Category Archives: Klaus Schwab

John Anthony: Scoundrels in a Bubble, the Great Reset’s ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ 4 (1)

by John Anthony

Stakeholder capitalism is the centerpiece of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.

According to Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, and the economic model’s most vocal advocate, the stakeholder capitalism will not only “optimize short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.”

Proponents claim the new capitalism is the inclusive replacement for greedy shareholder capitalism that places investor profits ahead of society.

Beyond this rhetoric you find Schwab’s model is more about redirecting wealth and power to the tip of a global hierarchy than benefiting society at large.

Stakeholder capitalism, the theory that corporations should satisfy more than shareholders dates back to a 1983 paper by R. Edward Freeman. As social awareness increased more companies included employees, suppliers,  the community, trade unions, government  agencies, financial institutions, and media as stakeholders. Schwab’s Great Reset expands this to myriad global interests.

You can build cases for or against expanding community stakeholders. But community concern is not what drives Schwab’s stakeholder model.

The flaws in Schwab’s comments

Contrary to Schwab’s account, shareholder companies do look beyond their investors. Most companies earn profits by providing quality goods and services at competitive prices customers can afford.  Smart companies know this happens best when they care for employees, suppliers, customers, and everyone who effects the business. Together, these factors increase the company’s and shareholders’ value.

In other words, in the shareholder model customers are at the top of the corporate food chain and are the ultimate decider of the company’s fate. No matter how socially aware a firm may be, if the customers are not satisfied it will soon be another CNN+.

In any model there will be some business leaders focused only on profits. But this shortcoming pales when compared to the Great Reset’s handful of the uber-rich managing the entire planet.

Corporate greed is blamed for increasing global risks     

According to Schwab, global risks including extreme weather, biodiversity collapse, food and water crises are interconnected. They are exacerbated by inequality and unfairness.

Schwab places much of the blame on corporate greed. Too many CEOs, he claims in his 2021 DAVOS speech, have focused on shareholders and failed to follow the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

There you have the core of Schwab’s scheme. He wants to implement an updated version of the 1992 Earth Summit’s Sustainable Development goals using big business as the hammer that drives the practices into our culture.

Who is the “society at large” that will benefit

When Schwab refers to stakeholders, he speaks globally as well as nationally. His stakeholders include communities, governments, the welfare state, trade associations, global stakeholders, the planet, and anyone else the power elite decides to add.

If you think you will personally benefit, you may have  a long wait. Under the Great Reset, stakeholders are ‘the people.’ When a politician says, “I’m doing this for the people,” watch out. Castro, Mao, Chavez and nearly every despot born acted ‘for the people.’

This massive “stakeholder” pool is the real target of governments. By leveraging big business, they have easy access to control the behaviors and property of large populations.

According to the DAVOS agenda, the new aim of companies is “to generate an economic surplus” so governments can assure the “greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people.”

How stakeholder capitalism leads to government control

Under the broad stakeholder model, governments hold companies accountable through environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance scorecards. Activities such as minimizing environmental externalities, volunteerism, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, diversity in the interview process all can raise their ESG score. Higher scores provide more favorable credit terms and easier access to suppliers and contracts.

A proposed SEC rule will be the first step in regulating these activities in the U.S.. Under “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors,” public companies must provide climate related information in their annual reports. This includes items like GHG reduction measures and climate risks.

Here are some examples:

  • “…a registrant in the construction industry might be required to disclose the physical risk of increased heat waves that affect the ability of its personnel to safely work outdoors, which could result in a cessation or delay of operations, and a reduction in its current or future earnings.”
  • The rule requires companies to look for “climate related opportunities” such as transitioning to “a lower carbon economy.”

Enter the stakeholders

The SEC rule also requires public companies to report the GHG reductions and climate initiatives for their customers, suppliers, and firms “upstream or downstream” in the value chain. This mandate provides the federal  government with access to virtually every small business in the nation.

