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Brownstone Institute

Is the WEF the Headquarters of Evil?

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This article is printed with permission of the Brownstone Institute
Back in 1983, Ronald Reagan colorfully described the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Today, it seems we have a new candidate for the headquarters of all evil: the World Economic Forum headed by Klaus Schwab.

The WEF has no borders, includes all nationalities, embraces governments, NGOs and big business, has no military, nuclear arsenal, flag or anthem, and purports to solve all the world’s problems at its annual conference each year while delegates down champagne and caviar. It sponsors a leadership training program that boasts such covid cultists as Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau. Is Klaus Schwab the first honest-to-goodness Bond villain, bent on taking over (or depopulating) the world?

Professor Schwab certainly looks the part with his German accent and his prize place on top of the Swiss mountains. He also certainly pretends to run the world. In fact, he has been pretending to run the world since the 1970s, when he started his yearly conferences, hoping to get noticed. Getting noticed took decades. Many of the WEF Young Leaders program graduates presently in power around the world only entered his ‘classes’ 30 years after the WEF started. For decades Klaus has lived the ‘fake it till you make it’ adage. Has he finally made it?

The title of Klaus’ 2020 book “The Great Reset”, coauthored with Thierry Malleret, was catchy enough to be taken on as a slogan during 2020-21 by a slew of political leaders wanting to communicate for myriad local political reasons that the pandemic has opened up some kind of grand reinitialization opportunity in global politics.

Few of these leaders will have read the book though, because if they had, they would have been taken aback by some of its contents. For example: “First and foremost, the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour.”

Such a view is not commonly spouted by the über-rich barons running global corporations or the governments they influence, for the obvious reason that it constitutes a direct attack on their stash. Certainly they might publicly express the wish for less inequality – who wouldn’t? – but many would baulk at a “massive wealth redistribution,” Robin-Hood style, to labourers and away from capitalists like themselves.

In fact, over the last two years the exact opposite has happened: the world now contains more billionaires and more poor people. “You will own nothing and be happy,” another oft-quoted and much-maligned Schwabism, also describes the opposite of what has actually happened, which can be summarized instead as “the rich own lots more while the poor own nothing and are miserable.”

This year, the WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland held from May 22-26 triggered the usual outpouring of hatred on Twitter and other platforms. The gossip implies that the WEF is secretly plotting to take over the world by means of a secret collaboration between government and big business, as if rich and powerful people needed a vehicle like the WEF for that. It feels satisfying to those wronged by covid policy to think they have identified the head of the snake responsible for the mess.

The WEF, they claim, is the coordinating platform for all the secret deals that make the rich richer and the entrenched heads of government more powerful, while national and local sovereignty is being clandestinely forfeited, leaving the ordinary person to rot away slowly with neither resources nor rights.

These accusations against the WEF are accompanied by misrepresentation and outright fakery. Photos were recently circulated on social media of hundreds of private planes lined up on an airfield, claimed to be those of attendees at Davos 2022 who were (for shame!) flouting their own pretensions to reduce carbon emissions. According to Reuters, one of the two widely circulated photos was in fact taken years ago at Las Vegas Airport around the time of a boxing title fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, while another was taken in January 2016 at a Swiss air force base that is often used by Davos attendees and was probably associated with the event that year.

None of us was able personally to fly to Davos this year (though some of us have attended such events in the past), but no matter: every session of the 2022 meeting from May 22-26 was posted online.  This included the opening address, via video link, by none other than Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, resplendent in his trademark brown tee and staring down the camera with unblinking intensity. Invigorated by the President’s defiant address, attendees turned their attention to the remaining 220 or so sessions that covered every weighty and worldly topic under the sun.

We took the time to watch a few, and found them to share a few characteristics.  First, those involved expressed overblown expectations of what would be achieved during the discussions.  Second, the discussions themselves were intelligent and informative. Third, the discussions all led to no particular kind of action.

The basic model of a WEF conference session is to subsidize smart people (the presenters) to say smart things to rich people (the audience), who themselves pay the exorbitant conference registration fees in order to network with each other and have smart people pretend to take them seriously for a few days.

