I am very sorry to announce that Bilderberg is back on the globalist schedule. Following a three year time-out since its previous meet up during June 2019 in Montreux, Switzerland – an event I covered in extensive detail over a series of seven articles – and on the back of last month’s reconvened WEF Davos conference, Bilderberg gathered for a 66th year; its newest location, the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington D.C.
Encamped about a mile to the south of the White House, a short ride from CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia and a just hop across the Potomac River from The Pentagon, this more shadowy sister summit to Davos had arrived in the capital with plenty to discuss. And with so much going on around the world, Bilderberg conspicuously extended its regular list of ‘key topics’ from the usual ten to a far more impressive fourteen. Although in truth there are basically just three major issues preoccupying the transatlanticist ruling class and all involve wars of one kind or another.
The schematic above is my reinterpretation of this year’s official Bilderberg agenda in the form of a Venn diagram.
With the faltering collapse of US global hegemony, top of their published list are the interrelated concerns over what to do to halt the re-emergence of competing superpowers Russia and China. I wrote an extended article on the subject of escalation against both China and Russia last December entitled “the coming wars with Russia, China and Iran – why the stakes are raised in the last days of the unipolar order” in which I made the following concluding points:
America’s long-term geostrategic repositioning through the stealth expansion of Nato directly up to the borders of Russia and China is now combined with its ever more bellicose political posturing. Repeatedly under the threat of attack, loose defensive alliances have tightened between Russia, China and Iran, so a coordinated response becomes all the more likely. Should the West or Israel (with US consent) take the decision to declare “pre-emptive” war against any one of the three sovereign powers, the realistic expectation is wider war. Given the probable magnitude of a three-pronged retaliation and the genuine potential for a thermonuclear exchange, the prospect of wars against Russia, China and Iran is therefore absolutely unthinkable.
A century ago a detached and callous ruling class led a largely innocent and unwitting generation into the bloody technological hellhole of no-man’s land to slaughter one another for the glory of king and country and, importantly, for the sake of empire. Back then and ever since, we have rightly talked of “lions led by donkeys”. Astonishingly, the donkeys are back in charge again, except that this time around besides an imbecilic and unprincipled political class, we also have an atrophied antiwar opposition, a moribund fourth estate and an endlessly diverted populous, so the worry is that we may be dealing with donkeys virtually all the way down.
So forgive me when I hammer this point: war is in the air again, and not just any old war. WAR with Russia! WAR with Iran! WAR with China! WAR with all three simultaneously!
I make no apologies for my vulgar use of capitals. We all need to shout about this. What’s the alternative?
When Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in February, the stakes were immediately raised of course. In the months that have followed and with the imposition of tough sanctions we have also seen the schism between the West and the rest of the world widen and widen. Furthermore, as the sanctions predictably backfired, the situation for the West (and Europe especially) looks increasingly shambolic with already raging inflation and the likely prospect of fuel shortages. In fact to ameliorate the self-imposed economic damage being caused by its sanctions regime, Europe has quietly sought ways to circumvent their own blockade – this would be laughable were it not for the seriousness.
During this same period events on the ground have also been going badly for Ukraine as the mainstream media is finally starting to confirm, and in response, we are now seeing moves to switch attention and geostrategic policy away from Russia and back on to China; the White House once again stirring up tensions over its longstanding dispute with Taiwan – something I also addressed in greater depth in December’s post.
We must keep in mind that the US is the most militarised power on Earth. It spends more on “defence” than the next ten nations combined! (Far more than both Russia and China together.) Having very recently pulled an occupying force out of Afghanistan, at the present time it remains deeply embroiled in the Saudi war against Yemen, in Somalia and, by proxy, in aiding Ukraine with weapons supplies, training and intelligence. The US also illegally occupies approximately a third of the oil-rich north-eastern territory of Syria. Worldwide there are at least 750 US military bases occupying zones in over 80 countries: a network spanning the Indian and Pacific Ocean and extending into South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.
In 2016, investigative reporter and independent filmmaker John Pilger released a new documentary entitled The Coming War on China saying “The aim of this film is to break a silence: the United States and China may well be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable”:
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, ‘disappeared’, a political embarrassment.
Another shadow now looms over all of us. This film, The Coming War on China, is a warning that nuclear war is not only imaginable, but a ‘contingency’, says the Pentagon. The greatest build-up of Nato military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China as the world’s second economic power is viewed in Washington as another ‘threat’ to American dominance.
To counter this, in 2011, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of all US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific, their weapons aimed at China.
Today, some 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. They form an arc from Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. It is, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.
As the crisis in Ukraine consumes public attention, geopolitical analyst and East Asian specialist Brian Berletic highlights other events unfolding in the background that are potentially leading to a much worse crisis:
*
Meantime, the ruling class has opened up its third front on the domestic populations of the West under the guise of the most open of open ‘conspiracy theories’ – a conspiracy that proudly announces itself on an official WEF website and that brazenly dares to speak its own name: “The Great Reset”.
This blueprint for a hi-tech future that ensures perpetual austerity and mass surveillance is today proselytised and peddled on the basis of ‘fairness’ and ‘sustainability’. As independent researcher and activist Alison McDowell writes:
We’re living in tumultuous times with polarizing political theater and pandemic providing ample cover for the roll out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. From the World Economic Forum’s outpost at San Francisco’s Presidio, the tentacles of dispossession triggered by Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” are rapidly encircling the globe.
We are witnessing the culmination of a century of machinations by western social engineers. We see predatory philanthropy using such euphemistic framing as “Living Cities,” “Healthy Cities,” “Resilient Cities,” and “Build Back Better” to package the profoundly anti-human and anti-life initiatives coming out of Davos as aspirational goals for “smart” living.
The oligarch class asks us to play along and overlook the fact that all of this smartness rests on a foundation of continued growth, fossil-fuel expansion, child labor, toxic waste, and space pollution. They demand we overlook the insatiable energy requirements needed to run the augmented reality Internet of Things illusion. That we put out of our minds the existence of vast data centers cooled 24/7 with the water of a thirsty, poisoned world.
They’ve outdone themselves propagandizing youth to cheer on transnational global capital’s plans to implement a final “green” solution. Though my hope is after months of digital alienation people’s spirits will stir in time to derail the intentions of this cruel biocapitalist regime to push us away from our rightful connection to natural systems and one another and into isolated virtual realms. The spell of faux ICT sustainability must be broken.
Alison McDowell’s presentation embedded above was part of an online forum, “Politics In And Out Of Europe”, hosted by Rutgers University’s Center for European Studies on Monday October 26th 2020. There were two panels followed by an hour of discussion. Alison McDowell was the second presenter, and framing remarks and response was provided by Naomi Klein.
Click here to read the same article interspersed with slides from the full presentation and comments published on Alison Hawver McDowell’s official website Wrench in the Gears on October 27th 2020.
*
At Montreux three years ago, China and Russia were already in the Bilderberg crosshairs (listed third and fourth respectively of the ten ‘key topics’), but away from the Alps this year’s backdrop has significantly darkened. From 2019’s rather optimistic tone of “A Stable Strategic Order” and “What Next for Europe?” we move instead to talk of “Geopolitical Realignments”, “Disruption of the Global Financial System” and “NATO Challenges” for which we are impelled to read more straightforwardly “sanctions and war”. This is what happens when empires fall, the Anglo-American oligarchs now desperate to prop up theirs by any means necessary.
As spectacular evidence of the rapid decline in US regional power, this week leaders across Latin America boycotted the ninth Summit of the Americas that was held in Los Angeles. Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said the move was in solidarity with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua who were not invited to attend:
*
Yet arguably the most striking item in this year’s ‘key topics’ is literally tucked away at the very heart of their list: number 7: “Continuity of Government and the Economy”. For those unfamiliar with the term ‘continuity of government’ (COG) I have supplied a description below which is actually the opening paragraph to the current Wikipedia entry on the subject:
Continuity of government (COG) is the principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of a catastrophic event such as nuclear war. [highlight retained]
It seems Bilderberg are surreptitiously warning that the lights are blinking red. And sooner than we might suppose, as the crises start to pile up, and people across the entire world (including the most prosperous regions in Europe and North America) are made desperate for food and energy, drastic contingency measures will need to be instituted. States of emergency. Martial law. Or worse. How else do we translate this most central item on last weekend’s Bilderberg agenda?
***
A council of war
This year’s press release is characteristically terse and last minute (doubtless to keep the crowds at bay) and reliably the corporate media with so many close ties to Bilderberg have mostly failed to mention any of it. In fact this year’s British media cohort included Bilderberg stalwart Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist accompanied by colleague and defence editor, Shashank Joshi as well as Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator at The Financial Times. One reliable exception to the general rule of media silence was maverick journalist Charlie Skelton, and he trotted out a brief report smuggled inside the Guardian. Writing on Saturday [June 4th] as the meeting kicked off, Skelton begins:
Bilderberg is back with a vengeance. After a pandemic gap of two years, the elite global summit is being rebooted in a security-drenched hotel in Washington DC, with a high-powered guest list that includes the heads of Nato, the CIA, GCHQ, the US national security council, two European prime ministers, a healthy sprinkle of tech billionaires, and Henry Kissinger.
Skelton’s tidy overview of this year’s list of participants is worth fleshing out a little bit more. For instance, the two aforementioned European PMs were Mark Rutte of the Netherlands (a perennial Bilderberg attendee) and, more noteworthy, Sanna Marin of Finland. Strictly off-the-record, devoid of public oversight or media scrutiny, Marin was doubtless engaged in frequent discussions with head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg about the terms and conditions for membership (generally about 3% of GDP channelled into weapons procurement). This is how open democracy functions today in Finland as in the rest of the western world.
Skelton writes:
The summit is heaving with experts in Russia and Ukraine, including the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, and ex-deputy national security adviser Nadia Schadlow, who has a seat on the elite steering committee of Bilderberg.
The conference room is rigged up with video screens for shy dignitaries to make a virtual attendance, and it’s highly likely that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will Zoom in for a T-shirted contribution to the talks. Just a few days beforehand, Zelenskiy met with a Bilderberg and US intelligence representative Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, the infamous CIA-funded surveillance and data analysis company.
Palantir, which was set up by billionaire Bilderberg insider Peter Thiel, has agreed to give “digital support” to the Ukrainian army, according to a tweet by the country’s deputy prime minister.
The participant list is rife with military advisers, one of which is a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and some hefty cogs from the Washington war machine. Among the heftiest is James Baker, head of the ominous sounding office of net assessment.
Another very high profile politician on the list is Canadian Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, a member of the WEF’s Board of Trustees and a person many see as the power behind the throne of the Trudeau government. The granddaughter of a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, Freeland was banned by Moscow in 2014. Given her background it isn’t very hard to understand Freeland’s virulent Russophobia or why she was behind the organisation of the so-called Lima Group with its goal of overthrowing Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolas Maduro. At Bilderberg she came to rub elbows with Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, and the CEO of Naftogaz, the state-owned Ukrainian oil and gas company.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal spoke with comedian Jimmy Dore about his own attempt to investigate last weekend’s meeting in Washington DC:
*
Within the ranks of this year’s participants there were also three senior politicians from the UK. With Boris Johnson days numbered (as I predicted as far back as December 2020!), and Bilderberg’s prodigious historic record as kingmakers (something I have previously documented – a summary also provided below), could it be that Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Tom Tugendhat who marks his second appearance at Bilderberg is finally being groomed for higher office? It is also curious that Michael Gove made a Bilderberg debut. Gove memorably stabbed Boris Johnson in the back in a bid for power during the 2016 Tory leadership contest that he eventually lost to Theresa May. So are we about to see him throw his hat into the ring once again?
Less high profile was the attendance of Labour’s David Lammy. Nominally on the left of the party, his Bilderberg appearance coincides with an invitation of the no less outwardly progressive Democrat Senator, Kyrsten Sinema as well as the reappearance of Mary Kay Henry, who by day is the international president of Service Employees International Union.
We must be aware that Bilderberg (and Davos too) functions along cross-party lines, seeking constantly to straddle some kind of dreamed up political ‘centre’. The ruling class is able to do this by being reactionary and progressive at one and the same time: reactionary in promoting their special interests and protecting the status quo, yet genuinely progressive not only by adapting to the times but in quite deliberately shaping our collective future.
For this secondary reason, a burgeoning contingent go there as representatives of the ever-more powerful tech sector; this year’s roll call featured Bilderberg everpresents Eric Schmidt (chairman of Google), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of Inflection AI and partner of Greylock), and Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies), who were also joined by Yann LeCun (vice-president and chief AI scientist at Facebook); Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder of DeepMind) and Kevin Scott (chief technology officer at Microsoft Corporation)
Of course, the crises we face are a direct consequence of comparatively recent policies. The stagflation was caused by economic mismanagement that stems from the bailouts and misguided policy of QE that was used to tackle the 2008 financial collapse and then pursued more vigorously since the lockdowns and additional bailouts following the covid pandemic. However neoliberal failures can actually be traced further back to the deindustrialisation of western societies.
