Raising the Stakes for the Great Reset
Post-election Quiz:
Joe Biden named four members of his family “Beau,” “Champ,” “Hunter,” and “Major”. Two were his sons, and two are dogs.Can you guess which are which?
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An article by Diana Kimpton at Conservative Woman
poses a good question and provides some pithy answers. Thank you Diana. She also provides a link to something called the Great Reset – a link which I followed, since I thought it was about time I knew what it was all about.
[I have an allergy to new words and expressions like some people have to peanuts. Internet acronyms produce violent choking in me. Anything marked “may contain neologisms” I avoid. I became a climate denier years ago when idle curiosity sent me to a site called RealClimate where I kept reading about the Science being Robust. The image of science as something hale and hearty and ruddy-cheeked was a big turnoff to me, and when I first saw photos of Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt my suspicions were confirmed. What could those stingy stringy fringy little beards be hiding?]
Where was I?
The WEF Great Reset page begins:
There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.
Aaaaargh! Stakeholder is one of those words. I’d always associated it with Tony Blair and killing vampires, which makes no sense because Tony is more vampire than vampire killer. It’s a cunning little word, suggesting that we’re all in this together. Only the size of our stakes distinguishes us. And no-one at the World Economic Forum would be so indelicate as to ask: “How big’s yours?”
This warm sense of inclusiveness is dissipated in the second paragraph though:
Leaders find themselves at a historic crossroads, managing short-term pressures against medium- and long-term uncertainties.
Right. Leaders are at the crossroads, but where are the rest of us? We come back into the picture at the end of paragraph three:
As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. Drawing from the vision and vast expertise of the leaders engaged across the Forum’s communities, the Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being.
Yup. That’s us at the end there. It’s the directors, the prioritisers, the managers and the leaders, with their vision and vast expertise, who are entering the unique window of opportunity. And once through, they’ll be the ones “determining the priorities of societies” and “managing the global commons.” We’re the guys and gals in the last sentence who are going to have our dignity honoured.
For “dignity” read: “posteriors.” For “honoured” read: “handed to you on a plate.”
I know it’s just guff, but guff has meaning, even when it’s meaningless. Especially when it’s meaningless. Take the announcements for today, 9thof November:
First off is the Volvo group, which is launching a Green Finance Framework for the financing of investments and projects in the area of clean transportation. Martin Lundstedt, President and CEO of the Volvo Group says:
“Sustainability is a part of our DNA… We take a holistic view on sustainability and are very pleased to show that we are supporting this transition with every part of our organization.”
Then Ahmed Galal Ismail, Chief Executive of Majid Al Futtaim, announces the launch of the world’s first benchmark corporate Islamic green bonds
And finally (for today) there’s the Green Horizon Summit which kicked off this morning. Here are some highlights:
Mark Carney(remember him?) who is now Finance Adviser on the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP 26) to the Prime Minister, said:
“Transition plans will reveal the leaders and laggers on the road to Glasgow. We will not get to net zero in a niche, [???] it requires a whole economy transition”.
Christine Lagarde, President at [sic] European Central Bank called for a wholesale transformation of the economy. She says:
“Climate change information remains optional [???]– in part because the financial impact is still not well understood…We need common technical reporting standards and increased data collecting to enable a consistent way to classify green activities and a taxonomy of carbon intensive activities.”
There’s also the European Commissioner for Economy, the Head of the World Bank, and host of other Shovers and On-the-Makers. The CEO of Barclays says:
“What COVID-19 is showing is that we’re on this planet together.”
Well, not actually together, in the sense of “together.” More like far apart really, with them, the leaders, determining the future, directing the priorities of societies, and managing the global commons, on the far side of a video conference, while we stakeholders wait to have our dignity honoured.
Or we could sharpen our stakes and drive them into the heart of the vampire I suppose.
Or we could sharpen our stakes and drive them into the heart of the vampire I suppose.
