The point of no return 454
James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo … noted in the first chapter of Where Next?: Civilization at the Crossroads that “Civilization is always threatened by barbarism, and the greater threat often comes more from within than from without.”
The political philosopher James Burnham made a similar point when he argued that “Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” …
The historian Arnold Toynbee spoke in this context of the “barbarization of the dominant minority.” When a society is robust and self-confident, Toynbee suggested, cultural influence travels largely from the elites to the proletariats. The elites furnish social models to be emulated. The proletariats are “softened,” Toynbee said, by their imitation of the manners and morals of a dominant elite. But when a society begins to falter, the imitation proceeds largely in the opposite direction: the dominant elite is coarsened by its imitation of proletarian manners. Toynbee spoke in this context of a growing “sense of drift,” “truancy,” “promiscuity,” and general “vulgarization” of manners, morals, and the arts. The elites, instead of holding fast to their own standards, suddenly begin to “go native” and adopt the dress, attitudes, and behavior of the lower classes. Flip on your television, scroll through social media, look at the teens and pre-teens in your middle-class neighborhood. You will see what Toynbee meant by “barbarization of the dominant [or, rather ‘once-dominant’] minority.” One part of the impulse is summed up in the French phrase nostalgie de la boue. But it is not “mud” that is sought so much as repudiation. …
What we are talking about is the drift, the tendency of our culture. And that is to be measured not so much by what we permit or forbid as by what we unthinkingly accept as normal. This crossroads, that is to say, is part of a process, one of whose markers is the normalization of the outré. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described this development as “defining deviancy down.” It is, as the late columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, a two-way process. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” he wrote, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. . . . Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle-class life then stands exposed as the true home of violence and abuse and a whole catalog of aberrant acting and thinking.”
Hilaire Belloc espied the culmination of this process in Survivals and New Arrivals (1929):
“When it is mature we shall have, not the present isolated, self-conscious insults to beauty and right living, but a positive coordination and organized affirmation of the repulsive and the vile.” …
Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints (1973) … imagines a world in which Western Civilization is overrun and destroyed by unfettered Third-World immigration. It describes an instance of wholesale cultural suicide … Conspicuous in that apocalypse is the feckless collusion of white Europeans and Americans in their own supersession. They faced an existential crossroads. They chose extinction, laced with the emotion of higher virtue, rather than survival. …
In 1994, Irving Kristol wrote an important essay called Countercultures. In it, he noted that “‘Sexual liberation’ is always near the top of a countercultural agenda—though just what form the liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite widely.” The costumes and rhetoric change, but the end is always the same: an assault on the defining institutions of our civilization. “Women’s liberation,” Kristol continues, “is another consistent feature of all countercultural movements—liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from family. Indeed, the real object of these various sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.”
In Eros and Civilization (1966), the Marxist countercultural guru Herbert Marcuse provided an illustration of Kristol’s thesis avant la lettre. Railing against “the tyranny of procreative sexuality,” Marcuse urged his followers to return to a state of “primary narcissism” and extolled the joys of “polymorphous perversity.” Are we there yet? … Marcuse sought to enlist a programmatically unfruitful sexuality in his campaign against “capitalism” and the cultural establishment: barrenness as a revolutionary desideratum. Back then, the diktat seemed radical but self-contained, another crackpot effusion from the academy. Today, it is a widespread mental health problem, accepted gospel preached by teachers, the media, and legislators across the country. As I write, the National Women’s Law Center has just taken to Twitter to declare that “People of all genders need abortions.” How many things had to go wrong for someone, presumably female, to issue that bulletin? “All genders,” indeed. I recall the observation, attributed to Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In The Catholic Tradition and the Modern State”(1916), the historian Christopher Dawson wrote, “It is not liberty, but power which is the true note of our modern civilization. Man has gained infinitely in his control over Nature, but he has lost control over his own individual life.” I think this is true. And there is a political as well as a technical or scientific dimension to the phenomenon Dawson describes.
[It may be true, but the underlined sentence is annoyingly badly written. When “Man” is used as a generic term, “he” cannot be said to have an “individual life”. A better formulation of the idea Dawson is trying to express: Humankind has gained greatly in control over Nature, but individuals have lost control over their own lives.]
In the West, what we have witnessed since the so-called “Progressive” movement of the 1910s and 1920s is the rise of a bureaucratic elite that has increasingly absorbed the prerogatives of power from legislative bodies. In the United States, for example, Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. For many decades, however, Americans have been ruled less by laws duly enacted by their representatives in Congress and more by an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. The members of these bodies are elected by no one; they typically work outside the purview of public scrutiny; and yet their diktats have the force of law. Already in the 1940s, James Burnham was warning about the prospect of a “managerial revolution” that would accomplish by bureaucracy what traditional politics had failed to produce. Succeeding decades have seen the extraordinary growth of this leviathan, the unchecked multiplication of its offices and powers, and the encroaching reach of its tentacles into the interstices of everyday life. We are now, to an extent difficult to calculate, ruled by this “administrative state”, the “deep state”, the “regulatory state”. …
When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over COVID-19, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the WEF plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power.
Kimball’s idea is that we are now at a point – a “crossroads”, or a fork in the road – where we have a choice to make: restore and preserve Western civilization, OR let it die.
I do not think we have that choice. “The drift, the tendency of our culture” has gone too far in the direction of “the repulsive and the vile” to be stemmed and diverted back to “right living”. Western Civilization has been “overrun and destroyed by unfettered [unobstructed] Third-World immigration”.
We are at – we have have passed the point of no return.
