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Davos / World Econ Forum

no notes 1.16?

SEE GREAT RESET de-pop // agenda21 (bannon, jnz, morano]

see klaus schwab WEF 2

soc entre?

see morano

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DN 1/21/22

Davos Man bk

goodall asked about hu nature

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mma 1 24

Following news that a session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting would be focused on the World Health Organization’s preparations for a potential epidemic of a currently unknown pathogen dubbed “Disease X,” right-wing media figures pushed conspiracy theories about a supposed plan to kill off “excess population” and fearmongered over the possibility of another pandemic and lockdowns. Some sought to capitalize on the fear by selling “medical emergency kits” that contain an unproven COVID-19 treatment.

because they “want less people.” Schlapp stated: “I think they must know something, and I’m not going to discount the fact that probably Disease X is a thing and could happen, and some people — as evil and dastardly as it sounds — thinks killing millions of people actually could be good for the rest of us who survive.” Additionally, host Chris Plante said that at the meeting, “globalists at Davos ... might not be preparing for imaginary situations, but rather assembling their next global power grab.” Newsmax, *Chris Plante The Right Squad*, [1/17/23; CNN, 12/16/23]

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COP28 Climate Summit Aiming to Redefine Global Economy as 190 Nations Target Fossil ...

NTD News

... Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot and author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think.” Marc has been […]

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ntd chris beers

phase out ff unrealistuc ubsci; 80 percent from FF virtue signal, pvt jets uk kerry; shit coal gas oil solar wind magically take over; sovietization central panning net zero netherlands govt shut farm cow fart ? deindustrialize devlopment prosperity best for citrizens lots of pressure sanctions want $ to give to 3rd w; will give to govt best ay lacking ppl in poverty; soalr panel on hut made of dung; virtue signal; UN planning control over energy sys; rationing of food...corps take over, world econ forum; look at 1st 1990's just more emissions

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an 5 23

https://www.alternet.org/managing-complexities-not-solving-problems/

no lnx

Our times call for managing complexities, not solving problems

April M. Short and Independent Media Institute May 24, 2023

How Paicines Ranch in California works to bring business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature—prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices.

At first the ground squirrels felt like the enemy—a problem to be solved. They were causing major issues for the 25 acres of vineyard at Paicines Ranch in San Benito County, California, with their burrows and mounds, and their taste for fine grapes.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

“We were like, these squirrels are terrible, we must get rid of them—or at least keep them out of the vineyard,” recalls Esther Park, CEO of Cienega Capital. While Park doesn’t work directly on the vineyard, she collaborates with the team that does via the No Regrets Initiative, which is the financial and investment arm of Paicines Ranch that Cienega Capital funds.

The vineyard crew came up with a number of schemes to solve the problem of those pesky ground squirrels. That is, until they met with ecologists and learned about the many essential roles the squirrels, and the underground burrows they create, play in the ecosystem.

“While they might be annoying to us as humans, they’re actually pretty key to providing habitat to many different species,” said Avery Sponholtz, who is on the No Regrets Initiative team and director of philanthropy for the Globetrotter Foundation. (Both are interconnected with the ranch as both were created by Sallie Calhoun and work in tandem with one another.)

It’s not every vineyard that would deem the ecological role of ground squirrels as equal in value to high crop yields. But instead of looking at challenges like that of the ground squirrels as problems to be solved—which is the predominant mode of operating just about everywhere you look in today’s largely extractivist, capitalist world—Paicines Ranch is intentionally working to operate under a different mentality: They’ve taken on an intentional mindset of managing complexities rather than solving problems.

In the example of the ground squirrels, the complexity lies in the fact that support for regenerative ecosystems is a core value of Paicines Ranch’s mission. The project was founded with the aim of working with the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Its 7,600 acres double as wildlife habitat for “animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, grasses, springs, rivers, and much more,” notes its website.

“We realized if we’re going to hold diversity of species up as an outcome that we want to achieve, those ground squirrels are actually pretty important,” says Park.

Now, instead of trying to solve the problem of the ground squirrels, the team has shifted toward “managing the complexity of [the] ecosystem,” adds Park.

“The squirrels are not necessarily helping us achieve some of the outcomes that we want, and yet they are helping us to achieve some of the other outcomes we want. And we’re getting comfortable with not having the answers, and just doing what we can to manage the complexity of that.”

Park shared another example of how to shift into managing complexities rather than solving problems, from the investment world.

“We deal a lot with grass-fed and pastured livestock operations, and one of the things that most producers point to as being a problem for them is access to [meat] processing [facilities],” she says.

Park says the problem the livestock operations often bring up is that they need more meat processing facilities, and while there have been many efforts to try to address the problem, “most of them have failed.” Parks says this boils down to the fact that the challenge is significantly more complex than just a need for more processing.

“It’s not just that you need a processor… There are all these other factors in the ecosystem that are affecting your whole supply chain,” she says. “It’s better to think about ways to manage all of the moving parts in a way that will serve each individual business, but also to get to know the processor and their business, and also the consumers and all of the other folks who are involved.”

She shares that she helped organize an online workshop for the purpose of connecting all of the different stakeholders along the meat production and processing supply chain. Among the speakers was an experienced and successful meat processor who spoke about the real constraints they face as a business, and the conversation began “helping people get their heads around the complexity of the nature of what they’re facing, versus thinking, ‘This is the answer to solve my problem,’ because oftentimes it’s actually not.”

Holistic Management

Managing complexities—rather than solving problems—has become a theme of the work Calhoun, who owns and manages Paicines Ranch and works with Park and Sponholtz, puts into the world. In addition to her work with the ranch, Calhoun is an activist, impact investor, and philanthropic funder in regenerative agriculture who founded the No Regrets Initiative, which seeks to use a wide variety of forms of capital—human, natural, investment, and philanthropic—to effect change in the agricultural system. She says all that she does aims to improve the health of ecosystems and the communities living in them. Calhoun’s efforts are often aimed in particular at agricultural soil health and sequestering carbon in soil to mitigate climate change.

Calhoun says she was introduced to the idea of running a business centered on managing complexities via Allan Savory, a livestock farmer and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute, who came up with something called holistic management. Managing complexities is one of the key premises of holistic management.

“It was created to help land stewards—because if you are a land steward, you are inherently managing complexity, right?” says Calhoun. “[Allan Savory] makes the distinction that the systems that we create, like computers and the internet, are complicated, but we understand them. Whereas there’s a whole set of natural living systems, which are complex—and complexity means that we can’t actually understand them. If we poke them, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and so we need to respond accordingly.”

Another main point of holistic management Calhoun points to is that so many systems we operate under are focused on preventing unwanted problems, rather than managing for the wanted outcomes.

“We literally declare war on drugs, and war on terror, and war on poverty—thereby guaranteeing the continuation of all of those things, because it’s this mentality of fighting against a problem rather than thinking about what you want to create,” she says. “My ideas really started over 20 years ago from the work of [Savory], and now we’ve been able to carry that and figure out what it means in other parts of our work.”

Managing the Complexities of Our Changing World

The realities of our changing planet call for different ways of doing business, relating to success, and, generally, being in the world. We were warned that climate disasters and their strange weather would come, and now they’re upon us, causing immense collateral damage to humans and other feeling beings on this special planet of water and life. The compound horrors we’ve collectively contributed to as a species are spiraling to a scale that can feel almost as hard to wrap our minds around as the vastness of the stars, time, and the universe. Tensions and talk of war are on the rise globally, and people in the wealthiest nations on the planet are contending with cost-of-living crises, worsened in the wake of the economic fallout of an ongoing global pandemic. And things do not promise to improve anytime soon—especially not by way of business as usual. Creative, collaborative, care-based ways of relating will be necessary to weather the coming storms—literally and figuratively.

