The Elitists Who Want to Rule the World - Ben Shapiro

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Heritage Foundation

Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum; he founded the organization in 1971. Each year, the World Economic Forum hosts a massive conference in Davos, Switzerland, with thousands of world leaders, diplomats, and experts on various topics gathering to trade ideas about how best to cooperatively run the world.

Lest this characterization be seen as overstating the case, Schwab himself said as much this year in opening the conference:

The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state of the world. But two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities, that we serve not only self-interest but we serve the community. That’s what we call stakeholder responsibility. And second, that we collaborate.

This is the call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests—without elections, without accountability—and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside.

 

Schwab himself has decoded his favorite term, “stakeholder capitalism.” He wrote in Time magazine in October 2020, “Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so.”

To do so, however, would require taking hints from Greta Thunberg, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter; it would require “building … a virtuous economic system” in which companies abandon their core mission of serving customers and shareholders and instead embrace answering questions like “What is the gender pay gap in company X? How many people of diverse backgrounds were hired and promoted? What progress has the company made toward reducing its greenhouse gas emissions?”

All of this extraordinary arrogance is predicated on a perverse view of how successful change works within decentralized systems. As Schwab himself acknowledges, free markets have generated more prosperity than any system in human history. But that’s because free markets are not a top-down imposition, a system created by conspiratorial muckety-mucks in a back room somewhere.

Free markets were the outgrowth of centuries of evolutionary societal progress: gradual recognition that private ownership was the greatest incentive toward work and innovation; incremental understanding that individual rights are the only alternative to endless conflict; step-by-step acceptance that decentralized sources of knowledge are both broader and deeper than centralized ones.

The most powerful and durable institutions we have are traditional because, as F.A. Hayek wrote, they are “a product of cumulative growth without ever having been designed by any one mind.”

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The Elites Have Every Intention Of Controlling Our Lives

Before anyone says we’re overreacting, that there’s no reason to be concerned, please consider this short list:

• Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has said, in the words of the BBC, that “COVID-19 may bring (a) new surveillance era.” “Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet, above all they want to know what is happening under our skin,” he said.
• A black box on automobiles that would be used to track mileage to determine how much drivers should pay for the roads in lieu of standardized fuel taxes “ could lead to a very slippery slope of the government knowing our whereabouts at any given moment,” says the Pacific Research Institute’s Tim Anaya. 
• “ Thanks to a new provision in the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill,” a couple of op-ed writers tell us in The Hill, “your car will be used against you in a court of law. Under this long-ignored provision, carmakers will be required to start monitoring drivers by 2026 using unspecified technology to search for signs of drinking.” Flaws in the system will inevitably lead to innocent drivers being flagged and punished.
• We’ve been told the government would never control residential smart thermostats to reduce energy use, but in 2017, a local Los Angeles radio station reported that in “a growing number of Southern California homes,” smart thermostats were “changing the temperatures automatically.” The customers had given Southern California Edison permission to adjust their homes’ temperatures, but the leap to political control, once those smart thermostats are more widely installed, is a short one.
• Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, also in Davos for the World Economic Forum, said that his company is working on a tablet that contains a chip, which “sends a signal that you took the tablet” and provides patient information to trackers. It’s an advance that used properly would likely be helpful in treating patients. But it’s chilling to think the pills could be wrongly used by power-mad elites.

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@Geee

 

June 23 2022

wo of the most infamous figures of the 20th century are two of its most notorious Marxist dictators: Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Each had his own methods. Speaking broadly, Lenin's Bolshevik approach could be considered top-down, imposed by government and its seized industries, and Mao's "Marxism-Leninism with Chinese Characteristics" might be considered bottom-up, a youth rebellion, and inside-out, a cultural revolution ushered in by his radicalized youth. The most infamous Neo-Communist figure of the early 21st century will be Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, who has figured out how to combine these approaches into a top-down, bottom-up, inside-out push. His primary tools: ESG and SEL. Join James Lindsay in this episode of New Discourses Bullets, where he succinctly explains how Schwab's "stakeholder capitalism" Is a Leninist-Maoist project to mold a new economy and society in his image using a two-pronged vanguard model and a cultural revolution.

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The Republican War on “Woke Capitalism”

Andrew Petillon

June23 2022

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ESG criteria (for “environmental, social, and governance”) are a set of standards for public companies’ actions that investors use to guide where they put their money. (These criteria could include committing to reduce carbon emissions by a certain percentage by a specific date, allowing employees work-at-home flexibility in light of pandemic safety and child care issues, or requiring that a minimum percentage of the board of directors be female or persons of color.) As more and more investors, large firms, and asset managers have gravitated toward ESG positions in recent years, they have found themselves at odds with a Republican Party that used to count on these institutions as A base of support. Republicans are now striking back, which is why you hear more of them railing against “woke capitalism” and ESG. One group recently formed a new right-wing business lobby, the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, to compete with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a long-standing supporter of mainstream Republican policies that anti-ESG activists now see as corrupted by the left. Another recent anti-ESG initiative has been to push red states to pass legislation to divest state pension fund assets from firms who follow ESG principles. For all the GOP fretting over left-wing “cancel culture,” the party is working very hard to cancel ESG.

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Given the growing wave of influential ESG investors, most public companies and asset managers have incorporated ESG into their operations to meet investor demand. Incorporating ESG means implementing policies and procedures to measure and accurately disclose the firm’s application of ESG principles to its business operations, workforce, and governance. For asset managers, incorporating ESG also means creating financial products that follow ESG principles, such as ESG-based investment funds. That is the free market at work. Customer demand shifts and businesses adjust their operations to meet the new demand. ESG is the product of a free market, not a cabal of pernicious financiers with international sympathies.

Pence’s performative outrage sounds like something from a far-right radio program. In fact, conservative talk-show host Glenn , who has promoted false conspiracy theories involving hedge fund manager George Soros and former President Barack Obama among others, has criticized ESG using similar arguments and language. Beck hosted a radio show on March 18, 2022, titled: “Why are woke CEOs using ESG to DESTROY our free market?” During the show, Beck called ESG “the opposite of the free market. It is 21^st century fascism.” In apparent disapproval of U.S. sanctions against Russia, he blamed the sanctions on ESG. Beck said: “We’re not the ones that—that have decided to go to war against Russia. These sanctions, these are not governmental sanctions. This is ESG.”

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Thing  is  This Is SLATE A Center Left (or what passes for Center/Left these days. 20 years ago Loony Left) magazine.

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