Jillian Becker December 12, 2022
The struggle against Donald Trump to implement the Great Reset 110
The extreme measures that the Democrats now in (fraudulently gained) power are taking to destroy Donald Trump, are a measure of their dread of him, with his ability to triumph over their anti-America, anti-Western-civilization agenda. And the intensity of passion they bring to their campaign against him is a measure of that indestructible ability of his to accomplish what they dread.
What is the agenda that they fear Trump will derail?
Their end, their objective, seems to be to establish a class in power to govern in perpetuity. For this forecast, we’ll call it their UberGovernment (UB).
This seems to be what is visualized: The UB’s domain will be the whole world. Nation-states will be abolished, so nations themselves will be gone. A homogeneous world population* will be created by the forcing of conformity and obedience. Disobedience, and even mere disagreement, will be severely punished – so severely as to terrify the bravest – until uniformity of both action and opinion prevails unchallenged. Food and other necessities will be provided or withheld according to judgment of worthiness by UB agents.
The present population of the world (over 7 billion) will be reduced to, and kept to, an approximate half-billion. To achieve this ideal, reproduction will be by permit only and all unpermitted conceptions will be aborted. Also these measures will be taken: the normalization of infanticide; the “transgendering” – ie. the sterilization – of all persons not explicitly granted the right to reproduce; the criminalization of marriage except between “subjects” (persons) of the same sex. Cohabitation will be allowed only to (same sex) married couples or groups, or as a temporary arrangement for qualified adults to have sexual relations with pre-pubescent children. Subjects will be chosen to donate sperm or give birth. Only artificial insemination will be allowed.
Many large volumes would be needed to describe in full the political system that will be established as a Great Reset, but here are a few more examples of intention:
Subjects will be told not only what they must do, but also what they may not do or have unless qualified. Qualification will be according to a UB point system, as it is now under the Communist government of China.
Access to pre-censored knowledge will be rationed and distributed to eligible subjects according to strict criteria. UB will lay down what is true and untrue. It will issue its accounts of present events daily, and its versions of past events – “history” – whenever it deems it necessary.
Access to medical treatment will be available according to points qualification. Time of death for subjects surviving past the age of 70 will be decided by UB panels and the eliminations carried out by licensed executioners.
Unless Donald Trump somehow regains the presidency of the United States, the agenda will be realized. It has advanced swiftly with the co-operation of the Biden Administration and the “Power on the Mountain” – the World Economic Forum (WEF) – with the support of the UN and under the leadership of Der Führer Klaus Schwab.
However, “perpetuity” won’t after all be a very long time. Socialism does not, cannot, work as an economic system. It’s amazing that the Soviet Union managed to last for about 70 years. The Schwabian world will disintegrate into hundred of thousands of tribes, with the chieftains making war on each other over territorial claims. Life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
*The present campaign by the woke for “diversity” is a pretense. By “diversity” they mean “non-white”. Anyone who is not white is “a diversity”. As the Great Reset world population will consist only of “diversities”, it will be non-diversified, ie. homogeneous. In addition, all “subjects” will be as alike as a phalanx of Communist Chinese soldiers.
The conquest of America 232
All those who with their votes or their assistance in the ballot-cheating got the Democrats into power, are guilty of destroying the America that was free, prosperous, ruled by law, and protected by a well-trained well-equipped military.
Now we are not only poorer, but impeded in all we do. Travel? You may need certification. Learn? Only approved topics and authorized dogma. Start a business? Get a license.
Every institution on which we used to be able to rely, has been corrupted, weakened, or destroyed.
The presidency was captured by fraud. A duly elected Republican president was twice impeached for no offense, no crime, while the offenses or crimes he was accused of were openly and brazenly committed by his accusers, including the fraudulent official who succeeded him by crookery.
We can no longer rely on the rule of law. Real insurrectionists who torched city centers, looted, murdered, threatened governmental authority, go unpunished, while people who walked into the Capitol and out again a few minutes later are imprisoned without trial for a year, ill-treated, and finally threatened with long prison sentences if they don’t confess to criminal acts they never performed – which will send them to prison anyway. The initiators of the “Russia-collusion” hoax – Hillary Clinton and her political lieutenants – have not been called to account. Applicants for legal immigration are kept waiting for years, while illegal aliens pour over the border unimpeded and are immediately given housing, schooling, health care, and even voting rights.
The House of Representatives is the staff quarters of a vindictive old woman. The Senate can be toyed with by a moronic vice-president.
The Supreme Court is under threat of extinction. The junta in power wants to turn it into a rubber-stamping bureau that will support one party rule forever.
Victor Davis Hanson writes at the Daily Signal:
Court-packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.
The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.
Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause celebre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority.
Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court.
That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it was met with stunning approval from the American left.
The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.
The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault on the court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats have gone ballistic ever since former President George W. Bush’s and especially former President Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a conservative majority.
During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, protesters stormed the Senate chambers in protest. …
Later in spring 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whipped up a protest crowd right in front of the Supreme Court. He directly threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh:
I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
What exactly did Schumer mean by “you will pay the price” or “you won’t know what hit you”?
Who or what would hit the two justices—and how exactly?
But it is not just the court the left is targeting. Long-standing institutions and even constitutional directives are now fair game.
At the 2020 funeral of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., former President Barack Obama crudely proposed bringing in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states—and with them likely four left-wing senators.
Obama’s “eulogy” also damned the 180-year-old Senate filibuster. Yet as a senator, Obama himself resorted to the filibuster in an effort to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
The Electoral College is under continued assault, especially since Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 were elected without winning the popular vote.