There is an opportunity in the midst of the polycrisis (as the World Economic Forumhas dubbed it) to reframe the challenges ahead as “complexities to manage” rather than “problems to solve.” This reframing can save us from becoming overwhelmed and has the potential to guide people toward more realistic ways of being and expectations. Because that’s what life is, ultimately: a series of complexities, as notes Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK.

Evans hosted a conversation with Calhoun, Park, and Sponholtz in March 2023 as part of an upcoming webinar series, and their conversation focused on just that: managing complexities in business and life.

During the conversation, Calhoun shared that the work their team does operates under two sets of guiding principles: one for soil, another for relationships....

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an 1 23

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) used Martin Luther King Jr. Day to serve up a Christian bible-based Old Testament rant that both reserves “vengeance” for God while calling on House Republicans to take action.

“Vengeance is mine declares the Lord,” the far-right self-identified Christian nationalist congresswoman proclaimed from her official government Twitter account. “God will not let evil go unpunished.”

She then called on House Republicans, saying they “must do what is right for the American people and no longer serve the Uniparty and the Globalist agenda,” presumably equating the few remaining “moderate” Republicans with the entire Democratic caucus.

“America First!” Greene then cried.

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene Could Access ‘The Most Sensitive Secrets in the Government’ if Republicans Get Their Way

Monday is also the official start of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, known as “Davos,” named for the part of Switzerland where it is held annually. Davos is frequently targeted by the right as the “globalist agenda.” Its attendees include government, corporate, and culture leaders from around the world.

The Associated Press on Monday reported on the conspiracy theories fueled by the annual Davos conference.

Greene proceeded to spread some conspiracy theories of her own, including about President Joe Biden’s classified documents and Ukraine. She also retweeted a conspiracy theory from her personal Twitter account calling for the special counsel investigating ex-President Trump for his unlawful handling of classified documents to be “totally defunded.”

“Joe Biden enforcer Merrick Garland has weaponized the DOJ to go after President Trump,” she wrote, referring tot he Attorney General. “They want Trump in jail. It’s like they took a page out of Saddam Hussein’s playbook. Garland’s politically weaponized special counsel must be totally DEFUNDED.”

She did not call for the special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents to be defunded.

READ MORE: Christian Nationalist Founder of Pastors for Trump ‘Pretty Sure’ Martin Luther King Would Have Been a ‘MAGA’ Republican

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ref

nEW YORK (AP) — When some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures gathered at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last year, sessions on climate change drew high-level discussions on topics such as carbon financing and sustainable food systems.

But an entirely different narrative played out on the internet, where social media users claimed leaders wanted to force the population to eat insects instead of meat in the name of saving the environment.

The annual event in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos, which opens Monday, has increasingly become a target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus of commentators who believe the forum involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit. Experts say what was once a conspiracy theory found in the internet’s underbelly has now hit the mainstream.

“This isn’t a conspiracy that is playing out on the extreme fringes,” said Alex Friedfeld, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League who studies anti-government extremism. “We’re seeing it on mainstream social media platforms being shared by regular Americans. We were seeing it being spread by mainstream media figures right on their prime time news, on their nightly networks.”

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

The meeting draws heads of state, business executives, cultural trendsetters and representatives from international organizations to the luxe mountain town. :(style="background-color:#f5f5f5ff"):}::{Though it’s always unclear how much concrete action will emerge, the meeting is slated to take on pressing global issues from climate change and economic uncertainty to geopolitical instability and public health.

Hundreds of public sessions are planned, but the four-day conference is also known for secretive backroom meetings and deal-making by business leaders. This gap between what’s shown to the public and what happens behind closed doors helps make that makes the meeting a flashpoint for misinformation.

“When we have very high levels of ambiguity, it’s very easy to fill in narratives,” said **Kathleen Hall Jamieson**, who is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and also studies misinformation.

Theories about influential global leaders are not new, she said, but scrutiny of the forum and its chairman,:(style="background-color:#f5f5f5ff"):}::{ Klaus Schwab, intensified in 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year, the theme of the annual meeting was “The Great Reset.” The initiative envisioned sweeping changes to how societies and economies would work to recover from the pandemic and build a more sustainable future.

Now, in increasingly mainstream corners of the internet and on conservative talk shows, “The Great Reset” has become shorthand for what skeptics say is a reorganization of society, using global uncertainty as a guise to take away rights. Believers argue that measures including pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates are tools to consolidate power and undercut individual sovereignty.

In a time of mounting anxiety, Jamieson says the public has become more susceptible to falsehoods, as conspiracy theories emerge as a tool to cut through the chaos. Researchers who monitor extremism say these beliefs are becoming more popular and more concerning.

At a rally staged on the grounds of an upstate New York church last fall, a photo of Schwab was displayed on the center of a large screen alongside other “villains” accused of threatening American values. The crowd of thousands had gathered in a revivalist tent at a traveling roadshow used as a recruiting tool for an ascendant Christian nationalist movement. Participants discussed “The Great Reset,” among a host of other theories, as an assault on America’s foundations.

The phrase was used more than 60 times across all programs on Fox News in 2022, according to one tally generated by the Internet Archive’s TV news database. That’s up from 30 mentions in 2021 and about 20 in 2020. It was discussed most frequently on “The Ingraham Angle” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

And in August, amid a defamation trial for calling the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack a hoax, Infowars host Alex Jones released a book called “The Great Reset: And The War For the World.” It’s described as an analysis of “the global elite’s international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.”

As the World Economic Forum has become intertwined with this narrative, a steady stream of claims have plagued the organization. While some people offer legitimate criticisms of the forum — namely that it hosts wealthy executives who fly in on emissions-spewing corporate jets — others spread unverified or baseless information as fact.

For example, a site known for spreading fabricated stories falsely claimed last month that Schwab publicly encouraged the decriminalization of sex between children and adults, using an invented quote and other baseless statements. Still, it drew tens of thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile, the popular claim that the forum wants people to replace meat with bugs is a distorted reference to an article once published on the organization’s website. In another instance, a widely shared post claimed without evidence that the forum had “appointed” U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House before the actual vote had taken place.

The concern, Friedfeld says, is that posts like these could introduce people to more fringe and dangerous conspiracy theories or even translate into real-world violence. Yann Zopf, head of media for the forum, says the organization has increased its monitoring of this kind of online activity and carefully watches for direct threats.

“Creating all that kind of stuff can generate enemies that people believe are responsible for whatever bad thing is happening in the world,” Friedfeld said. “Once that happens, when you believe that that things are happening in the world and a certain person or group of people is responsible for these attacks, all of a sudden,the idea of using violence to resist becomes more plausible.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of the World Economic Forum meeting at https://apnews.com/hub/world-economic-forum

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/climate-cataclysms-business-as-usual/

no lnx

'Florida has largely disappeared': The looming climate cataclysms if humanity continues 'business as usual'

Brandon Gage October 10, 2022

The World Economic Forum has released a new video warning of the cataclysmic consequences that anthropomorphic climate change will trigger over the next century if humanity's addiction to fossil fuels is not severed.

The two-minute spot navigates the extensive impacts that unchecked global warming will have on various regions of the planet through the coming decades as well as how drastically terrestrial life will be affected.

The sobering forecasts, while not exhaustive, have been extrapolated from cited accredited research.

