Great Reset
- Book. The Great Reset. Richard Florida
(book 2 is the more famous one by Klaus Schwab of the WEF and Davos)
Book 1
Review
Excerpted from John Hagel:
Richard Florida "has just written a compelling new book, The Great Reset, that takes a longer term historical view of changing patterns in the settlement of people and places. In fact, he makes a strong case that we are entering a third major reset . From his perspective, Great Resets are precipitated by economic crises and set into motion a remaking of the economy in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again. So far, the US has had three major resets over the past 150 years, once in the 1870s, once in the 1930s and now today.
As Richard explains it:
- A true Reset transforms into simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape. As it takes shape around new infrastructure and systems of transportation, it gives rise to new housing patterns, realigning where and how we live and work. Eventually it ushers in a whole new way of life . . .
He goes on to emphasize that
- Economic systems do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society – the way land is used, the locations of homes and businesses, the infrastructure that ties people, places and commerce together . . . . A reconfiguration of this economic landscape is the real distinguishing characteristic of a Great Reset.
For Richard, economic landscape is not just a metaphor, it is quite literally the way we organize ourselves across the land. “Every major economic era gives rise to a new, distinctive geography of its own.”
He further elaborates:
- Great Resets are defined not just by innovation but by massive movements of people. . . . These are times when talent flows out of some places and into others. . . . These talent Resets thus shift the balance of power among cities and regions as well as among nations. Locations rise or fall based on their ability to attract, retain and productively use talent of all sorts – from brilliant innovators to unskilled laborers.
The first Great Reset in the 1870s was defined by a revolution in transportation technology and energy systems which in turn led to a fundamental shift in the organization of production, known as the “American system of manufacture.” As result, industrial cities grew bigger and more complex, segmenting into specialized neighborhoods and business areas.
The second Great Reset in the 1930s was similarly fueled by the deployment of new transportation and communication infrastructures. The introduction of modern assembly lines combined with much more efficient wholesale and retail distribution channels led to even more scale in business activities. As companies moved production activity to new locations outside the urban center, residents followed suit, moving farther and farther out into suburban sprawls, prompted by government subsidies to home ownership. The Sunbelt also emerged as an area of great population growth.
Richard draws on the work of David Harvey to make the case that Great Resets result in “spatial fixes” that ultimately help to resolve economic crises through large-scale movement of people and channel capital into more productive uses. But these spatial fixes tend to be temporary, ultimately leading to further spatial fixes down the road.
Where we are now
The current economic crisis is precipitating the third Great Reset, as the growing imbalance between the movement of manufacturing offshore and suburban mass consumption supported by growing consumer debt became too precarious to sustain. Richard notes that we are in the midst of yet another major economic transition, driven by new infrastructures and global competition:
- Our own collapse, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is the crisis of the latest economic revolution – the rise of an idea-driven knowledge economy that runs more on brains than brawn. It reflects the limits of the suburban model of development to channel the full innovation and productive capabilities of the creative economy. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism. “Velocity” and “density” are not words that many people use when describing suburbia."
(http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2010/06/the-great-reset.html)
Book 2: Klaus Schwab
Discussion
Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships Are Public-Private Partnerships on the Global Stage
Ivan Wecke:
"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 realise that this actually means giving corporations more power over society, and democratic institutions less.
The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, “the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.” Governments would be just one stakeholder in a multi-stakeholder model of global governance. Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the University of Massachusetts, describes the report as “the most comprehensive proposal for re-designing global governance since the formulation of the United Nations during World War II.”
Who are these other, non-governmental stakeholders? The WEF, best known for its annual meeting of high-net-worth individuals in Davos, Switzerland, describes itself as an international organization for public-private cooperation. WEF partners include some of the biggest companies in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna).
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.
The multi-stakeholder ecosystem
Perhaps the most symbolic example of this shift is the controversial strategic partnership agreement the United Nations (UN) signed with the WEF in 2019. Harris Gleckman describes this as a move to turn the UN into a public-private partnership, creating a special place for corporations inside the UN.
The multi-stakeholder model is already being built. In recent years, an ever-expanding ecosystem of multi-stakeholder groups has spread across all sectors of the global governance system. There are now more than 45 global multi-stakeholder groups that set standards and establish guidelines and rules in a range of areas. According to Gleckman, these groups, which lack any democratic accountability, consist of private stakeholders (big corporations) who “recruit their friends in government, civil society and universities to join them in solving public problems”.
Multi-stakeholderism is the WEF’s update of multilateralism, which is the current system through which countries work together to achieve common goals. The multilateral system’s core institution is the UN. The multilateral system is often rightly accused of being ineffective, too bureaucratic and skewed towards the most powerful nations. But it is at least theoretically democratic because it brings together democratically elected leaders of countries to make decisions in the global arena. Instead of reforming the multilateral system to deepen democracy, the WEF’s vision of multi-stakeholder governance entails further removing democracy by sidelining governments and putting unelected ‘stakeholders’ – mainly corporations – in their place when it comes to global decision-making.