Meanwhile, the looming prospect of energy and (potentially) food shortages is mostly due to the geopolitical boomerang of sanctions that were intended to cause a regime change in Moscow – sanctions that have evidently failed in every regard. Leaving such details aside, however, late-stage capitalism has been in crisis for at least three decades and the plutocrats at Davos and Bilderberg are perfectly well aware of this fact. So the underlying purpose of WEF’s “Great Reset” is to manage the technologically-driven socioeconomic changes, accepting that change is unavoidable, in order to ensure maximal benefit for the corporations and the oligarchs who own them.
Reminding us of the close ties between Bilderberg and Davos, Skelton points to this matter succinctly:
Bilderberg is sometimes dismissed as a talking shop or crazed imagining of conspiracy theorists. But in reality it is a major diplomatic summit, attended this year as ever by extremely senior transatlantic politicians, from the US commerce secretary to the president of the European Council.
Many consider it an older, less flashy Davos, staged annually by the World Economic Fund. The two events have a good bit in common: namely, three WEF trustees at this year’s conference, and Klaus Schwab, the grisly head of Davos, is a former member of Bilderberg’s steering committee. His “Great Reset” looms large over the Washington conference, with “Disruption of the Global Financial System” at the heart of the agenda.
Concluding his article:
[H]olding court at the hotel bar will be Klaus Schwab’s mentor, Henry Kissinger.
Incredibly, Kissinger, 99, has been attending Bilderbergs since 1957.
The prince of realpolitik has been the ideological godfather of Bilderberg for as long as anyone can remember. And he’s recently co-authored a book, The Age of AI, with Bilderberg steering committee member Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, and this year’s Washington conference is noticeably rammed with AI luminaries, from Facebook’s Yann LeCun to DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.
Bilderberg knows that however the global realignments play out, and whatever a reset global financial system looks like, the shape of the world will be determined by big tech. And if the endgame is “Continuity of Government”, as the agenda suggests, that continuity will be powered by AI.
Whatever billionaire ends up making the software that runs the world, Bilderberg aims to make damned sure that it has its hand on the mouse.
Click here to read Charlie Skelton’s full article entitled “Bilderberg reconvenes in person after two-year pandemic gap: The Washington conference, a high-level council of war, will be headlined by Jen Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general” published in the Guardian on June 4th.
*
As a further insight into the comings and goings at this year’s meeting, here is my categorised guide to the more mentionable delegates:
First, the three intelligence chiefs alluded to in Skelton’s article are Jake Sullivan, director of National Security Council; William Burns, director of CIA; and Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ. They were joined by the director of France’s external intelligence agency, General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), Bernard Émié; Jen Easterly, the director of US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and seasoned Bilderberger, the former chief of MI6 (2009–2014), John Sawers.
Beside the Prime Ministers of Finland and the Netherlands, the political contingent also included Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Wopke Hoekstra; Belgian minister for energy, Tinne Van der Straeten, alongside Polish MEP, Radoslaw Sikorski, the husband of fellow attendee, Anne Applebaum, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a rabid neo-con commentator who routinely calls for war on Russia in her columns for the Washington Post and The Atlantic magazine. In addition there were two top level EU representatives: vice-president of European Commission, Margaritis Schinas and president of European Council, Charles Michel, who is Bilderberg returnee – first invited in 2018 when he was Belgian Prime Minister.
Lastly, a mention to a handful of the usual suspects in attendance: Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis and their close associate David Petraeus (chairman of KKR Global Institute); the chairman of Goldman Sachs International, José Manuel Barroso (no globalist shindig runs without top-level representation from ‘the squid’)… oh, and also just along for the craic, the one and only (presumably) King of the Netherlands!
Click here to read the reliably incomplete official list of participants as published on the Bilderberg website.
Correction:
In the original version it was incorrectly stated that the CIA HQ is at Arlington, Virginia when the correct location is a few miles north at Langley, Virginia.
*
List of western leaders previously groomed by Bilderberg:
Gerald Ford attended Bilderberg 1964, 1966 appointed as US President 1974
Margaret Thatcher attended Bilderberg (at least 1975, 1977, 1986) became Prime Minister 1979
Bill Clinton attended Bilderberg 1991 became US President 1993
Tony Blair attended Bilderberg 1993 became Prime Minister 1997
Paul Martin attended Bilderberg 1996 became Prime Minister of Canada 2003
Stephen Harper attended Bilderberg 2003 became Prime Minister of Canada 2006
Angela Merkel attended Bilderberg 2005 became Chancellor of Germany (Nov) 2005
Emmanuel Macron attended Bilderberg 2014 became President 2017 *
Alison McDowell is a mother and an independent researcher based in Philadelphia, PA. She blogs at the intersection of race, finance, nature, and technology at wrenchinthegears.com.
Her activism began fighting to slow the privatisation of public education in her city. These efforts eventually led her to an examination of globalized poverty management, euphemistically known as social impact investing. This new form of capitalism – biocapitalism or stakeholder capitalism – aims to turn humans into data commodities.
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has been planned out by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, seeks to replace human labor with artificial intelligence and robotics, a problem has arisen as to how life can be made profitable for transnational global capital interests once the poor have no buying power and are drowning in debt. The solution?
Human capital bond markets, but first everyone must be tagged and trackable for “impact.” That’s where biometric Covid health passports come in. Alison welcomes curious engagement and fellow travelers. You can follow her on Twitter at @philly852.
Alison McDowell’s presentation embedded above was part of an online forum, Politics In And Out Of Europe, hosted by Rutgers University’s Center for European Studies on Monday October 26th 2020. There were two panels followed by an hour of discussion. Alison McDowell was the second presenter, and framing remarks and response was provided by Naomi Klein. A full transcript is provided in the addendum below.
Click here to read the transcript in its original form interspersed with slides from the full presentation with comments beneath as it was published by Alison Hawver McDowell on her official website Wrench in the Gears on October 27th 2020.
***
To mark ten year’s blogging, reproduced below is the sixth of my re-uploads from the WoC archive. Originally posted on August 7th 2011, if you tolerate this… looked into the creeping rollout of biometrics in society, in particular in schools thoughout the United Kingdom, and the central role played by Serco.
*
My eldest nephew is very excited at the moment. He has just turned eleven and is about to move to his new secondary school. Anyway, a few weeks ago, my sister showed me a letter she’d received via the assistant head at her son’s new school. It read:
“Dear Parent/Carer,
I am pleased to inform you that we will be installing biometric fingerprint readers at the – – – School as part of the catering system.”
“Pleased to inform you… as part of the catering system!”, I parroted back, as my sister read on from the briefing, my own voice rising with incredulity. “They’re fingerprinting the kids to help with the catering?!”
“Yes, but he’s not going to have his fingerprints taken”, she assured me, “they’re not going to treat him like a prisoner. It’s not compulsory…” And she then read on:
“This will enable students to get their dinners more quickly by speeding up the payments process. It will also mean that they can put cash into the system (via paying in machines, like a ticket machine) whenever it suits them so that they do not have to carry cash around with them all day…”
I interrupted again: “But you could do that with a card or something.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, “that’s the alternative option…” And then continuing from the letter:
“Swipe cards can be issued as an alternative to the finger scanning however these can obviously be lost, forgotten or stolen.”
“So what are the other parents thinking?” I asked her.
“There are a few of us refusing but mostly they think it’s just a good idea.”
“Do you know what company’s behind it?” I asked.
“No, but there are some notes on the back…” And she turned the letter over to show me, adding: “perhaps you can check it out”.
On the back of the letter, there is indeed “information” about the biometric system being installed. Information that explains why: “students, parents and staff can rest assured that the fingerprint images cannot be used by any other source for identification purposes”, because “the software turns your child’s fingerprint into a mathematical algorithm” and about how “the image of the fingerprint is then discarded”.
What the notes fail to mention, however, is that this kind of “processing” is standard procedure when recording any kind of digital biometrics. With “image capture” followed by “feature extraction” leading finally to “digital representation”, data compression is an inevitability, but that’s okay so long as in this processing the “vital information” isn’t lost. The important thing is that “the encoded information is functionally as unique as the original, and as easily processed, i.e., compared.”
How do I know this? In part because I’ve just read through Chapter 8 of the Defense Science Board Task Force report on biometrics (p35–6) published in September 2006. Not that a report from the US Department of Defense has anything to do with the installation of a catering system at a school in Sheffield, obviously…
So the fact that “the information stored cannot be used to recreate an image of the child’s fingerprint”, as the notes on the back of the letter explain, is actually beside the point. The actual point being that they can be used to identify the child, because the information is still “as functionally unique as the original”. To put all this another way, a photograph cannot be used to reconstruct a perfect 3-D likeness of your head. There is a loss of information. But that obviously doesn’t mean a photograph can’t be used to identify you. It can, and even when still more information is removed, by let’s say photocopying it a few times, a photo will still retain a sufficiently detailed likeness to identify you. Biometrics are just the next step down. The original photo can be deleted, just so long as sufficient details are retained of, for example, how wide your mouth is and how close together your eyes are. With enough of the right pieces of information, they can distinguish one person from another, reliably and consistently. Which is how biometrics works.
All of this biometric information, “the unique digital signatures” are then held in the database, as the notes on the letter from school also explain. Less clear is who actually owns this database. And skipping through the other details on the back of the letter, I can’t immediately find the name of the company involved, but it does give the brand name of their “cashless catering system”, which is IMPACT. So I looked up IMPACT:
“A million users in over 1700 schools throughout the UK.
We design, build and maintain industry leading, reliable and functional cashless payment systems under the brand name IMPACT…”
Here begins the sales pitch on the homepage of CRB Solutions. Never heard of them? Nor had I. Well, it turns out that they are a “Serco Learning Partner”, one of many. Indeed, Serco have more than 20 current “Learning Partners” offering “solutions” to “clients” (i.e., schools and colleges across the country), which means they have access to a lot of biometric and other kinds of data on school pupils and college students. For instance, listed directly above CRB Solutions, there is Aurora Computer Services, who are:
“The UK market leader in face recognition. faceREGISTER is designed for sixth form registration or whole school lateness. faceREGISTER enables students to register automatically in school, college or university.”
Gone are the days, apparently, when teachers simply remembered their student’s faces. Now whenever a student is late:
“they will be asked for a reason why they are late and these marks are fed back to Serco Facility via our administration software faceMANAGER.”
Those of a more curious disposition are perhaps wondering what other kinds of personal information is downloaded at the “Serco Facility”. In fact, what other kinds of information more generally, since Serco already offers its services in sectors as diverse as environmental services, health, science, transport, local government, welfare to work, defence and nuclear. Nuclear? Yes, nuclear:
“We support the operation of over 20 nuclear reactors, and serve as the lead nuclear safety advisor to Westinghouse, designer of the AP1000 nuclear reactor currently under assessment for the UK’s new civil nuclear programme.” 1
That and the management of the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), which Serco says is the leading nuclear technology services provider in the UK, “with expertise across the full range of nuclear technology, including waste management, nuclear safety and non-proliferation, materials and corrosion and plant inspection.” So that’s pretty comprehensive. Aside from this, Serco also manages the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as part of a consortium with Lockheed Martin and Jacobs. So the company behind the introduction of school biometrics systems across the country is also responsible for managing the UK atomic power and weapons programmes:
“Serco has a reputation for being a tad secretive. This is perhaps not surprising, as it manages the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire, where nuclear weapons are made, and runs the ballistic missile early warning system.
There are parts of AWE that even the head of the company, Kevin Beeston, can’t go into. Other secrets, too, are kept from him, such as where the company stores evidence on behalf of the National Crime Squad. “I don’t need to know or want to know,” he says.” 2
So begins an article entitled “Serco thunders down the tracks: Traffic lights, rail services, atomic weapons, the time of day. This secretive company manages them all” from the Independent on Sunday, published in March 2002. The article goes on:
“While many people haven’t heard of Serco, almost everyone in this country will have come across its services. It is Serco that runs the speed cameras on the M25, and maintains the traffic signals on a third of motorways in the UK. Half of London’s traffic lights are run by Serco, as are all the signals in Dublin. Manchester’s tram service, Metrolink, and London’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR) are both Serco-operated. When you ring National Rail Enquiries, you will speak to a Serco employee. The company has also built hospitals and prisons.
“In fact, Serco is so ubiquitous, it even sets the time. It manages the National Physical Laboratory, which owns the atomic clock that gives us Greenwich Mean Time.