READ MORE: 'One of the biggest arsonists': World Bank blasted for 'investing' $15 billion into planet-scorching fossil fuels

The 2030s:

Ice caps and crucial ice sheets continued to melt, swelling sea levels by 20 centimeters [7.87 inches]

90 percent of coral reefs are threatened by human activity, while around 60 percent are highly endangered

Dwindling crop yields have pushed more than 100 million more people into extreme poverty

Climate change-related illnesses are killing an extra 250,000 people each year

The 2040s:

The world has already shot past its 1.5-degree Celsius [2.7-degree Fahrenheit] Paris Agreement temperature rise limit

Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Thailand are threatened by annual floods, sparking mass migration

Eight percent of the global population has seen a severe reduction in water availability

The Arctic is now ice-free in summer

Sea levels have risen 20 centimeters [two feet] in the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes now deliver devastating storm surges

The 2050s:

Two billion people now face 60-degree Celsius [140 degrees Fahrenheight] temperatures for more than a 10th of the year

In much of the world, masks are needed daily – not for disease prevention, but to protect your lungs from smog

The Northeast United States now sees 25 major floods a year, up from one in 2020

140 million people are displaced by food and water insecurity or extreme weather events

From 2100 and beyond:

The average global temperature has soared more than four degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit] – and even more in northern latitudes

Rising sea levels have rendered coastlines unrecognizable, and Florida has largely disappeared

Coral reefs have largely vanished, taking with them a quarter of the world's fish habitats

Insects have also been consigned to history, causing massive crop failures due to the lack of pollinators

Severe drought now affects more than 40 percent of the planet

An area the size of Massachusetts burns in the US every year

Southern Spain and Portugal have become a desert, tipping millions into food and water insecurity

READ MORE: How Florida's need to 'adapt to climate change' has ignited debate over whether to rebuild high-risk areas

The ad concludes with a reminder that these bleak outcomes are preventable:

Today, 'business as usual' is making our planet unlivable. But by making the transition to a nature-positive economy, we could generate 395 million jobs – one-fifth of the predicted labor force increase.

It also encourages viewers to consider what they can do to contribute toward a prosperous future for all of Earth's inhabitants.

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: Climate activists are parading a Ron Johnson 'scatue' around Milwaukee: report

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see all biggest greenwash ever?

reboot of agenda 21, plandemic, the memes are mating /remix smoothie

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

...

The Great Reset is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

So no, the Great Reset is not just another name for the Green New Deal, as many a right-winger with a digital chalkboard and an unhealthy AOC obsession is absurdly claiming. It is, first and foremost, about blocking a real Green New Deal, which most assuredly would not have the support of BP, Mastercard, the Prince of Wales, and all of the other Great Reset partners.

And yet, in recent weeks, a slew of right-wing commentators on Fox News, as well as Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs and prominent opposition politicians in Australia and Canada, have claimed to be confused about this and are suddenly giving oxygen to what was, until recently, amarginal conspiracy. Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro have all been terrifying their huge audiences with claims that green socialism is about to be forced down their throats via Schwab’s Great Reset, which, they explain, is the very same thing as President-elect Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, which is itself a thin cover for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. (Like an early fan of an indie punk band, Glenn Beck has been using his perch at The Blaze to point out that he was ranting about the Great Reset when it was just a gleam in Schwab’s eye.)

Do these people honestly think that Schwab is in cahoots with AOC and using the pandemic to put BP out of business — with the full cooperation of BP? Of course not. But President Donald Trump is on his way out, and the Green New Deal is popular — precisely because it is as far away from Davos as it could be, grounded in a polluter-pays ethos and in programs like a jobs guarantee and universal health care that enjoy broad working-class support. For right-wing politicians and the oil companies that back them, the more climate action can be conflated with an organization known for its traffic jams of private jets and its Bond villain founder, the easier it will be to resist any climate plan at all. That’s why the earliest alarmism about the Great Reset came from the Heartland Institute, ground zero of the climate change denial machine.

[Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party,speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Friday, April 5, 2019. Kenney said he would create a C$1 billion ($750 million) crown corporation to support Indigenous resource projects including pipelines if he's elected to lead Alberta's government this month, according to an emailed statement. Photographer: Todd Korol/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesJason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party, speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Canada, on April 5, 2019. Photo: Todd Korol/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This messaging is gaining traction not because people are suckers but because they are mad — and they have every right to be. Lockdown policies have demanded months of individual sacrifice for the collective good without providing the most basic collective protections to keep families from slipping into starvation and homelessness, or to keep small businesses afloat. Meanwhile, trillions have been spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, and pandemic profiteering is rampant. Is it any wonder that so many find it entirely plausible that the same elites who expect them to swallow all the coronavirus-related sacrifices while they party in the Hamptons and on private islands would also be willing to exaggerate the risks of the disease to get them to the accept more bitter “green” medicine, for the common good? As that first Davos theme made clear, trust between the people and the mountaintop has been broken — and it most certainly has not been rebuilt.

For a glimpse of how all of this fits together, take a look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada, under its truly reprehensible premier, one Jason Kenney. Kenney came to power pledging to serve as a shameless valet for the Alberta oil patch, specifically its extra-fast-planet-cooking tar sands. He promised to ram through all pipelines, no matter the opposition, and create a “war room” to surveil all opponents....

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannons-deranged-election-conspiracy-theories-ranked

no lnx vid

Steve Bannon's deranged election conspiracy theories, ranked

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 11/25/20

I listen to Steve Bannon’s podcast for four hours a day, every day. While its purported focus is the pandemic, at this point the show has devolved into a pro-beheading cesspool of election-related conspiracy theories.

On the show, Bannon frequently brags about the size and diversity of his audience (the show is at the time of publication ranked 55th in Apple Podcast’s rankings). But though he considers himself a leader and a patriot, Bannon has failed his audience by deliberately squandering the opportunity to tell them the truth about urgent matters related to the election and the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he serves them lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and other vague, random Breitbart-style brain worms. In these sputtering sunset hours of the Trump legal defense, he’s live on YouTube for four hours every day repeating some combination of the following rabbit holes and falsehoods.

As such, Media Matters has compiled a nonexhaustive list of his various deranged election conspiracy theories and has ranked them from “extraordinarily” to “completely.”

1. “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory

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Derangement rating: Extraordinarily

Bannon has embraced a conspiracy theory about The Great Reset initiative led by the World Economic Forum, the organization focusing on public-private partnership that hosts the world leaders, billionaires, and business leaders at an annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland. Of all his falsehoods, this one is perhaps the most vague and unhinged.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) describes the Great Reset initiative as a collaborative effort among the organization’s sponsors “to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being” in rebuilding a post-COVID world. The language may be vague and slightly creepy, but the initiative has no governance or enforcement mechanism -- its scope doesn’t extend beyond discourse. The Great Reset is also the title of a book written by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum. 

In Bannon-land, the great reset is an opportunity for the elite cabal to “depopulate” the earth to 500 million, then genetically engineer humankind using “the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering.” He explains that the Democrats are attempting to “steal this election” because “if they can thwart the will of the people in this country,” they’ll be able to achieve the great reset by taking down populist movements in other countries as well.

Video Citation From the November 16, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): You’ve got [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau up there talking about the great reset. This is what the whole deal is. This is what they’re going to try to do. this is globalization on steroids.A system -- I think it’s actually a combination of state capitalism and authoritarian rule that lets your [UNINTELLIGIBLE] betters -- as they depopulate.

…

These oligarchs, and I call them the AI aliens, right, because they’re all on the spectrum, right. They have no human compassion or empathy. They look at the deplorables as just cogs in the machine. They look at lao bai xing as units of production and consumption, and they would like the earth not to have 6 billion people or 7 billion people. They’d like the earth to have 500 million people, which would be all them. And -- I said one time in Italy that the purpose of populism is to make sure that the guys that make the decisions on the world economic system today were not the same people -- that’s why we had to confront it now -- were not the same people making the decisions on the singularity, that convergence -- and that’s what the fourth industrial revolution really is is the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering. They never want to talk about the bioengineering piece, right. The singularity is on one side homo sapiens, on the other side is something that’s post-homo sapien.

…

That singularity is going to be within the lifetime of our children. Maybe in the next 20, 25, 30, years. They don’t want to talk about that. That’s not conspiracy theory. I don’t have my -- it’s just a Harvard Business School case, right, to be deconstructed. And it’s obvious the direction they’re taking this, the great reset. Listen, we’re winning. But victory begets victory so Jack, I love the speech but hey, if they steal this election, it’s not about Trump. It’s not about Donald Trump as a person. If they steal this election they have basically thwarted the will of the people in the greatest republic in mankind’s history. If they can thwart the will of the people in this country, that’s how they try to break Brazil. That’s how they try to break Italy. That’s how they try to break the lao bai xing, the diaspora of the Chinese.