Climate Scepticism 
The billionaire’s reset….with billionaires in charge but more so.
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If the Western elites keep up with this meaningless guff that indeed means something, then they’ll court events that’ll reset them instead. Trump nearly did, and Brexit plus the Gilet Jeune riots were also reactions. If they don’t ditch the circular and self supporting virtue-signalling narratives soon, the next reaction will be bigger still.
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In their minds I suppose this guff is the magic incantation which keeps them in power, and also the way of impressing us with that same power.
The WEF will actually sell you some of their magic. For as little as €30 a month you can:
I think I’d rather send a dollar for a bodybuilding course so that I don’t get sand kicked in my face.
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I sometimes think that Douglas Adams made a category error in his bit in the Hitchhikers Guide about the three spaceships. It obviously should be world leaders who should be on the first one. The world will be a much better place if we can persuade all those who have planned our future that it will be much more fun for them to start a new colony on Alpha Centauri.
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Schwab introduced the idea of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ which basically redefines human beings as worker drones in a global capitalist economy dominated by a few major players (stakeholders).
“But in a general social context, the stakeholder concept is even more nefarious, discarding any idea of democracy, rule by the people, in favour of rule by corporate interests.
Society is no longer regarded as a living community but as a business, whose profitability is the sole valid aim of human activity.
Schwab set out this agenda back in 1971, in his book Moderne Unternehmensführung im Maschinenbau (Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering), where his use of the term “stakeholders” (die Interessenten) effectively redefined human beings not as citizens, free individuals or members of communities, but as secondary participants in a massive commercial enterprise.
The aim of each and every person’s life was “to achieve long-term growth and prosperity” for this enterprise – in other words, to protect and increase the wealth of the capitalist elite.”
“Genuine democracy essentially falls into the same category for Schwab. He knows that most people will not willingly go along with plans to destroy their lives and enslave them to a global techno-fascist system of exploitation, so giving them a say in the matter is simply not an option.
This is why the “stakeholder” concept has been so important for Schwab’s project. As discussed above, this is the negation of democracy, with its emphasis instead on “reaching out across stakeholder groups for solution building”. (80)
If the public, the people, are included in this process it is only at a superficial level. The agenda has already been pre-supposed and the decisions pre-made behind the scenes.
Schwab effectively admits as much when he writes: “We must re-establish a dialogue among all stakeholders to ensure mutual understanding that further builds a culture of trust among regulators, non-governmental organizations, professionals and scientists. The public must also be considered, because it must participate in the democratic shaping of biotechnological developments that affect society, individuals and cultures”.”
I won’t go into the obvious political and historical connotations, because that will almost certainly cause more controvery, but do read the article. This is the grim future that Schwab and the WEF have planned for us and the MBCC of Downing Street is fully in on it, which is why he’s ecstatic that Biden has ‘won’ the Presidency because he now sees no obstacles to ensuring that the British people will be the first to be enslaved to their new technocratic corporatist overlords. But he might permit us to have one last ‘semi-normal’ Christmas before that happens – if we’re very good.
https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/10/05/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-reset/
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Geoff, “I think I’d rather send a dollar for a bodybuilding course so that I don’t get sand kicked in my face.”
True fact: diminutive Ronnie Corbett of The Two Ronnies, once kicked actual sand into my face.
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JAIME
It’s interesting that “stakeholders” is a translation of the German “Interessenten” (= French: “Intéréssés.”) which translates into English as “those concerned, involved, most directly affected” and not “interested” which has a quite different sense of “being curious about.” We just don’t have a word for the concept, so one had to be invented. We don’t have a word to translate the French “solidaire” either, for similar reasons, which can be traced back to the good ol’ Emmanuel Todd’s theory of family structure and its influence on culture. Cue for a digression:
Traditional English family structure is nuclear, with loose ties between the generations and inheritance decided ad hoc. This structure emphasises personal freedom and initiative at the expense of social solidarity. The majority structure in Europe is authoritarian (what Todd calls the “famille souche” or stem family structure) with inheritance by the eldest son. This system generates (requires) strong bonds of solidarity to make it work, making for a society which is efficient, “solidaire” but tending towards rigidity. Look at the difference between English and Scottish politics. South of the border, fluid parties given to anarchy; north of the border the rigid rule of Scottish Labour giving way to the equally rigid SNP. Sometimes you get a lucky mix, like the Act of Union in the eighteenth century giving us the Scottish Renaissance and David Hume; or the influx of central European Jews into the USA giving us Hollywood and modern science.