“You’d be forgiven for thinking Serco was a government ministry.”
This article was published almost a decade ago and yet Serco‘s involvement in running public services was so large and far-flung that comparison is already being made to “a government ministry”. So just how did Serco manage to expand so rapidly and yet so inconspicuously? Well, here’s a brief overview of their rise and rise, taken from the same article:
“As well as having a novel corporate culture, Serco also has an intriguing history. It started out in 1929 as the UK maintenance division of RCA, at the time a cinema and radio equipment company. In the late Fifties it got its first taste of top-secret government contracts. The Ministry of Defence needed a radio equipment specialist to design, build and run the four-minute warning system for nuclear attacks. RCA got the job and has been maintaining it since.
“But it was in the early Eighties that the government-related business really started taking off. Beeston takes up the story: ‘Mrs Thatcher had come in power in 1979 and began reducing public sector costs on a tax-reduction agenda and carrying out privatisation. One of biggest areas that was first turned to contractualisation was the Ministry of Defence.’
“Happily for Serco, Thatcher’s successors, John Major and Tony Blair, both exhibited a fondness for getting the private sector involved in the public sector.”
Click here to read the full article by Heather Tomlinson.
Four years later and Serco were already being talked of as “probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, as a glowing profile of their CEO Christopher Hyman in the Guardian explained:
“Have you recently travelled on a train in northern England? Or on London’s Docklands Light Railway? Or perhaps been caught by a speed camera?
“If the answer to any of these questions was yes — or you have spent any time in custody or the armed forces — chances are you have dealt with the support services company Serco. With almost 48,000 people helping to service 600 largely public-sector contracts around the world, Serco is probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” 3
No longer a small British subsidiary of a little known American corporation, by 2006, when the article above was published, Serco had gone global. Here, for instance, is taste of what Serco are already running in Canada, Ireland, Dubai, and Australia these days:
Taken from ABC Australia’s Hungry Beast. [Link has since been removed]
Rebranded with Olympian titles, we are familiar with the names of most of our new gods: Blackwater and DynCorp, gods of war and reconstruction; Monsanto, god of harvests; Nokia, god of messages; Walmart, god of convenience; Aviva, god of life (insurance); but then, above and beyond all of these, there is Serco, the god of all the things the other gods don’t already do. A god without portfolio, and although not quite omnipresent, Serco is certainly “highly maneuverable”. As their own bragging PR likes to put it: “Serco has a finger in many pies”.
Now, having reached this point I realise that I have drifted well away from the original issue. My initial response to reading the letter from my nephew’s school having been to wonder at the kind of country we are living in. Already the most surveilled society in history, and now face-scanning and fingerprinting our children on a routine basis. In the process, as my sister says, we are already treating them as if they’re little criminals. Is it really necessary to hammer home the point here?
For we may believe this data can and will never be retrieved for uses beyond the bounds of the schools and colleges involved, but in permitting such licence we are nevertheless inculcating a sense of naïve trust in the next generation, which will normalise them to accept adult life in a surveillance society. We are teaching them to submit to authority. The word Orwellian is very overworked, but what other word can be applied in this instance? We are fingerprinting our children and entrusting that information to the major government defence contractor. And there is barely a raised eyebrow. Parents are mostly thinking that this is “helpful”. So please, if you haven’t done so already, read Nineteen Eighty-Four (not that Orwell has anything to say about fingerprint or face recognition systems, because back in the 1940s such hi-tech digital biometrics had yet to be imagined, let alone invented).
So what kind of a world awaits my nephew and his friends when he finally leaves school in five years time? Well, that will depend.
The road ahead is already laid. As our national assets and provision of our state sector were stolen away, Serco, and a few other giant corporations, absorbed the new workforce and took over. And now, as ours and other economies around the world begin to splutter and flail, they are about to suck up whatever remains at bargain prices. Finally, they will put up their toll-booths at every turn of our daily lives, and in the envisaged “cashless society”, these toll-booths will also be our checkpoints — logging every transaction and every movement.
History ought to have taught us to beware, its overriding message being that the rise of tyranny needs to be constantly guarded against. But those, like Thatcher and Reagan, who rushed us away from more direct forms of centralised government (supposedly to save us from a Soviet style tyranny) have delivered us instead into the talons of an unregulated and monopolised market. Any distinction between interests of the state and the corporations having thus been eroded, the takeover by multinationals such as Serco has been unstoppable. After all, someone has to be in charge of things. Serco then (and the pantheon of other corporate gods we must increasingly bow to) amounts to governance by another title, and not merely at a national scale, but transnationally — a few corporations becoming, in effect, arms of an unelected and largely unaccountable “global governance”.
This shift away from democracy and towards neo-feudalism is happening in plain sight. You even get the picture from Serco‘s own PR material — the closing overlapping mosaic of corporate heads in their latest video simultaneously and hypnotically announcing: “we are Serco”; with the eerie subtext being that “resistance is futile”. But resistance isn’t futile, not yet…
If you’d like further information about this widening programme of school biometrics then I direct you to a worthwhile campaign group called Leave Them Kids Alone (LTKA) that is calling for a stop to this latest encroachment upon our civil liberties, or rather, the civil liberties of our children.
*
Addendum: The full transcript of Alison McDowell’s presentation
We’re living in tumultuous times with polarizing political theater and pandemic providing ample cover for the roll out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. From the World Economic Forum’s outpost at San Francisco’s Presidio, the tentacles of dispossession triggered by Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” are rapidly encircling the globe.
We are witnessing the culmination of a century of machinations by western social engineers. We see predatory philanthropy using such euphemistic framing as “Living Cities,” “Healthy Cities,” “Resilient Cities,” and “Build Back Better” to package the profoundly anti-human and anti-life initiatives coming out of Davos as aspirational goals for “smart” living.
The oligarch class asks us to play along and overlook the fact that all of this smartness rests on a foundation of continued growth, fossil-fuel expansion, child labor, toxic waste, and space pollution. They demand we overlook the insatiable energy requirements needed to run the augmented reality Internet of Things illusion. That we put out of our minds the existence of vast data centers cooled 24/7 with the water of a thirsty, poisoned world.
They’ve outdone themselves propagandizing youth to cheer on transnational global capital’s plans to implement a final “green” solution. Though my hope is after months of digital alienation people’s spirits will stir in time to derail the intentions of this cruel biocapitalist regime to push us away from our rightful connection to natural systems and one another and into isolated virtual realms. The spell of faux ICT sustainability must be broken.
Predatory debt-finance got a spit and polish makeover, rebranded as circular economies and stakeholder capitalism to make it more palatable. Post-Covid, vast poverty mining enterprises will emerge from the ashes. Smart city sensor networks, predictive policing, and public-private partnerships will latch onto shell-shocked families trying to pick up the pieces.
And while Bitcoin-loving Agorists dream of liberation on Blockchain, central bankers have an entirely different vision in mind. They are conjuring a future of data flowing through digital wallets, fuel for an emergent social impact economy, one carefully plotted out for Third Sector, now Fourth Sector, implementation by Social Finance and Sir Ronald Cohen, Harvard Business School graduate and father of UK venture capital.
Bloomberg Philanthropies Digital Innovation Project and the Global Parliament of Mayors based out of The Hague will ensure gov-tech and open data platforms are ready to deliver all the data that is needed. Conveniently, a new “operating system for government” developed by Neil Kleiman of NYU’s GovLab and Stephen Goldsmith of Harvard Kennedy School’s Data-Smart City Solutions, will permit politicians to deftly shift accountability for devastating policies onto faceless cadres of analysts. Dashboards are effective weapons to sway populations conditioned for compliance. It’s difficult to effectively direct public sentiment against something as ephemeral as an algorithm.
The war on terror has been swapped out for pandemic preparedness, which should work out well for the World Bank’s efforts to grow their vaccine and pandemic bond markets. We all pose threats to state security simply by living in a human body. Robot police dogs, drones, facial recognition cameras, wearable sensors, and biometric tracking are framed vital investments needed to keep communities “safe” in what is rapidly becoming a global open air prison. Track and trace free-range humans; look to industrial farming; look to wildlife management; look to Gaza; look to The Commons Project.
CommonPass isn’t their only venture. Not by a long shot.
It’s not just air travel that the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Economic Forum intend to regulate. In their imagined future, presentation of tokenized credentials will be required to go to work, to school, to the store, to access public buildings and events. Such micro-management was unfathomable mere months ago, at least to everyone not in on the scheme.
When we speak of politics, when we speak of citizens’ rights this is THE game changer. Who voted in Common Pass? Who decided individual liberties will now be governed by apps advanced by corporations that stand to profit from population management?
How relevant will national borders be in an age of real-time geo-fencing? Pass laws have long been used to control targeted populations: on Indian reservations, in Nazi Germany, in Apartheid South Africa. Now we have Serco. Now we have legal discrimination based on health status? In the global biosecurity state on any given day the border could very well end up being your front door.
If we don’t object, moving forward blockchain tokens representing all sorts of digital assets, including rights and privileges, will be held in digital accounts. Social entrepreneurs need these biometric identity systems in place in order to install their planned impact economy. Using health status as an issue of national security, our hijacked governments plan to impose this upon us, not for our own good, but because the biocapitalist agenda must proceed.
Few realize it, but the Covid drama is providing cover for a far more insidious program of perpetual tracking and tracing tied to health management and Sustainable Development Goal 3. Health data will create new equity markets meaning more and more wearable tech surveillance. The Impact Management Project’s practitioners, the asset holders whose greed led to a world beset by chronic illness, have structured profit centers in Internet of Things preventative care – social determinants of health weaponized.
What we are living through is not a public health emergency but a reset of the global economy managed from Davos on behalf of the finance, technology and defense sectors. This “new normal” is totalitarianism wrapped up in a shiny “green” bow.
The post-Covid world will be characterized by welfare dependency on a scale heretofore unimaginable, justifying the creation of innovative human capital debt products. Portfolios of people, poor people, will emerge as a new asset class enabled by pay for success government contracts.
Education, training, healthcare, counseling, nutrition, and housing services all aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals to generate the metrics needed to satisfy contractual obligations. The richness of life narrowed to fit the stingy confines of a data analyst’s worldview.
This is a diagram featuring a digital wallet where food assistance funds are stored on blockchain with coded nudges guiding a recipient’s food purchase behaviors.
The State of Illinois Blockchain Task Force developed this thought experiment, but similar digital food payment programs are in use to manage the displaced. UK company IrisGuard’s is a major player in that space. Additional NHS has made arrangements to purchase DNA nudge bands tied to Covid Testing. Makes you wonder where the DNA from the testing is going, doesn’t it? Likely into academic tech-transfer hubs. Such is biocapitalism.
Stakeholder capitalists can’t profitably mine poverty without biometric identification that can be used to aggregate interoperable data. Vaccine registries are central to this program. GAVI is a key player with Gates sitting at the pinnacle of the Stakeholder Capitalist pyramid. ID2020 efforts running through the United Nations will ensure no one “gets left behind,” but few are aware the US Department of Homeland Security bankrolled much of the World Wide Web Consortium’s work in the digital identity space.
As I prepared these remarks I couldn’t help but mull over the intelligence communities’ interest in signals intelligence, weaponized narrative, simulation, predictive modeling, and social contagion. How will our collective voices ripple through this militarized cloud architecture into the general consciousness and beyond? Such are the thoughts that haunt the corners of a Zoom consciousness – Bluffdale and the NSA always out on the horizon, you know?
But those with eyes to see have the duty to speak.
So I am here today as a mother.
I am here as a mapper of geographies of power, as a voracious LinkedIn profile reader, and a viewer of obscure government webinars.
I am here as a resident of Philadelphia, a “smart” city set up for predatory “what works” “data-driven” government.
I am here to shine a light on municipal nudge units funded by self-interested foundations seeking to replace civil servants with apps that manage citizens as agents in behavioral economic equations.
I am here as a human relative living among a multitude of non-human beings on this beautiful earth, not yet remade as a planetary computer to profit social impact investors.
I am here as a lover of stars who opposes the weaponization of space, the atmosphere, and our weather systems.
I am here as a voice for peace who views 5G and the planned 6G installation as a domestic military occupation.
I am here to speak of Davos’s plans to deny us the opportunity to communally atone for and begin to remedy the devastation capitalism has wrought against nature and indigenous people.
I am here because we have entered a cyborg era in which sociopathic billionaires and defense contractors want to fundamentally alter what it means to be human, tapping nano-technology and morally bankrupt scientists to do their dirty work.
To the wealth hoarders, the masses exist as nodes in the Internet of Bodies, nodes that must be separated from the cosmic dance through force of law, hydro-gel biosensors, and blockchain.