On November 20, Bannon returned to the conspiracy theory, saying “the deplorables understand” that Democrats are “trying to steal” the election in order to implement the great reset, which will involve “the convergence of advanced chip design, robotics, artificial intelligence with biotechnology.”

Video Citation From the November 20, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

  1. Donald Trump was reelected president...

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note davos melds with UN (figures, global elite, woke corps):

gmail 7 22

Tucker Hosts Climate Denier, Calls Green Energy a 'War Against People'- Yahoo News

Yahoo News

Marc Morano. Political activist. Fox News. Tucker Carlson opened his Tuesday show railing against environmentally friendly means of energy ...

Carlson opened his Tuesday show railing against environmentally friendly means of energy production, and then hosted a climate change denier to discuss how green energy is part of a “war against people.”

Carlson began by discussing the ongoing public revolt against political leaders in Sri Lanka amid food and fuel shortages. The protests are the result of a combination of factors including excessive government borrowing, heavy monsoons, depleted tax and tourism revenue, the decreased value of the rupee, anda government ban on chemical fertilizers that limited harvests.Carlson honed in on this final cause.

What has happened in the island nation is an example of a country being “driven into the ground by green energy schemes thought up by morons like… [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] AOC,” Carlson said, marking yet another instance of the New York congresswoman’s name being mentioned derisively on the primetime Fox show.

"We are watching countries around the world… collapsing and entering into a state of revolution because thesemorons tampered with their energy grids. But they don’t care,” Carlson said. “They are going to continue doing it unless someone stops them—until exactly the same thing happens here.”

Marc Morano, a global warming denier whom Carlson did not introduce as such, had a similar point of view.

“I think green energy and this whole war on agriculture… the voters cannot support this anymore,” Morano said.

“We are seeing what’s happening in Sri Lanka, we are seeing what’s happening in the Netherlands, there are protests in other countries growing, [and] Canada is following the same line with fertilizer. This is a war against modern civilization,” he added, reminiscent of past criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez’s proposals from Fox figures.

“It is a war against people,” Carlson chimed in. Life expectancy will “drop to the floor” if decision makers even so much as “tamper with” fossil fuels, which are “our greatest blessing,” he added.

“How do we allow people like [Ocasio-]Cortez and [Joe] Biden, who do not know what a carburetor is, to lecture us about something as complex as energy policy? Like, this is insane,” Carlson huffed.

Morano responded by blaming individuals in the World Economic Forum and U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, who “can go to the CEOs of major corporations and get them to sign a climate pledge, which then commits them to all of these green goals.”

“They believe that us, the unwashed masses, if left to our own devices, will create inequity, racism, environmental destruction, [and] the climate crisis,”Moronoclaimed. “They literally want to regulate not just our farming but every aspect of our lives, and that is really what the World Economic Forum and the United Nationsis after here, is controlling humans.”

Barking Up The Wrong Tree? California Reparations Report Wants More Trees Planted ... - MRCTV

MRCTV

According to Republican Marc Morano, head of the website Climate Depot, the presence of “heat islands” is a real phenomenon, but the solution ...

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no lnx may

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theories-aside-there-something-fishy-about-great-reset/

Conspiracy theories aside, there is something fishy about the Great Reset

It’s a corporate takeover of global governance that affects our food, our data and our vaccines

Ivan Wecke

16 August 2021, 11.12am

Last year’s WEF summit had the theme ’the Great Reset’ | ]

‘The Great Reset’ conspiracy theories don’t seem to want to die. The theories were triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) summit last year, which had the theme ‘The Great Reset’ and argued that the COVID crisis was an opportunity to address the burning issues facing the world.According to the BBC, the term ‘Great Reset’ has received more than eight million interactions on Facebook and has been shared almost two million times on Twitter since the WEF initiative was launched.

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 by the palaver around last year’s summit, 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, m ore 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 real Great Reset

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.”

Multi-stakeholder partnerships are public-private partnerships on the global stage

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 future of food

In autumn 2021, the UN is set to host the World Summit on Food Systems (FSS) in Rome. This is necessary, given that 3.9 billion people – more than half of the world's population – are currently battling hunger and malnutrition, even though there is enough food to feed the world. But this year’s summit differs significantly from past UN food summits, embracing ‘multi-stakeholder inclusivity’, in which the private sector has ‘an important role’. A concept note from 2019 showed that the WEF was set to be involved in organising the summit, though it is not now clear what the role of the WEF will be.

“Abandoning pesticides is not on the table. How come?” asks Sofia Monsalve of FIAN International, a human rights organisation focused on food and nutrition.“There is no discussion on land concentration or holding companies accountable for their environmental and labour abuses.” This fits into a bigger picture Monsalve sees of large corporations, which dominate the food sector, being reluctant to fix the production system. “They just want to come up with new investment opportunities.”

FIAN International together with 300 other organizations have expressed their concerns about the multi-stakeholder setup in an open letter to the secretary general of the UN, António Guterres. In a meeting with civil society groups who signed the letter, Amina Mohammed, the UN deputy secretary general, assured them that strong safeguards would prevent a corporate capture of the event, “by allowing only platforms or networks and no single corporation to the summit.”

Related story

How the United Nations is quietly being turned into a public-private partnership

2 July 2019 | Harris Gleckman

A new agreement with the World Economic Forum gives multinational corporations influence over matters of global governance.

But for Monsalve, “this only makes it worse. Now corporations can protect their interests and hide behind these platforms because it's unclear who is in there.” Indeed, a corporate partner list is nowhere to be found on the official website. The FSS organisers were contacted for comment but had not responded by the time of publication.

The signatories to the letter fear that, with corporate involvement in the summit, food will continue to be treated “as a commodity and not as a human right”. If unchanged, industrial food systems will continue to have irreversible impacts on our health and the health of our planet.

Big tech governing big tech

Another landmark in the development of stakeholder capitalism can be found in the Big Tech sector. As a part of his 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation the UN Secretary-General called for the formation of a new ‘strategic and empowered multi-stakeholder high-level body’. Again it's not easy to find a list of stakeholders but after some digging a long list of ‘roundtable participants’ for the roadmap includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the WEF.

Although the functions laid out for this new body are quite vague, civil society organizations fear it will come down to Big Tech creating a global body to govern itself. This risks institutionalising these companies' resistance against effective regulation both globally and nationally and increasing their power over governments and multilateral organizations. If the body comes to fruition, it could be a decisive victory in the ongoing war GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) is waging with governments over tax evasion, antitrust rules, and their ever-expanding power over society.

More than 170 civil society groups worldwide have signed another open letter to the secretary general of the UN – this time to prevent the digital governance body from forming. The secretary general was approached for comment but had not replied at the time of publication.

COVAX

Then there’s COVAX. The COVAX initiative aims to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every country in the world”. That, again, sounds wonderful, especially given the staggering inequalities in vaccination levels between rich and developing countries.

But why is the World Health Organization (WHO), which is part of the UN, not calling the shots? “Countries together, through multilateral agencies like the WHO, were supposed to take decisions about global health issues, with maybe some technical support by others,” says Sulakshana Nandi from NGO People's Health Movement, which has recently brought out a Policy Brief on COVAX.

They just want to come up with new investment opportunities

COVAX was set up as a multi-stakeholder group by two other multi-stakeholder groups, GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), in partnership with the WHO. Both GAVI and CEPI have strong ties with the World Economic Forum (which was one of the founders of CEPI) as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and both are also connected to companies like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson through manufacturer partnerships (GAVI) or as 'supporters' (CEPI). Even though COVAX is funded predominantly by governments, it is these corporate-centred coalitions that are overseeing its roll-out.

