https://www.ecosophia.net/that-untraversed-land/
That Untraversed Land
It’s been just over a month since I started talking about how the predictions set out in 1972 by The Limits to Growth were coming true in our time. Since then the situation has become steadily worse. As I write this, rolling blackouts are leaving millions of people in China to huddle in the dark and shutting down yet another round of factories on which the West’s consumer economies depend, while China’s real estate market lurches and shudders with bond defaults. In Europe, natural gas supplies have run short, sending prices to record levels, while in Britain, the fuel they call petrol and we call gasoline is running short as well. Here in the United States, visit a store—any store, anywhere in the country—and odds are you’ll find plenty of bare shelves.
Insofar as the corporate media is discussing these shortages at all, they’re blaming it on the shutdowns last year and on a lack of truck drivers to haul goods to market. They’re not wholly mistaken. During last year’s virus panic, many firms closed their doors or laid off employees, and production of energy resources, raw materials, and finished goods fell accordingly. Now that most countries have opened up again, the energy resources, raw materials, and finished goods needed for ordinary economic life aren’t available, because the habit of just-in-time ordering that pervades the modern global economy leaves no margin for error.
The shortage of truck drivers is another product of the same set of policies. During the shutdown period, many people—truck drivers among them—got thrown out of work. Because of the same regulations that deprived them of work, they couldn’t look for other jobs, and the assistance programs meant to help people deal with the impact of the shutdowns weren’t noticeably more effective than such programs ever are. That left millions of people to find other ways of getting by, outside the official economy of employment. This, accordingly, many of them did.
I think that in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. Partly, the economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns would have taken years to heal even if the global industrial economy wasn’t already choking on excessive debt and running short of a galaxy of crucial raw materials. But there’s more to it than that.
If you want people to put up patiently with long hours of drudgery at miserably low wages, subject to wretched conditions and humiliating policies, so that their self-proclaimed betters can enjoy lifestyles they will never be able to share, it’s a really bad idea to make them stop work and give them a good long period of solitude, in which they can think about what they want out of life and how little of it they’re getting from the role you want them to play. It’s an especially bad idea to do it so that they have no way of knowing when, or if, they will ever be allowed to return to their former lives, thus forcing them to look for other options in order to stay fed, clothed, housed, and the like. (We can set aside the question of vaccine mandates for now—that’s another kettle of fish—but of course those feed into this same effect.)
So there’s a labor shortage, and it’s concentrated in exactly those jobs that are most essential to keeping the economy running. These are also the jobs most likely to have lousy pay and worse conditions. This isn’t accidental. It unfolds from one of the most pervasive and least discussed features of contemporary economic life: the metastatic growth of intermediation.
Let’s unpack that phrase a bit. The simplest of all economic exchanges takes place between two people, each of whom has something the other wants. They make an exchange, and both go off happy. If what one of the people brings to the exchange is labor, and the other person brings something the first person wants or needs in exchange for labor, we call that “employment,” and the first person is an employee and the second an employer, but it’s still a simple exchange. So long as there’s no overt or covert coercion involved on either side, it’s a fair trade.
What happens as a society becomes more complex, however, is that people insert themselves into that transaction and demand a cut. Governments—national, local, and everything in between—tax income, sales, and everything else they can think of. Banks charge interest and fees on every scrap of money that passes through their hands. Real estate owners drive up the cost of land so that they can take an ever larger share of the proceeds in rent and mortgage payments. Then you have a long line of other industries lobbying government for their share of the take.
Universities are a great example. A century and a half ago most people didn’t go to university. Doctors and lawyers entered the field by apprenticeship—you went to work for an established practitioner, learned the ropes, and passed state exams. Engineers and architects did the same thing. Schoolteachers had an even simpler route: bright kids who didn’t have other prospects got put to work teaching younger children, and as soon as they graduated from school themselves they’d find a job in a school somewhere. The system worked very well, not least because it was an effective means of social mobility: young people could enter the professions irrespective of the social class of their parents, so long as they were smart and willing to work hard.
