It’s true for all industries. I’m not exaggerating.

THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY (AND ENERGY & MINING)

One last example, let’s book a holiday on a computer or smartphone. We search for a flight to a sunny country on Skyscanner or Expedia. Both are from the same small group of investors. We fly with one of the many airlines. Many of which are in the hands of the same investors and of governments, as is the case with Air France, KLM. The plane we board is, in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus, also owned by the same names. We book through Booking.com or AirBnB and when we arrive we go out for dinner and place a comment on Tripadvisor.

The same big investors show up in every aspect of our trip and their power is even bigger, because of the kerosene is from their oil companies or refineries. The steel from which the plane is made comes from their mining companies. This small group of investment firms and funds and banks are namely also the biggest investors in the industry that dig for raw materials.

Wikipedia shows that the biggest mining companies have the same big investors that we see everywhere. Also, the big agricultural businesses, on which the entire food industry depends; they own Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto, the biggest seed producer in the world but they are also the shareholders of the big textile industry. And even many popular fashion brands who make the clothing out of the cotton are owned by the same investors.

Whether we look at the world’s biggest solar panel companies or oil refineries, the stocks are in the hands of the same companies. They own the tobacco companies that produce all the popular tobacco brands but they also own all big pharmaceutical companies and the scientific institutions that produce medicine. They own the companies that produce our metals and also the entire car, plane and weapons industry, where a great deal of the metals and raw materials are used. The own the companies that build our electronics, they own the big warehouses and online markets and even the means of payments we use to buy their products.

To make this video as short as possible, I only showed you the tip of the iceberg. If you decide to research this with the sources I just showed you, then you will see that most popular insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies restaurant chains and cosmetics are owned by the same institutional investors we have just seen.

BLACKROCK & VANGUARD

These institutional investors are mainly investment firms banks and insurance companies. In turn, they, themselves are owned by shareholders and the most surprising thing is that they own each other’s stocks

Together, they form an immense network comparable to a pyramid. The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen by now. They are Vanguard and BlackRock. The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.

A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost anything

Bloomberg calls BlackRock “The fourth branch of government”, because it’s the only private agency that closely works with the central banks. BlackRock lends money to the central bank but it’s also the advisor. It also develops the software the central bank uses. Many BlackRock employees were in the White House with Bush and Obama. Its CEO, Larry Fink can count on a warm welcome from leaders and politicians. Not so strange, if you know that he is the front man of the ruling company. But Larry Fink does not pull the strings, himself.

BlackRock, itself is also owned by shareholders. Who are those shareholders? We come to a strange conclusion. The biggest shareholder is Vanguard. But now he gets murky. Vanguard is a private company and we cannot see who the shareholders are. The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig.

Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.

Forbes, the most famous business magazine says that in March 2020, there were 2,095 billionaires in the world. This means that Vanguard is owned by the richest families in the world. If we research their history, we see that they have always been the wealthiest. Some of them, even before the start of the Industrial Revolution, because their history is so interesting and extensive, I will make a sequel.

For now, I just want to say that these families of whom many are in royalty are the founders of our banking system and of every industry in the world, these families have never lost power but due to an increasing population, they had to hide behind firms, like Vanguard, which the stockholders are the private funds and non-profits of these families.

NGOs AND FOUNDATIONS AND THEIR OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA

To clarify the picture, I have to explain briefly what non-profits actually are. These appear to be the link between companies, politics and media. This conceals the conflicts of interests a bit. Non-profits, also called “foundations” are dependent on donations they do not have to disclose who their donors are they can invest the money in the way they see fit and do not pay taxes as long as the profits are invested again in new projects. In this way, non-profits keep hundreds of billions of dollars among themselves according to the Australian government, non-profits are an ideal way of financing terrorists and of massive money-laundering.

The foundations and funds of the families that are the richest stay in the background as much as possible. For issues that get much attention, the foundation of philanthropists are used that are lower in rank but very rich.

I want to keep it short, so I will show you the three most important ones that connect all industries in the world. They are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation of the controversial multi-billionaire, Soros and the Clinton Foundation. I will give you a very short introduction to show you their power.

According to the website of the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation is the biggest sponsor of the WHO. That was after Donald Trump quit USA financial support to the WHO in 2020. So the Gates Foundation is one of the most influential entities in everything that concerns our health. The Gates Foundation works closely with the biggest pharma companies, among which are Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Biontech and Bayer.

And we have just seen who their biggest shareholders are. Bill Gates was not a poor computer nerd who miraculously became very rich. He’s from a philanthropist’s family that works for the absolute elite. His Microsoft is owned by Vanguard, BlackRock and Berkshire Hathaway. But the Gates Foundation, after BlackRock and Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway. He was even the member of the board there.

We would need hours if we wanted to uncover everything in which Gates, the Open Society Foundation of Soros and the Clinton Foundation are involved. They form a bridge to the current situation, so I had to introduce them.

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

We need to start the next topic with a question. Someone like me, who never makes videos can, with an old laptop objectively show that only two companies hold a monopoly in all industries in the world. My question is, why is this never talked about in the media?

We can choose daily between all sorts of documentaries and TV programs but none of them cover this subject. Is it not interesting enough or are there other interests at play? Wikipedia, again gives us the answer. They say that about 90% of the international media is owned by nine media conglomerates. Whether we take the monopolist Netflix and Amazon Prime or enormous concerns that own many daughter companies, like Time-Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, Fox Corporation, Bertelsmann and Viacom, CBS, we see that the same names own stocks.

These corporations not only make all the programs, movies and documentaries but also own the channels on which those are broadcast. So, not only the industries but also the information is owned by the elite.

I will show you briefly how this works in the Netherlands. To start with, all the Dutch mainstream media are owned by three companies. The first one is De PersGroep [DPG Media], the parent company of the following brands (. Apart from the many newspapers and magazines, they also own Sanoma, the parent company of some of the big commercial Dutch channels. Many media outlets from abroad, like VTM are also owned by the De PersGroep.

The second one is Mediahuis, one of Europe’s biggest media concerns. In the Netherlands, Mediahuis owns the following brands. Until 2017, also Sky Radio and Radio Veronica were owned by Mediahuis, as were Radio 538 and radio 10.

And then there is Bertelsmann, which is one of the 9 biggest media firms. This company owns RTL, that owns 45 television stations and 32 radio stations in 11 countries. But Bertelsmann is also co-owner of the world’s biggest book publisher, Penguin Random House.

The stocks of these companies are owned by private funds of three families. Those are the Belgian Van Thillo family, the Belgian Leysen family and the German Bertelsmann-Mohn family. All three families sided with the Nazis in the War.

According to Wikipedia, for this reason, the Telegraaf, the Leysen newspaper was temporarily forbidden in the Netherlands after the war.

THE FAKE NEWS

To complete this overview, look at where the news comes from. The daily news of all these media outlets the diverse news media do not produce news. They use information and footage from the press agencies, .ANP and Reuters. These agencies are not independent. .ANP is owned by Talpa, John de Mol. Thomson-Reuters is owned by the powerful Canadian Thomson family.

The most important journalists and editors working for these agencies are members of a journalism agency, like the European Journalism Centre. These are one of the biggest European sponsors of media-related projects. They educate journalists, publish study books, provide training spaces and press agencies and work closely together with the big corporations, Google and Facebook.

For journalistic analysis and views, the big media use Project Syndicate. This is the most powerful organization in the field. Project Syndicate and organizations like I mentioned are together with the press agencies. The link between all worldwide media outlets when news anchors reap from their autocues [teleprompters], chances are that the text stems from one of these organizations. That is the reason that worldwide media shows synchronicity in their reporting.

And look at the European journalism center, itself. Again, the Gates Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. They are also heavily-sponsored by Facebook, Google, the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Who sponsors the organization and press agencies that produce our news? With Project Syndicate, we see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. The organizations that bring the news get paid by non-profit organizations, of the same elite that also owns the entire media but also a part of taxpayers money is used to pay them.

In Belgium, there are protests regularly, since Mediahuis and De Persgroep receive millions of euros from the government, while many are abroad…

THE DANGER WE ARE IN NOW

Well, this was a lot to chew on and I tried to make it as short as I could. I only used examples that I thought were necessary to create a clear overview. This helps to better understand our current situation, that can shed new light on past events

There will be enough time to dive into the past, but now let’s talk about today but my goal is to inform you about the danger we are in now. The elite governs every aspect of our lives, also, the information we get and they depend on a coordination, cooperation to connect all industries in the world to serve their interests. This is done through the World Economic Forum, among others, a very important organization.

Every year in Davos, the CEOs of big corporations meet national leaders, politicians and other influential parties, like UNICEF and Greenpeace. On the supervisory board of the WEF is former Vice President, Al Gore, our own minister, Sigrid Kaag, Feike Sijbesma, Chairman of the Royal Dutch State Mines and the Commissioner of the Dutch bank, Christine Lagarde, the Chairwoman of the European Central Bank. Also, politician, Ferdinand Grapperhaus’ son works for the WEF.

Wikipedia says that the annual fee for members is 35,000 euros “but over half of our budget comes from partners who pay the cost for politicians who otherwise could not afford membership.”

According to critics, the WEF is for rich businesses to do business with other businesses or with politicians. For most members, the WEF would support personal gain instead of being a means to solve the world’s problems. Why would there be many world problems if the industry leaders, bankers and politicians from 1971 onwards have gathered every year to solve the world’s problems?

Isn’t it illogical, that after 50 years of meetings between environmentalists and the CEOs of the most polluting companies, nature is gradually doing worse, not better; that those critics are right, it’s clear, when we look at the main partners that together make up more than half of the budget of the WEF. Because these are BlackRock, the Open Society foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many big companies, from which Vanguard and BlackRock own the stocks.

Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he writes about the plans of his organization. The coronavirus is, according to him a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. He calls it “Build Back Better”. The slogan is now on the lips of all Globalist politicians in the world.

Our old society must switch to a new one, says Schwab. The people own nothing but work for the state to have their primary needs met. The WEF says it’s necessary for the consumption society the elite forced upon us is not sustainable anymore. Schwab says in his book that we will never return to the old normal and the WEF published a video recently to make clear that by 2030, we will own nothing but we will be happy.

THE GREAT RESET = THE NEW WORLD ORDER

You probably heard of the New World Order. The media wants us to believe that this is a conspiracy theory, yet it has been talked about by leaders for decades. Not just George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela but also world-famous philanthropists, like Cecil Rhodes, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and even George Soros.

The UN presented in 2015 their controversial Agenda 2030. It is almost identical to the Great Reset of Klaus Schwab. The UN wants to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth.

Sounds nice but wait till you read the small print. The plan is that Agenda 2030 will be paid by us, the citizens. Just like they ask of us now to give away our rights for public health, they will ask us to give away our wealth to battle poverty. These are no conspiracy theories. It is on their official website. It comes down to this: The UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand new society. The new infrastructure, because fossil fuels are gone in 2030.

For this project, the UN says we need a world government, namely the UN, itself.

The UN agrees with Schwab that a pandemic is a golden chance to accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030.

It is worrisome that the WEF and the UN openly admit that pandemics and other catastrophes can be used to reshape society. We must not think lightly about this and do thorough research.

On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF), along with Russia’s Sberbank and its cybersecurity subsidiary BI.ZONE announced that a new global cyberattack simulation would take place this coming July to instruct participants in “developing secure ecosystems” by simulating a supply-chain cyberattack similar to the recent SolarWinds hack that would “assess the cyber resilience” of the exercise’s participants. On the newly updated event website, the simulation, called Cyber Polygon 2021, ominously warns that, given the digitalization trends largely spurred by the COVID-19 crisis, “a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect,” adding that “a secure approach to digital development today will determine the future of humanity for decades to come.”

The exercise comes several months after the WEF, the “international organization for public-private cooperation” that counts the world’s richest elite among its members, formally announced its movement for a Great Reset, which would involve the coordinated transition to a Fourth Industrial Revolution global economy in which human workers become increasingly irrelevant. This revolution, including its biggest proponent, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, has previously presented a major problem for WEF members and member organizations in terms of what will happen to the masses of people left unemployed by the increasing automation and digitalization in the workplace.

New economic systems that are digitally based and either partnered with or run by central banks are a key part of the WEF’s Great Reset, and such systems would be part of the answer to controlling the masses of the recently unemployed. As others have noted, these digital monopolies, not just financial services, would allow those who control them to “turn off” a person’s money and access to services if that individual does not comply with certain laws, mandates and regulations.

The WEF has been actively promoting and creating such systems and has most recently taken to calling its preferred model “stakeholder capitalism.” Though advertised as a more “inclusive” form of capitalism, stakeholder capitalism would essentially fuse the public and private sectors, creating a system much more like Mussolini’s corporatist style of fascism than anything else.

Yet, to usher in this new and radically different system, the current corrupt system must somehow collapse in its entirety, and its replacement must be successfully marketed to the masses as somehow better than its predecessor. When the world’s most powerful people, such as members of the WEF, desire to make radical changes, crises conveniently emerge—whether a war, a plague, or economic collapse—that enable a “reset” of the system, which is frequently accompanied by a massive upward transfer of wealth.