The contrast between the multi-stakeholder approach and a 'classic' multilateral one came to the surface when South Africa and India proposed the so-called TRIPS waiver at the end of last year. They requested a temporary lifting of intellectual property rules on all COVID-19 technologies in order to boost the manufacturing and distribution of vaccines and other essential medical products in mainly developing countries. WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a speech that he backed the proposal. “But GAVI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – even Bill Gates himself – and Big Pharma opposed this proposal very strongly,” said Nandi. “It's more important for them to protect their interests and market mechanisms than to protect universal health or protect people from COVID.” The WHO was approached for comment but has not replied.

Again, there is a stark choice between a human rights-led approach carried out by the UN and a profit-led approach carried out by multistakeholder bodies representing the interests of corporations. In the case of COVAX – which is failing to meet its modest aim of vaccinating 20% of the populations of low- and middle-income countries – the former has won out.

Stake out stakeholder capitalism

So even if the WEF (or Bill Gates) is not responsible for the COVID pandemic, even if the vaccines are not laced with microchips to control our thoughts, something fishy really is going on in the realm of global governance. If you value your right to public health, to privacy, to access healthy food or to democratic representation, be wary of the words 'stakeholder capitalism’ when they pop up at the next Davos summit.

The WEF was approached for comment on the issues raised in this article, but had not replied at the time of publication.

How to change the narrative on corruption in the UK

Thanks to Owen Paterson, British politicians are at last starting to use the C-word. It’s not just a Westminster bubble story, though: our panel have spent years tracking lobbyists and other professional enablers of corruption and tax avoidance. Join this free live discussion to find out where we can go from here to force transparency and accountability on our self-serving elite.

Join us for this free live discussion on 11 November at 5pm UK time.

Hear from:

Susan Hawley Executive director of Spotlight on Corruption

Oliver Bullough Journalist and the author of 'Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back'

Prem Sikka Emeritus Professor of Accounting at Essex Business School, University of Essex, and at Sheffield University Management School

Chair, Peter Geoghegan Editor-in-chief, openDemocracy

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nyt

Among the other payments to Mr. Cohen’s company described in the financial records were four for $99,980 each between October and January by Novartis Investments S.A.R.L., a subsidiary of Novartis, the multinational pharmaceutical giant based in Switzerland. Novartis — whose chief executive was among 15 business leaders invited to dinner with Mr. Trump at the World Economic Forum in January — spent more than $10 million on lobbying in Washington last year and frequently seeks approvals from federal drug regulators. Novartis said in a statement that its agreement with Essential Consultants had expired.

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OMG

https://theconversation.com/how-ceos-experts-and-philosophers-see-the-worlds-biggest-risks-differently-128382

We live in a world threatened by numerous existential risks that no country or organization can resolve alone, such as climate change, extreme weather and the coronavirus.

But in order to adequately address them, we need agreement on which are priorities – and which aren’t.

As it happens, the policymakers and business leaders who largely determine which risks become global priorities spent a week in January mingling in the mountainous resort of Davos for an annual meeting of the world’s elite.

I participated in a global risk assessment survey that informed those at the Davos summiton what they should be paying the most attention to. The results, drawn from experts in a broad range of disciplines including business, happen to be very different from what company CEOs specifically see as the biggest threats they face.

As a philosopher, I found the differences curious. They highlight two contrasting ways of seeing the world – with significant consequences for our ability to address societal risks.

Two perspectives on the biggest risks

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report consolidates the perceptions of about 800 experts in business, government and civil society to rank “the world’s most pressing challenges” for the coming year by likelihood and impact.

In 2020, extreme weather, a failure to act on climate change and natural disasters topped the list of risks in terms of likelihood of occurrence. In terms of impact, the top three were climate action failure, weapons of mass destruction and a loss of biodiversity.

The specific perspective of corporate leaders, however, is captured in another survey that highlights what they perceive as the biggest risks to their own businesses’ growth prospects. Conducted by consultancy PwC since 1998, it also holds sway in Davos. I’ve been involved in that report as well when I used to work for the organization.

In sharp contrast to the World Economic Forum’s risk report, the CEO survey found that the top three risks to business this year are overregulation, trade conflicts and uncertain economic growth.

Economic or ethical

What explains such a big difference in how these groups see the greatest threats?

I wanted to look at this question more deeply, beyond one year’s assessment, so I did a simple analysis of 14 years of data generated by the two reports. My findings are only inferences from publicly available data, and it should be noted that the two surveys have different methodologies and ask different questions that may shape respondents’ answers.

A key difference I observed is that business leaders tend to think in economic terms first and ethical terms second. That is, businesses, as you’d expect, tend to focus on their short-term economic situation, while civil society and other experts in the Global Risk Report focus on longer-term social and environmental consequences.

For example, year after year, CEOs have named a comparatively stable set of narrow concerns. Overregulation is among the main three threats in all but one of the years – and is frequently at the top of the list. Availability of talent, government fiscal concerns and the economy were also frequently mentioned over the past 14 years.

In contrast, the Global Risk Report tends to reflect a greater evolution in the types of risks the world faces, with concerns about the environment and existential threats growing increasingly prominent over the past five years, while economic and geopolitical risks have faded after dominating in the late 2000s.

A philosophical perspective

Risk surveys are useful tools for understanding what matters to CEOs and civil society. Philosophy is useful for considering why their priorities differ, and whose are likelier to be right.

Fundamentally, risks are about interests. Businesses want a minimum of regulations so they can make more money today. Experts representing constituencies beyond just business place a greater emphasis on the common good, now and in the future.

When interests are in tension, philosophy can help us sort between them. And while I’m sympathetic to CEOs’ desire to run their businesses without regulatory interference, I’m concerned that these short-term economic considerations often impede long-term ethical goals, such as looking after the well-being of the environment.

An uncertain world

Experts agree on at least one thing: The world faces dire risks.

This year’s Global Risk Report, titled, “An Unsettled World,” depicts on its cover a vulnerable earth in the shadow of a gigantic whirlpool.

The cover photograph of the Global CEO Survey, which reported the lowest CEO confidence in economic growth since the Great Recession, shows an incoming tide beneath looming dark clouds, with the words: “Navigating the Rising Tide of Uncertainty.”

Between the covers, however, the reports demonstrate a wide gap between two influential groups that need to be on the same page if we hope to resolve the world’s biggest threats.

Last century, in the same year that World War II drew to a close, Bertrand Russell proclaimed that the purpose of philosophy was to teach us “how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.”

In the 21st century, philosophy can remind us of our unfortunate tendency to let economic priorities paralyze action on more pressing concerns.

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'We Have So Much More to Do': Youth Climate Activists Declare as Global Elite Close Out Davos Forum

ACTIVISM

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1/20

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/al-gore-davos-climate-crisis-interview-941722/

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at Davos, the Greta-Donald Dust-Up Was Hardly a Fair Fight

:{:{BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE}:

The teenage activist from Sweden delved into the finer points of carbon neutrality. The president denounced the “prophets of doom” and sputtered, “How old is she?” Read More}:

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-why-climate-change-has-become-a-lightning-rod-for-business-and-finance-leaders-report/

no lnx

Here’s why climate change has become a ‘lightning rod for business and finance leaders’: report

Written by Alex Henderson January 24, 2020

Countless articles have focused on the environmental and safety aspects of climate change, especially in liberal and progressive publications. But Dino Rabouin and Amy Harder, in an article published by Axios on January 24, discuss and analyze climate change from a business standpoint — explaining that climate change has “suddenly become a lightning rod for business and finance leaders around the world.”

Drawing on data Axios received from the High Lantern Group, Rabouin and Harder report that climate change “generated the highest degree of public pressure on corporations by activists, policymakers and journalists” in 2019 — which was a 77% increase from 2018.