The rise of the universities after the Second World War put an end to that system. Universities lobbied state governments to require job candidates in professional fields to have four-year degrees, so that the universities could insert themselves into the relationship between the professions and the pool of young people interested in them. You couldn’t simply find a physician, get taken on as an assistant, and proceed from there to qualify as a physician in your own right. No, you had to go to college and jump through an increasingly elaborate set of hoops in order to get to the point of passing your board exams and hanging out your shingle. If you didn’t have the money and free time to go to college, you were shut out.
It was a very effective scheme for limiting access to the professions to the children of the middle and upper middle classes, which was probably its original purpose. It was also a very effective scheme for decreasing the number of people in the professions, so they could drive up salaries to absurd levels, another likely goal. In the long run, finally, it has also turned into a very effective scheme for limiting access to the professions to conformists who never have a single original thought of their own. A century ago this wasn’t the case; physicians, for example, did their own original research and published papers in the medical journals. Now? Not so much.
Ultimately, of course, employment itself becomes a form of intermediation. By and large you aren’t hired by people who want what you produce, you’re hired by a corporation that inserts itself between you and the purchaser, takes most of the money, and gives you a pittance, while directing a big share to managerial staff. Since the corporation is also subject to intermediation, other shares go to governments, banks, and a whole ecosystem of other intermediaries who insert themselves into the same transaction. In the end, you get a small fraction of the value of your work, and that fraction has been shrinking steadily with each passing year.
There’s some history behind that. The spectacular growth of intermediation in modern times became possible for two reasons. The first was that fossil fuels made it possible for the labor of a single person to produce more wealth than ever before in human history. The second was that fossil fuels also enabled the world’s industrial nations to take over and exploit more of the planet than any previous empire in recorded history, first through conquest and colonialism, and later on through manipulative economic arrangements that left other countries notionally independent while they were being drained of wealth to support the industrial nations.
The impact of these factors on economic life is almost impossible to overstate. Before the coming of the industrial era, it took on average the productive labor of ten people to support one person in an economic role that didn’t produce necessary goods or services. This is why ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval kings somehow managed to get by without financial planners, administrative assistants, or personal coaches: they didn’t have the resources available to take so many people out of productive work. Exactly what the figure is nowadays is hard to work out, partly because so much glorified handwaving has been redefined as “productive work” and partly because most of the productive work that keeps modern industrial societies functioning is carried out by sweatshops and slave labor in a variety of Third World hellholes, but the sheer expansion of managerial job categories is a good sign of just how far things have changed.
The difficulty is that the torrents of cheap abundant energy that made that sort of metastatic intermediation possible depended all along on the breakneck exploitation of nonrenewable resources. Now fossil fuels are not so cheap as they once were, nor so abundant. There’s very little slack left in the fossil fuel sector—as current shortages and price spikes are making very clear—nor are renewable energy sources able to pick up the slack effectively—as current shortages and price spikes are making equally clear. For that matter, the extraction of wealth from the Third World to prop up the economies of the industrial nations is running into increasing difficulties, not least the far from minor fact that you can only pillage a nation of all its available wealth for so long before there isn’t anything left to loot.
All this imposes an existential challenge to the economy of intermediation, and to the millions upon millions of well-paid jobs that depend on intermediation. That challenge first began to bite in the 1980s, and it was met by driving the working classes into poverty and misery. It bears repeating and remembering that half a century ago in the United States, one adult with a high school education and a working class job could support a family of four in relative comfort. The changes in economic policy and corporate behavior that swept that away, replacing it with the current dismal landscape of despair and impoverishment for working people, were the steps by which the system of intermediation was preserved—for a while.