Anglo Saxon dominance over the past century has given the world a liberty of expression and cultural fluidity not seen since the time of hunter gathers. (The Anglo family structure is the primitive one, found in the wild only in outlying areas like Siberia and Northern Canada – hence the extreme individualism of a Jordan Peterson.) These structures are unconsciously rooted within all of us, and sooner of later they will emerge in a political form. The EU since the beginning was an unconscious rejection of the Anglo Saxon model. It wasn’t treachery that made France align itself with Germany after the war (we’re still on Berlin time here, though on the Greenwich meridian) but unconscious social structures.
Schwab may be spearheading the second great reaction against Anglo-Saxon individualism with a movement that has ambitions to be a kind of giant Rotary Club for billionaires. You need the freedom and indifference to egalitarianism of the Anglo model to become a billionaire, but once you’re there, you may rediscover your authoritarian, stem family roots in your central European origins and decide it’s time to put some structural backbone into your hegemony. And resetting is exactly what you do to a wobbly spinal column. The result is not necessarily Fascism – more like compulsory osteopathy.
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My main source of doubtful neologisms by far is Professor Lewandowsky. I owe him my familiarity with terms like “gaslighting” and “rabbit hole,” as used by the Guardian here:
You get the idea. “Rabbit hole” seems to mean: “argument too complex for you, dear reader, to need to bother your pretty little head about. Trust me.”
Like “stakeholder,” these terms are designed to obscure the ideology behind the discourse. It’s appropriate that fake news expert Lewandowsky should be such a proficient user of them.
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Geoff,
The word ‘interest’ comes from the Latin ‘inter est’; literally ‘is between’. The interface implied by the word can connote curiosity or investment. In my experience, a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy document would be the most uninteresting document in its portfolio, since it would be neither here nor there, nor anywhere in between. And yet, ironically, it would be where the word ‘stakeholder’ would have its nest.
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The word stakeholder has long been used when applying for research grants. One had to identify those groups in society who might benefit from the results of your research – the stakeholders. Yet again another example of the British system of having to predict the results of your research before you conduct it. But easy if you are a climate scientist where everyone and the entire planet have stakeholder status.
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JOHN
We use the word in the French/German sense when we talk about having an interest in something, declaring one’s interest etc. “Those who have an interest in (something)” would obviously be too cumbersome, hence “stakeholder,” which is inclusive, but in a way that disguises their different interests. I’ve always assumed it was Blair who introduced it to the UK, along with Orwellian horrors like Ofcom and Thiscom and Thatcom. But I may be wrong, I wasn’t paying attention at the time.
Brecht has a poem about it that ends:
Wir und: ich und du
Das ist nicht dasselbe
Wir erringen den Sieg
Und du besiegst mich.
[“We” and “you and me” are not the same thing. We win the victory; and you beat me.]
Only someone who would emigrate from the USA to East Germany could write that.
Years ago I saw the results of one of the National Statistical Office’s annual public opinion surveys. They asked: “Who should benefit most from private enterprise, the workers, the customers or the shareholders?” Only 3% said “shareholders.” The Guardian journalist writing it up missed the sense of this: that 97% of the British population are opposed to one of the fundamental tenets of capitalism. It seems they’d prefer Co-op socialism or possibly anarcho-syndicalism.
The Guardian may have missed the implication, but you can bet Herr Schwab didn’t.