Will you own your ledger or will your ledger own you? We are looking at a future where the masses will forfeit their innate human freedoms in exchange for the behavioral currency needed to survive within the panopticon.
Human capital bonded. Each life calculated according to its perceived burden on the coming robot society, at least in the eyes of hedge fund traders as they place their bets.
Don’t worry there’s safety on the “continuum of care” pathway. Just do as you’re told and keep your social credit score where it needs to be.
Every move in every country advances lockstep – a playbook aligned to strategic investments made over decades by philanthro-capitalists like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Steve Ballmer, and Marc Benioff.
Will human rights mean anything once financiers, faith community endowments, health insurers, pensions, and even sovereign wealth funds hold our futures in escrow?
Rockefeller Foundation-funded think tank change agents have cleared the way for life to be railroaded into virtual space – for our own good, the good of the planet, in service of the World Bank’s One Health initiative.
The oligarchs will use the UN Sustainable Development Goals to justify imprisoning the planet using sensor networks. Once the electrical engineers have nature and humanity firmly in their grasp, transnational global capital can channel its concentrated wealth through our bodies, our social relationships, and our non-human kin.
As we stand on this threshold questions must be asked.
Who intends to rule life on Earth?
To what end?
On whose authority?
John Trudell, visionary leader of the American Indian Movement, poet and prophet, expressed that it is our responsibility to use the intelligence gifted to us by the creator to be thinkers who will go up against the machine of tech-no-logic.
So today I am here to declare on behalf of the women of the world to say we do not consent to Davos’s Fourth Industrial Revolution.
In this battle of sacred and profane we stand ready to defend the children and the earth from further predation and to strive towards a future of reciprocity and abundance and spirit.
We stand firm in our power full of love and light, ready to face off against Klaus Schwab’s PharmaColonial Technocracy of Necromancers.
Click here to read the same article interspersed with slides from the full presentation and comments published on Alison Hawver McDowell’s official website Wrench in the Gears on October 27th 2020.
3 From an article entitled “Happy, touchy-feely and driven by God: The Serco chief Christopher Hyman is unusual for his values of doing business, with staff and customers coming first and profit last” by Jane Martinson, published in the Guardian on Friday 24th February, 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/feb/24/columnists.guardiancolumnists
Important note: It is well past the period spanning the end of May and beginning of June when Bilderberg meetings are ordinarily scheduled, so it should be observed that the home page of the official Bilderberg website still declares in bold capitals:
THE MEETING 2020 IS POSTPONED.
It does not say for how long.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
— Frank Zappa
This is the seventh and last of a sequence of articles based around the ‘key topics’ at last year’s Bilderberg conference discussed here in relation to the prevailing political agenda and placed within the immediate historical context.
This piece focuses on issues relating to the future of humanity and including ‘The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence’:
A schematically enhanced version of last year’s ‘key topics’
*
The new normal
In May 2017, Forbes magazine published a piece by financial analyst and writer John Maudlin that bears the prophetic title: “Brace Yourself For ‘The Great Reset’”. Interestingly, the piece is not concerned with climate change or forthcoming pandemics, but simply addresses what Maudlin describes as “the largest twin bubbles in the history of the world”:
These promises add up to hundreds of trillions of dollars. That’s vastly larger than global GDP.
These are real problems we must face. It will mean forging a new social contract. It will also require changes to taxes and the economy. I believe that within the next 5–10 years, we have to end the debt and government promises.
The banking crisis that broke in 2008 has festered ever since; western economies today are continually propped up thanks to vast injections of cheap money: non-stop rounds of quantitative easing with interest rates maintained at levels close to zero. Maudlin was right therefore to forewarn of the ramifications of what have been systematic failures; ones that by the time of publication of his article had already generated a global debt-to-GDP of 325%.
Moreover, he was far from alone in sounding the alarm. As recently as last July, the New York Federal Reserve’s own in-house model, which predicts the probability of a US recession occurring in the next 12 months and is regarded as critical indicator, recorded its highest level since 2009: a reading of 32.9% for June. As Business Insider reported:
“That could mean tough times ahead, considering the measure has breached the 30% threshold before every recession since 1960.” 1
Then in October (still in the months before covid), former Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, went on the record to say that he believed the world was sleepwalking into another crash:
Giving a lecture in Washington at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, King said there had been no fundamental questioning of the ideas that led to the crisis of a decade ago.
“Another economic and financial crisis would be devastating to the legitimacy of a democratic market system,” he said. “By sticking to the new orthodoxy of monetary policy and pretending that we have made the banking system safe, we are sleepwalking towards that crisis.”
He added that the US would suffer a “financial armageddon” if its central bank – the Federal Reserve – lacked the necessary firepower to combat another episode similar to the sub-prime mortgage sell-off. 2
Nor is Maudlin isolated when it comes to questioning whether levels of public spending are sustainable, although here he is necessarily buttressing his own ideological stance and keen to advocate further neoliberal reforms as a matter of unavoidable necessity. Thus, he continues:
What I mean by government promises are pensions and healthcare benefits. 3
Yet beyond the title of Maudlin’s piece, so far his forecast has been rather less than impressive. Instead of policies of stringent austerity, the crisis we now face has in fact resulted in a sudden flood of government spending. It transpires that ‘magic money trees’ aren’t really so hard to find after all.
Moreover, a sizeable fraction of that money has gone directly into the pockets of ordinary people through elaborate schemes set up to compensate for the shutdown of our societies. Meanwhile, a great deal more is being siphoned off into the coffers of global corporations – in America especially, this grand theft has been brazen, whereas in Britain the transfer of public money is a stealthier affair: a prime example being the £100 million wasted on privatised track-and-trace systems run by Serco.
Peter Geoghegan of OpenDemocracy discloses how the Tory government has exploited the coronavirus crisis and handed over multiple millions of pounds of public money in the form of contracts to friends of the party:
Of course, the situation is a temporary one and so the current economic measures are stopgaps, but still this easy availability of public money puts an immediate lie to simplistic arguments that previously justified a decade of austerity. Governments are not constrained to live within their means like households. Austerity is always an ideological choice and never an inescapable inevitability – as I have argued many times before, it is in any case counterproductive because it stifles growth.
That said, historically high levels of government debt do provide a perfect and very nearly irresistible excuse for waves of future austerity and for the sell-off of public assets. This is how disaster capitalism works.
*
On October 7th, economists Michael Hudson and Steve Keen were invited to discuss the current state of western economies and how the so-called ‘K-shaped recovery’ is now dividing the world into haves and have-nots with Peter Lavelle on RT’s Crosstalk.
Michael Hudson explained the ‘new normal’ as follows:
“What has become normal since 2008 has been completely different from the old normal. People have the idea that with ‘normal’ you go back to a balance. But really the economy hasn’t grown at all since the 2008 crisis. All of the growth in GDP, all of the growth in wealth, has accrued to the financial sector, to the real estate sector, and to the one percent. For the ninety-nine percent of the people, they’ve gone down and down and down.
“So the ‘new normal’ is you can’t get rich again by buying housing and joining the middle class like you used to. The ‘new normal’ is paying all of your increase in wages on debt service, in rents, and in monopoly prices. And so the ‘new normal’ is that the market is going to shrink and shrink until we look like Greece looks in the last five years. Think of the ‘new normal’ as looking like Greece: debt deflation and rent deflation.” [from 2:10 mins]
*
The great reset
Today, if you visit the website of the World Economic Forum, you will come across an article by its founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab that likewise calls for “a great reset”. From the main page, there is then a link to what WEF calls its “Great Reset microsite”, where the blurb reads:
As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. Drawing from the vision and vast expertise of the leaders engaged across the Forum’s communities, the Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being.
Time for the Great Reset – screenshot of WEF website
Schwab, a former member of the Bilderberg group steering committee, writes that:
We must use it [the COVID-19 crisis] to secure the Great Reset that we so badly need. That will require stronger and more effective governments, though this does not imply an ideological push for bigger ones. And it will demand private-sector engagement every step of the way.
Dressed up as a synthesis of capitalism and socialism, here the thinly-veiled intention is to amalgamate the worst elements of both systems with an ever-tightening alliance between global corporations and governments, and the replacement of any meaningful representative democracy with greater accountability going instead to so-called “stakeholder” interests. Schwab continues:
The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes. To this end, governments should improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.” At a time of diminishing tax bases and soaring public debt, governments have a powerful incentive to pursue such action.
Combined with these market-orientated reforms the public can also look forward to enjoying “socialism” in the form of restrictions on individual freedom for reasons of “sustainability”, “intellectual property” rights, green taxes, and, within an overarching plan for the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the growth of “smart cities”:
Moreover, governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes. Depending on the country, these may include changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition.
The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. […]
[F]or example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.
The third and final priority of a Great Reset agenda is to harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. 4
Click here to read the full piece by Klaus Schwab entitled “Now is the time for a ‘great reset’”.
*
AI is key to the NWO transformation
Meanwhile, as long ago as April 3rd – albeit with his crystal ball firmly in hand – Bilderberg’s most illustrious war criminal wrote this in an op-ed by The Wall Street Journal:
When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant. The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus.
Adding:
Global leaders have learned important lessons from the 2008 financial crisis. The current economic crisis is more complex: The contraction unleashed by the coronavirus is, in its speed and global scale, unlike anything ever known in history. 5
Kissinger’s solution to this impending crisis when boiled down (and seeing through all of the cant about “ameliorat[ing] the effects of impending chaos on the world’s most vulnerable populations” and “defend[ing] and sustain[ing] their Enlightenment values”) is this: to “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” Where for “liberal” we must read “neo-liberal”, and for “world order” we should prefix with the adjective “new” (as Kissinger himself has done on countless past occasions).
Indeed, here is Kissinger presenting a keynote conversation just last year at the George W. Bush Presidential Center beneath the very title “The New World Order” (not that he elucidates much on what he envisions for the NWO):
Kissinger’s view of ‘the shape of things to come’ might be better gauged from an article published August last year and provocatively entitled “The Metamorphosis” that was co-authored by Bilderberg confederate, former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc and current chair of the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Eric Schmidt, along with fellow techie and former director of Amazon, Daniel Huttenlocher. In it they write:
If AI improves constantly—and there is no reason to think it will not—the changes it will impose on human life will be transformative. Here are but two illustrations: a macro-example from the field of global and national security, and a micro-example dealing with the potential role of AI in human relationships.
The first of these examples relates to the development of new weapons and strategies, and implications for arms control and deterrence. The second is headed simply “Human Contact” and begins as follows:
Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are digital assistants already installed in millions of homes and designed for daily conversation: They answer queries and offer advice that, especially to children, may seem intelligent, even wise. And they can become a solution to the abiding loneliness of the elderly, many of whom interact with these devices as friends.
The more data AI gathers and analyzes, the more precise it becomes, so devices such as these will learn their owners’ preferences and take them into account in shaping their answers. And as they get “smarter,” they will become more intimate companions. As a result, AI could induce humans to feel toward it emotions it is incapable of reciprocating.
Already, people rank their smartphones as their most important possession. They name their Roombas, and attribute intent to them where none exists. What happens when these devices become even more sophisticated? Will people become as attached to their digital pets as to their dogs—or perhaps even more so?
All of which tiptoes very lightly indeed around the major concern when it comes to our routine installation of hi-tech surveillance equipment inside the home; Alexa already far exceeds the intrusion of Orwell’s telescreens in his dystopian nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four – and there is something else to worry about here (mention of it is again buried away in the middle of the text):
AI algorithms will help open new frontiers of knowledge, while at the same time narrowing information choices and enhancing the capacity to suppress new or challenging ideas.
As Eric Schmidt is perfectly well aware, of course, this is precisely what the Google algorithm already does. Social media platforms have also been installing filters to censor content, narrow opinion and condemn us to engage in ever decreasing bubbles of discussion. When one echo chamber then rubs up against another no light is shed, but only increasing levels of heat. Obviously, it isn’t AI as such that narrows and suppresses public debate, but the actions of the tech giants with their more or less unregulated control over content.
Then, finally, they get to the crux of the matter:
The technological capacity of governments to monitor the behavior and movements of tens or hundreds of millions is likewise unprecedented. Even in the West, this quest can, in the name of harmony, become a slippery slope. Balancing the risks of aberrant behavior against limits on personal freedom—or even defining aberrant—will be a crucial challenge of the AI era. 6
But once again, it isn’t AI that defines “aberrant” either, it’s whoever operates the AI and has control over the algorithms – and to understand who that is, I recommend studying the lists of Bilderberg participants throughout the past decade. Ever more prominent amongst the ranks of the great and good you will find many of the biggest names in Silicon Valley – one of whom, Reid Hoffman, also happen to sit on Eric Schimdt’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board alongside owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, “the richest man in modern history”, Jeff Bezos.