The difficulty, of course, is that you can only take that so far before it’s no longer worth anyone’s while to do those poorly paid jobs on which the whole system depends. Here in the United States, we’ve reached that point, and not just for employees. Go to any town in flyover country and walk down the streets, past the empty storefronts where businesses used to flourish. There are millions of people who would love to start their own business, but it’s a losing proposition in an economy in which governments, banks, and property owners demand so large a cut that most small startup businesses can’t break even. The same is equally true, of course, for employees, whose wages no longer even pay the basic costs of getting by in today’s America.
It’s becoming true in the field where I make my living. Writers who place their books with big corporate publishers have been watching their share of a book’s earnings shrink with every passing year due to predatory contracts. Just recently it’s come out that corporate publishers have become so rigid that a book that beats expectations won’t get reprinted—publishers will literally let it go out of print rather than cash in on the trend, because they’ve gotten locked into their own version of just-in-time ordering. As a result, more and more authors are self-publishing or turning to smaller presses not hobbled by corporate groupthink, of which there are many.
(There’s a curious astigmatism of the imagination in the essay just cited, by the way, and it’s one that I’ve seen quite often among writers. The author of the essay talks as though the only options for getting published are huge corporate publishers, on the one hand, and self-publishing on the other. Not so—there are many hundreds of small to midsized publishers, which don’t require your manuscript to go through an agent, which are open to innovative and interesting work, and which don’t have the same idiotic rigidities as the big boys. I make most of my living publishing books with them. The moral to this story is that if you ignore the conventional wisdom, you may discover that there are more options than you think.)
Thus the economy of intermediation is strangling the economic activity on which it survives. To change that would require the people whose jobs depend on intermediation to accept a drastic and permanent loss of status, influence, and wealth, and the number of them who will accept that loss willingly can doubtless be counted on the fingers of one foot. Nonetheless, they’re going to suffer that loss, some here and others there, some a little at a time and others all at once when a pink slip turns up in the inbox. If something is unsustainable, sooner or later it won’t be sustained: that’s an essential principle of economics in the real world, however busily economists try to pretend that it can’t possibly apply here and now.
The decision of millions of former working class employees to find better ways to support themselves is one of the ways that this principle is unfolding in our time. There are plenty of others—the primary force driving cancel culture in the universities, for example, is the no-holds-barred competition for an ever-shrinking pool of middle class jobs. But it’s the quiet dissolution of working class employment, the recognition by the people who keep the economy running that they have better things to do than prop up a system that treats them as disposable components, that strikes me as most important here and now.
Many of them are finding work in the underground economy. That’s a huge economic sector these days. How many people make a living doing work outside ordinary employment and getting paid “under the table,” as the phrase is, is for obvious reasons a hard question to answer, but it’s quite possibly in the tens of millions. Working in the underground economy is an effective way to get out from under the burden of intermediation, so that both parties in an economic transaction can keep most or all of the value they exchange. That’s going to become even more significant a fraction of the economy in the years ahead.
In a declining economy, one person’s productive labor can no longer support the vast teetering structure of intermediation that’s been heaped on top of it. As decline proceeds—and as we have seen, it will proceed for many years to come—so will the contraction in what each person’s labor can support. If we’re lucky, the decline will bottom out before it gets down to the medieval level—some of our scientific and technological achievements are potentially sustainable, and might keep economic life above the sheer subsistence level if they’re preserved and deployed in time—but in any possible future, the great majority of people will be producing goods and services for their own use and for that of their neighbors, rather than laboring for the benefit of the vast and unsustainable government, corporate, and institutional juggernauts of our day.
Those of my readers who are interested in making an adequate living in the future might keep this in mind. How steep the curve of decline will turn out to be in the different regions of the United States, to say nothing of overseas, is a challenging question to answer. One way or another, however, depending on regular employment in an ordinary job became a mug’s game quite some time ago and is quickly devolving further into a fool’s errand.
