But parallel to his career as outlined above, Klaus Schwab has been involved with the World Economic Forum (WEF), having founded it in 1971. The WEF does not deal with economics as a science, i.e., in the words of Investopedia: “Economics is the science that studies how societies produce goods and services and how they consume them.” A scientific approach to economics is about finding principles which are reflected in data and which can be used to predict future events from data. Economics as a science involves observing, measuring, finding patterns, etc.
Science is about gaining knowledge and understanding.
When economists recommend policies, they’ve left science behind and entered the world of politics. They are no longer engaged in a search for correlations and equations. They’ve entered a struggle for power and control.
The WEF is about control.
The WEF is a group of individuals: leaders in government, business, and academia. As their website states, their goal is “to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” They have rejected the scientific approach to economics and seek instead of influence policy.
In its own words, the WEF’s purpose is to “shape” — i.e., control and have power over — economic systems and policies. The WEF is not an organization doing research to discover lawlike regularities in economic phenomena. It is a group seeking power.
The WEF is not trying to control European economic systems, or American economic systems. The “W” in WEF means that this group wants to control the world’s economic systems.
Simply put, Klaus Schwab and the WEF would rather control events than understand them; they would rather have power than knowledge.
One example of this approach is Schwab’s introduction of what he calls “stakeholder capitalism.” Historically the two main types of capitalism have been “free market capitalism” and “crony capitalism.” Is Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism” a truly distinct third type, or is it merely one of the previous two types dressed up in new terminology? Exploring such questions includes the analysis of specialized jargon. According to Schwab, “free market capitalism” was “shareholder capitalism.” He is dismissive of “shareholder capitalism” as a system which needs to be discarded.
But, “free market capitalism,” as a report by Mercury Radio Arts explains, is “an economic system in which businesses, especially corporations, focus primarily on the desires of their customers, owners, and employees.” It’s a system of negotiation and compromise: a system in which all three parties — customers, owners, employees — engage in give-and-take. It’s a very inclusive system, because nearly everyone in society is a customer, an owner, or an employee — and some people are two of those, or even all three, at once.
So what is Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism”? It’s related to yet another phrase: it’s part of “The Great Reset.” The Mercury Radio Arts report attempts to define that term:
The reason that the Great Reset is so hard to define is because nothing quite like it has ever been tried before, at least not on this scale. The most accurate name for the Reset is probably something like “modern corporate cronyist techno socialistic international fascism,” but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Another attempt at explaining the Great Reset would be to call it “soft authoritarianism” — “soft” because it avoids the brutality of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zhedong, and “authoritarianism” because its goal is control.
It’s called “socialistic” and not “socialist” because it employs some aspects of socialism as instruments — as means to an end — without embracing the socialist goals of equity. The Great Reset uses the paternalistic role of the socialist state to buy the dependency and compliance of the average citizen.
The WEF’s Great Reset is not only for Europe, and not only for the United States. It is a truly global attempt to gain power. As extreme as it may sound, Klaus Schwab wants to control the world. But he wants to do this in a “soft” way — soft authoritarianism — he presents this as a series of initiatives, ideas, and programs which are for the global good. Everyone should want to go along with his ideas, he thinks, because he’s presented them as if they’re for everyone’s benefit.
Of course, simply because Klaus Schwab has presented these ideas as if they’re for everyone’s good, well, that doesn’t mean that they actually are for everyone’s good.
So how do the Great Reset and “stakeholder capitalism” appear in practice? What do they look like?
The WEF’s technique is to use money to control. This is a different use of wealth than the ordinary working-class person’s use of wealth.
For example, a working-class person who obtains money might use it to buy a car or a house — or take a vacation, or eat in a fancy restaurant, or save for retirement or for a college education. For working-class people, money is for buying things.
The people at the WEF have wealth measured in the billions — of dollars, euros, francs, yen, yuan, wen, pound sterling, krona, krone, etc. — and view money differently. A person who has 300 billion dollars will be able to afford the same lifestyle as the person who has 400 billion dollars. The increase of 100 billion dollars isn’t about being able to buy more things or being able to afford more luxuries. It’s about an increase in power, in the ability to control people and institutions.