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Do Lewandowsky, apparent expert on all, now thinks excercising one’s legal rights regarding election results is indulging in conspiracy ideation. The good professor seems like if he has a troubled trip to the bathroom he thinks there must be a conspiracy involved.
Geoff,
I think the misuse of language to achieve, a la Lew, a sort of crippled mental state is what you may be reacting to.
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The following brief article provides some insight into the historical origins of the term stakeholder within a corporate context:
https://www.ipma-usa.org/chgagent/where-did-the-term-stakeholder-come-from/
It includes one of those diagrams beloved of management consultants, in this case supposedly helping the reader visualize categories of stakeholding along three axes: interest, attitude and power. The ‘attitude’ axis predominantly follows the lines of benefit and loss. Being a stakeholder does not necessitate being a potential beneficiary, and this reflects in the existence of ‘blockers’ and ‘backers’. As P.G. Wodehouse put it in ‘The Adventures of Sally’:
“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.”
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HUNTERSON7
The misuse of language is indeed what I’m reacting to. Lacking any particular expertise, it’s all I can do.
JOHN
A quick Google suggests you’re on the right lines. According to Investopaedia “A stakeholder is a party with an interest in an enterprise or project; stakeholders in a corporation include investors, employees, customers, and suppliers.”
Neither Wikipaedia nor anyone else seems interested in the question of when and why it became a mainstream term in politics. I associate it with the kind of mushy non-ideological ideology of Blairism, where we all pull together along the Third Way towards the End of History, where patients are clients, students are end-users, and hospitals, schools, libraries and museums all adopt policies based on best management practice. It’s the period when the rich got richer, the poor got dependent, the middle classes got woke, and we all got stupider.
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GEOFF
>Neither Wikipaedia nor anyone else seems interested in the question of when and why it became a mainstream term in politics.
Does this help?
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JAIME
What Schwab is proposing is just an extended version of what has been happening in the UK economy over the last 40-50 years. It is called Rentier Capitalism. What has happened is that companies have secured the rights to resources, which can be almost anything eg mineral resources, IP, franchises or government contracts, and can extract rents by outsourcing the fulfilment of such contracts.
Mark Blyth has recently done a podcast on exactly this and goes into much more detail than I can here.
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Bill, yes, I made the mistake previously of thinking that Green Blobonomics was a rejection of capitalism to embrace a form of global communism/Marxism. I was wrong. It is naked capitalism, stripped of the benign mask of democracy and liberalism which it has worn throughout most of its development, when capitalism was working well and the financial markets were healthy. Now that capitalism is threatened, it has reverted to a much nastier form of governance to support the needs of its major stakeholders. The markets were headed for a major crash a long time before Covid struck.
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Jaime. You say that Green Blobonomics (I really like this expression by the way) is naked capitalism. It is certainly capitalism but one might comment that it surely isn’t naked enough because it has successfully sold itself to a lot of people as kind of cuddly and radical and alternative, and of course anti those nasty greedy capitalist fossil fuel firms. Obviously this is bosh but there is little sign that this disguise has ceased to work.
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The earliest use of ‘stakeholders’ in the Times archive is from a December 1821 leader expressing support for distressed farmers but opposing a proposed tax on, or even a prohibition of, foreign corn. It said that such propositions were a ‘very palpable absurdity’, continuing with…
(They didn’t half use long sentences in those days! The adduced material was a letter by Lord Stanhope. I couldn’t be arsed to try to work out whether the Times leader really supported whatever was in Stanhope’s letter or if its ‘full support’ of it was sarcastic.)
That usage of ‘stakeholders’ is pretty much the same as the modern usage – people who have a stake in something working properly. A useful word.
What makes the modern usage so annoying and often very palpably absurd is that most of the modern users are talking TED (AKA talking bollocks). Those who bang on about stakeholders also bang on about the three-legged equity stools of holistic capacity-building solutionary leadership key core paradigms and the like.