As this takes shape around us, I find myself thinking of John Chapman, the famous “Johnny Appleseed” of American folk legend, who was discussed in an earlier post on this blog. To support the life he wanted to lead, Chapman invented a profession all his own, providing apple seedlings to homesteaders across the Ohio River frontier region. Most of the people I know who are thriving in these times have done some (usually) less colorful equivalent, figuring out how to provide goods and services that people want and need directly to those who want or need them, without bothering with the clanking, dilapidated machinery of employment. For many people today, that’s territory as untraversed as the wilderness through which Johnny Appleseed roamed, but at this point that’s the direction in which the future can be found.
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/10/joseph-mercola/the-great-reset-is-accelerating-into-global-tyranny/
The Great Reset Is Accelerating Into Global Tyranny
The World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda includes the strangely ominous dictum that you will “own nothing and be happy.” The unstated implication is that the world’s resources will be owned and controlled by the technocratic elite, and you’ll have to pay for the temporary use of absolutely everything.
Nothing will actually belong to you. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class. Just how will this imposed serfdom make you happy?
Again, the unstated implication is that lack of ownership is a convenience — they’re just making your life easier. Rent a pot and then return it. You don’t need storage space! Imagine the freedom! They even promise the convenience of automatic drone delivery straight to your door.
Artificial intelligence — which is siphoning your data about every aspect of your existence through nearly every piece of technology and appliance you own — will run your life, predicting your every mood and desire, catering to your every whim. Ah, the luxury of not having to make any decisions!
Planned Theft Under the Cover of a Pandemic
This is the mindset they’re trying to program into you. As just one example, in a mid-November 2020 video announcement, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said:1
“This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”
Some, however, are starting to realize that these narratives of “building back better” and “resetting” the economy to ensure “equity” are proverbial mouse traps. Once you bite the cheese, you’ll be stuck, robbed of your freedom forevermore.
In the video above, author Douglas Kruger explains why freedom is impossible without the right to private ownership. The technocratic elite of course do not want you to understand the real-world ramifications of what they have planned, which is why they try to sell this diabolical idea as something that will benefit society and finally make life fair for everyone. It’s an attractive narrative, but a dangerous fantasy to buy into. As noted November 16, 2020, by National File:2
“… Trudeau suggested the COVID-19 virus provided an ‘opportunity for a reset … to re-imagine economic systems.’ This was taken as an endorsement of a World Economic Forum plan to concentrate most private property in the hands of Big Tech mega-corporations.
The ‘Great Reset’ plan involves a collaboration between national governments and international bodies to ‘reset capitalism’ with an integrated transnational technocratic welfare/surveillance state by the year 2030 …
WEF member corporations and government partners would accomplish the ‘reset’ by using economic policy to virtually abolish individual property and concentrate nearly all wealth in the hands of international mega-corporations.
The idea would be to leverage the welfare state and gig economy to replace the economic status quo of individual ownership with one where the majority of individual needs are rented instead.”
Learn to Recognize the Great Reset Catchphrases
The WEF’s 2030 agenda is part and parcel of what is now advertised as The Great Reset,3 a plan that originated in something called the Global Redesign Initiative, drafted by the WEF in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. The Transnational Institute’s website describes the initiative as “multi-stakeholderism” as a “new form of global governance.”4
On a side note, as I was entering the Transnational Institute reference, I noticed the URL included the words “taxonomy term backup delete later.” I don’t know if that means anything, but I archived5 the page just in case. Other terms and slogans that describe various facets of this global takeover agenda include:
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is part of the transhumanist movement.6 In the video above, WEF founder Klaus Schwab describes these plans
- Building Back Better
- The Green New Deal
- “Equity”
- Stakeholder capitalism
In recent days, we’ve seen a slew of world leaders come out in lockstep to denounce capitalism, saying we need “stakeholder capitalism.” Among them is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who September 17, 2021, spoke out against capitalism at a meeting in London.7,8
“In America, capitalism is our system, it is our economic system, but it has not served our economy as well as it should,” she said. “So what we want to do is not depart from that, but to improve it.