In a word, Klaus Schwab is a glorified and very talented conference planner selling flattery. He pretends that $60,000 provides the attending customer with access to crucial world decisions, all made in 4 days. The hordes paying the entry fee schmooze together, down vast quantities of wine and canapes, and participate in panel discussions that purport to solve problems associated with the world’s economy, environment, and society in end-on-end blocks of 45 minutes each. (Actually, it is closer to 35 minutes, because of 10 minutes of Q&A from the audience squeezed in at the end of each session.  Given the price tag of attendance, the organizers rightly expect some delegates to feel justified in having their moment on the mic.)

Typical of the level of ambition evident in WEF conference sessions, in his introduction to this year’s session on global taxation, host Geoff Cutmore announced that the incipient panel discussion was about getting to a point where “we all feel comfortable about what we’re paying, and we feel comfortable about what other people are paying and we feel comfortable about what corporations are paying and we all feel comfortable about where that tax revenue is ultimately going.”

Whoa.  He might have added, “And if we have a few minutes left over at the end, we’ll work out how to restore the Amazonian rain forest.” The panel consisted of the heads of both Oxfam and the OECD, plus a heavily masked economics professor from Harvard. Imagine what the head of Oxfam would have thought about Cutmore’s pronouncements, given how critical Oxfam has been of the tax evasion and self-enrichment of elites, particularly in the last 2 years.  If only he could get the conference delegates to pay their taxes and stop robbing poor people, he could axe Oxfam altogether!

Some sessions do make the stomach turn. For example, in one, Pfizer announced an “Accord for a Healthier World,”  with its CEO sitting alongside Bill Gates and two African potentates. Announcements like this are made at the WEF, but would they really not exist if not for the WEF? Unlikely. By providing a platform for such announcements, however, it becomes a lightning rod for suspicion. The WEF styles itself an “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation,” and like any large entity of its kind, it wants to get even bigger and more influential. But at heart, this is business. Klaus Schwab’s business.

The WEF claims serious positive impacts. For example, its ‘First Movers Coalition’ consists of 50 companies that have committed to investing in green technologies and removing carbon. Sounds great, right? The snag, of course, is that they have set up the measurement in such a way that they are able to decide themselves what is meant by ‘green’ or by ‘removing’ carbon. You can count caretaking a forest today as ‘removing’ carbon, and as long as the audience doesn’t know that you cut down and burned a mature forest in the same place last year, they will applaud!

Similarly, the WEF champions a system of reporting called ‘Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics’ (containing environmental, social, and governance, or “ESG,” measures), developed in a cooperative effort with major accounting firms and adopted by 70 companies. Paying a reasonable amount of taxes is not in those KPIs. Nor is free speech. Metrics, but not as you know them.

But what about the smoking gun represented in the many top politicians of today’s world who graduated from the WEF’s Young Leaders program? What about the creepy 2019 WEF conference about what to do in a pandemic?

On the Young Leaders program, it is undoubtedly true that the WEF has become a very successful job networking organization. But it did not invent networking. Networking societies for the rich and powerful have existed for centuries. Think of the Freemasons, the Rotary society, Chatham House, private high schools, Oxbridge, or the Ivy League. The rich and powerful will network with each other, come hell or high water, WEF or no WEF.

Perhaps those who met at the WEF have gelled together on an evil ideology that is bad for the world, but that ideology is clearly not the “Great Reset” ideology articulated by Schwab, since they are not following it in the slightest. Why then does Schwab not protest at how politicians are pretending to enact a Great Reset that is the very opposite of what he advocated in his book? Because he does not really care about his own ideas. A puffed-up conference organizer, Schwab follows his flock of customers rather than leading them. He is being used as a stooge.

OK, but what about that 2019 pandemic simulation conference? Again, you can read all about it online, a level of publicity for their plans that is surely not what you would expect of Bond villains. In these simulations, the WEF folks came to the conclusion that during a pandemic, movement and trade should not be disrupted because of the high costs to society. Yes, you read that right.  Once again, this is the very opposite of what was actually done.

The WEF pandemic conference was just one of the many ‘war games’ simulations that entertain people continuously all around the world. Pandemic simulations this week, asteroid simulations next week, killer bee simulations after that. Rather a lot of problems can be covered off in 220 sessions, and one of them is bound to be tomorrow’s news.