And they never mean *all* stakeholders – all of the people who have a stake in something working properly. They mean ‘civil society’: lobbyists, basically. The word has become a pointer to corporatism gone mad.
A definition from a 2008 glossary by The Centre for Policy Studies:
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This is the bit that resonated with me:
“There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”
What I think I’ve noticed was:
1. Panic on the part of the climate-concerned when Covid-19 arrived, since suddenly, faced with a real and current problem, people immediately prioritised it over the less obviously real and not immediate “climate crisis”.
2. This was an obvious problem for them, since if people decided that “climate chaos” was not really an issue, and certainly not an urgent one, then decades of propaganda had been in vain. Thus, a strategy was needed.
3. The strategy hit upon, and much used by, inter alia, the Guardian and the BBC, is to try to put coronavirus/Covid-19 in the same headlines and articles as each other, thus trying, however illegitimately, to link the two in the public mind, so that the panic induced by the authorities over Covid-19 can be used to keep the same panic going and sense of urgency going over the climate.
4. That wasn’t enough. It might defuse the damage done to the climate cause by Covid-19, but the really great thing would be to use Covid-19 to lever their dreams and demands for “transforming” the world (at immense expense) to “solve” the “climate crisis”. And thus we arrive at things like:
“There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”
Profoundly dishonest, in my view, but not surprising at all. A lot of money generally and a whole lot of incomes are at stake. There is a whole industry out there that was suddenly confronted with having to stand on its own two feet and stop milching the taxpayer, and this is its response.
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Thanks BILL BEDFORD for the links.
Something I didn’t know from Wikipaedia:
From the Guardian interview linked in the above Wiki extract:
There’s quite a lot of politics in the Prince’s statement, which will be out of bounds when he becomes king. It would only take the launch of an All Living Things Independence Party or a Small Visions of Change Party to make his position party political. It would be worth losing a few by-elections to shut him up.
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“Outlining a five-point plan to rebuild economies following a global recession, the 71-year-old prince said the pandemic was the result of a breakdown in the link between humanity and nature that could be corrected by recognising “the interdependence of all living things.”
I bet his plants told him to say that…
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Humans and Coronaviruses would have interacted completely naturally if it wasn’t for the hubris of some smart-arsed modellers and politicians.
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Their plan to begin fixing the breakdown in the link between humanity and nature is first to inject billions with a synthetic messenger RNA which instructs cells in the human body to manufacture a SARS-CoV-2 protein, then Schwab and his cronies have plans to inject us all with smart devices which will ‘redefine what it means to be human’. I’m not sure how becoming half-human, half-cyborg really equates to re-establishing our connection with nature, and I’m not sure that the witless Prince understands the nature of the people he has jumped into bed with.
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Talking of Mark Blyth (which we weren’t, but hay), he recently did another podcast entitled How a second Trump term would strengthen EU which is interesting enough if you like that sort of thing. But partway through he said something that made me think.
He was talking about European industry and how he saw it’s place in the world in the coming years. Almost in passing, he pointed to the fact that much of the renewable energy generation technology was developed in Europe, but was now manufactured in China. And then he moved on, ignoring, what seems to me, the obvious consequences of this particular technology transfer.
China has tried renewable energy, and from what I’ve read, they have side-lined it and are now building large numbers of coal-fired power stations. So China gets a double bonus. Not only do they get some of the cheapest electricity in the world, but by continuing to support the European push for renewables they ensure that Europe is not going to be a serious economic rival in the foreseeable future.
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thanks for the link -https://www.weforum.org/great-reset
some bits from the “about” statement – “fully virtual Sustainable Development Impact Summit will convene leaders from government, business, international organizations and civil society along with a diverse group of experts and innovators to initiate, accelerate and scale-up entrepreneurial solutions to tackle climate change and advance sustainable development”
wonder who “civil society” includes?