Here’s how “stakeholder capitalism” works: Companies need, from time to time, to borrow money. Maybe a shoe company needs to build a new factory. Maybe a small restaurant wants to expand. Companies borrow money for these purposes. Banks or groups of investors lend the money: they’ll lend the money if they think that the company will be able to pay it back. That’s why it’s difficult to get a loan to build a factory to produce green-and-purple-striped socks, but it’s easy to get a loan to build a factory to produce navy blue socks.
So the decision about whether or not to lend money to a company is based on the perceived ability of the company to repay what it’s borrowed. The interest rate on the loan will also vary: a company might be able to borrow money at 5% if it’s building that factory to produce navy blue socks, but the company will have to pay 10% to borrow the money to build the factory making the green-and-purple-stripe socks.
Given that the decision about whether or not to lend money is based on the perceived ability of the borrower to pay it back, then it follows that the interest rate on the loan is based on the same thing.
Klaus Schwab wants to change that. He wants banks, or groups of investors, to lend money based on the political and social opinions of the company’s management. He wants the interest rate to be based on those opinions as well. Notice that he’s not lending his own money this way, but he’s interested in persuading or forcing others to lend their money this way.
In the shift from “free market capitalism” to “stakeholder capitalism,” the ability of the owners, employees, and customers of the business to negotiate and compromise has disappeared. Now, all three groups must reshape their opinions and beliefs to match the requirements of the lender. Everyone’s being controlled in a system of “stakeholder capitalism,” and nobody’s free.
If six shoe companies — Nike, Puma, New Balance, Converse, Adidas, Reebok — each wanted to borrow $100 million dollars from a bank to build new factories, then it might be the case that three of them would be allowed to borrow the money, but the other three would not. Under Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism,” it wouldn’t matter how good the shoes were, or how popular they were. The decisions would be made by asking the management of the companies how they had voted in recent presidential elections, or which political groups they supported financially, or what they’d done to fund the printing of bumper stickers about social justice.
In Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism,” who decides the standards? If a company’s loan application will be accepted or rejected based on the political views of the company’s management, who decides which political views are the correct ones? In answering these questions, it becomes clear that “stakeholder capitalism” is “crony capitalism.” In Schwab’s “Great Reset,” the standards are set by the government, but the process of setting them is influenced by a few large corporations. The separation between the public sector and the private sector — i.e., between the government and the businesses — has been blurred or violated. No fair competition between companies is possible. The government, which is supposed to be the referee and umpire between the competing corporations, is instead intimately related to one of them, and gives disadvantages to all the others.
What happens to ordinary people? The workers in these companies might get pay raises, or they might get pay cuts, or they might even lose their jobs, based on the social and political opinions of the banks, or of the groups of investors, who will or won’t lend money to their employers. Klaus Schwab and the WEF are quite willing to throw the lower-class factory worker under the bus. They are quite willing to make the people in the middle-class and lower-class suffer. They are willing to do this because they demand the ability to control. They’re not after money: they already have so much of it that they can’t spend it all. They want control.
The irony is that “stakeholder capitalism” is willing to throw low-income workers into deeper poverty, or complete unemployment, while claiming that they’re doing all of this in the name of “social justice.” This is another instance in which it’s important to see the words as mere disguises for unseemly motives. Those who claim to work for “social justice” are actually against it. Those who claim to seek the interests of the low-class worker are actually willing to push that worker into deeper misery for their own purposes.
Such people use words to cover up their actions: actions which have the exact opposite than the meanings of those words. Those who claim to help the poor want to harm the poor. Those who claim to help the climate are the ones who destroy it. Those who claim to seek racial justice are actually racists. Whichever words Klaus Schwab and the WEF use, their actions are opposite of those words.
Their techniques and strategies are many. A variant on the loan scenario is this: companies which seek to borrow money often do so by selling bonds.
A bond is worth a small amount of money, and so, most ordinary citizens can buy one. If a company needs $100 million dollars, it can sell one million bonds at $100 each. Many lower- and middle-class people can afford to buy a bond for $100. Eventually, they’ll get their $100 back, with interest, and so they’ll be better off — having gained the interest. This is a good deal: a lower- or middle-class person can make some money in this type of investment, and the company can get the $100 million it needs.
When ordinary people buy bonds, they’ll look up the company’s reliability rating. There are economists who rate companies: they explain which companies are reliable. People rely on these ratings to decide which bonds to buy. People don't want to give $100 to a company unless they’re pretty sure that the company can pay it back.
But Klaus Schwab and WEF are changing the system. They are forcing economists to rate companies, not on their ability to repay the $100, but on their social and political opinions.