The total disconnect between what his pandemic conference said should be done and what actually happened during covid times is once again proof that Klaus is not led by his principles.  If he were, he would have been loudly protesting what has gone on over the past two years. Instead, he is merely riding his “good luck” that the leaders who came to drink champagne at his events have now embraced him as their supposed figurehead.

Since he is well into his 80s, Klaus probably figures that if an angry world population came to believe that he was responsible for the disaster that has befallen them, he’d be dead long before they came for justice. Thierry Malleret, his younger co-author on “The Great Reset,” has more to worry about in that regard!

The WEF, in sum, is hot air all the way.  It is led by a man who epitomizes pomp, which is nothing new in the circles of the rich and powerful. WEF-approved hot air is no different to the regular variety.

Sure, it’s a place where schmoozing and coordination happen, but the WEF invented neither schmoozing nor the idea of an old-boys club. It is simply the current clubhouse. The real culprits will find another venue the day after the WEF’s shingle is taken down.

Authors

  • Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy

  • Gigi Foster, senior scholar of Brownstone Institute, is a Professor with the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, having joined UNSW in 2009 after six years at the University of South Australia.

  • Michael Baker has a BA (Economics) from the University of Western Australia. He is an independent economic consultant and freelance journalist with a background in policy research.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Kid Lab Rats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Thomas BuckleyTHOMAS BUCKLEY 

” (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.” “

Mommy, can I be a Covid lab rat?”

That is a request most parents will never hear and it is a request that very few parents would ever want to hear.

But, unlike the more typical “Can I have a pony?” request, letting your child be a Covid shot test subject is a request that can actually be granted around the nation.

Right now, for example, Pfizer/BioNTech is running an ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of its shots (the shot is not a vaccine as it does not prevent catching the virus or transmitting the virus as typical vaccines do) on kids.

Pfizer has been running radio and other ads looking for test subjects; this is how they describe the study on their “Enrolling Children 6 to 23 months old for a COVID-19 Vaccine Study” website:

This study will help us learn how well our updated COVID-19 vaccine works in babies and toddlers who have not been previously vaccinated and see if the number of recommended doses can potentially be reduced for children under the age of 5. The study vaccine has been authorized by the United States Food and Drug Administration for children at least 6 months of age. It is designed to protect against the newer COVID-19 variant called XBB.1.5.

The company is also running similar trials for older kids and, of course, adults.

Clinical trials for drugs and procedures involving children are not inherently wrong and they are conducted safely around the world almost daily.

But this Covid trial stands out for a number of reasons.

First, the trial only involves kids who have never had a Covid shot before. The likelihood that a parent who has declined to get the shot for their kids in the first place will say “We chose not to get the shots for our kids, but feel free to experiment on them with the stuff we previously declined” is minimal.

In other words, if a parent didn’t feed their kid aluminum foil-flavored ice cream before it is highly unlikely they would feed their kid an experimental version of aluminum foil-flavored ice cream, even if you paid them (the trial comes with certain compensation enticements – Pfizer did not respond to a request for exactly what they are in this trial, though industry averages would indicate the pay would be between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars).

Second, there is the matter of “informed consent.” A trial subject must give permission freely, be told of any risks, and understand the entire situation. Clearly, nine-month-olds cannot do that.

It is perfectly legal for parents to give their “informed consent,” but here we get into the third problem: the risk/benefit question.

For example, during the pandemic (early 2020 to May 2023) there were 41 Covid deaths in California of kids under five. That number does not differentiate between “died with Covid” or “died from Covid;” that is a debate that continues to rage across the country and shall be put aside for the time being.

Every death of a child is a tragedy and this article is not intended to lessen that fact. However, children in general were not at all likely to get, let alone die from, Covid during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, there were about (rolling average) 2.4 million (about 6% of the total population) under-fives in California and there were about 385,000 cases of Covid reported in that age group.

Currently, about 3.2% of California’s under-fives have had the latest shot. That’s on par with the national average. What is interesting is that of the 70,817 kids who have received the shot in the state, 41,224 live in the Bay Area. In other words, the Bay Area has 20% of the state’s population, but 57% of the state’s “vaccinated” toddlers and babies. But do not ever think that politics has had nothing to do with Covid protocols.