In recent decades, such events have often been preceded by simulations that come thick and fast before the very event they were meant to “prevent” takes place. Recent examples include the 2020 US election and COVID-19. One of these, Event 201, was cohosted by the World Economic Forum in October 2019 and simulated a novel coronavirus pandemic that spreads around the world and causes major disruptions to the global economy—just a few weeks before the first case of COVID-19 appeared. Cyber Polygon 2021 is merely the latest such simulation, cosponsored by the World Economic Forum. The forum’s current agenda and its past track record of hosting prophetic simulations demands that the exercise be scrutinized.

Though Cyber Polygon 2021 is months off, it was preceded by Cyber Polygon 2020, a similar WEF-sponsored simulation that took place last July in which speakers warned of a coming deadly “pandemic” of cyberattacks that would largely target two economic sectors, healthcare and finance. Cyber Polygon 2020 was officially described as “international online training for raising global cyber resilience” and involved many of the world’s biggest tech companies and international authorities, from IBM to INTERPOL. There were also many surprising participants at the event, some of whom have been traditionally seen as opposed to Western imperial interests. For example, the person chosen to open the Cyber Polygon event was the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Mishustin, and its main host, BI.ZONE, was a subsidiary of the Russian-government-controlled Sberbank. This suggests that the overused “Russian hacker” narrative may be coming to an end or will soon be switched out for another boogeyman more suitable in light of current political realities.

Aside from Mishustin, WEF executive director Klaus Schwab and former UK prime minister Tony Blair participated in the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, which is due to be repeated annually and bears many similarities to 2019’s Event 201. Rather than preparing for a potential medical pandemic, Cyber Polygon 2020 focused on preparing for a “cyberpandemic,” one that mainstream media outlets like the New Yorker claim is “already underway.” Given the WEF’s recent simulations, powerful billionaire business owners and bankers appear to be poised to use both physical and digital pandemics to reform our societies according to their own design and for their own benefit.

The Architects of Cyber Polygon

According to Russian cybersecurity firm BI.ZONE, 120 organizations spread over twenty-nine countries took part in the two scenarios that were simulated at Cyber Polygon 2020, with as many as five million people allegedly having watched the livestream in over fifty-seven countries. Like many events that took place in 2020, the Cyber Polygon simulations were conducted online due to COVID-19 restrictions. Together with the World Economic Forum, BI.ZONE, a subsidiary of Sberbank, manages the Cyber Polygon project. Sberbank’s largest shareholder, as of last year, is the Russian government, and it is thus often described by English-language media outlets as a state-controlled bank.

The 2020 event was launched with an address from the prime minister of the Russian Federation Mishustin, who has a history of courting Western tech companies prior to entering politics. In 1989, Mishustin graduated from Moscow State Technological University (generally known as Stankin) with a qualification in systems engineering. During the 1990s, he worked at the International Computer Club, a nonprofit organization with the goal of “attracting Western advanced information technologies” to Russia. Between 1996 and 1998, Mishustin was the chairman of the board of the ICC, but the company was liquidated in 2016. Between 2010 and 2020, he served as head of the Federal Taxation Service of the Russian Federation. Even though he had never shown any previous political ambitions, on January 16, 2020, he was appointed prime minister of the Russian Federation by an executive order issued by President Putin.

During Mishustin’s welcoming remarks at the WEF’s Cyber Polygon 2020, the Russian PM warned of the need to create public policy to “strengthen the digital security of critical activities without undermining the benefits from digital transformation in critical sectors that would unnecessarily restrict the use and openness of digital technology.” The statement suggests that “unnecessary restrictions” could become seen as necessary in time.

Mishustin goes on to explain that Russia’s post-COVID economic recovery will be based on the “increasing digitalization of that economy and government,” adding that “we will drastically increase the number of available digital public services and introduce fundamentally new support measures for digital businesses.” He also stated that “Russia has developed a common national system for identification and the prevention of cyberattacks with the government agency’s information systems linked in the system.” He also addressed the Cyber Polygon audience about the international community needing to come together to prevent a “global cyberfraud pandemic.”

Sberbank, the largest Russian banking institution and former Soviet savings monopoly, which was originally founded by Nicholas I, was an official host of the Cyber Polygon 2020 event alongside the World Economic Forum. As reported in the Economist in January 2021, the Russian banking giant has begun to reimagine its business in an effort to become a consumer-technology giant. Sberbank has spent around $2 billion on technology and acquisitions, including the acquisition of internet media group Rambler, which it fully acquired in 2020. As late as December 30, 2020, Sberbank acquired Doma.ai, which describes itself as “a convenient real estate management platform.” On June 15, 2020, Sberbank bought 2GIS, a map, navigator, and business directory with over 42 million monthly active users. Sberbank’s twenty-two investments, eleven as the lead investor, include some of the most used services in Russia, and its clear intention is to become a one-stop digital shop for all services. The bank also became the owner of one of the largest data-processing centers in Europe when the South Port data-processing center opened in November 2011, replacing the existing thirty-six regional data centers. Sberbank is set to be the world’s first bank to launch its own cryptocurrency, Sbercoin, and digital finance “ecosystem” this March. It notably announced the coming Sbercoin, a “stablecoin” tied to the Russian ruble, just a few weeks after the Cyber Polygon 2020 exercise.

Sberbank’s alliance with the WEF and prominence at Cyber Polygon 2020 was underscored at the event during the welcoming remarks delivered by Klaus Schwab. Schwab gave special thanks to Herman Gref, a member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and Sberbank’s CEO and also issued the following dire warning:

We all know, but still pay insufficient attention to, the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyberattack which would bring to a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyberattack. We have to ask ourselves, in such a situation, how could we let this happen despite the fact we had all the information about the possibility and seriousness of a risk attack. Cybercrime and global cooperation should be on the forefront of the global agenda.

Similar warnings were heard at a 2019 simulation that was also cosponsored by the World Economic Forum, Event 201. Event 201, which simulated a global pandemic just months before the COVID-19 crisis, presciently warned in its official documentation: “The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering.” In contrast to similar simulations conducted in the past, Event 201 championed a “public-private partnership” approach to combatting pandemics, with a focus on engaging “the private sector in epidemic and outbreak preparedness at the national or regional level.” The WEF is, among other things, a major evangelist for the merging of the public and private sectors globally, describing itself as the “international organization for private-public cooperation.” It is thus unsurprising that their latest disaster simulation, which focuses on cyberattacks, would promote this same agenda.

The Speakers at Cyber Polygon 2020

Aside from Schwab and Mishustin, twenty others took part in Cyber Polygon 2020, including some big names from the top echelons of the political elite. First off, Herman Gref engaged in discussion with former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who has been pushing for digital identity systems for decades. Blair straightforwardly told the CEO of Sberbank that biometric digital identity systems will “inevitably” be the tools that most governments will use to deal with future pandemics. Blair, discussing the coronavirus pandemic with Gref, advocated the harshest of lockdown measures, saying the only alternative to biometric digital identities is to “lockdown the economy.”

Next, Sebastian Tolstoy, Ericsson’s general director for Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia and current chairman of the Tolstoy Family Foundation in Sweden, dialogued with Alexey Kornya. Kornya is president, CEO, and chairman of the management board of Mobile TeleSystems. He previously worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers and AIG-Brunswick Capital Management at North-West Telecom. Tolstoy and Kornya presented a segment at Cyber Polygon 2020 entitled “Building a Secure Interconnected World: What Is the Role of the Telecom Sector?” in which they discussed the importance of digital communication and connectivity to our modern way of living.

In the next segment, Nik Gowing, BBC World News presenter between 1996 and 2014 and founder and director of Thinking the Unthinkable, spoke with Vladimir Pozner, journalist and broadcaster, on the subject of “fake news” in a conversation that was actually somewhat refreshing in its arguments and approach.

Stéphane Duguin, the CEO of the CyberPeace Institute, a Geneva-based company that describes itself as “citizens who seek peace and justice in cyberspace,” then gave a talk to the millions of viewers watching the simulation. The CyberPeace Institute, funded by Microsoft, Facebook, Mastercard, and the Hewlett Foundation, among others, claims to help their customers “increase digital resilience and the capacity to respond to and recover from cyberattacks.” The core backers of the CyberPeace Institute are also among the top backers of the Global Cyber Alliance, which unites the public sectors of the US, UK, and France with multinational corporations and intelligence-linked cybersecurity firms, employing “a coordinated approach and nontraditional collaboration” to “reduce cyber risk.”

Duguin, who is also on the advisory board of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, recently launched the Cyber4Healthcare initiative, a “free” cybersecurity service to healthcare providers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cyber4Healthcare initiative includes as its main partners BI.ZONE as well as Microsoft and the Global Cyber Alliance. This is yet another suspicious Microsoft-linked free cybersecurity service currently being pitched to and adopted by healthcare providers around the world at a time when warnings of a coming cyberattack on healthcare systems globally are becoming more public.

Dhanya Thakkar, senior vice president of AMEA at Trend Micro, who advertises himself online as a top ASEAN LinkedIn “cybersecurity influencer,” and Wendi Whitmore, vice president of IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence, next discussed the topic “Know Your Enemy: How Is the Crisis Changing the Cyberthreat Landscape?” IBM’s presence is notable due to the company’s longstanding relationship with the CIA, dating back to the early Cold War. The company has become so entrenched that the CIA recently recruited their chief information officer directly from IBM Federal. Before joining IBM, Whitmore held executive positions at California-based cybersecurity technology companies CrowdStrike and Mandiant, the latter acquired by FireEye in a stock and cash deal worth in excess of $1 billion. Whitmore was responsible for “professional services.” Notably, both CrowdStrike and Mandiant/FireEye are the key organizations leading the investigation into the recent SolarWinds hack, which US intelligence has blamed on a “Russian hacker” without providing any evidence. Whitmore began her career as a special agent conducting computer crime investigations with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

Jacqueline Kernot, the Australian “partner in cybersecurity” for Ernst and Young, and Hector Rodriguez, senior vice president and regional risk officer for Visa, next discussed how to prepare for cyberattacks. Kernot worked for over twenty-five years as a military officer for the Australian Intelligence Corps and spent two years working at IBM’s Defence|Space|Intelligence for Tivoli Software in the UK with “international responsibilities within the UK Ministry of Defence, Defence Primes, and NATO.” Ernst and Young and Visa, alongside other WEF-linked corporations such as Salesforce, are well represented on the Vatican’s exclusive Council for Inclusive Capitalism. The Council, like the WEF, calls for the reconstruction of the economic system to be more “sustainable,” “inclusive,” and “dynamic” by “harnessing the power of the private sector.”

Troels Ørting Jørgensen , chairman of the advisory board of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, and Jürgen Stock, the Danish secretary general of INTERPOL, also spoke together at Cyber Polygon regarding the changes in global cybercrime over the course of the previous year. A few months after appearing at Cyber Polygon, the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority announced in an official statement that “Troels Ørting has notified the Ministry of Business Affairs that he is resigning from the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority’s board.” Citing unnamed sources, Danish financial news service FinansWatch reported that during the time between 2015 and 2018, when he was employed as head of security at Barclays bank, Ørting had been a key figure in the hunt for a whistleblower who had exposed the same criminal activity Ørting railed against at Cyber Polygon.

The man speaking alongside Ørting, Jürgen Stock, is a former German police officer, criminologist, and lawyer. He was elected for a second term as secretary general of INTERPOL in 2019, a term that generally lasts for five years. Craig Jones, the cybercrime director at INTERPOL, also joined the discussion at Cyber Polygon 2020. The New Zealander spent twenty-seven years in law enforcement and is considered an expert in cybercrime investigations. He previously held several senior-management positions in UK law enforcement, most recently at the National Crime Agency.

Petr Gorodov and John Crain were briefly interviewed at the Cyber Polygon 2020 event. Gorodov is head of the General Directorate for International Relations and Legal Assistance of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation and also sits on the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s files. He is on the Requests Chamber of INTERPOL, which examines and decides on requests for access to data as well as requests for correction and/or deletion of data processed in the INTERPOL information system. John Crain is chief security, stability, and resiliency officer at ICANN, the nonprofit internet security corporation. He is currently responsible for the management of the L-Root server, one of the internet’s thirteen root servers, making his inclusion at the simulation particularly notable. At Cyber Polygon 2020 he promoted a “long-term solution of working together in the cybersecurity community.”

The final word at Cyber Polygon 2020 was delivered by Stanislav Kuznetsov, deputy chairman of the executive board at Sberbank. He is also a board member for the Sberbank charity foundation Contribution to the Future, a project that seeks to get Russian schoolchildren from grades seven through eleven interested in AI (artificial intelligence), machine learning, and data analysis and to help them develop math and programming skills. Kuznetsov studied at the Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

The Main Event: Enter the Polygon

Participants in the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, Source: https://cyberpolygon.com/

The simulation component of Cyber Polygon 2020 saw 120 teams from twenty-nine countries take part in the cybersecurity technical simulation. During the online event, participants “exercise[d] the actions of the response team in a targeted attack aimed at stealing confidential data and thus resulting in damage to the company reputation.” Two teams, the Red and the Blue, went head-to-head in the simulations where the Red Team, made up of the training organizers from BI.ZONE, simulated cyberattacks and the Blue Team members attempted to protect their segments of the training infrastructure. The actual simulation was made up of two scenarios in which the various subgroups making up the teams could gain points.