It is not just access to these small business stakeholders; the government has control over them. Even smaller businesses that fail to follow the ESG system of governance will find it harder to gain funding, suppliers, and access to markets.

To meet ESG standards companies will be forced to redirect their primary concerns from providing excellent products at competitive prices to satisfying government mandated social scoring criteria.

According to Schwab,

“We can’t continue with an economic system driven by selfish values, such as short-term profit maximization, the avoidance of tax and regulation, or the externalizing of environmental harm. Instead, we need a society, economy, and international community that is designed to care for all people and the entire planet.”

It’s ironic Schwab complains about selfish values when his entire Great Reset project transfers the world’s power to a handful of unelected elites.

The expanded universe of non-business stakeholders might never invest in, buy, or even use a company’s product or service. But since businesses will be required to meet many of their environmental or social demands, they can profoundly influence a company’s bottom line.

Is this woke or is it not?

Proponents claim stakeholder capitalism addresses inequality and protects the environment.

Schwab explains, “the interconnectivity and the overarching well-being of people and the planet are central, ensuring a more harmonious outcome over time.”

This cuddly comment obscures the reality that those most responsible for division, inequality, unemployment, inflation, and debt are the same people who will manage the criteria governing how banks give loans, corporations conduct business, and who acts responsibly.  Downstream these same people make decisions that will affect the amount you will have to spend on your home, your car, or vacation.

Responding to a backlash accusing stakeholder proponents of advancing political wokeism,  BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, a major player in the scheme declared, “Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke.’”

Right. “Not woke” in the same way mask mandates and vaccine passports are not control.

But why would BlackRock, the largest asset management firm on earth, support stakeholder capitalism when the sustainable industries it favors, like wind and solar, rely on government subsidies to survive?

Sustainability drives up housing prices and production costs all to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.  So, how can asset managers predict huge windfalls in industries that are struggling? 

An endless supply of money

The answer is money. Broad stakeholder capitalism only survives where there are enormous cash inflows. If that money is not coming from consumers, then much of it comes from government.

Despite operating in the red, the federal government managed to budget $4.6 trillion dollars for pandemic relief.  So palpable was their financial ineptitude $100 billion of that was lost, and billions more were spent on green infrastructure, environmental justice, hotels, and ski slopes, and other projects barely pandemic related.

That inflow is not about to cease. Modern Monetary Theory is the support mechanism for the new economy. The absurd theory that is gaining traction in Washington states that since we can print limitless sums of money, it doesn’t matter if we run meteoric debts. We just print more money (think digital credits) and spend our way forward.

If that does not concern you, consider that MMT passes more power to the President and Congress to control financial flow to address inflation.

There are a basketful of other problems with Modern Monetary Theory I will hit in a later article. For now, know MMT, with its massive amounts of cash is the fuel that enables the Great Reset to advance Marxist-like control over our entire economy with socially sensitive cliches rather than threats, gulags, and mass killings.

That money can prop up fading wind turbine manufacturers, support expensive battery production for electric cars, keep struggling environmentally conscious firms afloat, and underwrite green infrastructure for new schools.

The Great Reset calls for a select group of corporations and political elite to lord it over the entire economy. Stakeholder capitalism, with its emphsis on community, gives this control a veneer of legitimacy while strengthening the bonds of compliance. Companies including Microsoft, Accenture, Bank of America, Disney, and John Deere are already on the ESG bandwagon.

Conclusion

If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that political and corporate elitists live in a deaf, irresponsible, selfish, and power-crazed bubble. Many of society’s pains are caused by those who have regulated beyond their moral and intellectual means.

Any flaws in our economic system are better managed by the millions of men and women who operate small businesses and those they serve, than by the scoundrels in the bubble.


John Anthony is a patriot and a conservative blogger. Read his commentary along with other interesting information at Sustainable Freedom Lab.