During the pandemic, the overall likelihood of a child dying from/with Covid was about 1 in 60,000; for those over 75 – about 6.5% of the population or 2.7 million – there were about 51,000 with/from Covid deaths, or about 1 in 50.

The risk, clearly, is extremely different depending upon age and general state of health.

With a relative risk of being harmed by Covid, the risks of the Covid shot itself must be considered carefully – note: no kid in the study will get a placebo for comparison purposes.

The Covid shots, in the general population, did have significant side-effects and did cause a number of deaths. While these numbers are not broken out by age, in the same time period there were 640 deaths and 89,000 “adverse effects” experienced (much much more than just a sore arm) by Californians.

Also during the same time period, all other vaccines combined caused 66 people to die and 14,000 to have a reportable “adverse effect.” (Note – the numbers are taken from the CDC’s “vaccine adverse event reporting system,” a tool it stood by as an early warning device for decades…that is, until the Covid problem numbers got too high.)

That puts the general odds of something bad happening to a person after they get a Covid shot at about 1 in a 1,000 and some studies have shown it to be 1 in 800. In other words, the risk from the shot appears to outweigh the risk of Covid itself by a factor of 60 times.

Citing the uncertainty of benefit, it should also be noted that the European Union has not cleared the shot at all (with minor exceptions) for the under-fives and were hesitant in allowing them for the under 18s.

Clearly, the risk outweighs the reward, as it were, and it is unclear – because Pfizer did not answer any request for information/comment (see questions below) – if parents are given those figures when making the decision to enroll their kid in an experimental drug program.

Adults calculate risk and reward constantly – from “Can I make that light before it turns red?” to “Should I tease that lion?” But a seven-month old is simply not capable of doing so and while certain clinical trials do hold out serious hope and are important for society at large, a trial such as this for such a limited reward – kids very very very rarely get, let alone suffer seriously, from Covid – seems dubious.

In other words, if you wanted to test a new malaria drug you would not do so on Santa’s elves at the North Pole because there are no mosquitoes there to infect anyone.

According to the Belmont Report, which set baseline standards for human-involved clinical trials in the late 1970s (it was a government reaction to the horror of the CDC’s own “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) one of the three core standards for justifying clinical trial testing is “beneficence.”

In other words, there is an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risk and harm.

That risk/benefit calculation obviously changes in regard to other far more common childhood maladies, making participation in those studies potentially far more “beneficent.”

But in the case of Covid, the question is how are maximal, as it were, are the anticipated benefits?

Very very minimal and that is the problem, said Dr. Clayton Baker, former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

“Given the real and well-established risks of harm (including myocarditis and death), and given the functionally zero potential for benefit (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.”

Come to think of it, maybe just get the kid the pony instead.

Here’s a link to an on-going kids Covid study with a handy map so you can find a location near you (mostly Bay Area): A Study to Learn About Variant-Adapted COVID-19 RNA Vaccine Candidate(s) in Healthy Children

For clinical trials in general, you can look here for one that you might be interested in taking part in:

For clinical trials just about Covid, you can look here

As noted above, here are the questions Pfizer did not reply to:

-Exactly how is informed consent handled? I assume a parent/guardian can provide said consent?

-Do (or have) you run trials with previously vaccinated children?

-What child/youth trials have been run in the past and what have been their results?

-What is the compensation amount?

-Have any previous trials shown conclusively that the vaccine ameliorates Covid severity in children?

-When and in what manner did the FDA approve this trial?

-When do you expect to conclude the trial?

-Is this trial aimed at testing a “booster” shot or to cover a new variant?

-Has any child in any trial conducted had a significant and serious reaction requiring hospitalization and/or led to death?

-It appears one of the points of the study is to figure out how to cut the number of doses as well as check effectiveness. Is that correct?

-How many children – nationwide and in California specifically – have signed up for/been through the trial so far?

-What are the differences between trials involving children and those involving adults?

-Will Pfizer conduct trials each time it comes out with new variant vaccine shot?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Thomas Buckley

    Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.

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