The first scenario, called Defence, made the Cyber Polygon participants practice repelling an active APT (advanced persistent threat) cyberattack. The scenario’s objective was stated as being to “develop skills for repelling targeted cyberattacks on a business-critical system.” The simulation’s fictional organization’s virtual infrastructure included a service that processes confidential client information. This service became the subject of interest to an APT group that planned to steal confidential user data and resell it on the “darknet” to financially benefit and damage the company’s reputation. The APT group studied the target system in advance and discovered several critical vulnerabilities. In the scenario, the cyber “gang” plans to attack on the day of the exercise. The participants involved were judged on their ability to cope with the attack as fast as possible, to minimize the amount of information stolen, and to maintain service availability. Blue Team participants could apply any applications and tools to protect the infrastructure and were also allowed to fix system vulnerabilities by improving the service code.

In the second scenario, called Response, the teams had to investigate the incident using “classic forensics and threat hunting techniques.” Based on the information gathered, participants had to compose a dossier that would help law enforcement agencies locate the criminals. The second scenario’s objective was to develop skills in incident investigation using the scenario in which cybercriminals gained access to a privileged account through a successful phishing attack.

When the BI.ZONE team released the results of the simulation they intentionally avoided using the real names of the organizations so as not to “set off a competition between the participants and keep their results confidential.” However, the teams could later compare their results with the others by using a basic scoreboard, and the hosts could analyse the crucial data showing various organizational weaknesses of each of the participating teams/institutions.

The final report states that the results showed that “banks and companies from the IT industry demonstrated the highest resilience. Security assessment expertise in these sectors is quite well developed, with classic forensics and threat hunting widely applied.” In lay terms, the teams from banks and the IT industry seemed to be better prepared than most other sectors for investigating and hunting down threats. However, all the teams involved proved to be less than able when it came to the initial defense from a cyberattack, with the BI.ZONE report stating that “27% of the teams had difficulties earning points for the first scenario, which allows us to conclude that some of the team members lack or have insufficient expertise in security assessment and protection of web applications.” On the subject of threat hunting, the report goes on to say that “21% of the teams could not earn a single point for the second round of the second scenario. This was attributed to ‘Threat Hunting’ being a relatively novel approach and the majority of organisations lacking experience of applying its techniques in practice.”

The Cyber Polygon 2020 event revealed the weakness in human-led defensive response and resilience as it relates cyberdefense. This outcome is convenient for hi-tech cybersecurity companies like BI.ZONE that wish to highlight the superiority of AI-driven cybersecurity products in comparison to “inefficient” human workers. Also, it should be noted that BI.ZONE’s gaining knowledge of global institutional weaknesses through cyberdefense training could be useful intelligence for their parent company, Sberbank, and in turn the largest shareholder of Sberbank, the Russian government.

Bringing Russia in from the Cold?

Although Russian Federation authorities are quite used to being out in the cold both politically and physically, there appears to be a change in the usual order of nations. Russia’s inclusion as the leader in such an important global cybersecurity initiative is a bit surprising, especially after Russia has been the scapegoat of choice for any cyberattack committed against any Western power for several years, most recently with the SolarWinds hack in the US. Yet, there was no outcry in the West over Cyber Polygon 2020, in which a company that is majority owned by the Russian government was able to gain direct knowledge of the cyberdefense weaknesses of major global institutions, banks, and corporations through their hosting of the exercise.

The complete absence of the “Russian hacker” narrative at Cyber Polygon as well as Russia’s leadership role at the event suggests either that a geopolitical shift has taken place or that the Russian hacker narrative commonly deployed by intelligence agencies in the US and Europe is mainly meant for the general public and not for the elite figures and policymakers in attendance at Cyber Polygon.

Another possibility for Russia no longer being treated as the perpetual enemy of cyberspace is that it is entirely on board with both the official coronavirus narrative and the allegedly imminent cyberpandemic. Cyber Polygon 2020 appeared, in part, to be a Russian charm offensive that was welcomed by the powerful elite. Tony Blair, who once held out the hand of false reconciliation on behalf of the international community to Colonel Gaddafi, has often been involved in these exercises of international diplomacy on behalf of the elites in the years since he left public office. His involvement in the exercise may have been meant to facilitate support among Western WEF-aligned governments for even greater Russian inclusion in the Great Reset. Part of this is due to the WEF-led effort to bring BRICS nations like China and Russia into the Great Reset fold because it is essential for their agenda’s success on a global scale. Now, Russia is pioneering this new model of supposedly national finance systems that the WEF supports through Sberbank’s creation of a digital monopoly not only of financial services but all services within the Russian Federation.

Cyber Polygon 2020 was both an ad for pro-Russian relations and a promotional exercise for Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Some of the people who took part and supported the Cyber Polygon event are involved at the highest levels of cyber intelligence; some may have even been unofficial representatives of their national state intelligence apparatus. The decisions of several national governments to participate directly in the WEF-led Great Reset is no “conspiracy theory.” For instance, the incoming Biden administration sent its climate envoy, John Kerry, to the WEF annual meeting last month, where Kerry underscored the US commitment to the Great Reset agenda and the associated Fourth Industrial Revolution that seeks to automate most jobs being currently performed by humans. With the governments of Russia, China, the US, the UK, Israel, Canada, and India, among others, on board with this transnational agenda, it becomes deeply unsettling that high-ranking operatives in both the public and private sectors joined the WEF to conduct a simulation of a crisis that would clearly benefit the Great Reset agenda.

As previously mentioned, the WEF cosponsored a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic just months before the actual event. Soon after the COVID-19 crisis began in earnest last March, Schwab noted that the pandemic crisis was just what was needed to launch the Great Reset as it served as a convenient catalyst to begin overhauling economies, governance, and social society on a global scale. If the destabilizing events simulated at Cyber Polygon do come to pass, it will likely be similarly welcomed by the WEF, given that a critical failure in the current global financial system would allow the introduction of new public-private “digital ecosystem” monopolies such as those being built in Russia by Sberbank.

This effort by Sberbank to both digitize and monopolize access to all services, both private and public, may be appealing to some because of its apparent convenience. However, it will also be emblematic of what we can expect from Schwab’s Great Reset—monopolies of fused public- and private-sector entities disguised by the term “stakeholder capitalism.” What the general public does not realize yet is that they themselves will not be included among these “stakeholders,” as the Great Reset has been designed by the bankers and wealthy elite for the bankers and the wealthy elite.

As for the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, the coming cyberpandemic is being prophetically thrown in our faces just as the pandemic exercise was prior to the actual disease’s appearance. Such prophetic warnings are coming not only from the WEF, however. For instance, the head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, Yigal Unna, warned last year that a “cyber winter” of cyberattacks “is coming and coming faster than even I suspected.” In the cyber directorate, Unna works closely with Israeli intelligence agencies, including the infamous Unit 8200, which has a long history of electronic espionage targeting the US and other countries and which has been responsible for several devastating hacks, including the Stuxnet virus that damaged Iran’s nuclear program. Israeli intelligence is also poised to be among the greatest beneficiaries of the Great Reset due to the strength of the nation’s hi-tech sector. In addition, last month saw the UAE’s central bank following Cyber Polygon’s lead by conducting its first-ever cyberattack simulation in coordination with the Emirati private-finance sector. Corporate media outlets, for their part, began this year by claiming that “cyberattacks may trigger the next crisis for banks” and, as of February 1, that “the next cyberattack is already underway.”

Some will say that a “cyberpandemic” is an inevitable consequence of the quickly developing hi-tech world in which we live, but it still fair to point out that 2021 is the year that many have been predicting for the financial destruction of big institutions that will lead to new economic systems that align with the Great Reset. The inevitable collapse of the global banking system, resulting from the off-the-charts corruption and fraud that has run rampant for decades, is likely to be conducted through a controlled collapse, one that would allow wealthy bankers and elites, such as those that participated in Cyber Polygon, to avoid responsibility for their economic pillaging and criminal activity.

This is especially true for Cyber Polygon participant Deutsche Bank, whose inevitable collapse has been openly discussed for years due to the bank’s extreme corruption, fraud, and massive exposure to derivatives. In late 2019, months before the COVID-19 crisis began, the CEO of Deutsche Bank warned that central banks no longer had tools that could adequately respond to the next “economic crisis.” It is certainly telling that entirely new banking systems, such as Sberbank’s soon-to-be-launched digital monetary monopoly, began to be developed just as it began to be publicly acknowledged that central banks’ traditional means of responding to economic calamities were no longer viable.

A massive cyberattack, such as that simulated at Cyber Polygon 2020, would allow faceless hackers to be blamed for economic collapse, thus absolving the real financial criminals of responsibility. Furthermore, due to the difficult nature of investigating hacks and the ability of intelligence agencies to frame other nation states for hacks they in fact committed themselves, any boogeyman of choice can be blamed, whether a “domestic terror” group or a country unaligned with the WEF (for now, at least) like Iran or North Korea. Between the well-placed warnings, simulations, and the clear benefit for the global elite intent on a Great Reset, Cyber Polygon 2020 appears to have served not only its publicly stated purpose but its own ulterior motives.

• Cyber Polygon
• Cyberattack
• Cyberpandemic
• event 201
• Great Reset
• Solarwinds
• World Economic Forum

Author

Johnny Vedmore

Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com

Author

Whitney Webb

Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.

Less than 2 weeks ago, Tanzanian Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan delivered the news that her country’s president, John Pombe Magufuli, had died of heart failure. President Magufuli had been described as missing since the end of February, with several anti-government parties circulating stories that he had fallen ill with COVID-19. During his presidency, Magufuli had consistently challenged neocolonialism in Tanzania, whether it manifested through the exploitation of his country’s natural resources by predatory multinationals or the West’s influence over his country’s food supply.

In the months leading up to his death, Magufuli had become better known and particularly demonized in the West for opposing the authority of international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) in determining his government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. However, Magufuli had spurned many of the same interests and organizations angered by his response to COVID for years, having kicked out Bill Gates-funded trials of genetically-modified crops and more recently angering some of the most powerful mining companies in the West, companies with ties to the World Economic Forum and the Forum’s efforts to guide the course of the 4th industrial revolution.

Indeed, more threatening than his recent COVID controversies was the threat Magufuli posed to foreign control over the world’s largest, ready-to-develop nickel deposit, a metal essential to electric car batteries and thus the current effort to usher in an electric, autonomous vehicle revolution. For instance, just a month before he disappeared, Magufuli had signed an agreement to begin developing that nickel deposit, a deposit that had been previously co-owned by Barrick Gold and Glencore, the commodity giant deeply tied to Israel’s Mossad, until Magufuli revoked their licenses for the project in 2018.

Running afoul of the most powerful corporate and banking cartels followed then by the mysterious onset of sudden regime change would normally garner considerable coverage from anti-imperialist independent media outlets, which recently covered similar events in Bolivia that led to the removal of Evo Morales from power. However, the very outlets that have extensively covered Western-backed regime change efforts for years have been entirely silent on the very convenient death of Magufuli. Presumably, their silence is related to Magufuli’s flouting of COVID-19 narrative orthodoxy, as these same outlets have largely promoted the official narrative of the pandemic.

Yet, regardless of whether one agrees with Magufuli’s response to COVID, his sudden departure and Tanzania’s new leadership is a defeat for a widely popular domestic movement that sought to mitigate and reverse the centuries-long exploitation of Tanzania by the West. Now, with Magufuli’s lengthy disappearance followed by his apparent sudden death from heart failure, the country’s future is now set to be determined by Tanzanian politicians with deep ties to the oligarch-beholden United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

In contrast to Magufuli, who routinely stood up to predatory corporations and imperialist designs on his country, Samia Suhulhu and Tanzanian opposition politician Tundu Lissu are poised to offer up their country’s resources, and their population, on the altar of the Western elite-driven 4th industrial revolution.

Magufuli’s celebrated rise and his clashes with the West

Magufuli was first elected with his running mate and now president of Tanzania, Samia Suhulu, back in 2015 with 58% of the vote. At first, the president was met with lavish praise from the same Western media outlets that would later seek to demonize him. For instance, a BBC report from 2016 reflected on Magufuli’s first year in office and noted his 96% approval rating. The report also quoted political analyst Kitila Mumbo, who remarked, “there is no doubt that President Magufuli is very popular among many ordinary Tanzanians” and added that “the president’s main promise of extending free education to secondary school, which came into effect in January, has been well received.”

Running mates John Magufuli and Samia Suhulu on a 2015 campaign flier. Source: 2015 FILE PHOTO

Also in 2016, CNN had reported that “the Tanzanian public has gone wild for its new President John Magufuli” and that “after sweeping to victory in October 2015, Magufuli has embarked on a remorseless purge of corruption.” The article reported that Magufuli had inspired a new term, as seen in Tanzanians’ social media posts:

“ … ‘Magufulify’ – defined as: ‘To render or declare an action faster or cheaper; 2. to deprive [public officials] of their capacity to enjoy life at taxpayers’ expense; 3. to terrorize lazy and corrupt individuals in society.’”