You cannot have a system where the success of some springs from the exploitation of the workers and springs from the exploitation of the environment and the rest, and we have to correct that.”
President Biden is the first U.S. president to embrace stakeholder capitalism by name,9 and leading Democrats, including Vice-President Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have presented policy proposals that would write stakeholder capitalism into law.10
What Is Stakeholder Capitalism?
But just what is stakeholder capitalism? If it’s fairer and makes everyone more prosperous than the shareholder capitalist system we currently have, shouldn’t we all support it? The problem is that the way it’s described is not how it actually works in the real world. It sounds great in theory, but the end result is not going to benefit the average person.
As reported by Ivan Wecke on Open Democracy, in an article titled “Conspiracy Theories Aside, There Is Something Fishy About the Great Reset”:11
“The set of conspiracy theories around the Great Reset are nebulous and hard to pin down, but piecing them together gives us something like this: the Great Reset is the global elite’s plan to instate a communist world order by abolishing private property while using COVID-19 to solve overpopulation and enslaving what remains of humanity with vaccines.
Intrigued … I decided to find out what the WEF’s Great Reset plan was really about. At the heart of conspiracy theories are supposed secret agendas and malicious intent.
While these may be absent from the WEF’s Great Reset initiative, what I found was something almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines.
The magic words are ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a concept that WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has been hammering for decades and which occupies pride of place in the WEF’s Great Reset plan from June 2020.
The idea is that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders.’
The way the WEF sees stakeholder capitalism being carried out is through a range of ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ bringing together the private sector, governments and civil society across all areas of global governance.
The idea of stakeholder capitalism and multi-stakeholder partnerships might sound warm and fuzzy, until we dig deeper and realize that this actually means giving corporations more power over society, and democratic institutions less.”
Stakeholder Capitalism Increases the Power of Corporations
The Global Redesign Initiative, which served as the basis for the Great Reset, has been described as “the most comprehensive proposal for redesigning global governance since the formulation of the United Nations during World War II.”12 So, this is no minor tweak. It’s a complete overhaul of how we do business and govern nations, not only in the U.S. but globally.
In this multi-stakeholder model, government is just one stakeholder among many. Other stakeholders that would have to be taken into account include nongovernmental organizations such as the WEF itself and multinational corporations. In other words, these other stakeholders will have a say in how nations are governed.
Notice that world leaders will stress that the stakeholders include the environment and workers. The truth, however, is that the needs and desires of workers and the natural world are hardly at the center of this model. As explained by Wecke:13
“Instead of corporations serving many stakeholders, in the multi-stakeholder model of global governance, corporations are promoted to being official stakeholders in global decision-making, while governments are relegated to being one of many stakeholders.
In practice, corporations become the main stakeholders, while governments take a backseat role, and civil society is mainly window dressing.”
Stakeholder Capitalism Is Taking Over by Stealth
Wecke points out that this multi-stakeholder ecosystem has already been implemented and is expanding with each passing day. It’s not something that they’re proposing to implement in the future. Instead, they’re basically just telling us now what they’ve been doing for years already.
“Multi-stakeholder groups have spread across all sectors of the global governance system,” Wecke says, noting there are already “more than 45 global multi-stakeholder groups that set standards and establish guidelines and rules in a range of areas.”
These groups, which have no democratic accountability, consist of large multinational corporations, which recruit insiders within government, civil society and educational institutions. Together, they claim to solve all sorts of problems that plague society.
Essentially, they believe they know what’s best for everyone, and without having been elected to speak and act on our behalf, they are making unilateral decisions that will dictate how we live, grow and prosper.
As just one example of a multi-stakeholder “ecosystem” that is already up and running is the COVAX initiative, the aim of which is to accelerate the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. This initiative was created by two multi-stakeholder groups, GAVI and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), in partnership with the World Health Organization and funded by governments.