*
Klaus Schwab and the fascist new deal
“We are at the threshold of a radical systemic change that requires human beings to adapt continuously. As a result, we may witness an increasing degree of polarization in the world, marked by those who embrace change versus those who resist it.
“This gives rise to an inequality that goes beyond the societal one described earlier. This ontological inequality will separate those who adapt from those who resist—the material winners and losers in all senses of the words. The winners may even benefit from some form of radical human improvement generated by certain segments of the fourth industrial revolution (such as genetic engineering) from which the losers will be deprived. This risks creating class conflicts and other clashes unlike anything we have seen before”
Those who believe the multi-billionaire class of plutocrats who gather annually at Davos and more “privately” at Bilderberg do so in pursuit of “socialism” are either delusional or else miss the point for more deliberate reasons. In fact, the primary agenda set forth by these exclusive clubs is rather more straightforward and perfectly understandable if we adjust to see the world through the jaundiced eyes of its membership. The goal is to forge an ever-tightening relationship between the corporations (which they already own and control) and governments (where political power ultimately resides) until eventually there will be no distinction.
This process of public-private convergence has been underway for many decades with groups like Bilderberg and WEF at the vanguard. If and when the merger they seek is completed, our society will be governed wholly in accordance to a political regime known as corporatism, which is a form of fascism (of the type first implemented by Mussolini).
As Winter Oak explains in a very recent article entitled “Klaus Schwab and his Great Fascist Reset”:
In other words, fascism and socialism (at least ‘state socialism’ which first emerged in the Soviet Union) are superficially similar but mainly because they are both statist, while in other ways they are diametrically opposed. That said, fascists have historically used “socialism” for left-cover, and this trend continues today.
The same article then breaks down how Schwab’s plans for a “stakeholder society” (with its leftist overtones) can be rolled out in order to achieve the kinds of fascist (or corporatist) ends desired:
[I]n 1971 [Schwab] founded the European Management Forum, which held annual meetings at Davos in Switzerland. Here he promoted his ideology of “stakeholder” capitalism in which businesses were brought into closer co-operation with government.
“Stakeholder capitalism” is described by Forbes business magazine as “the notion that a firm focuses on meeting the needs of all its stakeholders: customers, employees, partners, the community, and society as a whole”.
Even in the context of a particular business, it is invariably an empty label. As the Forbes article notes, it actually only means that “firms can go on privately shoveling money to their shareholders and executives, while maintaining a public front of exquisite social sensitivity and exemplary altruism”.
But in a general social context, the stakeholder concept is even more nefarious, discarding any idea of democracy, rule by the people, in favour of rule by corporate interests.
Society is no longer regarded as a living community but as a business, whose profitability is the sole valid aim of human activity.
Schwab set out this agenda back in 1971, in his book Moderne Unternehmensführung im Maschinenbau (Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering), where his use of the term “stakeholders” (die Interessenten) effectively redefined human beings not as citizens, free individuals or members of communities, but as secondary participants in a massive commercial enterprise.
The aim of each and every person’s life was “to achieve long-term growth and prosperity” for this enterprise – in other words, to protect and increase the wealth of the capitalist elite.
Winter Oak then highlights and discusses at length admissions made by Schwab in his writings for public consumption and in particular his 2016 book The Fourth Industrial Revolution [the same term is often abbreviated to 4IR]:
Schwab waxes lyrical about the 4IR, which he insists is “unlike anything humankind has experienced before”.
He gushes: “Consider the unlimited possibilities of having billions of people connected by mobile devices, giving rise to unprecedented processing power, storage capabilities and knowledge access. Or think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing, to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological worlds”.
He also looks forward to more online education, involving “the use of virtual and augmented reality” to “dramatically improve educational outcomes”, to sensors “installed in homes, clothes and accessories, cities, transport and energy networks” and to smart cities, with their all-important “data platforms”.
“All things will be smart and connected to the internet”, says Schwab, and this will extend to animals, as “sensors wired in cattle can communicate to each other through a mobile phone network”.
He loves the idea of “smart cell factories” which could enable “the accelerated generation of vaccines” and “big-data technologies”.
These, he ensures us, will “deliver new and innovative ways to service citizens and customers” and we will have to stop objecting to businesses profiting from harnessing and selling information about every aspect of our personal lives.
“Establishing trust in the data and algorithms used to make decisions will be vital,” insists Schwab. “Citizen concerns over privacy and establishing accountability in business and legal structures will require adjustments in thinking”.
At the end of the day it is clear that all this technological excitement revolves purely around profit, or “value” as Schwab prefers to term it in his 21st century corporate newspeak.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schwab also writes with tremendous enthusiasm about the use of the blockchain (the distributed ledger behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin) and 5G technology, and then, having pronounced that “a world full of drones offers a world full of possibilities”, he spells out what the “revolution” means at a human level, saying “Already, advances in neurotechnologies and biotechnologies are forcing us to question what it means to be human”
The following passage is quoted directly from his more recent book Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2018):
“Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies will not stop at becoming part of the physical world around us—they will become part of us. Indeed, some of us already feel that our smartphones have become an extension of ourselves. Today’s external devices—from wearable computers to virtual reality headsets—will almost certainly become implantable in our bodies and brains. Exoskeletons and prosthetics will increase our physical power, while advances in neurotechnology enhance our cognitive abilities. We will become better able to manipulate our own genes, and those of our children. These developments raise profound questions: Where do we draw the line between human and machine? What does it mean to be human?”
This is where Schwab turns to a favourite subject: transhumanism – and please bear in mind that he was raised in Germany (born in 1938) during the last years of The Third Reich – which as Winter Oak reminds us was “a police-state regime built on fear and violence, on brainwashing and control, on propaganda and lies, on industrialism and eugenics, on dehumanisation and ‘disinfection’, on a chilling and grandiose vision of a “new order” that would last a thousand years.”
The article continues:
A whole section of this book is devoted to the theme “Altering the Human Being”. Here he drools over “the ability of new technologies to literally become part of us” and invokes a cyborg future involving “curious mixes of digital-and-analog life that will redefine our very natures”.
He writes: “These technologies will operate within our own biology and change how we interface with the world. They are capable of crossing the boundaries of body and mind, enhancing our physical abilities, and even having a lasting impact on life itself “.
No violation seems to go too far for Schwab, who dreams of “active implantable microchips that break the skin barrier of our bodies”, “smart tattoos”, “biological computing” and “custom-designed organisms”.
He is delighted to report that “sensors, memory switches and circuits can be encoded in common human gut bacteria”, that “Smart Dust, arrays of full computers with antennas, each much smaller than a grain of sand, can now organize themselves inside the body” and that “implanted devices will likely also help to communicate thoughts normally expressed verbally through a ‘built-in’ smartphone, and potentially unexpressed thoughts or moods by reading brain waves and other signals”.
“Synthetic biology” is on the horizon in Schwab’s 4IR world, giving the technocratic capitalist rulers of the world “the ability to customize organisms by writing DNA”.
The idea of neurotechnologies, in which humans will have fully artificial memories implanted in the brain, is enough to make some of us feel faintly sick, as is “the prospect of connecting our brains to VR through cortical modems, implants or nanobots”.
It is of little comfort to learn that this is all – of course! – in the greater interests of capitalist profiteering since it “heralds new industries and systems for value creation” and “represents an opportunity to create entire new systems of value in the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
Click here to read the full article by Winter Oak entitled “Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset”.
And here to read an extended post about the nature of fascism and how historically it has repeatedly disguised its true intentions with recourse to ‘left cover’.
*
The future of humanity
“Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.”
Nick Bostrom is a philosopher with deep scientific and technical training 9 ,who aside from being Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University is also co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (renamed Humanity+, Inc.) as well as an acknowledged inspiration for Elon Musk and Bill Gates. 10
A self-confessed utopian, Bostrom is strangely religious in that way only scientific materialists can be: so he has dreams of constructing a future heaven by wholly technological means and with ethical foundations grounded and held firm by pure reason. Inspired, he says, by a youthful acquaintance with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, his envisioned Utopia will be a brave new world that is infinitely more delightful, more pleasurable, and finally more pristine than Huxley’s arch conception – a place without death and, in all likelihood, devoid of all corporeality. Subscribing to an increasingly fashionable opinion that the physical universe is just some kind of digital simulation (it used to be clockwork), Bostrom’s Utopia, is set to be the best of all possible simulations: the matrix par excellence! 11
That said, Bostrom is amongst first to acknowledge that unavoidably the road to hell is also paved with good intentions. Indeed, lurking just beneath his sometimes optimistic and occasionally exuberant facade, it is hard not to discern a rather desperate almost pathological desire to escape the horrors of the material world.
During an interview conducted by the Guardian in 2016, he was asked about membership of Alcor, “the cryogenic initiative that promises to freeze mortal remains in the hope that, one day, minds can be reinvigorated and uploaded in digital form to live in perpetuity.” The conversation with Tim Adams then proceeded as follows:
“I have a policy of never commenting on my funeral arrangements,” he says.
But he thinks there is a value in cryogenic research?
“It seems a pretty rational thing for people to do if they can afford it,” he says. “When you think about what life in the quite near future could be like, trying to store the information in your brain seems like a conservative option as opposed to burning the brain down and throwing it away. Unless you are really confident that the information will never be useful…”12
Bostrom was one of a handful of academics and another of the new faces who made it on to the guest list at Bilderberg last year. A few months prior to his attendance, in January 2019, he had also been invited to chat with head of TED and business entrepreneur, Chris Anderson, about his “Vulnerable World Hypothesis”.
As Business Insider reported:
Philosopher Nick Bostrom is known for making scary predictions about humanity.
Over 15 years ago, he made the case that we are all living in a Matrix-like simulation run by another civilization. The idea, though difficult to swallow, is well-regarded by some philosophers, and has even been sanctioned by Elon Musk.
Many years later, Bostrom isn’t done outlining frightening scenarios.
On Wednesday, he took the stage at the TED 2019 conference in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss another radical theory. While speaking to head of the conference, Chris Anderson, Bostrom argued that mass surveillance could be one of the only ways to save humanity from ultimate doom. 13
The full discussion is embedded below:
What Bostrom goes on to outline is a world threatened by ever more sophisticated future technologies whether from advances in nuclear arms; bioweapons research; development of drone swarms; or from other applications of AI: all of which do indeed have the potential to destroy civilisation.
What he says he fears most is that one of these future technologies might become ‘democratised’, accidentally enabling rogue individuals who are without compunction to deliver a Samson-like attack that brings the world down on our heads. In preempting such an existential catastrophe Bostrom therefore presents four solutions.
The first is simply to control the development of such dangerous new technologies; an approach that Bostrom quickly dismisses (for reasons that are hard to fathom). The second, subtitled “eliminate bad actors”, is already more sinister and accompanied by a strange image of a drone sending love bombs (presumably) to dissuade some future assailant. Bostrom half jokes “I think it’s like a hybrid picture: I think ‘eliminate’ could mean incarcerate or kill, or it could persuade them to a better view of the world.”
He continues:
“Suppose you were extremely successful in this and you reduced the number of such individuals by half. And if you want to do it by persuasion I mean you’re competing against all other powerful forces that are trying to persuade people: [political?] parties, religion, education systems; but, suppose you could reduce it by half: I don’t think the risk would be reduced by half, it would maybe be reduced by five or ten percent.” [from 14:45 mins]
Response 2: Eliminate bad actors
That brings him to ‘Response 3: Mass Surveillance’ – Chris Anderson fittingly describes this as the “Minority Report option”:
“So I think there are two general methods that we could use to achieve the ability to stabilise the world against a whole spectrum of possible vulnerabilities. Probably we need both. So one is an extremely effective ability to do preventive policing, such that if anybody started to do this dangerous thing, you could intercept them in real time and stop them. This would require ubiquitous surveillance – everyone would be monitored all the time… AI algorithms, big ‘freedom centres’ that were reviewing this, you know, etc, etc. [from 15:30 mins]
Response 3: Mass Surveillance
Referring to the accompanying picture (see screenshot above), he adds:
“Yes, so this little device there – you might have a kind of necklace that you would have to wear at all times with multidirectional cameras. But to make it go down better just call it ‘the freedom tag’ or something like that.” [from 16:15 mins]
And finally we have ‘Response 4: Global governance’.