Indeed, Magufuli’s term was characterized by making decisions that benefited the majority of Tanzanians, largely at the expense of foreign corporations but also by overhauling a government known for its entrenched corruption and absenteeism prior to Magufuli’s rise. His administration cut the salaries of the executives at state-owned companies, as well as his own salary, from $15,000 to $4,000 USD. Some State parades and celebrations were reduced or cancelled to cover the expenses of public hospitals.

Healthcare had long been one of Magufuli’s priorities, and the life expectancy of the country significantly increased every year he was in office. In addition, in the previous 50 years of Tanzanian independence, only 77 district hospitals were constructed, whereas during the past 4 years alone, 101 such hospitals were constructed and equipped with local funds. By July 2020, the country had grown from a so-called lower income country to a middle income country, per the World Bank.

A recent report by the hawkish, US establishment think tank, the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), was highly critical of Magufuli, but noted the following about his political philosophy:

“Magufuli, who subscribes to his own homegrown “Tanzania first” philosophy, believes that Tanzania has been cheated out of profit and wealth by exploitative mabeberu (“imperialists”) since independence. To secure populist support, Magufuli has fashioned his agenda as a continuation of the socialist vision of Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who advocated self-reliance, an intolerance to corruption, and a strong nationalist character.”

Magufuli’s various conflicts with the mabeberu transpired throughout his presidency, targeting various projects and business ventures of corporations and oligarchs that have worked to exploit much of the Global South for decades. For example, in late 2018, Tanzania’s government ordered a stop to all ongoing field trials on genetically modified (GM) crops and the destruction of all plants grown as part of those trials. Those trials were being conducted by a partnership called the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project, which was a collaboration between Monsanto and the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, a non-profit funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, GM seed/agrochemical giant Syngenta, PepsiCo and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), long known to be a cut-out for the CIA. Then, in January of 2021, a month before Magufuli’s disappearance, Tanzania’s agriculture ministry not only announced a cancellation of all “research trials involving genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the country” for the second time, it also announced plans to institute new biosafety regulations aimed at protecting Tanzania’s food sovereignty by scrutinizing western GM seed imports.

Historically, the US has been particularly harsh to countries that resist the integration of GM biotech into their food systems. According to a State Department cable from 2007 published by Wikileaks, Craig Stapleton, then-US Ambassador to France, advised the US to prepare for economic war with countries unwilling to introduce Monsanto’s GM corn seeds into their agricultural sectors. He recommended the US “calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the E.U.” for the bloc’s resistance to approving some GM products. In another cable from 2009, a US diplomat stationed in Germany relayed intelligence on Bavarian political parties to several US federal agencies and the US Secretary of Defense, telling them which parties opposed Monsanto’s M810 corn seed and spoke of “tactics that the US could impose to resolve the opposition.”

The US government’s use of food as a weapon for imperialist agendas became de facto policy when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State during the Nixon administration. During that period, a classified report was produced by the State Department that argued that the population of the developing world threatened US national security and posited that food aid be used as an “instrument of national power” to advance US empire.

A roadblock for the Ruling Class’ “green” future

Magufuli’s role in robbing Big Ag of a foothold in Tanzania a month before his disappearance and death certainly casts suspicion on the circumstances surrounding his demise. Yet, if that weren’t enough, Magufuli, during the exact same time frame, greatly angered the most powerful commodity corporations in the world across the sectors of mining, oil and natural gas.

Particularly damaging to foreign corporate interests and agendas was Magufuli’s targeting of the foreign-dominated mining sector in Tanzania, which contains some of the world’s largest deposits of minerals essential to 4th industrial revolution-related technologies. With 500,000 tonnes of nickel, 75,000 tonnes of copper, and 45,000 tonnes of cobalt, Tanzania sits on a mountain of mineral wealth and, more specifically, minerals needed for next-generation batteries and hardware that are themselves essential to the effort to rapidly implement “smart” infrastructure and automation globally. Within Africa, Tanzania has the continent’s second largest mining sector, second only to South Africa.

In the years prior to Magufuli’s rise, Tanzania had offered relatively low tax rates and little regulatory oversight for mining companies. Yet, in 2017, Magufuli declared “economic warfare” on foreign mining companies and his administration followed through on the declaration, passing two laws that provided the government with a much greater share of the revenue from the exploitation of Tanzania’s natural resources. This, of course, came at the expense of foreign mining conglomerates. The new legislation also gave the government the right to renegotiate and/or revoke existing mining licenses that had been awarded prior to Magufuli’s presidency.

Soon after, Tanzania’s government took aim at Acacia Mining, which is now owned by Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold, and slapped them with $190 billion in fines for unpaid taxes and penalties. “It shouldn’t happen that we have all this wealth, sit on it, while others come and benefit from it by cheating us,” Magufuli said of the decision. “We need investors, but not this kind of exploitation. We are supposed to share profits.” In 2018, the administration went after Acacia again, fining them $2.4 million for contaminating local water supplies in residential areas.

The signing of the Kabanga Nickel Framework Agreement in January 2021. Source: https://www.kabanganickel.com/

2018 was also the year that Magufuli’s biggest rift with powerful mining corporations took place, one that potentially influenced his disappearance and subsequent death. The Kabanga nickel project, the largest, development-ready nickel deposit in the world, had been owned jointly by Canada’s Barrick Gold and commodities giant Glencore. In May 2018, Magufuli’s administration revoked the Barrick-Glencore license for the project, along with several others that included other nickel, gold, silver, copper and rare earth mining projects.

Angering Glencore in particular is a risky business. The commodities giant was originally founded by Marc Rich, an infamous asset for Israel’s Mossad who allowed Glencore profits to be used to finance covert intelligence activities. Rich and Glencore’s intelligence ties are discussed in greater detail in Part IV of Whitney Webb’s series on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Today, Glencore is closely linked with Nat Rothschild, the son and heir of the scion of the British-based branch of the elite banking family, who purchased a $40 million stake in the company and was largely responsible for orchestrating Simon Murray’s appointment as Glencore’s chairman as well as his close relationship with Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg.

Then, in January 2021, a month before Magufuli disappeared, the Kabanga Nickel project went forward without Glencore and Barrick Gold, with Tanzania successfully negotiating joint ownership of the mine with a company set up by Norwegian millionaire Peter Smedvig and two of his associates. Unlike the Barrick-Glencore project, in which Tanzania’s government had no financial stake, the new project gave Tanzania a 16% ownership stake in the mine, which is now required by law following Magufuli’s reform of the country’s mining sector.

The loss of Kabanga was clearly a grave one for Barrick Gold and Glencore given the central role nickel and this specific deposit in Tanzania are set to play in the production and implementation of “smart” technologies. Nickel, among other uses, is a key component of the next-generation batteries used in “smart” technologies, specifically in electric vehicles. As a result, the demand for nickel is projected to rise dramatically in the next few years, in part due to the current effort to phase out most motor vehicles and replace them with ones that are both electric and self-driving. The importance of nickel to the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution has been underscored by the World Economic Forum, which estimates that demand for high-purity nickel for EV battery production “will increase by a factor of 24 in 2030 compared to 2018 levels.” In addition, last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that “nickel is the biggest concern for electric car batteries.”

In addition to Tanzania’s valuable nickel reserves, it can be argued that Tanzania’s other most significant mineral wealth lies in its graphite reserves, which rank as the 5th largest in the world. In 2018, Oxford Business Group estimated that Tanzania would become one of the top three graphite producers on the planet. With the World Bank estimating that graphite demand will increase 500% in the next 30 years, Tanzania now holds a strong bargaining position in the global market. The global lithium-ion battery market is “expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.0% from 2020 to 2027,” and these batteries usually require both nickel and graphite, both of which are plentiful under Tanzania. As Elon Musk has put it, “lithium-ion batteries should be called nickel graphite batteries.”

Last year, Musk had tweeted that “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” in response to accusations that the US government had backed the 2019 coup in Bolivia so that Musk’s Tesla could acquire rights to the world’s largest lithium reserves, another mineral critical to electric vehicle battery production. A few months before Musk’s infamous tweet, the foreign minister of Bolivia’s coup government had written a letter to Musk that stated that “any corporation that you or your company can provide to our country will be gratefully welcomed” in relation to the country’s mining sector. These incidents underscore US empire’s current willingness to engage in regime change to ensure control of mineral deposits considered essential to emerging technologies and the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Logo for the latest iteration of the Kabanga Nickel mining project. Source: https://www.kabanganickel.com/

In the case of Tanzania, it is worth noting that Glencore, which had its ownership of the Kabanga nickel deposit revoked by Magufuli, is closely tied to the World Economic Forum and is part of the Forum’s Global Battery Alliance as well as its Mining and Metals Blockchain Initiative, both of which focus on supply chains for minerals deemed essential to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Also of interest is the fact that Tundu Lissu, the Magufuli government’s most vocal critic and a main source for all mainstream media Tanzania reporting, was formerly employed by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based non-profit and “strategic partner” of the World Economic Forum. The WRI aims to build “clean energy markets” and “value supply chains,” supply chains which will inevitably depend on cheaply sourced raw materials like nickel, graphite, and cobalt.

The World Resource Institute has received no less than $7.1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and, according to the WRI donor page, they’ve received no less than $750,000 from the West’s most powerful corporate actors including Shell, Citibank, The Rockefeller Foundation, Google, Microsoft, The Open Society Foundation, USAID, and the World Bank. Lissu praised news of Magufuli’s sudden death as a “relief” and an “opportunity for a new beginning” in Tanzania. Tellingly, he also spoke very positively of the country’s future under Magufuli’s Vice President and current President Samia Suhulu, suggesting that she will take the country in a direction very different than that of her predecessor.

Thabit Jacob, a Tanzanian academic at Denmark’s Roskilde University was quoted in UpStream as saying that Rostam Aziz — one of Tanzania’s wealthiest businessmen and ex-parliament member who had a major falling out with Magufuli over tax policy— could soon become a key player in the new government, “meaning big business will play a bigger role” in the country’s future. Rostam owns Caspian Mining, the single largest Tanzanian mining firm and a frequent contractor for Barrick Gold.

COVID-19 response met with foreign hostility

Under the Magufuli administration, Tanzania’s COVID-19 response policies ran counter to the international consensus, with the country declining to implement any major lockdowns or mask mandates. It should be noted that even the CFR relayed that these decisions had the democratic support of the masses, writing that “on-the-street sentiment suggests many Tanzanians agree with the government’s light-touch approach.”

Magufuli was also skeptical of adopting COVID-19 vaccines before they could be investigated and certified by Tanzania’s own experts, warning that they could pose safety concerns due to their rushed development. “The Ministry of Health should be careful, they should not hurry to try these vaccines without doing research … We should not be used as ‘guinea pigs'”, Magufuli had stated in January. “We are not yet satisfied that those vaccines have been clinically proven safe,” Tanzanian Health Minister Dr. Dorothy Gwajima later remarked at a news conference.

Magufuli refused to immediately agree to receive COVID-19 vaccines from COVAX, a public-private partnership between Gates’ GAVI and the World Health Organization which aims to deliver 270 million COVID vaccines – with 269 million of them being the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine – to the world “as soon as they’re available.” In recent weeks, major safety issues with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine have been identified by national regulatory bodies across Europe and Asia and numerous countries have suspended its use.

However, such nuance regarding the safety of “vaccine aid” was absent from the now ubiquitous mainstream narrative of Magufuli being “anti-science.” That narrative was first established as early as May 2020, when Magufuli exposed the inaccuracy of imported PCR testing kits after a goat, a piece of fruit, and motor oil all received ‘positive’ test results from the supplied kits. “There is something happening … we should not accept that every aid is meant to be good for this nation,” he proclaimed in a national address.

After this address, Bloomberg called Magufuli the “COVID-denying president.” Foreign Policy went as far as to dub the President as “Denialist in Chief” and asked if he was even “more dangerous than COVID-19.” Magufuli became the Western press’s poster boy for “COVID denial” while Tanzania became “the country that’s rejecting the vaccine.”

However, in the months that followed May 2020, the accuracy of PCR testing kits have been called into question, not only by mainstream media, but also “authoritative” global health bodies like the World Health Organization, thereby validating Magufuli’s initial critique. In a story titled “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be”, the New York Times reported that the “standard [PCR] tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. . . and are not likely contagious.”

In November 2020, a landmark court case in Portugal ruled that the PCR test used to diagnose COVID-19 was not fit for that purpose, ruling that “a single positive PCR test cannot be used as an effective diagnosis of infection.” In their ruling, judges Margarida Ramos de Almeida and Ana Paramés referred to a study by Jaafar et al., which found that the accuracy of some PCR tests was only about 3%, meaning up to 97% of positive results could be false positives.

By December 2020, the World Health Organization had confirmed that the PCR test was ripe for false positives, warning that they could easily lead to COVID-free individuals receiving positive test results. The position that PCR testing kits are unreliable is not new science, as a 2007 New York Times article titled “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic that Wasn’t” wrote that the sensitivity of PCR testing kits “makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested, false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.” In addition, large batches of PCR test kits in the early phase of the COVID-19 crisis were contaminated with COVID-19 prior to their use, which was later found to have significantly skewed the number of cases reported in the early phases of the pandemic in the US and beyond.