High Lantern’s data, according to Rabouin and Harder, “includes analysis of more than 6 million tweets.” Rob Gluck, managing partner for High Lantern, notes that “the vast majority of relevant public actors” are “using (Twitter) to communicate.”

“In recent months,” Rabouin and Harder observe, “the world’s foremost economic institutions have advocated for policies cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This trend is driven by a confluence of factors, including more extreme weather and greater public pressure.”

Institutions that have been discussing climate change, Rabouin and Harder point out, include “major central banks” as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). In a research paper released on January 20, BIS warned that climate change could cause “potentially extremely financially disruptive events that could be behind the next systemic financial crisis.”

According to BIS, “This complex collective action problem requires coordinating actions among many players, including governments, the private sector, civil society and the international community.”

IMF head Kristalina Georgieva, in a speech last week, asserted that the IMF “ought to begin to build standards for disclosure of climate risks” — and that includes “mandatory disclosure standards.”

Journalist Josh Holland addressed climate change’s financial costs in a September 2019 article for The Nation, stressing that a Green New Deal wouldn’t be nearly as costly as the effects of climate change. Holland noted that in a 2015 report, the Economist Intelligence Unit warned that “the asset management industry — and thus the wider community of investors of all sizes — is facing the prospect of significant losses from the effects of climate change.”

Rabouin and Harder also note that “BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, says it’s making climate change a pillar of its investment strategy, and even Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are calling for a price on carbon emissions.”

The Axios reporters emphasize, however, that “all this rhetoric should be scrutinized carefully and often” because “talking about supporting policies addressing climate change is quite different from actually doing something about it.”

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djt mnu condescenion may backfire? they feel davos a safe space for assholery/denial? or she is such a threat must be swatted down? plus woman uppity is irresistable target?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/foreclosure-king-steve-mnuchin-tells-greta-thunberg-to-go-study-economics/

no lnx

‘Foreclosure King’ Steve Mnuchin tells Greta Thunberg to go study economics

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams January 23, 2020

During press briefing Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, former Goldman Sachs banker and current U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed Greta Thunberg’s call for complete divestment from fossil fuels and condescendingly told the 17-year-old climate activist to go study economics.

“Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin said. “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”

Critics immediately hit back at Mnuchin’s suggestion that one need have a degree in economics to understand the severity of the climate emergency and the steps necessary to avert global catastrophe.

“Here’s what Mnuchin learned from economics studies: as the ‘foreclosure king,’ he ran a company that booted elderly residents from their homes due to onerous loans and technicalities,” tweeted Miller Center fellow Chris Lu, referring to Mnuchin’s destructive tenure as CEO of OneWest Bank.

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein pointed to the thousands of academics who have echoed Thunberg’s call for fossil fuel divestment:

Naomi Klein

@NaomiAKlein

Somebody should tell Mnuchin about the hundreds of Harvard faculty members - and thousands at other universities - who have called for fossil fuel divestment too. https://harvardfacultydivest.com/  https://twitter.com/AP/status/1220294681663287296 …

Faculty Petition for Fossil Fuel Divestment

For a Fossil Free Endowment

harvardfacultydivest.com

The Associated Press

?

@AP

U.S. Treasury chief says it's ''a joke''' when asked about climate activist Greta Thunberg's  recommendation that the public and private sectors should divest from fossil fuels.  He says she can't give economic advice until she gets a college degree.   http://apne.ws/Px1YqDW

Other critics piled on:

Peter Daou

?

@peterdaou

Look at #Mnuchin, this smug clown. #GretaThunberg has more integrity and wisdom in her pinky toe than a thousand Mnuchins.

These Trump cronies are wretched people, truly.https://www.thedailybeast.com/mnuchin-patronizes-greta-thunberg-saying-go-study-economics-then-well-talk …

Mnuchin Patronizes Greta Thunberg: Go Study Economics, Then We’ll Talk

The Treasury secretary was asked if he should listen to teen climate-change activist’s advice on divesting from fossil fuels.

thedailybeast.com

David Dayen

@ddayen

Steve Mnuchin thinks Greta Thunberg needs an economic education, where she can take courses like "strip-mining Sears assets 103" and "forging signatures to take homes away from people 204" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/davos-2020-mnuchin-criticizes-thunberg-says-she-should-study-economics-at-college.html …

Mnuchin says Thunberg can tell us what to do 'after she goes and studies economics in college'

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sharply criticized the financial credentials of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on Thursday.

cnbc.com

Mnuchin’s swipe at Thunberg came after the Swedish activist warned Tuesday in a speech to the World Economic Forum that global elites are “fueling the flames” of the climate crisis “by the hour.”

“We demand at this year’s World Economic Forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions, and governments: Immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction. Immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies. And immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” said Thunberg. “We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030, or even 2021. We want this done now.”

Anticipating attacks from elites like Mnuchin, Thunberg added: “It may seem like we’re asking for a lot. And you will of course say that we are naïve. But this is just the very minimum amount of effort that is needed to start the rapid sustainable transition.”

“So either you do this or you’re going to have to explain to your children why you are giving up on the 1.5-degree target,” said Thunberg. “Giving up without even trying. Well I’m here to tell you that, unlike you, my generation will not give up without a fight.”

new 120 an

Foreclosure King’ Steve Mnuchin tells Greta Thunberg to go study economics

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

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ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mnuchin-patronizes-greta-thunberg-saying-go-study-economics-then-well-talk

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120 ew

Ashutosh Pandey

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is returning to the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the 2020 World Economic Forum with a strong and clear message: put an end to the fossil fuel "madness."

Thunberg's missive is aimed at, among others, U.S. President Donald Trump, who in the past has mocked the Swedish environmental campaigner, saying she has an "anger management problem." Trump, who is among the most prominent climate change skeptics, is returning to Davos after giving it a miss in 2019 due to a government shutdown.

It's the first time Trump and Thunberg would be present at the same event since last year's United Nations climate change summit in New York, where the teenager could be seen staring down the U.S. president as the two briefly crossed paths.

Later, Thunberg — named TIME magazine's Person of the Year 2019 — told the BBC that she "wouldn't have wasted [her] time" talking to Trump about the climate crisis at the UN event.

"Honestly, I don't think I would have said anything because obviously he's not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me," she said.

[vid]

'State of Emergency'

Thunberg, who famously told Davos participants last year that "our house is on fire," has, however, found support among the organizers of the World Economic Forum, including its81-year-old founder Klaus Schwab, who said the world is facing "a state of emergency."

"We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change," Schwab told reporters on Tuesday. "We do not want the next generations to inherit a world which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable —just think of the wildfires in Australia," he said.

An annual risks survey published by the WEF on Wednesday put climate and other environmental threats ahead of risks posed by geopolitical tensions and cyberattacks. It's the first time that the survey found the top five long-term risks were all environmental, from extreme weather events to businesses and governments failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Stakeholder Capitalism

Sustainability is the main theme at this year's Davos meeting, taking place at a time the world is grappling with global warming which is threatening to become worse because of growing divisions among nations and businesses on how to tackle it.

The meeting, which will see over 50 heads of state and government, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, descend on the Alpine resort, seeks to give concrete meaning to "stakeholder capitalism" — a concept that businesses should serve the interests of all society rather than simply their shareholders.

"Business has now to fully embrace stakeholder capitalism, which means not only maximizing profits, but use their capabilities and resources in cooperation with governments and civil society to address the key issues of this decade," Schwab said. "They have to actively contribute to a more cohesive and sustainable world."

Davos 2020 by the Numbers

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Talk is cheap, says the acting executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, who begged governments around the world to make sure that 2020 is not another year of conferences and empty promises, but instead is the year to take decisive action to stop the mass extinction of wildlife and the destruction of habitat-sustaining ecosystems, as The Guardian reported.

Acting Executive Secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema warned that the absence of concrete action to stop deforestation, pollution and the climate crisis will mean that humanity has given up on the planet.