How does the “Great Reset” coerce economists to play along with its version of “crony capitalism”? Again, the key here is “soft” authoritarianism. No soldiers will show up to demand that the economists use certain rating systems. But economics departments at major universities depend on government grants and taxpayer dollars. With such money come conditions. Individual economists build careers by publishing articles in professional academic journals and giving presentations at international conferences. Whose articles get published? Who gets invited to speak at conferences? Who extends the invitations? People like Klaus Schwab and the WEF. To be clear, there are many more people like Schwab, and many more institutions like the WEF.
What are the results of this “stakeholder capitalism” and its effects on bond ratings? Some companies who are able to repay the bonds won’t be able to sell those bonds to investors; these companies lose the opportunity to expand; their workers get less pay or lose their jobs altogether; the consumers aren’t able to buy the good products they want; because low- and middle-class investors can’t buy those bonds, they lose an opportunity to earn that interest.
Meanwhile, companies who can’t repay the bonds can still sell them to investors. Therefore, low- and middle-class investors lose the $100 they invested in the bonds. These companies can’t sell their products, so their workers either get less pay or lose their jobs.
Pretty much everyone in this system suffers — except Klaus Schwab and the multi-billionaires in the WEF.
One of the mechanisms used to implement this scheme, according to the Mercury Radio Arts report, “is called the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, and it functions as the heart of Schwab’s stakeholder-capitalism model,” and it provides “the elites with transformative authority over — well, just about everything.”
Again, the WEF vocabulary is an exercise in using words to cover up the realities which are the opposites of those words. When a bank or an investor reads about an “environmental, social, and governance” score for a company, each of those words has been twisted into a reverse meaning. The “environmental” part of an ESG score doesn’t tell the reader about a company's environmental friendliness; rather, it simply reflects whether the company has met the arbitrary demands of the economists who rate it — economists who are influenced by the WEF. Likewise, the “social” component of the ESG score doesn’t reveal anything about a company’s effectiveness in combating racism or inequities; it shows rather whether the company has complied with the symbolic but ineffectual demands of the WEF — demands spread through professional and academic networks. Likewise, the “governance” score simply reflects the degree to which the company corresponds to the WEF’s political agenda. Note that, in each of the three metrics, the WEF’s control is mediated and indirect, spread via economists, bank loan officers, and bond-rating agencies.
To be quite precise, the reader may note the following examples: BlackRock is an investment firm which invests billions of dollars on behalf of its clients. BlackRock’s CEO is Larry Fink, who also happens to be a member of the WEF. Under Fink’s leadership, BlackRock pressured many companies to do business in ways which did not maximize returns to BlackRock’s customers. In one case, BlackRock coerced Exxon Mobil into making decisions which did not maximize profits. Those profits would have gone to retirement funds for blue-collar union workers. BlackRock chose to reduce retirement benefits for factory workers in order to advance its political agenda.
Another example is FitchRatings, a company whose task it is to guide ordinary individual investors as they buy bonds. Rather than rate companies based on their ability to repay — a bond is simply a small loan made by the individual to the company — FitchRatings now rates companies on their ESG scores. Investors have little guidance when they buy bonds. Ordinary working-class people are vulnerable: they might buy bonds which will never be repaid, and they’ll buy them because FitchRatings chose to conceal the relevant financial information from the public. FitchRatings, infected by the influence of the WEF, would rather see people’s savings evaporate than see the political and social agendas of the WEF be ignored.
Thus is made manifest the net impact of Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and “stakeholder capitalism” — no concern for the economic well-being of lower- and middle-class workers, and therefore no concern for true social justice; feigned concern for the climate, cloaked in arbitrary demands; a political agenda camouflaged as concerns about “governance.”
What is true of the WEF — at least in terms of its economic views — can be said of other similar organizations: the IMF, the WTO, the CFR, the Bilderberg Meetings, etc.
What is true of Klaus Schwab — at least in terms of his economic views — can be said of Larry Randall Wray and Stephanie Kelton.
Klaus Schwab and the WEF — the “Great Reset” and “stakeholder capitalism” — are merely two of the clearest examples of a worldwide network of elite individuals and elite organizations who are seeking to consolidate power and control for themselves.
Klaus Schwab, the WEF, and “stakeholder capitalism” have one clear objective: control — control consolidated in the hands of a small group of elite multibillionaires in the WEF.