Numerous examples of vaccines with severe adverse effects being pushed onto the Tanzanian people, combined with the widely reported safety issues surrounding the AstraZeneca/ Oxford vaccine that Tanzania would receive through COVAX, make the Western media’s “anti-science” characterization of Magufuli particularly inappropriate. For example, as far back as 1977, studies published in The Lancet established that the risks of the diphtheria tetanus pertussis (DTP) vaccine are greater than the risks associated with contracting wild pertussis. After mounting evidence linking the drug to brain damage, seizures, and even death, the U.S. phased it out in the 1990s and replaced it with a safer version called DTaP. A 2017 study funded by the Danish government concluded that more African children were dying at the hands of the deadly DTP vaccine than by the diseases it prevented. Researchers examined data from Guinea Bissau and concluded that boys were dying at 3.9 times the rate of those who had not received the shot, while girls suffered almost 10 times (9.98) the death rate. GAVI, subsidized by USAID and the Gates Foundation, has dumped over $27 million worth of the dangerously outdated DTP vaccine onto the Tanzanian health system as of today.

Furthermore, as detailed by Unlimited Hangout in December, the developers of the Oxford vaccine (the vaccine Tanzania would receive under COVAX), are deeply entangled with the eugenics movement and engage in ethically questionable activities regarding the intersection of race and science to this day. In 2020, The Wellcome Trust, the research institute where both of the lead developers of the Oxford vaccine work, was accused by the University of Cape Town of illegally exploiting hundreds of Africans by stealing their DNA without consent.

Also concerning is the fact that more than 20 European countries have halted use of the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine due to a possible link to blood clot disorders and strokes. Even the New York Times has questioned if the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is a viable candidate, particularly for Africa. According to a Times article from February, South Africa halted use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford coronavirus vaccine after evidence emerged that the vaccine did not protect clinical trial volunteers from mild or moderate illness.”

A recent election victory “amid claims of fraud”

In October 2020, Magufuli was reelected to a second, five year term, this time gaining a resounding 84.39% of vote. At the time, the US government-funded outlet Voice of America (VOA) quoted one Tanzanian, Edward Mbise, who told the outlet that “[they] all expected [Magufuli] to win due to what he has done … he has accomplished so many things that you can’t even finish listing all of them.”

However, Tundu Lissu, the leader of Magufuli’s main opposition party, alleged that the election had been fraudulent, but provided no evidence. According to the same VOA article, Lissu called for “citizens [to] take action to ensure all election results are changed.”

Lissu’s accusations of fraud were widely reprinted by Western media despite the lack of evidence. A BBC article was titled “President Magufuli Wins Election Amid Fraud Claims.” The Guardian, funded heavily by the Gates Foundation, _s_imilarly claimed that “Tanzania’s President wins re-election Amid Claims of Fraud.” In the US, the New York Times published a story called, “As Tanzania’s President Wins a Second Term, Opposition Calls for Protests.”

Neither mention of Magufuli’s approval ratings nor quotes from actual Tanzanian people were anywhere to be found in these articles, details which had been plentiful in Western mainstream media coverage of his first election victory. Quotes that did appear were usually from Lissu, now exiled in Belgium, or other members of his party.

Not long after Lissu’s claims had been uncritically repeated by major Western media outlets, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced sanctions on his last day in charge of the State Department that targeted Tanzanian officials who had allegedly been “responsible for or complicit in undermining the 2020 Tanzanian general election”. It is worth pointing out that the similarities between the election fraud accusations in Tanzania and those made in Bolivia just prior to the US-backed November 2019 coup are considerable.

Two weeks later, on February 5th, 2021, the Center for Strategic & International Studies suggested that the US might, as it often does, fund Magufuli’s political opposition, openly suggesting that the “the Biden administration has an opportunity to increase direct engagement with Tanzanian opposition politicians and civil society groups,” using Magufuli’s “dangerous” approach to COVID-19 as public justification.

That same week, _the Guardian’_s Global Development section (made possible through a partnership with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) published an article titled, “It’s time for Africa to rein in Tanzania’s anti-vaxxer president.” Predictably, this article, and others like it, sought to paint the African leader as a crazy conspiracy theorist, but left out the fact that Magufuli had earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in Chemistry before being elected president in 2015.

On March 9th, Tundu Lissu, the opposition leader formerly employed by the Washington-based and Wall Street-funded World Resource Institute, contended that Magufuli was critically ill with COVID-19. In a series of tweets, Lissu asserted that the then-president had been flown first to Kenya and then India to be treated for the virus. “We urge the government to come out publicly and say where is the president and what is his condition,” John Mnyika, another opposition leader, also publicly stated similar claims. The very first paper to run the story that Magufuli had COVID-19 was The Nation, a relatively new Kenyan newspaper that has received $4 million from the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Meanwhile, the Magufuli government repeatedly dismissed these claims as fake news. “He is fine and doing his responsibilities,” insisted Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa on March 12. “A head of state is not a head of a jogging club who should always be around taking selfies,” Constitutional Affairs Minister Mwigulu Nchemba had said at the time.

On March 11, just days before the announcement of Magufuli’s death and Suhulu’s appointment to the post of President, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the influential think tank closely tied to the Rockefeller family and the US political elite, suggested that a “bold figure within the ruling party [i.e. Magufuli’s party] could capitalize on the current episode to gain popularity and begin to reverse course …”

While a swift leadership transition in Tanzania might seem like an unexpected surprise to western financial interests, groups in the US who specialize in foreign meddling and regime change operations had been at work in Tanzania ever since Magufuli’s initial election victory. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government think/do tank which aims to “support freedom around the world,” pumped $1.1 million into different Tanzanian opposition groups and causes over the last few years. One co-founder of NED, Allen Weinstein, once disclosed to the Washington Post that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Carl Gershman, NED’s other co-founder, once told the New York Times that “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA . . .and that’s why the endowment was created.”

NED’s recent operations in Tanzania included projects to “organize young people to promote reform, and introduce them to new media tools that can assist in their efforts”, “recruit and train young artists to convey stories about governance”, financially support an opposition-friendly “satirical” news production that provides humorous commentary on current events to “encourage conversations”, as well as financially supporting the production of a “comprehensive televised civic education campaign” aimed at both COVID-related public awareness and “voter education.” The grantee for the funds, the Tanzania Bora Initiative, whose slogan is “transforming mindsets, influencing cultures” boasts of “empowering over 50 young Tanzanian political candidates.” The Tanzania Bora Initiative was also heavily supported by USAID while Magufuli was in office.

One wonders what effects these NED and USAID-funded efforts would have had on the country if Magufuli had not died in office. In January, the CIA-filled Jamestown Foundation began reporting on Tanzania’s “creeping radicalization issue” and eerily put forward the idea that “Tanzania could be primed to experience an increase in violence directed inward…” Though this thankfully never came to fruition, in other cases of Western-backed regime change, opposition groups funded by these same organizations have been known to stoke or create violence in order to justify Western intervention.

The Magufuli Administration wasn’t oblivious to the West’s regime change efforts. In the years following his election victory, Tanzanian police forces had raided meetings organized by the Open Society Foundations, a group infamous for their meddling initiatives in states targeted by the US’ foreign policy establishment.

Yet, despite his strong stands against the West, something about Magufuli’s approach had changed the day of his last public appearance on February 24th, 2021. That morning, the Tanzanian President had begun urging his countrymen to wear masks, something he had resisted doing for nearly a year after the WHO declared a pandemic, and urged them to begin taking health precautions.

A new President, to Western applause

Convenient for the powers that Magufuli had angered, his successor and VP, Samia Suluhu, hails from the United Nations’ World Food Programme and has a profile listed on the website of the World Economic Forum, suggesting a closeness with the circles her predecessor had rebuked. It still remains unclear if she has already reversed any of Magufuli’s policies, either economic or COVID-related, but some shifts seem likely given that her appointment has been met with pure celebration by the same institutional actors that actively worked to undermine President Magufuli.

Another potential indicator is the dubious discovery of a new COVID variant in Tanzania that reportedly has more mutations than any other variant. That variant’s discovery was announced just over a week following the announcement of Magufuli’s death and seems tailor-made to provide a public justification of a reversal of Tanzania’s government approach to COVID. Notably, the Tanzania variant was discovered by Krisp, “a scientific institute that carries out genetic testing for 10 African nations” that is funded by the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the governments of the US, the UK and South Africa.

Regarding a potentially imminent reversal of Tanzania’s COVID policy, the reaction of the top official at the World Health Organization may offer a clue. WHO General Director Tedros Ghebreyesus had no time to comment after receiving word of Magufuli’s sudden death, but quickly took to Twitter minutes after Suluhu’s swearing-in ceremony to congratulate the country’s first female president, telling her that he’s “looking forward to working with her to keep people safe from COVID-19, and end the pandemic.” Ghebreyesus was previously on the board of two organizations that Bill Gates had founded, provided seed money for, and continues to fund to this day: GAVI and the Global Fund, where Tedros was chair of the board.

Samia Suluhu Hassan’s WEF profile. Source: https://www.weforum.org/people/samia-suluhu-hassan

A few days before Ghebreyesus’ tweet, the State Department released a statement reaffirming the US’ commitment to supporting Tanzanians as they advocate for respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and work to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that “We hope that Tanzania can move forward on a democratic and prosperous path.” Vice President Kamala Harris had nothing to say in regards to the popular East African president suddenly dying, yet – like Ghebreyesus, she managed to send her best wishes to the newly sworn in Suluhu Samia on Twitter.

Billionaire-backed Human Rights Watch, whose revolving door with the US government is well documented, welcomed Magufuli’s death, publishing a piece entitled “Tanzania: President Magufuli’s Death Should Open New Chapter,” writing that the African leader’s sudden passing “provides an opportunity.” Notably, the same organization had supported the US-backed military coup in Bolivia as well as the Trump Administration’s regime change efforts in Nicaragua and had called for an increase of deadly U.S. sanctions on Venezeula’s Chavista government, even after the publication of a report by The Center for Economic and Policy Research which found that at least 40,000 Venezuelan civilians had already died due to the such sanctions.

Earlier this month, Judd Devermont, a former CIA senior political analyst on sub-Saharan Africa, in a CSIS piece titled “Will Magufuli’s Death Bring Real Change to Tanzania?,” wrote that, prior to Magufuli’s death, it was “believed that Suluhu was growing increasingly wary of Magufuli’s authoritarian policies. . .” Later in the article, the former CIA analyst accidentally disclosed his working definition of “authoritarianism” when he wrote: “Magufuli steered Tanzania toward authoritarianism by implementing a nationalist economic agenda characterized by stifled regional and international trade and a blow to foreign direct investment (FDI).”

However, the claim that Magufuli was against all foreign investment is misleading. Perhaps Devermont should have written that Magufuli’s policies were a blow to FDI from the West, as Magufuli, in the last months of his presidency and his life, was directly courting foreign investment from China.

In mid-December 2020, Tanzania Invests reported on a Magufuli meeting with Chinese leadership, after which Magufuli announced that Tanzania “welcomes traders and investors from China in various areas like manufacturing, tourism, construction, and trade for the benefit of both parties.” The report also noted that “Magufuli asked China to cooperate with Tanzania in investing in large projects by providing cheap loans” and that “Tanzania will further develop and enhance its long-standing relationship with China and will continue to support China on various international issues.” China is currently Tanzania’s top trading partner and Tanzania is the largest recipient of Chinese government aid in Africa. It is worth considering that this China pivot, particularly at a time when the US’ new Cold War with China is reaching new heights, played a role in Western-backed regime change efforts targeting Tanzania.

Looking beyond Tanzania

The fate suffered by President John Magufuli and Tanzania is similar to what happened in a neighboring country, Burundi, just six months ago. The president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, publicly refused to enact top-down mitigation measures in response to COVID-19, and was similarly vilified by US aligned press and think tanks. In May 2020, Nkurunziza expelled the World Health Organization from Burundi and, three weeks later, it was reported that he had died after suddenly going into cardiac arrest.

More recently, Zambia, which borders Tanzania and is set to hold elections this August, is currently angering some of the same actors that Magufuli had challenged in its government’s efforts to nationalize its copper mines and potentially other mining projects. In December, Zambian President Edgar Lungu announced that his government would acquire “a significant stake in some selected mine assets” in order to “create sufficient wealth for the nation.” Echoing Magufuli, Lungu had stated “We shall no longer tolerate mining investors who seek to [profit] from our God-given natural resources, leaving us with empty hands.”

In January, Lungu took a step towards nationalizing the copper mining sector after a protracted dispute with none other than Glencore. Copper, like nickel, graphite and lithium, is a metal critical to the success of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Western media reports on Lungu’s recent move quoted experts who urged Zambia’s government “to tread carefully” in its efforts to increase the role of the public sector in the nation’s mining industry.

Then, a week after Magufuli’s death was announced, Lungu’s main competitor in the upcoming election publicly accused Lungu of trying to have him murdered while some English language, pro-Western media outlets have already claimed that Lungu plans to rig the upcoming election in his favor and that the country “may burn” if the election has the “wrong” outcome.