Bostrom says, “Surveillance would be kind of [plugging the] governance gap at the micro-level – preventing anyone ever doing something highly illegal – then there is a corresponding governance gap at the macro-level, at the global level. You would need the ability reliably to prevent the worst kinds of global coordination failures: to avoid wars between great powers; arms races; and cataclysmic commons problems. [from 16:55 min]
Asked in summary what the likelihood is that we’re all doomed, he replies:
“On an individual level I mean we seem to be kind of doomed anyway just with a timeline from rotting and aging and all kinds of things.” [from 20:00 mins]
As Business Insider points out:
Under Bostrom’s vision of mass surveillance, humans would be monitored at all times via artificial intelligence, which would send information to “freedom centers” that work to save us from doom. To make this possible, he said, all humans would have to wear necklaces, or “freedom tags,” with multi-directional cameras.
The idea is controversial under any circumstance, but especially at TED, which has focused this year on strategies to ensure privacy in the digital era.
Even Bostrom recognizes that the scenario could go horribly wrong.
“Obviously there are huge downsides and indeed massive risks to mass surveillance and global governance,” he told the crowd. But he still thinks the ends might justify the means.
“On an individual level, we seem to be kind of doomed anyway,” he said.
Click here to read the full article published by Business Insider entitled “An Oxford philosopher who’s inspired Elon Musk thinks mass surveillance might be the only way to save humanity from doom”.
*
In this video essay Tom Nicholas contextualises Muskian futurism to ask what its appeal is and what other social, political, economic and cultural movements it might have something in common with. In the final segment he discusses the ramifications of some of Musk’s specific projects – his is not a vision of egalitarian prosperity for all, but one of gilded corridors for an elite few:
*
Final, final thoughts: Ctrl-Alt-Del
“Humans will be able to evolve by harnessing the super-intelligence and extra abilities offered by the machines of the future, by joining with them. All this points to the development of a new human species, known in the science-fiction world as ‘cyborgs’. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to become a cyborg. If you are happy with your state as a human then so be it, you can remain as you are. But be warned – just as we humans split from our chimpanzee cousins years ago, so cyborgs will split from humans. Those who remain as humans are likely to become a sub-species. They will, effectively, be the chimpanzees of the future”
Some years ago I had been thinking up names for an envisaged progressive political movement, when, after realising that all of the traditional labels ‘people’s’, ‘popular’, ‘democratic’, ‘freedom’, ‘revolutionary’, etc were already irreparably sullied, it occurred to me that in our mimetic age something snappier might be more suitable. Something along the lines of ‘system reset’, although without the Maoist overtones! Briefly that led me to consider the familiar 3-fingered salute on every computer keyboard, Ctrl-Alt-Del: a consideration that altogether stopped me in my tracks.
In fact, picking apart the elements, Ctrl-Alt-Del already represents the three-pronged assault we are increasingly subjected to: the plutocrats using these precise three strategies to oppress and dominate. First through Ctrl by means of propaganda and censorship, with the steady encroachment of mass surveillance in all areas of our lives (the panopticon), and arguably too with the mental health crisis and widespread prescription of ‘chemical cosh’ opiates and more Soma-like SSRI antidepressants.
In a recent study by scientists at University of Chicago, it was found that rats given anti-anxiety medications were less inclined to free a companion in distress, presumably because they didn’t have the same ability to feel empathy:
Next is Alt (i.e., alteration) with rollout of GMO in agriculture and transhumanism which opens the door to many developments including the advent of designer babies by means of gene editing and the literal rewiring of human consciousness. Finally there is Del (delete) by virtue of ‘population control’ which is a shorthand euphemism for the desire to dramatically reduce human numbers.
Bostrom clearly stands at the forefront of methods of Ctrl and Alt being a leading proponent of total surveillance and for transhumanism, which is basically eugenics 2.0 enhanced by virtue of refined genetic manipulation and accentuated by means interfacing with machines. As Bostrom’s Humanity+ announces its own intentions:
What does it mean to be human in a technologically enhanced world? Humanity+ is a 501(c)3 international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, to expand human capacities. In other words, we want people to be better than well. This is the goal of transhumanism. 15
‘Better than well’ is putting it extremely mildly. If you read past the opening statements then you quickly appreciate that the final goal is nothing short of total mastery of biology in order to achieve absolute control of human life and everything in the biosphere. Advocates of such godlike dominion over Nature should perhaps attend to the writings of Mary Shelley and Johann von Goethe. For Bostrom with his outspoken desire to install mass surveillance to save the world, I also recommend a healthy dose of Orwell.
It is almost tempting to think that the choice of Ctrl-Alt-Del was meant to be a piece of subliminal predictive programming, except that the man credited with its origins is an IBM engineer called David Bradley, who says it was not intended for use by ordinary end users but helpful for software designers. Curiously, however, as Bradley also says (see interview embedded above): “I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill Gates made it really famous.” 16
*
Additional: ‘Against Transhumanism: the Delusion of Technological Transcendence’
Richard Jones is a Professor of Materials Physics and Innovation Policy at the University of Manchester. Jones is an experimental physicist, whose research centres around the properties of polymer molecules at interfaces and ultrathin polymer films.
Between 2007 and 2009 he was the Senior Strategic Advisor for Nanotechnology for the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; he was also Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield from 2009 to 2016.
In this discussion with futurist and transhumanist enthusiast Nikola Danaylov, Jones covers a variety of topics including his own work in nanotechnology and his book and blog on the topic; technological progress and whether it is accelerating or not; Ray Kurzweil and technological determinism; Platonism and Frank J. Tipler‘s claim that “the singularity is inevitable”; the strange ideological routes of transhumanism; Eric Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology as reducing the material world to software; the over-representation of physicists on both sides of the transhumanism and AI debate; mind uploading and the importance of molecules as the most fundamental unit of biological processing; the quest for indefinite life extension and the work of Aubrey de Grey; and the importance of politics and ethics in technology.
Richard Jones’ scholarly book Against Transhumanism: the delusion of technological transcendence is available free for download: Against Transhumanism, v1.0, PDF 650 kB.
Bostrom, a 43-year-old Swedish-born philosopher, has lately acquired something of the status of prophet of doom among those currently doing most to shape our civilisation: the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley. His reputation rests primarily on his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which was a surprise New York Times bestseller last year and now arrives in paperback, trailing must-read recommendations from Bill Gates and Tesla’s Elon Musk. (In the best kind of literary review, Musk also gave Bostrom’s institute £1m to continue to pursue its inquiries.)
Important note: It is well past the period spanning the end of May and beginning of June when Bilderberg meetings are ordinarily scheduled, so it should be observed that the home page of the official Bilderberg website still declares in bold capitals:
THE MEETING 2020 IS POSTPONED.
It does not say for how long.
*
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference.
This is the sixth of a sequence of articles based around the ‘key topics’ at last year’s Bilderberg conference discussed here in relation to the prevailing political agenda and placed within the immediate historical context.
This piece focuses on issues relating to climate change, ‘sustainability’ and the future of Capitalism:
A schematically enhanced version of last year’s ‘key topics’
*
“Suddenly, saving our planet is within reach. We have a plan. We know what to do. Stop the damaging stuff, roll out the new green tech, stabilise the human population as low as we fairly can, keep hold of the natural wealth we have currently got and we’ll have built a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. We now have the choice to create a planet that we can all be proud of, our planet, the perfect home for ourselves and the rest of life on earth.”
— narrative spoken by Sir David Attenborough on World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) promo
WWF recently released (June 5th, 2020) a short video 2 of British “national treasure” and conservation icon, Sir David Attenborough, telling us that “suddenly” saving the world is within reach. He says they know what to do and have a plan to build a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. What’s not to like? Well, a lot! WWF’s plan regurgitates a 19th century racist assumption: That too many of the wrong kind of people threaten us all.
Their “plan” has four commandments: 1) “stop the damaging stuff”; 2) “new green tech”; 3) get population down, and; 4) keep hold of “natural wealth we have currently got.” Let’s begin by removing the two “no-brainer” outliers, the first and last in the plan, stopping doing damage and keeping existing advantages. Both are self-evident approaches to pretty much anything. What we’re left with then is just two answers to the planet’s problems – new green tech and reducing population.
So begins a damning critique of the ‘Big Green’ agenda and a recent WWF promotional film to “save the planet” written by Stephen Corry, an activist and campaigner who has worked since 1972 with Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights. 3
Corry continues [all footnotes retained from the original]:
[I]t’s in the other “solution” – getting the population down – where both Attenborough and WWF really plumb the depths of their elitist ideology. One can visualize the meetings of writers who struggled to express this without attracting attacks from those like me who think the 200-year old cry of “overpopulation” is ideological, fundamentally racist, certainly eugenic, and nothing to do with science.
The writers finally came up with, “stabilize the human population as low as we fairly can.” They presumably thought that using “stabilize” rather than “reduce” (which is what they mean), and that inserting “fairly,” would satisfy the critics. That only goes to show just how little they understand what the problems with their “overpopulation” dirge actually are!
The inconvenient truth, never mentioned by the ideologues, is that the Global North’s population has been dropping for generations. Overall numbers are still growing there only because they’re boosted by newcomers from the Global South. 4 The largest growth area is sub-Saharan Africa, where the population density remains extremely low and where they use very little of the world’s resources themselves. 5 That’s because the “natural wealth they have currently got” is largely stolen from them by the North. 6 Have a look at the area at night from a satellite to see just how little energy is used in Africa compared to Europe, or get the view from a plane, as Attenborough will have done hundreds of times.
In other words, if you’re worried about overpopulation threatening the environment, then you’re blind to the real menace: It’s not the growing number of “have nots” in the South, but growing overconsumption by the “haves” in the North.
Adding:
The story reminds me of WWF fundraising from 1994, which posed the very odd question: whether to send in the army or an anthropologist to stop indigenous people destroying the Amazon (its proposed answer, needless to say, was to give WWF yet more money). Yes, WWF actually suggested that indigenous people, not the industry bigwigs 7 it invites to sit on its boards are the destroyers of the world’s largest rainforest, an ecosystem which those same indigenous people are both responsible for creating and by far the best at protecting. That can now be proven from satellite pictures and data about the higher biodiversity in indigenous-controlled territories.
The real tragedy here is not what Attenborough and WWF believe – that won’t change unless and until savvier folk get a controlling hand – it’s that they are able to foist their propaganda on so large a sector of the Global North, including on many progressives. Perhaps many white environmentally-aware people really do believe that “overbreeding” will overrun the Earth and see it as a duty, even “sacred” duty, to defend the planet from the barbarian hordes. That’s been the really big lie drummed into us for over a century, it’s a key component of racism and anti-immigration. It has financial support from corporations and big foundations, and enormous backing from governments which dedicate massive amounts of our money to foment it. Worst of all, those who promulgate this lie are now planning on getting billions more dollars through their terrible “new deal for nature,” which is warming up to be the biggest land grab in history. They want control of no less than one-third of the globe for their “Protected Areas,” and yes, they are sending in the army, often private militias, to get local people out. 8
Click here to read the Stephen Corry’s full article entitled “The Big Green Lie” published by Counterpunch on June 26th, 2020.
*
In the short clip embedded above, recorded in November 2014, Baka from Ndongo, a village where WWF has a regional base, call upon WWF to stop funding the anti-poaching squads that have persecuted them for years. A slighter longer report is embedded below featuring the Baka at Yenga, Cameroon:
Many Baka refer to both WWF and the anti-poaching squads it funds as “dobi-dobi” or ‘dobi-dobiyu’ (WWF). Here, they are referring to WWF itself.
Click here to learn more at Survival International.
*
Big Green
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
Whenever I peruse the list of participants for any forthcoming Bilderberg meeting, the names that really stand out are not those of the bankers, hedge fund bosses and major industrialists; and nor are my eyes especially drawn to the inclusion of usual suspects from journalism, academia (especially economics departments) and the major political parties, or with high ranking attachment to the military and intelligence agencies, nor even the occasional monarch; last year it happened to be His Majesty the King of the Netherlands – Funny how they include NLD after his title presumably as a token to their inherent egalitarianism!
But the names that always grab my attention are instead those I’m just not expecting to see at all. For instance last year:
Henry, Mary Kay (USA), International President, Service Employees International Union
Hers was certainly amongst the names stood apart. These are a few of the others:
Solhjell, Bård Vegar (NOR), CEO, WWF – Norway
Rockström, Johan (SWE), Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Buitenweg, Kathalijne (NLD), MP, Green Party
With sincere apologies to Oscar Wilde: to invite one environmentalist may be regarded as a misfortune; to invite three looks like a plan of action. Not that environmentalist ties to Bilderberg are as novel as they may first appear.