The Founders’ arguments for the Electoral College are never mentioned. But the drafters of the Constitution felt it forced candidates to visit rural areas. They believed it would discourage European-style multiple splinter parties. It made voter fraud more difficult on a national scale. And it emphasized the United States of America. That is, America today is 50 unique states that are represented as such in presidential elections.
The Biden administration also narrowly failed to push through a national voting law. Such legislation would have superseded the states’ constitutional rights to set most of their own balloting protocols in national elections.
So what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College? …
And how can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas openly negate federal immigration law? How can he welcome millions to cross illegally the southern border?
The answers are obvious.
The hard left had detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51% public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.
Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.
Has any institution not been deliberately spoiled? Is any activity, if not yet prohibited, left free of government regulation?
The banking system has become so byzantine that quite simple transactions, such as sending a payment abroad, takes days or even weeks to complete.
The schools and universities have been changed into indoctrination seminaries.
The mainstream media are as meekly submissive to the junta as a silly woman to a domineering husband.
The police are defunded, demoralized, weakened, disarmed, reduced in number, abused – even murdered with impunity.
As for the army …These quotations are from How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen by Daniel Greenfield.*
Under Biden [“Biden” being the name of the president and so of the administration, though the man himself is senile and does not make the decisions propagated in his name], genocide and terrorism have become cultural norms that we are bound to accept. (p.4)
China might beat us in the hypersonic weapons race, but America’s top military brass were determined to pull out all the stops to make sure they had the most diverse arrangement of incompetent radicals, preferably in senior leadership positions, to establish their progressive credentials. (p.10)
Obama didn’t just leave the military smaller in size, but smaller in spirit, its leadership class no longer dedicated to national security, but to the identity political agendas of the radical Left. (p.11)
Obama remade the military just as he remade the nation, from a team based on individual worth into a broken system divided by the intractable gulfs of oppressors and the oppressed. No military organization can function that way and no nation can survive that way. (pp. 11, 12)
Long before the Taliban entered Kabul, the moral struggle had already been lost in Washington D.C. While the Taliban were carving up Afghanistan, the nation’s military leaders were busy implementing racial quotas, imposing implicit bias training, and teaching military personnel to hate their country through critical race theory. (pp.12,13)
There has been no accountability for the political leaders and military brass who wrecked the military. And none for those who were responsible for our defeat in Afghanistan. Patriots are being driven out while the disloyal leaders responsible for purging them and enabling the Taliban remain in charge. (p.62)
All that at a time when the US is faced with a more dangerous threat of attack than the nation has ever had to confront before.
Quotations from an article by Judith Bergman at Gatestone:
China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.
Look at what they [CCP) have today…. We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed.
The Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It’s all happening at the same time.
There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination…. a strategic partnership of “no limits” and with “no forbidden areas” in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.
Meanwhile, the Left has already captured and destroyed the free republic of America. It no longer influences the world for the better. It is ripe and ready for Chinese Communist conquest.
Can the free republic be resurrected? Can America be saved?
*Published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964
World conquest by needle 4
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the agency of the abominable UN that is being used to bring us under one world government.
Dr. Tess Lawrie writes:
The WHO is proposing a global pandemic agreement that would give it undemocratic rights over every participating nation and its citizens. Put simply, in the event of a ‘pandemic’, the WHO’s constitution would replace every country’s constitution. Whether your country’s elected government would agree or not, the WHO could impose lockdowns, testing regimes, enforce medical interventions, dictate all public health practice, and much more.
Over the course of this pandemic, the WHO has withheld safe and established older medicines, ignored the experiences of frontline doctors, disregarded evidence from low, middle and high-income countries, and taken no heed of the values and preferences of people affected by their recommendations. It has apparently ignored the huge numbers of adverse reactions on its own database and has failed to issue warnings about the gene-based vaccines. It has also advertised that the mRNA vaccines are as safe as normal vaccines – and this is simply not the case.
Many of us are extremely concerned that the WHO now intends to take full control over every member nation via this pandemic treaty.
And over every individual.
Is it possible, do you think?
And if it is possible, is it likely to happen?
The Great Reset: not all that dangerous but actually even more dangerous 44
America is governed by an oligarchy. Has been for some time, with a four year interruption when Donald Trump was president. The oligarchs are rich and powerful and determined to stay that way. (Donald Trump, though rich, was not one of them but, unacceptably, a patriot.) Their only willing change will be to become more rich and more powerful. They are the elite, and they see their interests, being rich and powerful and ever more rich and powerful, as naturally best served in an international, or “global”, alliance of the rich and powerful, whoever and wherever they may be.
Most of the oligarchs are not in government. They resent the power of governments, even of those that belong in the alliance – chiefly those of the US, the EU, Britain, and China.
In the implementation of the Great Reset, an agenda issued by the World Economic Forum from a mountain top in Switzerland, private powers will be in close partnership with governments. They call it public-private partnership. The private part will be the dog, and the public part – government – will be the tail. The dog will wag the tail.
Ivan Wecke writes, at OpenDemocracy, a skeptic’s view of the Great Reset – and he finds that the horrified reaction to it of us ordinary citizens is not irrational or unjustified:
The Great Reset conspiracy theories don’t seem to want to die. The theories were triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) summit last year, which had the theme The Great Reset …
The set of conspiracy theories around the Great Reset are nebulous and hard to pin down, but piecing them together gives us something like this: the Great Reset is the global elite’s plan to instate a communist world order by abolishing private property while using COVID-19 to solve overpopulation and enslaving what remains of humanity with vaccines.
Such laughable nonsense, the writer implies. So –
Intrigued by the palaver around last year’s summit, I decided to find out what the WEF’s Great Reset plan was really about. At the heart of conspiracy theories are supposed secret agendas and malicious intent. While these may be absent from the WEF’s Great Reset initiative, what I found was something almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines.
“Almost as sinister … In fact, more sinister …”?
Then tell us, please, what the real Great Reset is all about.
The magic words are ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a concept that WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has been hammering for decades and which occupies pride of place in the WEF’s Great Reset plan from June 2020. The idea is that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders’. The way the WEF sees stakeholder capitalism being carried out is through a range of ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ bringing together the private sector, governments and civil society across all areas of global governance.
The idea of stakeholder capitalism and multi-stakeholder partnerships might sound warm and fuzzy …
No it doesn’t. It sounds sinister like those conspiracy theories the writer has dismissed.
… until we dig deeper and realise that this actually means giving corporations more power over society, and democratic institutions less.
As we said, the Corporations Dog will wag the Governments Tail.
The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, “the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.” Governments would be just one stakeholder in a multi-stakeholder model of global governance. …
Multi-stakeholder partnerships are public-private partnerships on the global stage.
Who are these other, non-governmental stakeholders? The WEF, best known for its annual meeting of high-net-worth individuals in Davos, Switzerland, describes itself as an international organization for public-private cooperation. WEF partners include some of the biggest companies in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna).
Instead of corporations serving many stakeholders, in the multi-stakeholder model of global governance, corporations are promoted to being official stakeholders in global decision-making, while governments are relegated to being one of many stakeholders. In practice, corporations become the main stakeholders, while governments take a backseat role …
It is coming. For sure. No, wait … Oh good grief! it is already here!
The multi-stakeholder model is already being built. In recent years, an ever-expanding ecosystem of multi-stakeholder groups has spread across all sectors of the global governance system. There are now more than 45 global multi-stakeholder groups that set standards and establish guidelines and rules in a range of areas. … These groups, which lack any democratic accountability, consist of private stakeholders (big corporations) who “recruit their friends in government, civil society and universities to join them in solving public problems”.
Multi-stakeholderism is the WEF’s update of multilateralism, which is the current system through which countries work together to achieve common goals. The multilateral system’s core institution is the UN. The multilateral system is often rightly accused of being ineffective, too bureaucratic and skewed towards the most powerful nations. But it is at least theoretically democratic because it brings together democratically elected leaders of countries to make decisions in the global arena. Instead of reforming the multilateral system to deepen democracy, the WEF’s vision of multi-stakeholder governance entails further removing democracy by sidelining governments and putting unelected ‘stakeholders’ – mainly corporations – in their place when it comes to global decision-making.
Put bluntly, multi-stakeholder partnerships are public-private partnerships on the global stage. And they have real-world implications for the way our food systems are organized, how big tech is governed and how our vaccines and medicines are distributed. …
And all other commodities. Because by controlling resources over the whole world, they will have more power and more money. (Read more about that here).
Another landmark in the development of stakeholder capitalism can be found in the Big Tech sector. … It’s not easy to find a list of stakeholders but after some digging a long list of ‘roundtable participants’ for the roadmap includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the WEF.
Although the functions laid out for this new body are quite vague, civil society organizations fear it will come down to Big Tech creating a global body to govern itself. This risks institutionalising these companies’ resistance against effective regulation both globally and nationally and increasing their power over governments and multilateral organizations. If the body comes to fruition, it could be a decisive victory in the ongoing war GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) is waging with governments over tax evasion, antitrust rules, and their ever-expanding power over society.
More than 170 civil society groups worldwide have signed another open letter to the secretary general of the UN – this time to prevent the digital governance body from forming. The secretary general was approached for comment but had not replied at the time of publication. …
So … something fishy really is going on in the realm of global governance. If you value your right to public health, to privacy, to access healthy food or to democratic representation, be wary of the words ‘stakeholder capitalism’ when they pop up at the next Davos summit.
Must we now accept that the age of democracy is over? You may still have a vote, you may even help elect a government of your choice, but it will have little power.
There will not be “world government” – that’s just conspiracy theory – but there will be “global governance”.
There will not be “communism”, but there will be “equitable redistribution” – aka communism – and it will be called “stakeholder capitalism”.
There will be? No, there is. As the man says, it has started.
Are we all socialists now? 6
Are we in the midst of a socialist revolution?
We quote (in full) Victor Davis Hanson, who writes at American Greatness:
Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them.
The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable.
“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic.
If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical.
In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state?
Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux.
Liberals try to yank capitalism to the left; but true revolutionaries seek to dismantle the very tenets upon which it is based. No wonder that a recent poll showed most Democrats had a more favorable view (59 percent) of socialism than of capitalism (49 percent).
So, the Right shouts “They are socialists!” And the Left fires back “Smears and lies!” while quietly the Biden Administration has already begun systematically to warp the rules of free-market capitalism. In other words, we are apparently all to be socialists now.
By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep?
Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back? Biden is talking about vastly expanding any prior idea of student loan debt cancellations by massive new amnesties. As capitalism transitions into socialism, what about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition, the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working-class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead at 18 to go straight to work?
Are they hapless Kulaks? And what do we name the indebted students and the loan-sharking universities who finagled a collective$1.7 trillion in student debt? Revolutionaries? Who pays for what others have incurred?
Supply and demand under capitalism adjudicate wages and thus the rate of unemployment. But have we ever seen an expanding economy seeking to meet pent-up consumer demands for goods and services without the labor to meet that need? The workers are everywhere and nowhere, but the government has deliberately persuaded millions not to return officially to work, given rising unemployment compensation is more remunerative than the wages of working. Have we now finally embraced the old Marxist canard, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”?
Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it.
Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt. Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an “infrastructure” bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash. Ronald Reagan talked of “starving the beast”—cutting taxes to deprive the voracious bureaucratic state of its fiscal food.
Now instead we are “gorging the beast”: exponentially expanding government with so much debt that higher taxes are inevitable. And with the red ink comes redistribution in the socialist sense of borrowing more to give to the deserving, and taking more from the undeserving—to borrow even more for the more deserving still.
Socialism does not believe in the construct of merit given it is predicated on free will that trends supposedly towards selfishness, and results in an absence of “equity”: that is why colleges have dropped standardized tests for applicants, and are jettisoning traditional ideas of “exclusionary” honors programs.
Remember, under socialism, in T-ball style, we all win—or lose. Our shared purposes are not to help meet and surpass purportedly artificially constructed standards of excellence to ensure greater prosperity, security, and comfort, but to demolish such ossified constructs, and rebrand the formerly failed as the now successful.
The revolution has already redefined crime as a construct in the eye of the bourgeois beholder. Our woke elite told us to cool it for 120 days of last summer’s riots, looting and arson, since in the words of the “1619 Project” architect and former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Torch a federal courthouse, a church, or police precinct and why worry over mere “brick and mortar”? Take over a few city blocks and, presto, we have a “summer of love”.
“Defund the police” became a socialist slogan supposedly to remind us that “crime” is what the rich call going into Walgreens to grab something they never fret about needing. COVID-19 is not the real reason why prisoners are freed from jails and prison to commit new crimes at an alarming rate. Indeed, those people didn’t really commit crimes so much as reflect society’s bad karma of arbitrarily labeling what they did as “crimes” in the first place, which in truth were often simply cries from the heart.
Two years ago, it would have been considered absurd that youth would ride bikes into drug stores and steal with impunity as security guards watched, or thieves could enter into Neiman-Marcus department stores and skip out with thousands of dollars of rich people’s favorites. Over $2 billion in “stuff” was destroyed in 2020. And almost none of the violence was ever properly investigated, the perpetrators arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, or incarcerated.
In such revolutionary times, no one knows any more what is and is not a crime. Illegally storming the border when positive for COVID-19? Destroying a public statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Looting a corporate chain store? Knocking out an Asian-American septuagenarian? Or turning over the tables of Jewish-Americans as they eat? Taking over municipal blocks and declaring the confiscation an autonomous zone? Not crimes. “Illegal parading” inside the U.S. Capitol building? Crime.
Twenty years ago, on the eve of 9/11, there were earlier heated debates over cash reparations. The acrimony has now again resurfaced after the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd.
Yet the Left this time around did not envision reparations as just monetary gifting for the distant descendants of the enslaved and the generations who grew up under Jim Crow. Rather, it is already recalibrating the Great Society doctrine of “proportional representation” quotas, achieved through “disparate impact” into new reparatory and disproportionate quotas and allotments.
We are jettisoning the old idea under our Lebanese-like system of racial spoils that each group deserved representation in hiring and admission commensurate to its percentages of the population—trumping many traditional meritocratic criteria of examination scores, grades, or prior work experience.
No more. If one examines current fall 2021 entering classes at many of our elite universities, many minority groups will enroll with numbers disproportionate to their current demographic percentages but proportionate to the idea of reparatory “overrepresentation”.
The same holds true of the racial make-up of new television shows and commercials, pilot training programs, and corporate board room representation. Again, the idea is that blacks, for example, should be represented in percentages exceeding 12 percent in any coveted honors or awards—to make up for past underrepresentation, given prior mere proportionality offers no reparatory justice.
In a strange way, for all the furor over reparation payments, the issue already is beginning to be settled quietly by our major institutions. Note class consideration will have no role in such disproportionate and compensatory action.
Another revolutionary crackpot idea was ending nuclear power and fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar generation that would power our homes and our new envisioned national fleet of electric cars. No one quite believed the revolutionary Left would be so suicidal as to spike the energy costs of the middle class, make the United States dependent again on imported oil from the autocratic Middle East and Russia, and strangle the oil and gas industry that had enriched America.
But without much debate, Joe Biden has cancelled the huge ANWR oil and gas project in Alaska. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline and destroyed Alberta’s export of oil to the United States. He nixed all new fossil fuel leases on federal lands. He discouraged frackers from using their full inventory of rigs. As gasoline heads to $5 a gallon, Joe Biden, in the months before the next midterm elections,asks OPEC to send us its hated carbon fuel to help our addicted, but suddenly furious, commuter-voters.
Here is a final reminder of why the revolution has already turned society upside down. The canniest elements of the aristocracy always cut deals with the revolution and indeed often remain the nomenklatura. What unites Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the Silicon Valley billionaire crowd are the exemptions they purchased from revolutionary justice.
In the old days they would have gotten dachas on the Black Sea coast and three dial phones on their desks. These days they keep their billions if they give a hundred million dollars in “civility” bounties here to Van Jones (ex-truther and expert on why white people are supposedly responsible for mass shootings) or there seed $500 million to key voting precincts to help ensure the good people defeat the bad.
In 1961, Cubans were not quite aware that they were experiencing a Marxist takeover. Nor were Russians fully cognizant in 1917 of the plans that the Bolsheviks had for them over the next few decades. It is hard to see during anarchy, chaos, and collapsing institutions that leftists still have an agenda for what will emerge on the other side.
In other words, we are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.
Socialism is a system proven over and over again to bring shortage, insecurity, fear, compulsion, poverty, desperation, sorrow and worse for all but the dictators who control the lives of the rest.
Is it too late to prevent it being established in America?
If so, can it be disestablished? Can freedom be restored?
Oligarchy 186
The Supreme Court has no way of enforcing its rulings.
It depends totally on the legislative and executive branches of government to enforce them.
If, as now, a party takes power (“takes”, not “wins”, being the right word for how the Democratic Party has come to have it) over both the legislative and executive branches and chooses not to obey the Supreme Court, there is nothing that can be done about it. Nothing.
The Framers of the Constitution never imagined it could happen.
Now the Democrats in power know that they need not go to the trouble of packing the Supreme Court, they can simply disobey it. Ignore it. And that’s what they’re doing.
The Court ruled that a moratorium forbidding eviction for non-payment of rent is illegal – but the “Biden” administration went ahead with it.
The period of the moratorium was due to end about now, but the administration has decided to extend it. Again the Court has declared that it is illegal. Again the administration has imposed it.
Imposed it how? Not even by administrative order of “President Biden”. A woman, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued the order. And the administration gladly enforces the rulings of the CDC.
Landlords may not demand rent from tenants. But they must continue to pay property taxes and maintenance costs.
One of the few journalists who have chosen to tell the public about this is John Daniel Davidson who writes (in part) at The Federalist:
An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.
By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If landlords try to evict tenants for not paying rent, they could face criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.
The eviction moratorium is one of the most important stories of the COVID-19 lockdowns but also one of the least covered, because the left doesn’t want to draw undue attention to its evisceration of property rights under the guise of public health.
Nationwide nearly half of the landlords are people who own a second house or apartment that they rent out. Many of these people have gone a year without receiving any rent, yet they’re still liable for taxes, upkeep, and mortgage payments. Landlords are supposed to be able to survive because of a $46.5 billion federal government rental relief fund. The problem is, the money isn’t being used. With trillions of government aide already creating incentives for people not to return to work, the eviction moratorium creates an incentive not to pay rent.
The way all this has gone down illustrates a deeply disturbing reality about the Democrats running the pandemic response in Washington: They’re lawless, and as the pandemic drags on, they’re becoming bolder about it.
The background here is that a nationwide ban on evictions expired on Saturday. Since then, Democrats in Congress have been agitating for an extension of the ban despite a determination by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that the CDC has no legal authority to do that, as anyone with a passing familiarity of the U.S. Constitution could tell you.
The utter contempt for the rule of law shown in all of this is simply staggering.
The notion that a federal agency tasked with the control and prevention of infectious diseases could simply by fiat impose an “eviction moratorium” on the entire country, effectively nationalizing housing, is shocking and outrageous. Biden himself knows this. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said “The bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
It sure isn’t. But later that same day he did it anyway.
*
What all this means is that America is no longer a democracy, no longer a free republic. It is a dictatorship.
This country is now governed dictatorially.
The power to dictate is in the hands of an oligarchy.
The oligarchs are the very rich. The richest men who have ever lived. They are technocrats who own the means of mass communication, newspapers, television news media, the “social” media. They own the politicians through whom they will transform the world.
So it is a plutocratic oligarchy.
The plutocrats are almost all men. Their executive consists increasingly of women: women governors, public prosecutors, mayors, police chiefs, member of congress, cabinet members, directors of government agencies. Lifted into office by the oligarchs, one could reasonably call them the dictators’ “temps” – the Grand Temps of the American oligarchy.
And there is nothing that can be done to bring the dictators down.
Vote them out of power? Can we really believe that there will be fair elections ever again? If a (constitutionally required) election is held at all, it will be rigged. On the excuse that there is a dangerous virus threatening the nation so that voters must keep far apart from each other – which, the CDC will assure them, they must do to survive – elections will be by mail and “drop box” only. Staff under the Grand Temps will collect the ballot sheets, count them in closed offices, and announce the result: a huge majority (why not 100%?) for the re-election of the oligarchs’ chosen executors.
It is more than likely that the position of Oligarch will become hereditary. Then it will be an aristocratic oligarchy. Who knows but there may even be a monarch?
The dictators of the twentieth century – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, Chavez – became rich by becoming dictators.
The new American oligarchic dictators became rich first, then became dictators.
They will not be satisfied with dictatorial power over America. They are “globalists”. They desire global power. Plutocrats from everywhere on earth meet at Davos, and it was there, in the small Swiss town on a mountain, that the decision was taken to “reset” the way human beings will live and how they will be governed.
The world they intend to create is very different from the world we have known.
There will be no nation states. No borders. The impoverished peoples of what was once called the Third World will continue for a time to move in vast numbers into what used to be called the First World. It does not matter to the oligarchs where people settle. The oligarchic power will extend over them all wherever they may be.
Individuals, other than the oligarchs, will own nothing. No house, no money, no clothes, no car … Not even an electric car. Not even a bicycle. Everything will be provided for them by the Global Oligarchy. What they “need” will be decided by their masters.
They will be allowed the temporary use of things – clothes, maybe a bicycle.
They will be housed, each in a tiny apartment in a vast building. (Herding people together is useful for the spreading of disease when population needs to be reduced.) They will be fed communally. There will be no families. Breeding will be controlled. Children will be raised by staff of the Oligarchy.
Only some children will be taught to read and write and reckon. All will be taught obedience to the authorities.
Adults will be assigned jobs. The product of their labors will be distributed by the authorities.
A permanent aristocracy will rule over a world of slaves.
Marxism-Schwabism: or the dictatorship of the tycoons 212
The silly-billy tyranny exerted shamelessly now by the Obama-Pelosi gang through a puppet president, nasty as it is, may be short-lived because nonsense cannot endure. But the real power, the serious power, lies elsewhere, with the financial institutions.
They have an agenda to reduce us all to serfdom.
We summarize an article by Justin Haskins at Townhall:
In June 2020, elites from around the world announced [from a “virtual Davos meeting”] the launch of a plan to “reset” the entire global economy.
Every country, from the United States to China, must participate in the Great Reset, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. So wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
Although Great Reset supporters call for dramatic expansions of government welfare programs, including job guarantees, government-provided health care, etc.,the heart of the Great Reset is something called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. Those include how “green” a company is, its “right” ratio of minorities, whether a business is involved in politically disfavored industries such as gun manufacturing and sales. According to its ESG metrics, a company is accorded a rating.
Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo – the six largest banks in the United States – have announced their commitment to the Great Reset. (So has Mastercard.)
Individuals should also expect to be “rated” by these financial institutions. If you want a loan from one of those banks in the future, you’d better toe the globalist line on climate change.
If banks are allowed to collectively decide to stop financing any group of people they want, based not on financial concerns but ideological considerations, then banks and their Great Reset allies will have, in effect, near-total control over society.
In January 2021, the Trump-era Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a finalized Fair Access to Financial Services regulation that would have made it illegal for large banks to engage in that sort of discrimination. But just one week after entering the White House, President Joe Biden “paused” the rule’s implementation, signaling his clear intention to eliminate the rule before it ever has a chance to be published in the Federal Register. No surprise. The Biden administration’s “climate czar” John Kerry is an ardent supporter of the Great Reset.
The time has come for a massive populist revolt against the Great Reset. The fate of the free world depends on it.
A dummy now leads the free world 47
By a tremendous effort of complicated conspiracy, the American Left has elected a demented old man to the presidency of the United States!
The Great Reset 85
The World Economic Forum is now (January 25-29, 2021) enjoying its 51st session.
It is about to change our world forever. Or hopes to. If we let it.
Its main purpose this year is to promote the implementation of the Great Reset.
The Great Reset is, according to its admirers:
A project to bring the world’s best minds together to seek a better, fairer, greener, healthier planet as we rebuild from the pandemic.
The first thing to know about the World Economic Forum, which meets annually at Davos in Switzerland, is that it is a voluntary luxury parliament of billionaires and politicians and billionaire-politicians.
The next thing to know is: what is it for, what do these people aim at, what do they want? And the answer, with no exaggeration, is: they want to rule the world.
The Covid-19 world-wide epidemic provides the would-be world rulers with their best opportunity yet for claiming that “world solutions” are needed.
So now again an arrogance of theorists [collective noun; singular verb] wants to organize the rest of us, or as many of the rest of us as can be raked in and arranged into a pattern of existence they know to be beautiful. Their aim is only to do us good. Theirs is a kindly plan for putting human affairs right and making the whole world nice, and they alone can do it. That is their conviction, their unshakable belief.
They call their plan the “Great Reset”. They will gather into their own hands all the wealth of the world (now don’t go asking what that is or how such a thing can be done!) and redistribute it equally so each gets the same share as everyone else. (No, shush, don’t ask whether they will put their own wealth in the pool for redistribution. That’s another inappropriate question. Please try not to be hostile. Please be co-operative, neighborly, communitarian, declare that you are concerned above all else for the wretched of the earth, and you will already be helping to accomplish the Great Reset.)
This economic equalizing of all – leading, they say, inevitably to the social equalizing of all (though not of course making us all equal in power with them, the rulers themselves) – is NOT to be called or thought of as Communism, or Marxism, or neo-Marxism, or even Socialism. It is “a better form of capitalism”, aka “stake-holder’s capitalism”. It is the gift to humanity of Big Business.
The Great Reset has been made gloriously implementable right now by the Covid pandemic. Universal lockdown has forced people everywhere to change the pattern of their lives. The old ways have had to go. What an opportunity this is for shaping the new ways as they ideally ought to be! For directing the arc of history the way it ought to bend!
The World Economic Forum will turn a nasty disease into a boon for humankind.
There might have been difficulties put in the way by the United States of America if Donald Trump had been re-elected president in November 2020. He was a nuisance to the would-be world rulers for three years, and would have gone on holding them back for a while yet had not Covid-19 burst upon the political scene and forced even him to accept unprecedented change.
A billionaire himself but like no other, he is a man incapable of formulating a grand theory of any sort; one who personally knows people who build things with mortar and metal, actually standing among them and listening to them, sometimes wearing a hard hat himself! That man wants each of those workers to have a say in how he [generic masculine pronoun] is ruled! He wants each of them to keep the money he earns for himself and his dependents! That man would acknowledge no world crisis needing a “world solution” (not even global warming) – until he was confronted by Covid-19. That one man could have stood in the way of the Davos plan for years to come, and perhaps even destroyed it forever!
They did their best to traduce him in the eyes of the millions of deplorable Americans who voted for him. They accused him of all the worst sins they could think of, calling him racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, homophobe, transgenderphobe, misogynist, narcissist, climate change denier, liar, Nazi, Hitler. They tried to impress on the electorate that his face was orange, his hands too small, his hair too … too … They said he had two scoops of ice-cream when everyone else had only one. They explained why his wife and children were beneath their contempt. They did all that, and did everything they could think of to relieve the country of his leadership – and it made no difference. The deplorables continued to cheer him on, fanatically. Tens of millions of them. They said the accusations were not true. And then he actually got more votes in that November 2020 election than any other Republican candidate for the presidency had ever got before him!
Fortunately, somehow, even more votes were cast for his opponent Joe Biden, a man who loves the plan of Davos.
How can the visionaries of Davos not be grateful to the Covid virus for falling upon the world; grateful to China from where it emanated; grateful to the United Nation’s World Health Organization for promoting the great change in everyday life that nothing else could have accomplished?
You too must learn to love the vision and the plan.
Here is the face and the message of Davos. See it, hear it, learn it, obey it.
The face is that of Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. He is introduced by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the EU).
And here’s CNN, at highest sycophantic pitch, interviewing Klaus Schwab in 2020, when he and his like-thinkers were still trying to use “climate change” as the urgent disaster from which the world needed saving by them, before the happy advent of the Covid pandemic.
And here is Klaus Schwab talking about what he calls the fourth industrial revolution – the digital revolution – and how it requires globalization and social equalization.
And here he explains his “new definition of capitalism”.
And here is an appreciative article about the World Economic Forum put out for the occasion of this 51st. session. It is by Jonathan Michie, Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, University of Oxford, He writes at The Conversation:
The 51st World Economic Forum starts on January 25 …
Inevitably, the event … aims to respond to the apocalyptic events of the past 12 months. “A crucial year to rebuild trust” is the theme, built around the “great reset” that World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab and Prince Charles launched last year.
The event will be accompanied by virtual events in 430 cities across the world, to emphasise the fact that we face global challenges that require global solutions and action.
This recognises that the effects of the pandemic are likely to be increasingly compounded by other major global threats, including the climate crisis, financial crises, and social and economic inequality. To give just one example, the COVID-19 mortality rate in England in December was over twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived.
See? Pure philanthropy drives the WEF.
So how successful is the WEF’s mission likely to be?
This is not the first time that global crises have required global action, but there have been mixed results in the past. After the first world war, the UK played a pivotal role in forming the League of Nations on the international stage. But this ultimately failed to deliver, with the UK’s insistence on post-war reparations undermining Germany’s economic recovery and political stability.
So the failure of the League of Nations – and therefore the outbreak of the second world war? – was Britain’s fault.
Professor Michie does his best to make the idea of an international forum managing the world’s economy nothing to be feared; rather something already tried and tested:
When the world next sought to prevent future conflicts towards the end of the second world war, the lessons were to some extent learned from last time around. The allies met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the US in 1944 to develop policies for economic stability.
This led to a new system of interlinked exchange rates organised around a gold-backed US dollar, as well as new institutions to help manage it, including the International Monetary Fund and what later became the World Bank. This was followed in the next couple of years by the United Nations and the forerunner to the World Trade Organization. The Bretton Woods system endured until the early 1970s when the US came off the gold standard, but much of the system created in the 1940s survives in one form or another today.
And who dares say that the creation of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization was a bad thing?
The 2007-09 financial crisis, which involved the first global recession since the 1930s, led to many calls for action to prevent similar crises in future. There was some tightening of regulation, but the threat of instability remains due to excessive debts and too much speculation.
With only the 1940s seeing a really adequate response to global crises, what will make the difference this time?
The WEF’s vision of a “great reset” recognises that what is needed to tackle these crises goes far beyond economic reforms, or climate measures, or tackling a pandemic – it is all of these combined, and more. It is the idea that global action needs to be underpinned by a mission to change society, to make it more inclusive and cohesive; to match environmental sustainability with social sustainability. It follows their call to “build back better” – one echoed by many around the world.
The WEF seeks action across seven key themes: environmental sustainability; fairer economies; “tech for good”; the future of work and the need for reskilling; better business; healthy futures with fair access for all; and “beyond geopolitics” – national governments collaborating globally.
The WEF says the key is reestablishing public trust, which is “being eroded, in part due to the perceived mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic”. But this may prove difficult, given there is little change in corporate or government leadership.
The big hope is 78-year-old Joe Biden, who was US vice president for eight years during which many of these problems were mounting, not being solved.
Sadly, the main cause for optimism is the fact that today’s crises are so great that they may provoke action. Future financial crises look likely. The climate crisis is increasingly accepted to be an existential threat. And now the pandemic is a huge economic and human disaster, with further such pandemics recognised as likely because of everything from the explosion in global travel to the effects of climate change.
A key question for this year’s conference … is whether a new form of globalisation will be developed. …
A new era is required, building on the Paris Agreement to limit climate change now that the Americans are joining again – with more support of a Green New Deal geared towards achieving net zero emissions and making the global economy truly sustainable.
We need bold initiatives to tackle the threat of future pandemics; financial speculation, tax evasion and avoidance, and the threat of financial crises; and to reduce the unsustainable inequalities of wealth, income and power across the globe.
So tax avoidance is now considered morally wrong or possibly criminal. We must arrange our financial affairs so that we pay the greatest amount of tax that we possibly can.
Will corporate and political decision-makers rise to the challenge? There needs to be sufficient popular pressure – from citizens, voters, consumers, workers, educators and activists – to push governments and business to change course fundamentally.
The professor names the forerunners of this new globalist movement:
These past few years have witnessed the Occupy movement, the Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter and countless climate crisis groups.
Who could have predicted that all those billionaires, many of them from Wall Street, would find reason to honor and adopt the agenda of the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Yes. And BLM – a self-declared Marxist movement – will work in perfect harmony with the new capitalism and Big Business.
Calls for action have been coming from business leaders at Davos and elsewhere for years.
The hope is that this time, the scale of the emergency will finally make radical change unavoidable.
Unavoidable, the radical change that Klaus Schwab, and Prince Charles, and Bill Gates, and George Soros, and Joe Biden will manage. We have no choice but to let it happen.
And why should we not be happy about it? It will improve the world forever. Guaranteed.