Such examples reveal that the situation that has recently unfolded in Tanzania is hardly unique in today’s Africa. However, the domination of the media landscape with constant COVID coverage has made Western audiences largely unaware of the various regime change efforts that have taken place or are underway in the region. Unlike regime change efforts of the recent past, those targeting Africa, and also Bolivia, seem laser focused on mining assets deemed essential to establishing the supply chains needed to power the 4th Industrial Revolution.

With many of these countries having recently cozied up to China, it seems the regime change projects and proxy wars of the future are set to revolve, not around fossil fuels and pipelines, but over whether the East or the West will dominate the supplies of minerals needed to produce and maintain next-generation technology.

Not only has COVID kept reporting on these coups for minerals to a minimum, it has also lent a convenient cover for the demonization of leaders and the advancement of regime change in countries that are being targeted for other reasons that have everything to do with resources and little to do with a virus.

• 4IR
• COVID-19
• Magufuli
• mining
• Samia Suhulu
• Tanzania
• WEF

Author

Jeremy Loffredo

Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist and researcher based in Washington, DC. He is formerly a segment producer for RT AMERICA and is currently an investigative reporter for Children’s Health Defense.

Author

Whitney Webb

Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.

The President of Russia Vladimir Putin has given a great speech to the Davos 2021 online forum organized by the World Economic Forum. As usual it created little echo in the 'western' media.

Putin sees a new danger of large international conflicts. Economic imbalances have caused socio-political problems in many countries which, when externalized, can lead to international conflicts.

To solve this one has to reject the laissez faire doctrines that caused the economic imbalances. The nation states must intervene more in their economies. The people must be seen as the ends, not the means of such economic policy. There must be more international cooperation through global organizations to enable this everywhere.

There is more in the speech than that. But the above is the core idea. U.S. neo-liberalism will of course reject such a program.

Following are excerpts that reflect on the above points.

The big picture view points to great danger:

The pandemic has exacerbated the problems and imbalances that built up in the world before. There is every reason to believe that differences are likely to grow stronger. These trends may appear practically in all areas.

Needless to say, there are no direct parallels in history. However, some experts – and I respect their opinion – compare the current situation to the 1930s. One can agree or disagree, but certain analogies are still suggested by many parameters, including the comprehensive, systemic nature of the challenges and potential threats.

We are seeing a crisis of the previous models and instruments of economic development. Social stratification is growing stronger both globally and in individual countries. We have spoken about this before as well. But this, in turn, is causing today a sharp polarisation of public views, provoking the growth of populism, right- and left-wing radicalism and other extremes, and the exacerbation of domestic political processes including in the leading countries.

All this is inevitably affecting the nature of international relations and is not making them more stable or predictable. International institutions are becoming weaker, regional conflicts are emerging one after another, and the system of global security is deteriorating.

Klaus [Schwab] has mentioned the conversation I had yesterday with the US President on extending the New START. This is, without a doubt, a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, the differences are leading to a downward spiral. As you are aware, the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to the WWII catastrophe.

Putin then goes into the details of the above theses.

What caused the current economic imbalances?

These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s, which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on the wealthy and the corporations.

As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs. Yes, half of them were restored by the end of the year but still almost 250 million jobs were lost. This is a big and very alarming figure. In the first nine months of the past year alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and, hence, social tension is on the rise.

At the same time, post-crisis recovery is not simple at all. If some 20 or 30 years ago, we would have solved the problem through stimulating macroeconomic policies (incidentally, this is still being done), today such mechanisms have reached their limits and are no longer effective. This resource has outlived its usefulness. This is not an unsubstantiated personal conclusion.

According to the IMF, the aggregate sovereign and private debt level has approached 200 percent of global GDP, and has even exceeded 300 percent of national GDP in some countries. At the same time, interest rates in developed market economies are kept at almost zero and are at a historic low in emerging market economies.

Taken together, this makes economic stimulation with traditional methods, through an increase in private loans virtually impossible. The so-called quantitative easing is only increasing the bubble of the value of financial assets and deepening the social divide. The widening gap between the real and virtual economies (incidentally, representatives of the real economy sector from many countries have told me about this on numerous occasions, and I believe that the business representatives attending this meeting will agree with me) presents a very real threat and is fraught with serious and unpredictable shocks.

The economic imbalances create deep socio-political problems:

In this context, I would like to mention the second fundamental challenge of the forthcoming decade – the socio-political one. The rise of economic problems and inequality is splitting society, triggering social, racial and ethnic intolerance. Indicatively, these tensions are bursting out even in the countries with seemingly civil and democratic institutions that are designed to alleviate and stop such phenomena and excesses.

The systemic socioeconomic problems are evoking such social discontent that they require special attention and real solutions. The dangerous illusion that they may be ignored or pushed into the corner is fraught with serious consequences.

In this case, society will still be divided politically and socially. This is bound to happen because people are dissatisfied not by some abstract issues but by real problems that concern everyone regardless of the political views that people have or think they have. Meanwhile, real problems evoke discontent.

The danger rises when the socio-political problems get externalized:

And finally, the third challenge, or rather, a clear threat that we may well run into in the coming decade is the further exacerbation of many international problems. After all, unresolved and mounting internal socioeconomic problems may push people to look for someone to blame for all their troubles and to redirect their irritation and discontent. We can already see this. We feel that the degree of foreign policy propaganda rhetoric is growing.

We can expect the nature of practical actions to also become more aggressive, including pressure on the countries that do not agree with a role of obedient controlled satellites, use of trade barriers, illegitimate sanctions and restrictions in the financial, technological and cyber spheres.

Such a game with no rules critically increases the risk of unilateral use of military force. The use of force under a far-fetched pretext is what this danger is all about. This multiplies the likelihood of new hot spots flaring up on our planet. This concerns us.

What can be done to prevent the danger which arises from socio-political problems caused by imbalanced economies?

Clearly, with the above restrictions and macroeconomic policy in mind, economic growth will largely rely on fiscal incentives with state budgets and central banks playing the key role.

Actually, we can see these kinds of trends in the developed countries and also in some developing economies as well. An increasing role of the state in the socioeconomic sphere at the national level obviously implies greater responsibility and close interstate interaction when it comes to issues on the global agenda.
...
It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a million people, or even the golden billion. This is a destructive precept. This model is unbalanced by default. The recent developments, including migration crises, have reaffirmed this once again.

We must now proceed from stating facts to action, investing our efforts and resources into reducing social inequality in individual countries and into gradually balancing the economic development standards of different countries and regions in the world. This would put an end to migration crises.

The essence and focus of this policy aimed at ensuring sustainable and harmonious development are clear. They imply the creation of new opportunities for everyone, conditions under which everyone will be able to develop and realise their potential regardless of where they were born and are living.

Here Putin sets the goals for national strategies:

I would like to point out four key priorities, as I see them. This might be old news, but since Klaus has allowed me to present Russia’s position, my position, I will certainly do so.

First, everyone must have comfortable living conditions, including housing and affordable transport, energy and public utility infrastructure. Plus environmental welfare, something that must not be overlooked.

Second, everyone must be sure that they will have a job that can ensure sustainable growth of income and, hence, decent standards of living. Everyone must have access to an effective system of lifelong education, which is absolutely indispensable now and which will allow people to develop, make a career and receive a decent pension and social benefits upon retirement.

Third, people must be confident that they will receive high-quality and effective medical care whenever necessary, and that the national healthcare system will guarantee access to modern medical services.

Fourth, regardless of the family income, children must be able to receive a decent education and realise their potential. Every child has potential.

This is the only way to guarantee the cost-effective development of the modern economy, in which people are perceived as the end, rather than the means. Only those countries capable of attaining progress in at least these four areas will facilitate their own sustainable and all-inclusive development. These areas are not exhaustive, and I have just mentioned the main aspects.

A strategy, also being implemented by my country, hinges on precisely these approaches.

What should be done globally:

We are open to the broadest international cooperation, while achieving our national goals, and we are confident that cooperation on matters of the global socioeconomic agenda would have a positive influence on the overall atmosphere in global affairs, and that interdependence in addressing acute current problems would also increase mutual trust which is particularly important and particularly topical today.

Obviously, the era linked with attempts to build a centralised and unipolar world order has ended. To be honest, this era did not even begin. A mere attempt was made in this direction, but this, too, is now history. The essence of this monopoly ran counter to our civilisation’s cultural and historical diversity.

The reality is such that really different development centres with their distinctive models, political systems and public institutions have taken shape in the world. Today, it is very important to create mechanisms for harmonising their interests to prevent the diversity and natural competition of the development poles from triggering anarchy and a series of protracted conflicts.

To achieve this we must, in part, consolidate and develop universal institutions that bear special responsibility for ensuring stability and security in the world and for formulating and defining the rules of conduct both in the global economy and trade.

It is no wonder that the neo-liberal 'west' constantly attacks Putin and at the same time takes care that his speech gets as little attention as possible. It is dangerous because it could give the deplorables some ideas.

It is also sad that no 'western' politician I am aware of would ever give such a speech.

Session of Davos Agenda 2021 online forum

Vladimir Putin spoke at the session of the Davos Agenda 2021 online forum organised by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

January 27, 2021

15:10

The Kremlin, Moscow

The online events are taking place from January 25 to 29 and involve heads of state and government, CEOs of major international companies, global media and youth organisations from Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, North America and Latin America.

The main focus of the forum is the discussion of the new global situation arising from the novel coronavirus pandemic.

* * *

World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab: Mr President, welcome to the Davos Agenda Week.

Russia is an important global power, and there’s a long-standing tradition of Russia’s participation in the World Economic Forum. At this moment in history, where the world has a unique and short window of opportunity to move from an age of confrontation to an age of cooperation, the ability to hear your voice, the voice of the President of the Russian Federation, is essential. Even and especially in times characterised by differences, disputes and protests, constructive and honest dialogue to address our common challenges is better than isolation and polarisation.

Yesterday, your phone exchange with President Biden and the agreement to extend the New START nuclear arms treaty in principle, I think, was a very promising sign in this direction.

COVID-19, Mr President, has shown our global vulnerability and interconnectivity, and, like any other country, Russia will certainly also be affected, and your economic development and prospects for international cooperation, of course, are of interest to all of us.

Mr President, we are keen to hear from your perspective and from that of Russia, how you see the situation developing in the third decade of the 21st century and what should be done to ensure that people everywhere find peace and prosperity.

Mr President, the world is waiting to hear from you.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Schwab, dear Klaus,

Colleagues,

I have been to Davos many times, attending the events organised by Mr Schwab, even back in the 1990s. Klaus [Schwab] just recalled that we met in 1992. Indeed, during my time in St Petersburg, I visited this important forum many times. I would like to thank you for this opportunity today to convey my point of view to the expert community that gathers at this world-renowned platform thanks to the efforts of Mr Schwab.

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to greet all the World Economic Forum participants.

It is gratifying that this year, despite the pandemic, despite all the restrictions, the forum is still continuing its work. Although it is limited to online participation, the forum is taking place anyway, providing an opportunity for participants to exchange their assessments and forecasts during an open and free discussion, partially compensating for the increasing lack of in-person meetings between leaders of states, representatives of international business and the public in recent months. All this is very important now, when we have so many difficult questions to answer.

The current forum is the first one in the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century and, naturally, the majority of its topics are devoted to the profound changes that are taking place in the world.

Indeed, it is difficult to overlook the fundamental changes in the global economy, politics, social life and technology. The coronavirus pandemic, which Klaus just mentioned, which became a serious challenge for humankind, only spurred and accelerated the structural changes, the conditions for which had been created long ago. The pandemic has exacerbated the problems and imbalances that built up in the world before. There is every reason to believe that differences are likely to grow stronger. These trends may appear practically in all areas.

Needless to say, there are no direct parallels in history. However, some experts – and I respect their opinion – compare the current situation to the 1930s. One can agree or disagree, but certain analogies are still suggested by many parameters, including the comprehensive, systemic nature of the challenges and potential threats.

We are seeing a crisis of the previous models and instruments of economic development. Social stratification is growing stronger both globally and in individual countries. We have spoken about this before as well. But this, in turn, is causing today a sharp polarisation of public views, provoking the growth of populism, right- and left-wing radicalism and other extremes, and the exacerbation of domestic political processes including in the leading countries.

All this is inevitably affecting the nature of international relations and is not making them more stable or predictable. International institutions are becoming weaker, regional conflicts are emerging one after another, and the system of global security is deteriorating.

Klaus has mentioned the conversation I had yesterday with the US President on extending the New START. This is, without a doubt, a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, the differences are leading to a downward spiral. As you are aware, the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to the WWII catastrophe.

Of course, such a heated global conflict is impossible in principle, I hope. This is what I am pinning my hopes on, because this would be the end of humanity. However, as I have said, the situation could take an unexpected and uncontrollable turn – unless we do something to prevent this. There is a chance that we will face a formidable break-down in global development, which will be fraught with a war of all against all and attempts to deal with contradictions through the appointment of internal and external enemies and the destruction of not only traditional values such as the family, which we hold dear in Russia, but fundamental freedoms such as the right of choice and privacy.

I would like to point out the negative demographic consequences of the ongoing social crisis and the crisis of values, which could result in humanity losing entire civilisational and cultural continents.