Kathleen Marquardt: THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION = PLANNED DYSTOPIA 5 (1)

by Kathleen Marquardt

Klaus Schwab has been someone in the background of global machinations for many decades. He is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) which he formed in 1971 (fifty years ago) as an International NGO (one of the way too many “civil society” partners of the United Nations). The majority of these NGOs are there to promote and embed Agenda 21/2030/The Green New Deal into every country, no matter how small, in the world. Schwab’s WEF was set up to push Public-Private Cooperation, in other words, fascism, across the globe.

Kimberly Amadeo, President of World Money Watch defines fascism as: “a brutal economic system in which a supreme leader and their government controls the private entities that own the factors of production. The four factors are entrepreneurship, capital goods, natural resources, and labor. A central planning authority directs company leaders to work in the national interest, which actively suppresses those who oppose it”.[i]

To simplify and clarify what Public-Private Partnerships PPPs) are:

In a speech at the Freedom 21 National Conference in Dallas in 2007, Tom DeWeese, president of American Policy Center, noted:

During the first years of the Clinton Administration in the early 1990s, there was much fanfare about a new policy to “reinvent government.” It was sold as a way to make government more efficient and less costly. It would, said its proponents, “bring business technologies to public service.”

Pro-business, anti-big-government conservatives and libertarians were intrigued. The backbone of the plan was a call for “public/private partnerships.” Now that sounded like their kind of program.

Government, they said, would finally tap the tremendous power of the entrepreneurial process and the force of the free market into making government more effective and efficient. It sounded so revolutionary and so American.

Being open-minded and wanting to help us get back to what the framers of the Constitution had built for us, we wanted this to be true. But as Tom pointed out:

Today that “reinvention” has revealed itself to be the policy known as Sustainable Development, which is nothing more than a plan for a top-down managed society. Sustainable Development policy includes population control; development control; technology control; resource control; and in a great sense, thought control.

Sustainable Development is not freedom. Not one of the three principles apply. There is no individuality as it advocates group policies; there is no private property under Sustainable Development – period. And there is no free enterprise as markets and supplies are tightly controlled by the hand of government.

Yet, incredibly, much of the Sustainable policy has been embraced by the “free-trade” movement, which advocates open borders, free trade zones, and one-size fits all regulations, currencies, and the use of public/private partnerships. And many of the biggest proponents of the policy are conservative and libertarian think tanks.

Tom nails it:  Public/Private Partnerships = Government-Sanctioned Monopolies

It is little understood by the general public how public/private partnerships can be used, not as a way to diminish the size of government, but in fact, to increase government’s power.

That’s because no one ever comes forward and tells the general public the entire plan for something as vast as the Security and Prosperity Partnership. No one ever calls for a debate or a vote to implement the plan with public approval.

Instead, it’s done incrementally, a piece at a time, in an easy to disguise program here – a suggestion there. There are few debates or discussions. Even elected officials rarely know the true agenda they are helping to put in place.

Slowly, the whole comes together. By the time people realize the truth, it’s already in place. Policy is set.[ii]

For fifty years the WEF has been using these PPPs to cancel any liberty, individual freedom, and take property rights from individuals. Agenda 21! The Public Private Partnerships are a big tool in relieving us of our property, liberty, and control of our nation. PPPs and Regionalism, with its unelected governing bodies, work hand in hand to destroy our Constitution and the rule of law.

As society breaks down, the globalists welcome the anarchy, chaos, and general social unrest. Next, they need a defining event.

What drew Schwab to set up the WEF?