#BP at #Bilderberg: the chairman, Helge Lund, arrived in Montreux in his travel sneakers. I just hope he brought some headphones, so he can tune out during the session on 'Climate Change & Sustainability'. Also at #Bilderberg is BP board member & ex-MI6 boss Sir John Sawers. pic.twitter.com/BvqxBsfOAo
In fact, anyone familiar with the history of Bilderberg knows that the attendance of the King of the Netherlands is also in keeping with the origins of the meeting, which had been co-founded by Prince Bernhard, consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. And those familiar with the generally unspoken history of modern environmentalism will recall that Prince Bernhard is one of the co-founders of the World Wildlife Fund (as WWF was originally known); becoming its first President in 1961.
nothing to see here, just the King & Prime Minister of the Netherlands arriving at #Bilderberg to meet with the heads of #NATO, Davos, the Bank of England, HSBC, Microsoft, AXA, Total, Thales, Santander, the German defence minister, the Irish finance minister & the PM of Estonia. pic.twitter.com/Dv3JOcuhr9
Moreover, when Bernhard was forced to step down as WWF President in 1976 because his involvement in the Lockheed Bribery Scandal came to light, he was immediately succeeded by John Loudon, the former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell (called “Royal Dutch” for very good reason) And there was more to Loudon’s network of interests:
After [John Loudon] stepped down as chairman in 1965, he continued to be active in the company as chairman of the board of supervisory directors for 11 more years.
When David Rockfeller, the president of Chase Manhattan Bank, set up an advisory committee in 1965 to counsel the bank on its growing international business, Mr. Loudon was named as chairman. He retired from the group in 1977. 10
From an obituary published by The New York Times on February 9th, 1996.
What the NYT fails to mention here is that once Loudon became WWF President in 1976, his appointment also crossed over with tenure on that advisory committee of Chase Manhattan. Noteworthy too is the fact that President of Chase Manhattan, David Rockefeller, has sat alongside Prince Bernhard as a fellow member of Bilderberg since its inception in 1954. Afterwards he became co-founder of closely-allied globalist body, the Trilateral Commission.
These unseemly beginnings of WWF ought to serve as a caution, and especially to those on the left, that the environmental movement is not all it seems. That Bilderberg is back to greening itself ought to come as no surprise either.
*
On 22 June 2011, German public broadcaster ARD aired a documentary by Wilfried Huismann in which WWF was directly accused of contributing to the willful destruction of habitat and species it claims to protect and of harming indigenous peoples. The documentary entitled “Silence of the Pandas – what the WWF does not tell us” [In German: Pakt mit dem Panda – was uns der WWF verschweigt] (which is embedded below) calls into question the WWF’s close associations with major corporations including Monsanto:
In it [Wilfried Huismann] complained above all about the proximity [of WWF] to the agricultural industry. One of the problems is that the WWF is sitting with so-called round tables for soybean (RTRS) and palm oil (RSPO) producers together with large agricultural groups such as Monsanto. 11
From a review of the documentary by Der Spiegel.
The excerpt below is from an earlier report by Der Spiegel that was similarly critical of the WWF’s soy and palm oil policies at this time:
SPIEGEL has traveled through South America and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to test this. In Brazil, an agro manager talked about the first shipload of sustainable soy that was certified according to the WWF standard and reached Rotterdam with a lot of PR noise last year. The manager conceded that the origin of the cargo was not exactly known. In Sumatra, members of a tribe reported how hired troops from WWF partner Wilmar [International Limited is Asia’s leading agribusiness group] had destroyed their homes. They had been in the way of undisturbed palm oil production.
Representatives of independent non-governmental organizations such as Rettet den Regenwald [trans: Rainforest Rescue] and Robin Wood no longer see the aid organization as just the trustee of the animals. To many, the WWF seems more like an accomplice of the corporations to whom it grants the license to destroy nature in exchange for large donations and small concessions. 12
Click here to read the full Der Spiegel article entitled “Kumpel der Konzerne” which translates as “Buddy of the corporations”
Huismann was subsequently sued by WWF over the documentary and the book he based on it, and in an out of court settlement agreed to remove or else revise some of the claims.
As the Der Spiegel review explains:
In fact, the “black book” was not available for a long time from providers such as Amazon or Thalia – for fear of legal disputes. “Rarely has the book trade been so intimidated after the publication and deterred by the distribution of the book,” complained Random House lawyer Rainer Dresen. The German Journalists’ Union (DJU) also criticized the environmentalists’ “legally questionable attempts at intimidation” and the “anticipatory obedience” of the dealers in a statement. 13
*
‘Natural Capital’ and ‘Green Growth’
“We must adapt our ways to the carrying-capacities of this planet and distribute the resources more fairly. And the only way to achieve that is to move toward a model of economic growth where the value of natural capital is fully integrated in economic and political decision-making by governments and by businesses and citizens alike. This to me is the essence of green growth, which of course means that the dichotomy between green growth and just growth is a false one. Just as you cannot take on a larger financial debt you can handle, you cannot use natural resources, which is like taking up a loan from nature, beyond nature’s capacity to renew itself. However, done properly, green growth means prosperity and a better future.” [from 7:40 mins]
From then-Norwegian Minister of the Environment, Bård Vegar Solhjell’s keynote speech during Forests: the 8th Roundtable at Rio+20, a CIFOR-hosted event, which brought together over 550 scientists, policy makers and members of civil society to discuss the role of forests in providing the world with food, energy, income and clean water:
*
“Natural capital” has become a buzzword in the sphere of environmentalism. It means literally putting a price tag on nature or as the World Forum on Natural Capital puts it:
Natural capital can be defined as the world’s stocks of natural assets which include geology, soil, air, water and all living things.
It is from this natural capital that humans derive a wide range of services, often called ecosystem services, which make human life possible.
The most obvious ecosystem services include the food we eat, the water we drink and the plant materials we use for fuel, building materials and medicines. There are also many less visible ecosystem services such as the climate regulation and natural flood defences provided by forests, the billions of tonnes of carbon stored by peatlands, or the pollination of crops by insects. Even less visible are cultural ecosystem services such as the inspiration we take from wildlife and the natural environment 14
This is the top result from a Google search on the topic. The next result brings up the Natural Capital Coalition which “was launched in January 2020 and hosts over 370 leading organizations to accelerate the use of capitals thinking”. The blurb on their website continues:
Originally established in 2012 as the TEEB For Business Coalition and hosted by ICAEW, the Natural Capital Coalition quickly became the global leader in mainstreaming natural capital approaches in the private sector, and released the internationally recognized Natural Capital Protocol in 2016.
The ICAEW for those not fully literate in contemporary acronyms is the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, which perhaps doesn’t need further comment, while TEEB is a group whose title in full is The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. The opening statement on their official website begins:
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) is a global initiative focused on “making nature’s values visible”.
Interestingly, one of their listed partners is the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, another is Pricewaterhouse Coopers. I think the picture is becoming clearer, arguably all the more so when we discover the World Bank has its own entry that is again ranked on page one of any Google search. Here’s how the World Bank lists “natural capital” with commendable frankness as just another “asset”:
Long‐term development is a process of accumulation and sound management of a portfolio of assets—manufactured capital, natural capital, and human and social capital. 15
A decade ago, Forbes magazine ran an article entitled “Names You Need to Know In 2011: Natural Capital Project”. It explains:
[U]ntil recently it’s been difficult to put a truly measurable value on what are often threatened natural resources. The Natural Capital Project, a non-profit venture led in part by scientists from Stanford University, has changed that. Its software tool, called InVEST, helps to map out the value of natural land or seascapes—assets the group calls “natural capital.” 16
The same Natural Capital Project is still going strong and back in March 2019 they had teamed up with Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) in an official partnership. Prior to his invitation from Bilderberg, Professor Johan Rockström had been the Executive Director of SRC for twelve years (2004–2012) where he led a team of scientists in developing a scientifically debatable, neo-Malthusian Planetary Boundaries framework.
Alongside Rockström’s SRC, the National Capital Project also proudly lists three more “world-class academic institutions – Stanford University [its host], the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Minnesota” and amongst its six core partners, two of the world’s largest NGOs, The Nature Conservancy and Bård Solhjell’s World Wide Fund for Nature. 17 In short, last year’s Bilderberg meeting brought together two attendees who are both deeply embedded within this ‘natural capital’ matrix, which aims to set a price on everything in nature.
As Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher write in an excellent rebuttal of this new environmental accountancy:
The fact that the food we eat and the water we drink apparently need to be labeled “natural capital” only becomes meaningful in the context of capitalist growth. In this context everything should, in principle, become “capital”.
It is therefore vital to be clear on what “capital” really means. In daily conversations and some economic theory, the term is frequently defined as a “stock” or as “assets”. More accurate, however, is to see capital as a process, a dynamic. It is about investing money (or value) in order to make more money (or value). In short, capital is “value in motion”.
Capital in a capitalist economy is therefore never invested for the sake of it. The aim is to extract more money or value than had been invested. Otherwise it would not be capital.
It follows that the move from “nature” to “natural capital” is not an innocent change in terminology, another word for the same thing. Rather, it constitutes a fundamental reconceptualisation and revaluation of nature. Natural capital is about putting nature to work for capitalist growth – euphemistically referred to as green growth.
The move from nature to natural capital is problematic because it assumes that different forms of capital – human, financial, natural – can be made equivalent and exchanged. In practice – and despite proponents’s insistence to the contrary – this means that everything must potentially be expressed through a common, quantitative unit: money. But complex, qualitative, heterogeneous natures, as these same proponents acknowledge, can never adequately be represented in quantitative, homogenous money-units.
And even if we try, there is an untenable tension between the limitlessness of money (we can always generate more money) and the limits of natural capital (we cannot exchange evermore money-capital into natural capital, for all eternity).
Natural capital is therefore inherently anti-ecological and has little to do with giving value to nature, or rendering this value visible. It is the exploitation of nature to inject more value, and seeming legitimacy, into a faltering capitalist growth economy.18
Click here to read the full article published by Wrong Kind of Green in September 2016.
*
It’s not the end of the world
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.
— The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome19
*
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
Michael Shellenberger, quoted above, has credentials that give weight to these contentions. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment in 2008 – the same year he won the Green Book Award – has provided expert testimony to US Congress and was invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report. Just as importantly, Shellenberger is able to draw upon his wealth of experience as an environmental activist as the next statement in this recently published mea culpa entitled “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize For the Climate Scare” (soon afterwards retracted by Forbes magazine), goes on to add:
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
Unsurprisingly then, Shellenberger’s piece (which is still available online at other sites) has caused a bit of a stink. In response, for instance, the Guardian ran a long item which criticises some of the claims but mostly highlights Shellenberger’s close links to the nuclear trade association Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). My purpose here is not to defend or promote Shellenberger and I certainly do not share his opinions about the need to expand nuclear power (as many previous articles testify) however, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that the Guardian’s chief environmental columnist, George Monbiot, is another well-known and outspoken advocate for nuclear power (read my previous criticism here).
In any case, the most significant issue Shellenberger raises goes beyond such particular concerns as the dangers of ‘climate change’ and our best response to it (including nuclear); points which remain highly contested. The point is that we are no longer allowed to contest any of this – the constant demand being that we must “get with the programme”. As he says:
Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a life long progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct.
And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
Click here to read Michael Shellenberger’s full article.
*
Final thoughts: XR and the ‘Fourth Industrial Repression’
“I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic”
These days you will often find grown men dressed in polar bear costumes parading outside the entrances to the G20 or COP, rubbing their eyes to brush away fake tears. The TV companies flock to it. They love every kind of manipulative theatrics. Not that we are supposed to believe the polar bears are truly sad of course; that’s just for the children. No, this otherwise quite blatant appeal to sentimentality – well, polar bears are cute, let’s face it – is deliberately tempered. They are crying dry self-conscious tears that are laced with postmodern irony: crocodile tears shed for the presumed fate of the human race.
And I wonder what they really want, sweating beneath those layers of Mickey Mouse costuming. What do modern environmentalists want in general? Most of ones I know (many are friends) actually consume a great deal more than I do, and whenever I propose modest solutions of my own, the response is highly predictable.
Here is one challenge I sometimes like to set them. If you really wish to put a stop to overconsumption – as in principle I do too – then let’s begin with a straightforward ban on advertising, I will say. After all the primary purpose of such ubiquitous mass psychological manipulation is in driving our desire to consume – and I don’t even bother mentioning the unseen role advertising plays both in weakening our personal sense of self and buttressing the extant free market system (There are a whole host of good reasons to place a ban on advertising – read this for my fuller thoughts).
A ban can be rolled out in stages, I propose (maintaining the inherent modesty of my proposition and reminding them of the successful restrictions that now prohibit advertisements for cigarettes and other tobacco products), and the first step might simply introduce bans on commercials for SUVs or airlines or oil companies or something else that is considered especially polluting.
It’s then that the eye-rolling generally begins. Excuses are sought for why a ban of this kind would make no real difference and the conversation moves on. Thus, although, they say they dream of radically changing the world, my experience is that even such a simple and workable idea is likely to be rejected out of hand. This response is telling don’t you think?