We have a shared responsibility to prevent this scenario, which looks like a grim dystopia, and to ensure instead that our development takes a different trajectory – positive, harmonious and creative.

In this context, I would like to speak in more detail about the main challenges which, I believe, the international community is facing.

The first one is socioeconomic.

Indeed, judging by the statistics, even despite the deep crises in 2008 and 2020, the last 40 years can be referred to as successful or even super successful for the global economy. Starting from 1980, global per capita GDP has doubled in terms of real purchasing power parity. This is definitely a positive indicator.

Globalisation and domestic growth have led to strong growth in developing countries and lifted over a billion people out of poverty. So, if we take an income level of $5.50 per person per day (in terms of PPP) then, according to the World Bank, in China, for example, the number of people with lower incomes went from 1.1 billion in 1990 down to less than 300 million in recent years. This is definitely China's success. In Russia, this number went from 64 million people in 1999 to about 5 million now. We believe this is also progress in our country, and in the most important area, by the way.

Still, the main question, the answer to which can, in many respects, provide a clue to today’s problems, is what was the nature of this global growth and who benefitted from it most.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, developing countries benefitted a lot from the growing demand for their traditional and even new products. However, this integration into the global economy has resulted in more than just new jobs or greater export earnings. It also had its social costs, including a significant gap in individual incomes.

What about the developed economies where average incomes are much higher? It may sound ironic, but stratification in the developed countries is even deeper. According to the World Bank, 3.6 million people subsisted on incomes of under $5.50 per day in the United States in 2000, but in 2016 this number grew to 5.6 million people.

Meanwhile, globalisation led to a significant increase in the revenue of large multinational, primarily US and European, companies.

By the way, in terms of individual income, the developed economies in Europe show the same trend as the United States.

But then again, in terms of corporate profits, who got hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: one percent of the population.

And what has happened in the lives of other people? In the past 30 years, in a number of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating, not growing. Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do you know by how much? Three times.

In other words, millions of people even in wealthy countries have stopped hoping for an increase of their incomes. In the meantime, they are faced with the problem of how to keep themselves and their parents healthy and how to provide their children with a decent education.

There is no call for a huge mass of people and their number keeps growing. Thus, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), in 2019, 21 percent or 267 million young people in the world did not study or work anywhere. Even among those who had jobs (these are interesting figures) 30 percent had an income below $3.2 per day in terms of purchasing power parity.

These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s, which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on the wealthy and the corporations.

As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs. Yes, half of them were restored by the end of the year but still almost 250 million jobs were lost. This is a big and very alarming figure. In the first nine months of the past year alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and, hence, social tension is on the rise.

At the same time, post-crisis recovery is not simple at all. If some 20 or 30 years ago, we would have solved the problem through stimulating macroeconomic policies (incidentally, this is still being done), today such mechanisms have reached their limits and are no longer effective. This resource has outlived its usefulness. This is not an unsubstantiated personal conclusion.

According to the IMF, the aggregate sovereign and private debt level has approached 200 percent of global GDP, and has even exceeded 300 percent of national GDP in some countries. At the same time, interest rates in developed market economies are kept at almost zero and are at a historic low in emerging market economies.

Taken together, this makes economic stimulation with traditional methods, through an increase in private loans virtually impossible. The so-called quantitative easing is only increasing the bubble of the value of financial assets and deepening the social divide. The widening gap between the real and virtual economies (incidentally, representatives of the real economy sector from many countries have told me about this on numerous occasions, and I believe that the business representatives attending this meeting will agree with me) presents a very real threat and is fraught with serious and unpredictable shocks.

Hopes that it will be possible to reboot the old growth model are connected with rapid technological development. Indeed, during the past 20 years we have created a foundation for the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution based on the wide use of AI and automation and robotics. The coronavirus pandemic has greatly accelerated such projects and their implementation.

However, this process is leading to new structural changes, I am thinking in particular of the labour market. This means that very many people could lose their jobs unless the state takes effective measures to prevent this. Most of these people are from the so-called middle class, which is the basis of any modern society.

In this context, I would like to mention the second fundamental challenge of the forthcoming decade – the socio-political one. The rise of economic problems and inequality is splitting society, triggering social, racial and ethnic intolerance. Indicatively, these tensions are bursting out even in the countries with seemingly civil and democratic institutions that are designed to alleviate and stop such phenomena and excesses.

The systemic socioeconomic problems are evoking such social discontent that they require special attention and real solutions. The dangerous illusion that they may be ignored or pushed into the corner is fraught with serious consequences.

In this case, society will still be divided politically and socially. This is bound to happen because people are dissatisfied not by some abstract issues but by real problems that concern everyone regardless of the political views that people have or think they have. Meanwhile, real problems evoke discontent.

I would like to emphasise one more important point. Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, have started playing an increasing role in the life of society. Much is being said about this now, especially regarding the events that took place during the election campaign in the US. They are not just some economic giants. In some areas, they are de facto competing with states. Their audiences consist of billions of users that pass a considerable part of their lives in these eco systems.

In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal for organising technological and business processes. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests. Where is the border between successful global business, in-demand services and big data consolidation and the attempts to manage society at one’s own discretion and in a tough manner, replace legal democratic institutions and essentially usurp or restrict the natural right of people to decide for themselves how to live, what to choose and what position to express freely? We have just seen all of these phenomena in the US and everyone understands what I am talking about now. I am confident that the overwhelming majority of people share this position, including the participants in the current event.

And finally, the third challenge, or rather, a clear threat that we may well run into in the coming decade is the further exacerbation of many international problems. After all, unresolved and mounting internal socioeconomic problems may push people to look for someone to blame for all their troubles and to redirect their irritation and discontent. We can already see this. We feel that the degree of foreign policy propaganda rhetoric is growing.

We can expect the nature of practical actions to also become more aggressive, including pressure on the countries that do not agree with a role of obedient controlled satellites, use of trade barriers, illegitimate sanctions and restrictions in the financial, technological and cyber spheres.

Such a game with no rules critically increases the risk of unilateral use of military force. The use of force under a far-fetched pretext is what this danger is all about. This multiplies the likelihood of new hot spots flaring up on our planet. This concerns us.

Colleagues, despite this tangle of differences and challenges, we certainly should keep a positive outlook on the future and remain committed to a constructive agenda. It would be naive to come up with universal miraculous recipes for resolving the above problems. But we certainly need to try to work out common approaches, bring our positions as close as possible and identify sources that generate global tensions.

Once again, I want to emphasise my thesis that accumulated socioeconomic problems are the fundamental reason for unstable global growth.

So, the key question today is how to build a programme of actions in order to not only quickly restore the global and national economies affected by the pandemic, but to ensure that this recovery is sustainable in the long run, relies on a high-quality structure and helps overcome the burden of social imbalances. Clearly, with the above restrictions and macroeconomic policy in mind, economic growth will largely rely on fiscal incentives with state budgets and central banks playing the key role.

Actually, we can see these kinds of trends in the developed countries and also in some developing economies as well. An increasing role of the state in the socioeconomic sphere at the national level obviously implies greater responsibility and close interstate interaction when it comes to issues on the global agenda.

Calls for inclusive growth and for creating decent standards of living for everyone are regularly made at various international forums. This is how it should be, and this is an absolutely correct view of our joint efforts.

It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a million people, or even the golden billion. This is a destructive precept. This model is unbalanced by default. The recent developments, including migration crises, have reaffirmed this once again.

We must now proceed from stating facts to action, investing our efforts and resources into reducing social inequality in individual countries and into gradually balancing the economic development standards of different countries and regions in the world. This would put an end to migration crises.

The essence and focus of this policy aimed at ensuring sustainable and harmonious development are clear. They imply the creation of new opportunities for everyone, conditions under which everyone will be able to develop and realise their potential regardless of where they were born and are living

I would like to point out four key priorities, as I see them. This might be old news, but since Klaus has allowed me to present Russia’s position, my position, I will certainly do so.

First, everyone must have comfortable living conditions, including housing and affordable transport, energy and public utility infrastructure. Plus environmental welfare, something that must not be overlooked.

Second, everyone must be sure that they will have a job that can ensure sustainable growth of income and, hence, decent standards of living. Everyone must have access to an effective system of lifelong education, which is absolutely indispensable now and which will allow people to develop, make a career and receive a decent pension and social benefits upon retirement.

Third, people must be confident that they will receive high-quality and effective medical care whenever necessary, and that the national healthcare system will guarantee access to modern medical services.

Fourth, regardless of the family income, children must be able to receive a decent education and realise their potential. Every child has potential.

This is the only way to guarantee the cost-effective development of the modern economy, in which people are perceived as the end, rather than the means. Only those countries capable of attaining progress in at least these four areas will facilitate their own sustainable and all-inclusive development. These areas are not exhaustive, and I have just mentioned the main aspects.

A strategy, also being implemented by my country, hinges on precisely these approaches. Our priorities revolve around people, their families, and they aim to ensure demographic development, to protect the people, to improve their well-being and to protect their health. We are now working to create favourable conditions for worthy and cost-effective work and successful entrepreneurship and to ensure digital transformation as the foundation of a high-tech future for the entire country, rather than that of a narrow group of companies.

We intend to focus the efforts of the state, the business community and civil society on these tasks and to implement a budgetary policy with the relevant incentives in the years ahead.

We are open to the broadest international cooperation, while achieving our national goals, and we are confident that cooperation on matters of the global socioeconomic agenda would have a positive influence on the overall atmosphere in global affairs, and that interdependence in addressing acute current problems would also increase mutual trust which is particularly important and particularly topical today.

Obviously, the era linked with attempts to build a centralised and unipolar world order has ended. To be honest, this era did not even begin. A mere attempt was made in this direction, but this, too, is now history. The essence of this monopoly ran counter to our civilisation’s cultural and historical diversity.

The reality is such that really different development centres with their distinctive models, political systems and public institutions have taken shape in the world. Today, it is very important to create mechanisms for harmonising their interests to prevent the diversity and natural competition of the development poles from triggering anarchy and a series of protracted conflicts.

To achieve this we must, in part, consolidate and develop universal institutions that bear special responsibility for ensuring stability and security in the world and for formulating and defining the rules of conduct both in the global economy and trade.

I have mentioned more than once that many of these institutions are not going through the best of times. We have been bringing this up at various summits. Of course, these institutions were established in a different era. This is clear. Probably, they even find it difficult to parry modern challenges for objective reasons. However, I would like to emphasise that this is not an excuse to give up on them without offering anything in exchange, all the more so since these structures have unique experience of work and a huge but largely untapped potential. And it certainly needs to be carefully adapted to modern realities. It is too early to dump it in the dustbin of history. It is essential to work with it and to use it.

Naturally, in addition to this, it is important to use new, additional formats of cooperation. I am referring to such phenomenon as multiversity. Of course, it is also possible to interpret it differently, in one’s own way. It may be viewed as an attempt to push one’s own interests or feign the legitimacy of one’s own actions when all others can merely nod in approval. Or it may be a concerted effort of sovereign states to resolve specific problems for common benefit. In this case, this may refer to the efforts to settle regional conflicts, establish technological alliances and resolve many other issues, including the formation of cross-border transport and energy corridors and so on and so forth.

Friends,

Ladies and gentlemen,

This opens wide possibilities for collaboration. Multi-faceted approaches do work. We know from practice that they work. As you may be aware, within the framework of, for example, the Astana format, Russia, Iran and Turkey are doing much to stabilise the situation in Syria and are now helping establish a political dialogue in that country, of course, alongside other countries. We are doing this together. And, importantly, not without success.

For example, Russia has undertaken energetic mediation efforts to stop the armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, in which peoples and states that are close to us – Azerbaijan and Armenia – are involved. We strived to follow the key agreements reached by the OSCE Minsk Group, in particular between its co-chairs – Russia, the United States and France. This is also a very good example of cooperation.

As you may be aware, a trilateral Statement by Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia was signed in November. Importantly, by and large, it is being steadily implemented. The bloodshed was stopped. This is the most important thing. We managed to stop the bloodshed, achieve a complete ceasefire and start the stabilisation process.

Now the international community and, undoubtedly, the countries involved in crisis resolution are faced with the task of helping the affected areas overcome humanitarian challenges related to returning refugees, rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, protecting and restoring historical, religious and cultural landmarks.

Or, another example. I will note the role of Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United States and a number of other countries in stabilising the global energy market. This format has become a productive example of interaction between the states with different, sometimes even diametrically opposite assessments of global processes, and with their own outlooks on the world.

At the same time there are certainly problems that concern every state without exception. One example is cooperation in studying and countering the coronavirus infection. As you know, several strains of this dangerous virus have emerged. The international community must create conditions for cooperation between scientists and other specialists to understand how and why coronavirus mutations occur, as well as the difference between the various strains.

Of course, we need to coordinate the efforts of the entire world, as the UN Secretary-General suggests and as we urged recently at the G20 summit. It is essential to join and coordinate the efforts of the world in countering the spread of the virus and making the much needed vaccines more accessible. We need to help the countries that need support, including the African nations. I am referring to expanding the scale of testing and vaccinations.