“The most influential group that spurred the creation of Klaus Schwab’s symposium was the Club of Rome, an influential think tank of the scientific and monied elite that mirrors the World Economic Forum in many ways, including in its promotion of a global governance model led by a technocratic elite. The Club had been founded in 1968 by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish chemist Alexander King during a private meeting at a residence owned by the Rockefeller family in Bellagio, Italy.”[iii]

The Club of Rome spelled out what they view as the true enemy:

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.[iv]

Realizing that back in the ‘70s, when the above was written, the masses weren’t yet dumbed-down enough to accept that they needed to join VHEMT, the voluntary human extinction movement. The globalist Marxist Left decided a New Ice Age would fit the bill of a major crisis that only they could fix. Oops, it didn’t happen. So, let’s flip it to Global Warming (to go along with the hole in the ozone. Of course, the Earth wasn’t warming. Tweak that, voila, Climate Change. Ignore the fact that the climate changes four times a year, and sometimes daily.

No matter the science. We are facing an apocalyptic threat.

Maurice Strong, former Undersecretary General of the UN, Sec. Gen. of UN Conference on the Environment, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, was called a visionary and a “pioneer of global sustainable development. He was the secretary-general of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit which unveiled Agenda 21, the culmination of decades of scheming, planning, and cajoling to bring about a global government via the UN. He was also a close friend of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and many of the rogues’ gallery of One-World government advocates.

In interviews that Strong did with two reporters in Canada wanting to write about their golden boy, both times he talked about his vision of the future. The early vision focused on the WEF:

Each year, the Word Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEOs prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics, gather in February. to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead.

 What if a small group of these world leaders were to form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse? It’s February. They are all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. They’ve engineered a panic using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies. They’ve jammed the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can’t close. The rich countries . . . I probably shouldn’t be saying things like this.”[v]

Does this sound familiar? Sure sounds plausible to me. In his second theoretical vision, Strong dreams, “what if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive those rich countries would have to sign an agreement, reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is “no”. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, a group decides ‘isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse’.”[vi]

It’s in the works now; it has been for decades. But a statement that most overlook, but it shows that the people on the Left, the globalists, the Fabians, the cultural Marxists, the Communists are all looking for the right bait, the right evil foe to attack.

Strong and Klaus Schwab were good friends; they were also close with David Rockefeller. They were (are, in Schwab’s case) members of that not so secret, secret society, the Bilderburg Group. The Bilderburg Group is approximately 130 political leaders from Europe and North America who meet once a year for informal discussions about major issues. “The Meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed. Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity, and hence are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights. There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.”[vii]

According to Schwab, the fourth Industrial Revolution provides the potential “to robotize humanity, and thus compromise our traditional sources of meaning—work, community, family, identity.[viii]” He also predicts that it will “lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness.[ix]” And it will “upend the existing ways of sensing, calculating, organizing, acting and delivering”. That was a statement from 2015, so don’t think he hasn’t been pushing this for a long time. Now his edicts are getting more definitive, “Even our thinking and behavior will have to dramatically shift. We must have a new social contract centered on Social Justice. We need a change of mindset, moving from short-term to long-term thinking, moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder responsibility (ed. note: PPPs). Environmental, social and good governance have to be a measured part of corporate and governmental accountability.”[x][xi]

While Schwab is predicting that his Industrial Revolution will “lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness”, Dr. Anthon Mueller, a German professor of economics, wrote, “The WEF’s great reset project is social engineering at the highest level. Advocates of the reset contend that the UN failed to establish order in the world and could not advance forcefully its agenda of sustainable development—known as Agenda 2030 —because of its bureaucratic, slow, and contradictory way of working. In contrast, the actions of the organizational committee of the World Economic Forum are swift and smart. When a consensus has been formed, it can be implemented by the global elite all over the world.”

Johnny Vedmore at Unlimited Hangout writes, “At the Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in January 2021, Schwab stressed that the building of trust would be integral to the success of the Great Reset, signalling a subsequent expansion of the initiative’s already massive public relations campaign. Though Schwab called for the building of trust through unspecified “progress,” trust is normally facilitated through transparency. Perhaps that is why so many have declined to trust Mr. Schwab and his motives, as so little is known about the man’s history and background prior to his founding of the World Economic Forum in the early 1970s.”