Do they want to allow corporate providers to go on lying to us all on a daily basis, cajoling us to buy their unnecessary products? Or are they just afraid of the economic repercussions such a ban might have? In fact I believe both answers apply, and the reasoning is quite straightforward and understandable. The environmental movement is itself inherently consumerist: beset with ingrained market-led values of a system it claims to oppose; and all the environmentalists I know are happy consumers of eco-friendly brands.
Yet, and though modern environmentalism seeks inherently materialist solutions including, if it is deemed necessary, the final commodification of the entirety of the natural world, it habitually confuses all of this with spiritual ends. Even the word ‘ethical’ is becoming narrowly redefined in some quarters. In the future it may simply mean obeying controls on how much one consumes and observing the proper restrictions on provision and/or access to ‘natural resources’. Being a good consumer will finally equate to being a good person.
Unlike the old-style conservationism it supplanted (which had serious issues too as described in sections above), a darker side to the new environmentalism has gradually evolved as focus was shifted from preservation of our natural environment by acting primarily on a local scale to calls for the prevention of an impending global catastrophe. The threat of a terror it evokes is of such magnitude that it seems nearly impossible to surmount: an existential crisis that arguably calls for miraculous or semi-miraculous modes of intervention.
“The end of the world” is of course attractive to some, if only because of its unique power to diminish all other problems and fears by rolling them up into a single ball of quintessential evil. Old-style religious zealots, chastising sinners or else parading their own sinfulness under the burden of heavy banners that declare “The End is Nigh” are seldom seen on our high streets nowadays. Their self-inflicted mournfulness intensified all the more by the derision of the average passerby and unintentionally sanctified: “for blessed are ye, when men shall hate you” 21
But many of today’s eco-prophets of doom have picked up the same banners to parade in their stead. Enter the ‘Red Rebel Brigade’ furies (not to be confused with Mao’s Red Guards!) dressed in scarlet gowns and veils, weeping blood over funereal face-paint:
Other emblems of the new faith are the death’s head and the increasingly familiar and starkly angular XR hourglass, which always looks to me like a neatly folded swastika:
Screenshot from Guildford Extinction Rebellion website
Aspects of these performances are presumably intended to give you the creeps, at least if you take them seriously, though it’s hard to see beyond the amateur dramatics and cappuccino angst. As death cults go, this has to be one of the most convivial – most greenies I know wouldn’t hurt a fly (some literally).
And what plans do they have to save the planet, besides new bicycle lanes, shopping ‘bags for life’, bamboo toothbrushes and veganism? To judge by the literature on affiliated websites whatever this envisioned transformation involves, its goals are remarkably vague – waking people up to the ‘climate emergency’ is enough for now basically.
Meanwhile, the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (4IR) or ‘Industry 4.0’ constructed around 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) is awaiting implementation – a development I discussed in greater length in a previous article within this series. As Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, writes in his book of the same title:
“The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril.” 22
And behind the overarching 4IR hi-tech rollout that combines artificial intelligence, gene editing and advanced robotics – “blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds” to quote the current UK government website 23– there are other gilded labels like ‘smart growth’ and ‘sustainable development’ that disguise more insidious intent: translated it will mean the microscopic monitoring of our personal lives and household activities with attendant regulations and social controls allied closely to an incrementally tightening regime of ‘austerity measures’. Economic hardship applied not only to our western economies, but stifling development across the third world. (Rest assured that the billionaire class with their private jets, private yachts and private islands, whose agenda is being inadvertently pushed, will not be subjected to the same privations and exclusions).
As anarchist author Paul Cudenec outlines in a short essay published by Wrong Kind of Green, “The Fourth Industrial Repression wants to replace everything true and authentic with its replicas, with a reality not so much virtual as entirely fake”:
The 4IR wants us all to be on our own, online and in line.
The 4IR empties everything of meaning, particularly words. It says “sustainable” when it means ecocidal. It says “development” when it means destruction. It says “basic universal income” when it means slavery.
When the 4IR talks about “social impact investing” it really means it wants to turn human beings into lucrative investment opportunities.
When the 4IR talks about “a new deal for nature” it really means it wants to privatise the whole living world so as to make the billionaire class even richer than it already is.
Concluding:
The 4IR employs huge armies of professional liars and gullible fools to spread its propaganda and scream abuse at all who dare challenge its fearmongering falsehoods.
The 4IR is a death cult which dreams of wiping out everything that is natural, everything that is wild, everything that is free.
Click here to read the full article entitled “Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression!”
Finally, should any of these demands require the further hollowing out of western democracies in order to put greater powers into the hands of technocratic administrators, then so be it. For what sacrifice is too great when you believe the fate of the whole planet hangs in the balance, and worse, when we are so swiftly “running out of time”?
*
It is interesting to note that in 2018 Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, was invited and attended the Bilderberg Conference when it convened in Turin. What is relevance? Well, almost precisely twelve months later, in the wake of an audience with chief executives and chairs from global finance and multinational energy companies, Pope Francis officially declared a global “climate emergency”:
“Future generations stand to inherit a greatly spoiled world. Our children and grandchildren should not have to pay the cost of our generation’s irresponsibility,” he said, in his strongest and most direct intervention yet on the climate crisis. “Indeed, as is becoming increasingly clear, young people are calling for a change.”
The Pope’s impassioned plea came as he met the leaders of some of the world’s biggest multinational oil companies in the Vatican on Friday to impress upon them the urgency and scale of the challenge, and their central role in tackling the emissions crisis. It followed a similar meeting last year, but this time the Pope’s stance was tougher as he warned that time was running out and urged them to hear “the increasingly desperate cries of the earth and its poor”.
From a Guardian article published last year entitled “Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action”.
The chief executives or chairs of BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, ConocoPhilips, Chevron and several major investors including BlackRock and Hermes, responded by calling on governments to put in place carbon pricing to encourage low-carbon innovation, and called for greater financial transparency to aid investors.
However, they made no pledges to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and set no timetable for action.
But, as the article goes on to say, carbon indulgences may be offered in lieu…
In two statements, which came at the end of a two-day meeting in the Vatican that was addressed by the pope and led by senior Vatican churchmen, the signatories called for a “combination of policies and carbon pricing mechanisms … designed in a way that simultaneously delivers innovation and investment in low-carbon solutions while assisting those least able to pay”. 25
Click here to read the full Guardian report published in June 2019.
*
Additional: The technocratic society
“UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world. INVENTORY AND CONTROL.
“Have you wondered where these terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘smart growth’ and ‘high density urban mixed-use development’ came from? Doesn’t it seem like about 10 years ago you’d never heard of them and now everything seems to include these concepts? Is that just a coincidence? That every town and county and state and nation in the world would be changing their land use/planning codes and government policies to align themselves with…what?
“Far from being a ‘conspiracy theory’ or a ‘tin-foil hat’ fantasy, this is an actual United Nations plan, signed onto in 1992 by President George HW Bush along with 178 other world leaders. The UN called it Agenda 21 because it is the Agenda for the 21st century. According to UN Secretary General Maurice Strong, the ‘affluent middle-class American lifestyle is unsustainable.’ That includes single family homes, private vehicles, appliances, air-conditioning, & meat-eating. They are a threat to the planet” — Rosa Koire 26
*
Embedded below is Rosa Koire’s special presentation to the New Hampshire Legislature. It took place in the Legislative Office Building just behind the Capital in Concord on June 25, 2012. She shared with concerned legislators what she has learned about the true nature of Sustainable Development:
*
1 Quote taken from Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 7, by Aldous Huxley.
4 The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Migration and population change – drivers and impacts”. Population Facts, no 2017/8 (2017).
9 Quote from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” (1754) which has the formal title, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes), also commonly known as the “Second Discourse”.
Before translation, the original passage reads:
“Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s’avisa de dire: Ceci est à moi, et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la société civile. Que de crimes, de guerres, de meurtres, que de misères et d’horreurs n’eût point épargnés au genre humain celui qui, arrachant les pieux ou comblant le fossé, eût crié à ses semblables: Gardez-vous d’écouter cet imposteur; vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n’est à personne.”
The section was translated by Google translate. The original text is below:
Darin beklagte er vor allem die Nähe zur Agrarindustrie. Problematisch sei unter anderem, dass der WWF zusammen mit großen Agrarkonzernen wie Monsanto an sogenannten Runden Tischen für Soja- (RTRS) und Palmölproduzenten (RSPO) sitzt. Auch der SPIEGEL hatte kritisch über die Soja- und Palmöl-Politik des WWF berichtet.
The section was translated by Google translate. The original text is below:
Der SPIEGEL ist durch Südamerika und auf die indonesische Insel Sumatra gereist, um das zu prüfen. In Brasilien erzählte ein Agro-Manager von der ersten Schiffsladung nachhaltigen Sojas, die nach WWF-Standard zertifiziert wurde und im vergangenen Jahr mit viel PR-Getöse Rotterdam erreichte. Die Herkunft der Ladung, räumte der Manager ein, kenne er gar nicht genau. Auf Sumatra berichteten Angehörige eines Stamms, wie angeheuerte Trupps des WWF-Partners Wilmar ihre Häuser zerstört hatten. Sie waren der ungestörten Palmöl-Produktion im Weg gewesen.
Auch Vertreter unabhängiger Nichtregierungsorganisationen wie Rettet den Regenwald und Robin Wood sehen in der Hilfsorganisation längst nicht mehr nur den Treuhänder der Tiere. Vielen kommt der WWF eher wie ein Komplize der Konzerne vor, denen er gegen große Spenden und kleine Zugeständnisse die Lizenz zur Zerstörung der Natur erteilt.
The section was translated by Google translate. The original text is below:
Tatsächlich war das “Schwarzbuch” längere Zeit über Anbieter wie Amazon oder Thalia nicht zu beziehen – aus Angst vor Rechtsstreitigkeiten. “Selten wurde der Buchhandel nach der Veröffentlichung derart flächendeckend eingeschüchtert und vom Vertrieb des Buchs abgeschreckt”, beklagte Random-House-Jusitiar Rainer Dresen. Auch die Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union (DJU) kritisierte in einer Erklärung die “rechtlich zweifelhaften Einschüchterungsversuche” der Umweltschützer und den “vorauseilenden Gehorsam” der Händler.
NatCap is a partnership of four world-class academic institutions – Stanford University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Minnesota, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre – advancing new science together with, inspired by, and implemented through two of the world’s largest NGOs, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.
19 Quote from The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome, Part I “The Problematique”, Ch 5, “The vacuum”, p 75, written by Alexander King & Bertrand Schenider, published by Pantheon Books in 1991. https://archive.org/details/TheFirstGlobalRevolution/page/n85
Here are some further extracts:
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
A few pages earlier
“The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation. It is to be hoped, with a new found enthusiasm for democracy in the liberated countries today, that people will not reproduce slavish copies of existing models that are unable to meet contemporary needs.”
Which leads us to a different subheading “The limits of democracy”, following which the text continues:
“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely, sacrilegious although as this may sound. In its present form, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time. Few politicians in office are sufficiently aware of the global nature of the problems facing them and little, if any, awareness of the interactions between the problems. Generally speaking, informed discussion on the main political, economic and social issues takes place on radio and television, rather than in Parliament, to the detriment of the latter. Political party activities are so intensely focused on election deadlines and party rivalries that they end up weakening the democracy they’re supposed to serve. This confrontational approach gives an impression that party needs come before national interests. Strategies and tactics seem more important than objectives, and often a constituency is neglected as soon as it is gained. With the current mode of operation, Western democracies are seeing their former role decline and public opinion drifting away from elected representatives. However, the crisis in the contemporary democratic system must not be allowed to serve as an excuse for rejecting democracy.
Adding:
In the countries now opening up to freedom, Democracy is being introduced in a situation which demands greatly changed attitudes and patterns of behavior demands from citizens. The inevitable problems of phasing in democracy are difficult to solve. But there is another, still more serious question. Democracy does not necessarily build a bridge between a colonial or neo-colonial economy or a centralized bureaucratic economy towards a market economy based on competition and producing growth. In a transitional situation such as the present which because of sudden and unforeseen change has been neither planned nor prepared for. The necessary structures attitudes market relations and managerial styles simply do not exist. If such a situation is allowed to go on too long, it is probable that democracy will be made to seem responsible for the lagging economy, the scarcity and uncertainties. The very concept of democracy could then be brought into question and allow for the seizure of power by extremists of one brand or the other.
20 From a speech delivered by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg to the World Economic Forum at Davos on January 25, 2019 [from 2:20 mins]:
21 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. Luke 6:22.
wall of controversy 