Mrema who grew up in Tanzania near Mount Kilimanjaro has seen the streams near her childhood home dry up, turning a fertile forest into bare land, she said to The Guardian.

Her stark assessment of an empty world came just ahead of the Davos World Economic Forum, which starts on Wednesday. The climate crisis is expected to take center stage.

The World Economic Forum said this year that climate-related risks overshadow all other risks, and it placed loss of biodiversity as the third biggest risk to the world, ahead of infectious diseases, terrorism and war between countries. It was only outranked by other climate-related threats, withextreme weatheras the top threat, followed by a failure to adapt and mitigate the climate crisis, according to the World Economic Forum.

"For the first time in the history of the Global Risks Perception Survey, environmental concerns dominate the top long-term risks by likelihood among members of the World Economic Forum's multistakeholder community," according to the executive summary of the Forum's 2020 Global Risks Report.

Mrema is tasked with creating an international agreement to protect nature on the scale of the 2015 Paris agreement. She noted in urgency that the disappearance of coral reefs, rainforests and other life supporting ecosystems will lead to an "empty world" and have "catastrophic" consequences for societies, according to The Guardian.

"People's lives depend on biodiversity in ways that are not always apparent or appreciated. Human health ultimately depends on ecosystem services: the availability of fresh water, fuel, food sources. All these are prerequisites for human health and livelihoods," she said to The Guardian in an exclusive interview.

Scientists have warned that human-activity is fueling the sixth mass extinction in history as animals and plants are disappearing at rates tens to hundreds of times faster than at any point in the last 10 million years. In fact, researchers predict that nearly 1,000 species will be lost over the next century and animal size will decrease 25 percent, as conditions favor smaller more adaptable animals, according to EcoWatch.

In October, governments will meet in China to formalize an agreement on protecting biodiversity. The draft proposal released last week calls for a modest commitment to protect at least 30 percent of the planet, controlling invasive species and reducing pollution from plastic waste, according to the draft from the Convention on Biological Diversity, as The Guardian reported.

Mrema told The Guardian she hopes the attendees will negotiate a more rigorous and ambitious agreement. However, if this modest one fails, the consequences will be dire.

"The risks will be major," she said to The Guardian. "One is that we will not have listened to the science and the evidence provided. Because we will not have listened, it means the global community will have said: let biodiversity loss continue, let people continue to die, let the degradation continue, deforestation continue, pollution continue, and we'll have given up as an international community to save the planet. I hope that's not where any of us would want to be."

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wildlife species extinction deforestation pollution davos world economic forum biodiversity extreme weather paris agreement coral reefs rainforests sixth mass extinction climate crisis

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just coincidence that crits b/c current event, or some tip pt?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/of-davos-and-donkey-kong-how-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-outshines-the-plutocratic-elite-pretending-to-save-the-world/

This week we may have passed a cultural milestone.

This was a week when the world’s richest and most powerful gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to make the world better. As a confab of the elite, Davos has come to symbolize the persistence of a particularly extreme form of capitalism. No one there among the presidents, prime ministers, and billionaires is seriously looking at upending the system that lifts them ever higher while dropping the have-nots ever lower.

But while the Davos set gabs about global poverty, Financial Timescommentator Edward Luce points out on the Deep State Radio podcast, the word “inequality” isn’t on the agenda. They are certain they can save the world and maintain their exalted position in it.

The scene is divorced from reality as most Americans experience it. This is all happening during a federal government shutdown now extending into its second month that has made 800,000 federal workers go without pay, plus another 1.2 million contractors who not only aren’t being paid, but won’t receive back pay when the shutdown ends. (As of Friday, Jan. 25, there was a tentative agreement to reopen the government for three weeks so a budget could be negotiated.)

Trump administration officials told them to just suck it up, with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross admitting to CNBC he didn’t know why federal employees were going to food banks when they could just take out loans.

But something else was unfolding at the same time, something even more symbolic. A new crop of progressive congressional representatives arrived in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. Getting the most press among the newbies is 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bronx-born, Twitter-native, and worm in the heads of right wing pundits. She made waves calling for a Green New Deal, proposing a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent to pay for it, and, last week, marched in the second anniversary Women’s March, worked to end the federal shutdown, and called in to a 57-hour livestreamed game of Donkey Kong 64 to support trans rights.

That’s Donkey Kong, the Nintendo video game from the ’80s. The online game was organized as a fundraiser for Mermaids, a U.K. charity that supports trans youth. It was run by Harry Brewis, known online as “Hbomberguy” and for a series of “Measured Response” videos in which he calmly dissects right-wing talking points and conspiracy theories. Brewis ended up raising about $340,000 for the charity.

Most remarkable about the event—besides a congressional representative showing up—is that the video game community has long been seen as a refuge of misogynistic, right-wing “GamerGate” types. That some people are turning that around and opting for inclusion is a sign of culture shift and progress.

The worlds of Davos and Donkey Kong could not be farther apart. There’s the obvious: the world’s wealthiest assembled in one resort location to save the world for capitalists, and a group of gamers raising money for a cause that benefits a marginalized community.

What resonates with people more today: a 70 percent top marginal tax rate (which was the average top rate from the 1930s through the 1960s) or the status quo in which ordinary people have a higher tax burden than the superrich? Who’s more in tune with the world right now, Michael Dell (net worth approximately $23 billion) or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who famously couldn’t afford a second home in Washington, D.C., until she started receiving her congressional paychecks?

Here’s a hint: One poll put support for a 70 percent top marginal tax rate at nearly 60 percent, and even 45 percent of Republicans were in support of it, according to CNBC.

Every once in a while, one of our leaders seems so in tune with the times that they become legends. Think Franklin Roosevelt intoning that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” to rally a nation in the depths of the Great Depression, or John F. Kennedy calling the country to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you ….” Even Donald Trump’s revanchist “Make America Great Again” resonated with a large number of people, marking a significant cultural moment in American life—one that we hope will go down in infamy.

When these moments have passed into history, the words linger as a shorthand version for cultural turning points that were in reality more complex, nuanced, and hard-won.

We may be in the next such moment right now, although we haven’t had a pithy quote yet to encapsulate it. (I hope it doesn’t turn out to be Wilbur Ross’ “let them eat cake” gaffe.) Maybe Ocasio-Cortez will become the one to deliver that cultural marker, maybe it will come from someone else. But all the trends are pointing to a shift in collective consciousness.

The Rosses, Dells, and other superrich and superpowerful went to Davos because that’s where their people are, the community they care about, where they could be assured of hobnobbing with their fellow plutocrats. Likewise, Ocasio-Cortez went to her people where they were, where the price for entry into the club wasn’t a nine-figure bank account, but the desire to welcome and lift up one another.

Ocasio-Cortez’s people also wonder if the world can support billionaires, and why anyone should have a billion dollars to begin with. Like the idea of bringing back a 70 percent marginal tax rate, they are questions that are getting asked more often. When enough people ask those questions, that’s a turning point.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/watch-this-historian-call-out-davos-elite-to-their-faces-stop-talking-about-philanthropy-and-pay-higher-taxes/

While the private jets have mostly left the airport outside of Davos, Switzerland following the conclusion of this year’s World Economic Forum, a little noticed exchange that took place during the annual gathering has picked up steam in recent days showing what it looks like when some of the world’s richest people are confronted by someone willing to call literal “bullshit” on the we-can-save-the-world-with-charity mantra that dominates among the global elite.

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If the world’s richest and most powerful are worried about a so-called popular “backlash” in response to the global economic system they defend—and largely control—Rutger Berman, a Dutch historian and author of the book Utopia for Realists, during a panel last week titled “The Cost of Inequality,” said the pathway is not complicated. “The answer,” he said, “is very simple: Just stop talking about philanthropy, and start talking about taxes.”