The Global Technology Governance Summit (GTGS) of the World Economic Forum, meeting in Tokyo (and virtual) the first week of April 2021 has a number of documents to be discussed. One, Harnessing new technologies, states:

“Industry transformation: No industry has been untouched by the global response to COVID-19. The world can no longer operate as it has, and as such markets will have to respond to its new and evolving needs. To survive, every business in the world will have to become a technology company. – Government transformation: The transformation of government will be front and centre in the area of digital infrastructure as technology services become an essential public utility comparable to electricity, water or roads. In simple terms, Pubic Private Partnerships. The government controls, the businesses follow government orders.

In one of the best articles I’ve read on the Great Reset, Thomas DiLorenzo’s “The Great Nonsense of “The Great Reset”, is this:

[S]ocialism . . . is . . . the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with . . . the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment . . . . [C]apitalism must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism.”    Robert Heilbroner, “After Capitalism,” The New Yorker, Sept. 10, 1990

The above quotation by socialist economist, the late Robert Heilbroner, was written in the context of an article that lamented and mourned the worldwide collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The great debate between capitalism and socialism was over, he said, and Ludwig von Mises was right about socialism all along, said a man who had spent the past half century promoting socialism in his teaching, speaking, and writing. But do not despair, he told his fellow socialists, for there is one more trick up our sleeves, namely, the Trojan Horse of achieving socialism under the guise of ‘environmentalism.’

“The basic strategy was then, as it is now, to constantly frighten the gullible public with predictions of The End of the World from environmental catastrophe unless we abandon capitalism and adopt socialist central planning. This has always been the one constant theme of the environmentalist movement (not to be confused with the conservation movement which is actually interested in the health of the planet and the humans who occupy it) since the 1960s.  It ignores the fact that the twentieth-century socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China had by far the worse environmental problems on the planet, orders of magnitude worse than in the capitalist countries.”

“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order. David Rockefeller at a 1994 UN Dinner

Can a combination of two fraud emergencies, COVID and Climate Change, be the crises that will usher in the globalist dream of a New World Order? If so, and if the inhabitants of what remains of the free world do not get off their duffs and wake up to this threat, Klaus Schwab et al will have achieved the “global transformation” they have spent 100+ years to achieve.

I for one want to see them fail. We, the useless eaters, the nobodies, can stop them. All we have to do is turn over the rock they are under and let the sun shine in. Most people, if they see the truth, will start thinking.

The World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:

  1. People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.
  2. The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.
  3. Organs will not be transplanted but printed.
  4. Meat consumption will be minimized.
  5. Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.
  6. To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.
  7. People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.
  8. Western values will be tested to the breaking point.

I cannot believe even half of the American people want to live like that.

We must take back our country a city and a county at a time. All the while, we must get our lesser magistrates to ignore unconstitutional federal laws, throw the bums out of office, and we must educate our children with truth, reason, and sound science.

[i]  Amadeo, K. thebalance.com/fascism

[ii]  Americanpolicy.org/public _private_partnerships

[iii]  Unlimitedhangout.com Schwab

[iv]  Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, p. 85

[v]  Wood, Daniel, West magazine May 1990.

[vi]  Johnston, Jim, British Columbia Report 3, no.22 (May 18,1992).

[vii] Bilderburg Meetings.org

[viii]  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-h         ow-to-respond/

[ix]  Ibid.

[x]  https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/06/the-great-reset-a-unique-twin-summit-to-begin-2021

[xi]  https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/12/26/german-economist-great-reset-will-cause-a-crash-worse-than-1930s/


Kathleen Marquardt has been an advocate for property rights and freedom for decades. While not intending to be an activist, she has become a leader and an avid supporter of constitutional rights, promoter of civility, sound science, and reason. She serves as Vice President of American Policy Center. Kathleen now writes and speaks on Agenda21/2030, and its threat to our culture and our system of representative government.