GAVI and CEPI are both tied to the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a long list of drug companies. As noted by Wecki, while governments are funding the COVAX initiative, corporate-centered coalitions (GAVI and CEPI) are overseeing and reaping the profits from the work.
We’ve already been given a glimpse of the core problem with this system, which is that it’s entirely profit-driven. In 2020, South Africa and India sought to lift intellectual property rules on COVID-19 vaccine technologies to boost manufacturing in developing countries. GAVI, Gates himself and the drug industry strongly opposed, as you’d expect they would.
Why? Because public health is not their prime incentive or motivation. Profit is. Profit is their main interest, and as a primary “stakeholder,” their interests must be weighed against other stakeholder interests, such as people’s want and desire to not get sick and die. And, well, they’re at the center of the power structure, so guess whose interest wins, and will always win?
Stakeholder Capitalism Will Destroy Freedom
Wecke describes multi-stakeholderism as “the WEF’s update of multilateralism,” which is the system by which nations of the world are currently working together. At the core is the United Nations.
So far, this system is still democratic, at least in theory, as elected leaders are the ones brought together to make global decisions. The problem we’re facing is that the stakeholder capitalism now proposed is not going to deepen democracy but rather eliminate it altogether.
Its design sidelines governments and places unelected stakeholders, primarily transnational corporations, in the driver’s seat, giving them ultimate authority to make decisions for the world as a whole, which is precisely what we’ve increasingly started to experience during this pandemic. As explained by Wecke:14
“Put bluntly, multi-stakeholder partnerships are public-private partnerships on the global stage. And they have real-world implications for the way our food systems are organized, how big tech is governed and how our vaccines and medicines are distributed.”
We’re in for a Medical Reset as Well
Since the first quarter of 2020, we’ve already gotten a taste of what The Great Reset will mean for public health. It’s basically founded on the premise that we live in a biosecurity state, where these unelected “stakeholders” decide what is best for us, regardless of how we feel about it.
For example, hospitals around the U.S. are all instructed to use the deadliest COVID treatments imaginable, and doctors who defy the guidance and actually do what is best for their patients are having their medical licenses threatened. Merely speaking out about effective COVID treatments will put a bullseye on a physician’s back.
In countries everywhere, people are told COVID shots are the only way forward, and vaccine passports — once derided as a paranoid conspiracy theory — are being implemented. Who made these decisions? No one is admitting the real source of these lockstep decisions, but we can be sure they’re coming from a central hub, run by people no one ever voted into power.
Around the world, a twisted mind game is being played out, where world leaders are now telling us that vaccine passports are our “ticket to freedom,” completely ignoring the fact that our freedom is not, and cannot be, predicated on our medical choices.
Trudeau, for example, recently stated that vaccine passports are “all about” letting you know that “if you’ve done the right things, you get to be safe” wherever you go.15 And those who refuse to do “the right thing,” well, they simply aren’t entitled to those same “freedoms.”
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That the disease countermeasures we currently see for COVID-19 won’t end with COVID-19 is clear. Already, President Biden has signed an executive order adding measles to the list of diseases for which a person can be quarantined and/or forced to self-isolate “to protect public health.”16
Again, what’s being built all around us is a biosecurity state that will control every aspect of our lives under the auspice of “protecting public health,” all while doing no such thing. It’s undeniable that the COVID countermeasures have wrought far more destruction than the virus actually did, and these countermeasures continue to destroy lives and kill people unnecessarily, all under the banner of keeping us “safe” from disease.
The fact that people are dying from suicide, starvation, untreated medical problems and vaccine injuries, well, that doesn’t count. They’re protecting us from COVID! Of course, that’ll be expanded to protecting us from other infections du jour.
In closing, stakeholder capitalism is essentially a form of global
fascism, where nations are run not by elected governments alone, but by
unelected corporations in partnership with government. As for “equity,” I
wouldn’t hold my breath for that to come true. The equity they’re
talking about is all of us being in the same miserable position of
owning nothing and having no human rights.
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