“I mean we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes,” Bregman added. “We can invite [U2 frontman] Bono once more. But, come on, we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”

Watch the following clip put out by Now This:

Embedded video

NowThis

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@nowthisnews

‘It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.’ — This historian wasn’t afraid to confront the billionaires at Davos about their greed

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4:33 PM - Jan 28, 2019

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Also on the Davos panel with Bregman was Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International. Just last week, as the WEF summit was just opening, Oxfam released a report on global inequality showing that just26 billionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s 3.8 poorest billion people.

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“We have a tax system that leaks so much, that allows $170 billion of money every year to be taken to tax havens and to be denied the developing countries that need that money most,” said Byanyima during the panel. “So we have to look at the business model, and we have to look at the role of governments to tax and plow back money into people’s lives.”

As the video clip began to go viral in the wake of the Davos’ gathering, the media team for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who has continued to put global inequality and the idea of a “rigged” economy at the heart of his political message—snagged the central claims of Bregman’s remarks and on Tuesday put out this version:

Embedded video

Bernie Sanders

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@SenSanders

We have a rigged tax code that has essentially legalized tax-dodging for large corporations and the world's wealthiest individuals. It is time to end these egregious loopholes and make the wealthy pay their fair share.

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12:18 PM - Jan 29, 2019

4,349 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“We have a rigged tax code that has essentially legalized tax-dodging for large corporations and the world’s wealthiest individuals,” said Sanders. “It is time to end these egregious loopholes and make the wealthy pay their fair share.”

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The annual confab of the captains of global industry, finance, and wealth is underway in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum.

Meanwhile, Oxfam reports that the wealth of the 2,200 billionaires across the globe increased by $900 billion last year – or $2.5 billion a day. Their 12 percent increase in wealth contrasts with a drop of 11 percent in the wealth of the bottom half of the people of the world. In fact, the world’s 26 richest billionaires now own as much as the 3.8 billion who comprise the bottom half of the planet’s population.

SPONSORED

If Davos’s attendees ignore all this, and blame the rise of right-wing populism around the globe on racism fueled by immigrants from the Middle East and from Central America, they’re deluding themselves.

The real source of the rise of repressive authoritarianism, nativism, and xenophobia in the United States as well as Italy, Spain, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Bulgaria, Greece, France, and Britain is a pervasive sense that elites are rigging the world economy for themselves. And, guess what? They are.

Message to Davos Man (and Women): Either commit to pushing for broader prosperity and democracy, or watch as trade wars, capital controls, and isolationism erode global prosperity (including yours) and global peace.

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Britain's Prince William interviewed famed broadcaster David Attenborough on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Switzerland.

During the sit-down, the 92-year-old naturalist advised the world leaders and business elite gathered in Davos this week that we must respect and protect the natural world, adding that the future of its survival—as well as humanity's survival—is in our hands.

"We can wreck it with ease," Attenborough said. "We can wreck it without even knowing we are doing it. And if we wreck the natural world, in the end, we wreck ourselves."

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At this time of year, about 2,000 private jets fly into Zurich airport and to various smaller Swiss airports (including the Dübendorf military airbase). Hundreds of helicopter flights move from Zurich to Davos, where the hotel rooms go for as high as US$10,000 a night during the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF, which began in 1971, opened this Tuesday and runs through to the end of the week. The theme is Globalization 4.0, which refers—it seems—to the need to tackle the high-tech economy and to create a new architecture for a crumbling world system.

Evidence of the irrelevance of Davos and of that crumbling system is clear. Neither the U.S. President Donald Trump nor the Chinese President Xi Jinping will be there. With the European Union falling apart, neither British Prime Minister Theresa May nor French President Emmanuel Macron will be flying in. Germany’s Angela Merkel will be stuck with strongmen such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. It will not be pleasant company.

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Billionaires Club

The World Economic Forum slips into liberal language, reflecting concern for the deep disparities in the world and the crises of war and climate change. It is impossible to ignore fully the calamities in our world. They have to make a show of taking these things seriously.

There are currently 2,208 billionaires in the world, twice the number since the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Most of them are from North America and Europe. They currently have more wealth than ever before, according to a new report from Oxfam International. The combined wealth of the richest 26 among these 2,208 billionaires reached US$1.4 trillion. This amount of wealth is equivalent to the total wealth of the planet’s 3.8 billion poorest people. That means that only 26 individuals have as much wealth as 3.8 billion people. Let that sink in.

Who are these 26 men and women? The top ten of them are Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Bernard Arnault (LVMH), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Amancio Ortega (Zara), Carlos Slim Helu (America Movil), the Koch Brothers (Koch Industries) and Larry Ellison (Oracle). On this list, only one person—Carlos Slim Helu—is neither European nor North American. He is Mexican. Further down the list is one Indian (Mukesh Ambani) and several Chinese billionaires (Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Li Ka-shing, Hui Ka Yan, Lee Shau-kee and Wang Jianlin).

It is not that these men—and a few women—work so hard that they earn their wealth. Most of them inherited their wealth; others were able to get their hands on public assets at fire-sale prices during the time of privatization. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of women in working-class and middle-class households do millions of hours of unpaid labor to maintain a system that has cut social safety nets and social welfare. The Oxfam report has a startling piece of data. “If all the unpaid care work done by women across the globe was carried out by a single company, it would have an annual income of $10 trillion—43 times that of Apple.” And yet, it is people who own Apple and its kindred firms who make the billions while these women earn nothing. This is the actual structural crisis that will not be discussed at Davos. It goes against the interests of the billionaires to open this conversation.

Libyan Beach

A few days ago, an inflatable dingy sunk off the Libyan coast. It was carrying at least 120 migrants. Three of them survived. They were brought to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where they said that the boat carried people from West Africa and Sudan. There were children on board, and one pregnant woman. The men who survived came from Sudan and Gambia.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) counts the number of people who attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea. It says that in the first 16 days of 2019, 4,216 people attempted the crossing as compared to 2,365 in the same period last year. Thus far, 200 migrants have already died in these perilous waters. Italy’s far-right government has been arresting those migrants who make it to Europe and taking them back to Libya. There is as yet no count of how many of these migrants go back to the boats and try to make the passage again.

It is estimated that close to a million migrants are amassed in Libya, some in concentration camps, hoping to make it to Europe. They mainly come from Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Syria. What brings them to Libya, even as they hear stories in their homelands of the dangers of this journey? Many come because war has torn their country apart—wars in Sudan and Syria as cases in point. But the rest come because of the harshness of their lives, the impossibility of making a living where they continue to work but their work only fattens the bank accounts of the few.

Most of the migrants are economic refugees, people who work hard but starve and dream of a better life anywhere else. Policies that would help them at home—such as an increase in social welfare, universal health care and universal education—are denied. The rich no longer want to pay taxes, which is what increases the wealth of the few and prevents even sympathetic states from offering a wide social democratic agenda. The rich also hide roughly US$7.6 trillion from tax authorities, money secured in tax havens that could provide the finances necessary to improve the lives of people where they live.

Davos Man will smile at the World Economic Forum and talk at length about the need for “reform” and to tackle the “challenges” in the world. But, at the same time, Davos Man will fight hard to protect the wealth that has been secreted away, wealth that people created, and that people are now denied.

There is a direct line between the increased wealth of the billionaires and the increased number of migrants who want to cross the Mediterranean. One lot flies into Davos in their private jets, while the other sits in sinking rubber boats in the sea.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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1/19

Failure to Curb Climate Change a Top Risk, Davos Survey Says

(Reuters)

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== http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/27/sustainable-market-trends/

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giants pp:

The Global Power Elite works out policies to advance their

interests with regard to the management and protection of

global capital and the enforcement of debt collection worldwide

in suchprivate policymaking forums as the World Economic

Forum, Trilateral Commission, Group of 30, Atlantic Council,

and Bilderberg Group, and in such transnational state institu-

tions as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20, and

Bank for International Settlements.

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