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."
The Global Councils of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
"to supplant all inter-state mechanisms with global governance in the hands of business corporations"
Javier Tolcachier:
"Every social problem, from hunger, disease, climate change, inequality, even loneliness or death can – according to these proponents of capitalist reconversion – have a technological solution, as long as there is a business opportunity, that is, always.
As an essential addition, and legitimised by themselves, they organise from their think tank Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution an attempt at strategic design for global governance called Global Councils of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Among the functions of these councils, according to their descriptive document, would be to “identify gaps in public policy or private practice that could benefit from the development of multi-stakeholder policy frameworks and governance protocols”. Another intended remit is to “create a structured but informal process among key policy makers, practitioners and experts for the exchange of information, experiences and learnings from innovative policy and governance experiments around the world to shape the trajectory of emerging technologies” as well as “act as early adopters and ambassadors to test, refine and improve the interoperability of Fourth Industrial Revolution policies and protocols.”
What sounds like conspiracy theory is an ongoing reality. Listed are the Global Council on Artificial Intelligence, the Global Council on the Internet of Things, the Global Council on Blockchain Technology, the Global Council on Urban and Autonomous Mobility, the related Drones and Air Mobility, and Precision Medicine. To prevent democratic intrusions, the pamphlet is explicit: “participation by invitation only”.
Not for nothing, the founder of the World Economic Forum and author of the book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, German economist and businessman Klaus Schwab, has also been a board member of the Bilderberg Club.
This aspiration to supplant all inter-state mechanisms with global governance in the hands of business corporations was already embodied in the Global Redesign Initiative in 2009.
In an introductory commentary by its three co-chairs Schwab, Malloch-Brown, (then WEF vice-president) and Samans (its executive director), to the 600-page report presented in Doha ‘Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World’ – quoted in the book by Manahan and Kumar mentioned below – one can read: “The time has come for a new paradigm of international stakeholder governance, analogous to that embodied in the theory of corporate stakeholder governance on which the World Economic Forum itself was founded”.
The Davos Economic Forum’s initiative known as “the great reset” aspires to be the launch of a new stage (or “reset”, to better use digital technology terms) of capitalism.
Following the interpretation of an old business adage derived from the Japanese and Chinese word for “crisis” (kiki and wēijī respectively, an ideogram composed of the terms “danger” and “opportunity”), the WEF sees in the global consequences of the pandemic not the logical correlate of the deterioration of a system of appropriation and destruction, but the possibility of infusing capital with new horizons through the model conceived by Schwab himself and called “stakeholder capitalism”.
This capitalism would come to replace “shareholder capitalism” -predominant in Western corporations- and “state capitalism”, which has had an important role in the emerging economies of Asia. Capitalism that, according to the same author, aims for “companies to pay a fair share of taxes, show zero tolerance for corruption and respect human rights in their global supply chains”. As if that were not enough, it suggests respecting competition on a level playing field, including when operating in the “platform economy”, which requires new metrics and a new purpose for investment that includes “environmental, social and governance objectives”.
The positive marketing of this proposal, a continuation of the failed idea of “corporate social responsibility” after the social catastrophe caused by neoliberalism imposed by blood and treaties in the last decades of the last century, has excited many corporations. Although we do not know for sure, it is possible that the donations with which they support the development of this innovative strategy in propagandistic terms are deducted from their tax declarations, nowadays tending towards absolute minimums.
Far from being a bad joke, this ecological and charitable whitewashing of capital (always fond of whitewashing) is increasingly making inroads into the multilateral system of the United Nations. The capture of the system of global governance parameters is taking place through the eponymous “multistakeholder system”.
In the book “The Great Takeover”, authors Mary Ann Manahan and Madhuresh Kumar mapped and analysed 103 “multistakeholder” initiatives with prominent corporate involvement in the fields of education, environment, health, internet and data, and food and agriculture.
In the introduction to the text, the editors note: “By shifting the centre of key policy decisions in the multilateral system to mixed mechanisms in which the private sector rules – with the support of some states, international institutions and major philanthropists – the phenomenon of “multi-stakeholderisation” of global governance has become systemic.”
The financial crisis of the United Nations, motivated among other things by declining contributions from its richest members, particularly the United States of America, opened the floodgates for an increasing involvement of transnationals and philanthropy in sectoral action partnerships with the multilateral organisation.
“Over time, the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which incorporated multi-stakeholder partnerships as a cornerstone of their implementation and realisation, further entrenched multi-stakeholderism in the UN system,” the authors note.
Correlating this process, “on 13 June 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a Strategic Partnership Framework under the pretext of “deepening institutional arrangements to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs”.