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ps – Vinny partially gives his definition in above comment:-)
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“wonder who “civil society” includes?”
The climate assemblies, no doubt.
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Geoff,
I intended posting this comment yesterday, but I forgot.
I have found an introduction to a 1990 paper in the Journal of Behavioural Economics that reads as follows:
“The proposition that business corporations can and should serve the interests of multiple stakeholders, rather than simply those of shareholders, is enjoying a considerable current vogue. In late 1987 NCR Corporation ran a striking series of ads in national media on the theme “NCR’s Mission: Create Value for Our Stakeholders”; the latter were specifically identified as employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders, and communities… A 1988 Business Roundtable study of 100 major companies found “widespread recognition that corporate obligations extend to a variety of constituencies or stakeholders . . . that are considered in planning and evaluating corporate policy and action”. In January 1989, Mobil featured the stakeholder concept in one of its regular op-ed ads, with bondholders and pensioners added to the stakeholder list (Washington Post 1/8/89). The stakeholder concept is, of course, scarcely new. Freeman traced the term back to an SRI internal memorandum of 1963.”
This account of a late 1980s upsurge in usage coincides with Bill’s graph and gives you a pretty good account of the origination of the term in business parlance. I’m pretty sure that, on this occasion, the business consultants got in there before the politicians, and so the term was a business neologism before it became a political one. The route towards political adoption was probably through the public management sector. I have found the following, written in a 2005 paper:
“Despite being in management literature (STONEY; WINSTANLEY, 2001) since Richard E. Freeman published his landmark book “Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach” in 1984, stakeholding has yet to be fully explored in the Public Management field, with little empirical evidence in local government studies. The sporadic examples of stakeholding in Public Management are to be found in studies involving public services such as hospitals (FOTTLER et al., 1989), health care (BLAIR; BUESSELER, 1998; KUMAR; SUBRAMANIAN, 1998; MILLER; WILSON, 1998;), and education (ENZ et al., 1993).”
Still ‘sporadic’ in 2005, as far as local government was concerned, but on every politician’s lips now. Today the term is in such common usage it probably has lost most of the originally intended meaning. In the hands of the political elite it has become just one of those cozy-wozy, fuzzy words like ‘engagement’ and ‘buy-in’. As with all management speak, discern the meaning and expect the opposite.
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John, indeed I’ve heard the term bandied about in business for around 30 years I think. Especially at leadership and marketing trainings.
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…and it did have a pragmatic operational use in that ‘a project stakeholder meeting’ might be used for one in which all critical project parties are involved. So the end user, a big systems integrator or two who sit between us and the end user, a critical partner or two we are using to help satisfy our contribution to the project, potentially a critical supplier of ours whose timeline might impact the project, and potentially multiple departments from each of these (e.g. for us, QA, engineering, product marketing, management, support). The actual name of the meeting (project launch, or critical design review, or whatever), might be what is used most commonly for each, but communally these were sometimes call stakeholder meetings. I recall in some (per another thread regarding equipment for Harrier jump-jet), you might have an actual pilot present as a stakeholder; and for sure they have a lot a stake because if we get the flight computer wrong they are doomed!
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I an gonna write a paper on The Guvuhmint As Stakeholder.
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Some random notes:
On the bikeshedding post Barry Woods points to a new Lew paper which finds that Trump’s tweets are leading the mainstream media astray. It uses data from the “neutral media source” the New York Times. And just to keep up the neutrality, yesterday Lew tweeted about the Trump presidency being “four years of evil.”
There’s a video going around of this exchange:
Journalist: I’m from the BBC.
Biden: BBC? I’m Irish.
What was that about being under the influence of a foreign power?
Pfizer’s CEO has just sold 60% of his shares in the company. No doubt he’ll buy them back as soon as the price drops. (Isn’t there an expression about pulling up stakes and moving on?)
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BETH
Somehow I still have the image of a stakeholder as an apprentice vampire slayer.
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