We see that mass vaccination is accessible today, primarily to people in the developed countries. Meanwhile, millions of people in the world are deprived even of the hope for this protection. In practice, such inequality could create a common threat because this is well known and has been said many times that it will drag out the epidemic and uncontrolled hotbeds will continue. The epidemic has no borders.

There are no borders for infections or pandemics. Therefore, we must learn the lessons from the current situation and suggest measures aimed at improving the monitoring of the emergence of such diseases and the development of such cases in the world.

Another important area that requires coordination, in fact, the coordination of the efforts of the entire international community, is to preserve the climate and nature of our planet. I will not say anything new in this respect.

Only together can we achieve progress in resolving such critical problems as global warming, the reduction of forestlands, the loss of biodiversity, the increase in waste, the pollution of the ocean with plastic and so on, and find an optimal balance between economic development and the preservation of the environment for the current and future generations.

My friends,

We all know that competition and rivalry between countries in world history never stopped, do not stop and will never stop. Differences and a clash of interests are also natural for such a complicated body as human civilisation. However, in critical times this did not prevent it from pooling its efforts – on the contrary, it united in the most important destinies of humankind. I believe this is the period we are going through today.

It is very important to honestly assess the situation, to concentrate on real rather than artificial global problems, on removing the imbalances that are critical for the entire international community. I am sure that in this way we will be able to achieve success and befittingly parry the challenges of the third decade of the 21st century.

I would like to finish my speech at this point and thank all of you for your patience and attention.

Thank you very much.

Klaus Schwab: Thank you very much, Mr President.

Many of the issues raised, certainly, are part of our discussions here during the Davos Week. We complement the speeches also by task forces which address some of the issues you mentioned, like not leaving the developing world behind, taking care of, let’s say, creating the skills for tomorrow, and so on. Mr President, we prepare for the discussion afterwards, but I have one very short question. It is a question which we discussed when I visited you in St Petersburg 14 months ago. How do you see the future of European-Russian relations? Just a short answer.

Vladimir Putin: You know there are things of an absolutely fundamental nature such as our common culture. Major European political figures have talked in the recent past about the need to expand relations between Europe and Russia, saying that Russia is part of Europe. Geographically and, most importantly, culturally, we are one civilisation. French leaders have spoken of the need to create a single space from Lisbon to the Urals. I believe, and I mentioned this, why the Urals? To Vladivostok.

I personally heard the outstanding European politician, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, say that if we want European culture to survive and remain a centre of world civilisation in the future, keeping in mind the challenges and trends underlying the world civilisation, then of course, Western Europe and Russia must be together. It is hard to disagree with that. We hold exactly the same point of view.

Clearly, today’s situation is not normal. We need to return to a positive agenda. This is in the interests of Russia and, I am confident, the European countries. Clearly, the pandemic has also played a negative role. Our trade with the European Union is down, although the EU is one of our key trade and economic partners. Our agenda includes returning to positive trends and building up trade and economic cooperation.

Europe and Russia are absolutely natural partners from the point of view of the economy, research, technology and spatial development for European culture, since Russia, being a country of European culture, is a little larger than the entire EU in terms of territory. Russia’s resources and human potential are enormous. I will not go over everything that is positive in Europe, which can also benefit the Russian Federation.

Only one thing matters: we need to approach the dialogue with each other honestly. We need to discard the phobias of the past, stop using the problems that we inherited from past centuries in internal political processes and look to the future. If we can rise above these problems of the past and get rid of these phobias, then we will certainly enjoy a positive stage in our relations.

We are ready for this, we want this, and we will strive to make this happen. But love is impossible if it is declared only by one side. It must be mutual.

Klaus Schwab: Thank you very much, Mr President.

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In their World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.

Viewing the virtual-reality film “Collisions” at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2016. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Diana Johnstone
**in Paris**Special to Consortium News

By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).

In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest coronavirus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.

The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.” We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”

Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.

“Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus … will thus speed the relentless march of automation…” Really?

“The pandemic may increase our anxiety about sitting in an enclosed space with complete strangers, and many people may decide that staying home to watch the latest movie or opera is the wisest option.”

“There are other first round effects that are much easier to anticipate. Cleanliness is one of them. The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.”

This is the voice of would-be Global Governance. From on high, experts decide what the masses ought to want, and twist the alleged popular wishes to fit the profit-making schemes they are peddling. Their schemes center on digital innovation, massive automation using “artificial intelligence,” finally even “improving” human beings by endowing them artificially with some of the attributes of robots: such as problem-solving devoid of ethical distractions.

Engineer-economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, founded his World Economic Forum in 1971, attracting massive sponsorship from international corporations. It meets once a year in Davos, Switzerland – last time in January 2020 and next year in May, delayed because of Covid-19.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum, on Jan. 21, 2015. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A Powerful Lobby

What is it, exactly? I would describe the WEF as a combination capitalist consulting firm and gigantic lobby. The futuristic predictions are designed to guide investors into profitable areas in what Schwab calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)” and then, as the areas are defined, to put pressure on governments to support such investments by way of subsidies, tax breaks, procurements, regulations and legislation. In short, the WEF is the lobby for new technologies, digital everything, artificial intelligence, transhumanism.

It is powerful today because it is operating in an environment of State Capitalism, where the role of the State (especially in the United States, less so in Europe) has been largely reduced to responding positively to the demands of such lobbies, especially the financial sector. Immunized by campaign donations from the obscure wishes of ordinary people, most of today’s politicians practically need the guidance of lobbies such as the WEF to tell them what to do.

In the 20th century, notably in the New Deal, the government was under pressure from conflicting interests. The economic success of the armaments industry during World War II gave birth to a Military-Industrial Complex, which has become a permanent structural factor in the U.S. economy.

It is the dominant role of the MIC and its resulting lobbies that have definitively transformed the nation into State Capitalism rather than a Republic.

The proof of this transformation is the unanimity with which Congress never balks at approving grotesquely inflated military budgets. The MIC has spawned media and Think Tanks which ceaselessly indoctrinate the public in the existential need to keep pouring the nation’s wealth into weapons of war. Insofar as voters do not agree, they can find no means of political expression with elections monopolized by two pro-MIC parties.

The WEF can be seen as analogous to the MIC. It intends to engage governments and opinion manufacturers in the promotion of a “4IR” which will dominate the civilian economy and civilian life itself.

The pandemic is a temporary pretext; the need to “protect the environment” will be the more sustainable pretext. Just as the MIC is presented as absolutely necessary to “protect our freedoms,” the 4IR will be hailed as absolutely necessary to “save the environment” – and in both cases, many of the measures advocated will have the opposite effect.

Public street art on 6th Street in Austin, Texas, depicting the impact of Covid-19 closings. (Leah Rodgers, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

So far, the techno-tyranny of Schwab’s 4IR has not quite won its place in U.S. State Capitalism. But its prospects are looking good. Silicon Valley contributed heavily to the Joe Biden campaign, and Biden hastened to appoint its moguls to his transition team.

But the real danger of all power going to the Reset lies not with what is there, but with what is not there: any serious political opposition.

Can Democracy Be Restored?

The Great Reset has a boulevard open to it for the simple reason that there is nothing in its way. No widespread awareness of the issues, no effective popular political organization, nothing. Schwab’s dystopia is frightening simply for that reason.

The 2020 presidential election has just illustrated the almost total depoliticization of the American people. That may sound odd considering the violent partisan emotions displayed. But it was all much ado about nothing.

There were no real issues debated, no serious political questions raised either about war or about the directions of future economic development. The vicious quarrels were about persons, not policy. Bumbling Trump was accused of being “Hitler,” and Wall Street-beholden Democrat warhawks were described by Trumpists as “socialists.” Lies, insults and confusion prevailed.

A revival of democracy could stem from organized, concentrated study of the issues raised by the Davos planners, in order to arouse an informed public opinion to evaluate which technical innovations are socially acceptable and which are not.

Cries of alarm from the margins will not influence the intellectual relationship of forces. What is needed is for people to get together everywhere to study the issues and develop well-reasoned opinions on goals and methods of future development.

Unless faced with informed and precise critiques, Silicon Valley and its corporate and financial allies will simply proceed in doing whatever they imagine they can do, whatever the social effects.

Serious evaluation should draw distinctions between potentially beneficial and unwelcome innovations, to prevent popular notions from being used to gain acceptance of every “technological advance,” however ominous.

Redefining Issues

The political distinctions between left and right, between Republican and Democrat, have grown more impassioned just as they reveal themselves to be incoherent, distorted and irrelevant, based more on ideological bias than on facts. New and more fruitful political alignments could be built through confrontation with specific concrete issues.

We could take the proposals of the Great Reset one by one and examine them in both pragmatic and ethical terms.

(Bob Mical, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

No. 1 – Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a great increase in the use of teleconferences, using Skype, Zoom or other new platforms. The WEF welcomes this as a trend. Is it bad for that reason? To be fair, this innovation is positive in enabling many people to attend conferences without the expense, trouble and environmental cost of air travel. It has the negative side of preventing direct human contact. This is a simple issue, where positive points seem to prevail.

No. 2 – Should higher education go online, with professors giving courses to students via internet? This is a vastly more complicated question, which should be thoroughly discussed by educational institutions themselves and the communities they serve, weighing the pros and cons, remembering that those who provide the technology want to sell it, and care little about the value of human contact in education – not only human contact between student and professor, but often life-determining contacts between students themselves. Online courses may benefit geographically isolated students, but breaking up the educational community would be a major step toward the destruction of human community altogether.

No. 3 – Health and “well-being”. Here is where the discussion should heat up considerably. According to Schwab and Malleret: “Three industries in particular will flourish (in the aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness.” For the Davos planners, the three merge.

Those who think that well-being is largely self-generated, dependent on attitudes, activity and lifestyle choices, miss the point. “The combination of AI [artificial intelligence], the IoT [internet of things] and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will model how we are and feel […] precise information on our carbon footprints, our impact on biodiversity, on the toxicity of all the ingredients we consume and the environments or spatial contexts in which we evolve will generate significant progress in terms of our awareness of collective and individual well-being.”

Question: do we really want or need all this cybernetic narcissism? Can’t we just enjoy life by helping a friend, stroking a cat, reading a book, listening to Bach or watching a sunset? We better make up our minds before they make over our minds.

User being monitored in a biometrics lab. (Grish068, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

No. 4 – Food. In order not to spoil my healthy appetite, I’ll skip over this. The tech wizards would like to phase out farmers, with all their dirty soil and animals, and industrially manufacture enhanced artificial foods created in nice clean labs – out of what exactly?

The Central Issue: Homo Faber

No. 5 – What about human work?

“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labor market.”

This replacement has already been underway for decades. Along with outsourcing and immigration, it has already weakened the collective power of labor. But clearly, the tech industries are poised to go much, much further and faster in throwing humans out of work.

The Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have “suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses.”

Cutting labor costs has long been the guiding motive of these innovations, along with the internal dynamic of technology industry to “do whatever it can do.” Then socially beneficial pretexts are devised in justification. Like this:

“As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening with call centers will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.”

“Consumers may prefer…”! Everyone I know complains of the exasperation of trying to reach the bank or insurance company to explain an emergency, and instead to be confronted with a dead voice and a choice of irrelevant numbers to click. Perhaps I am underestimating the degree of hostility toward our fellow humans that now pervades society, but my impression is that there is a vast unexpressed public demand for LESS automated services and MORE contact with real persons who can think outside the algorithm and can actually UNDERSTAND the problem, not simply cough up preprogrammed fixes.

“Corporate agility in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” session held in Tianjin,China, September 2018. (World Economic Forum, Faruk Pinjo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

There is a potential movement out there. But we hear nothing of it, being persuaded by our media that the greatest problem facing people in their daily lives is to hear someone exhibit confusion over someone else’s confused gender.

In this, I maintain, consumer demand would merge with the desperate need of able-minded human beings to earn a living. The technocrats earn theirs handsomely by eliminating the means to earn a living of other people.

Here is one of their great ideas. “In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programs to large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air.” What a great alternative to paying human deliverers a living wage!

And incidentally, a guy riding a delivery bicycle is using renewable energy. But all those robots and drones? Batteries, batteries and more batteries, made of what materials, coming from where and manufactured how? By more robots? Where is the energy coming from to replace not only fossil fuels, but also human physical effort?

At the last Davos meeting, Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari issued a dire warning that:

“Whereas in the past, humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance… Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class’ – not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.”

No. 5 – And the military. Our capitalist prophets of doom foresee the semi-collapse of civil aviation and the aeronautical industry as people all decide to stay home glued to their screens. But not to worry!

“This makes the defense aerospace sector an exception and a relatively safe haven.” For capital investment, that is. Instead of vacations on sunny beaches, we can look forward to space wars. It may happen sooner rather than later, because, as the Brookings Institution concludes in a 2018 report on “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” everything is going faster, including war:

“The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time … thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen. Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action.”

So, no danger that some soft-hearted officer will hesitate to start World War III because of a sentimental attachment to humanity. When the AI platform sees an opportunity, go for it!

“In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail. Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decision-making to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.”

Americans have a choice. Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it.

The future is shaped by investment choices. Not by naughty speech, not even by elections, but by investment choices. For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command over how and for what purposes capital is invested.

And if private capital balks, it must be socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the only way to conserve decent human life. It is what real politics is about.

Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .