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It’s a corporate takeover of global governance that affects our food, our data, our vaccines, etc.
‘The
Great Reset’ plan was triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF)
summit in June 2020, which had the theme ‘The Great Reset’ and
argued that the COVID crisis was an opportunity to address the burning
issues facing the world.
The
theories around the Great Reset are 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.
We really
need to know what the WEF’s Great Reset plan is about. At the
heart are secret agendas and malicious intent. While these may be
absent from the WEF's Great Reset initiative, what is something almost
as sinister is 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.
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. 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
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. The report is “the most comprehensive proposal for
re-designing global governance since the formulation of the United
Nations during World War II.”
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, and civil society is mainly window dressing.
Perhaps the most symbolic example of this shift is the controversial strategic partnership agreement the United Nations (UN) signed with the WEF in 2019. Harris Gleckman describes this as a move to turn the UN into a public-private partnership, creating a special place for corporations inside the UN.
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. According to Gleckman, 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.
Another landmark in the development of stakeholder capitalism can be found in the Big Tech sector. As a part of his 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation the UN Secretary-General called for the formation of a new ‘strategic and empowered multi-stakeholder high-level body’. Again 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.
Then there’s COVAX. The COVAX initiative aims to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every country in the world”. That, again, sounds wonderful, especially given the staggering inequalities in vaccination levels between rich and developing countries.
COVAX was set up as a multi-stakeholder group by two other multi-stakeholder groups, GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), in partnership with the WHO. Both GAVI and CEPI have strong ties with the World Economic Forum (which was one of the founders of CEPI) as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and both are also connected to companies like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson through manufacturer partnerships (GAVI) or as 'supporters' (CEPI). Even though COVAX is funded predominantly by governments, it is these corporate-centred coalitions that are overseeing its roll-out.
