realworldeconomicsreview | Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played
through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would
lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and
control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this
scenario a reality.
According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took
two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of
“experts and decision-makers from academia, business, politics and
government – across industries and political ideologies” and publish it
in glossy on April 21, 2020, under the title “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.
I became aware of this plan through a German translation of an article by Dux Morales in the Italian newspaper il manifesto about it. As I read through this my breath stood still.
Two weeks seems a very short time for such a comprehensive work with
allegedly many contributors and about 25 signers. However, the
Foundation had ten years to prepare for this moment. So it wasn’t a
hollow phrase in the 2010 publication, which already included the
“Lock-Step” pandemic response scenario, telling decision-makers in
foundations: ” Scenarios are designed to stretch our thinking about both
the opportunities and obstacles that the future might hold; they
explore, through narrative, events and dynamics that might alter,
inhibit, or enhance current trends, often in surprising ways.”.
In the current brochure, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes, along
with other recommendations, to form a Pandemic Testing Board, modelled
on the War Production Board, which was an agency of the US to supervise
and plan war production during World War II. This new powerful
technocratic council is designed to consist of nine representatives from
business, government, acadimia, universities and labor, and the order
seems not to be random. Microsoft and Google are probably at the top of
the list of candidates for this council.
The name of one of the four authors of the proposal caught my eye
immediately: E. Glen Weyl, techno-libertarian market radical, Microsoft
research manager and long-time campaigner for the legalisation and reintroduction of debt bondage, precisely for migrants.
Another author is Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt
University and former researcher at the “Counterinsurgency Training
Centre” in Afghanistan. The third is Julius Krein, former hedge fund
manager and head of the right-wing nationalist journal American Affairs, which emerged from the Journal of American Greatness. The renowned ethics professor Danielle Allen is allowed to dilute a bit this toxic cocktail of authors.
In wartime, anything goes
As in wartime, the Pandemic Board should have the power to confiscate
and order the production of whatever is needed to achieve testing
capacity in a short time, a capacity to test so many people a day that
the majority of Americans, and possibly the entire world population, can
be tested for Covid-19 on a weekly basis. This, it is said, is
necessary to get the economy back on track.
Congruously, the state should guarantee test providers a fair price,
“e.g. $100” per test. Where companies invest, governments are to relieve
them from any risk for their great profit prospect by a guarantee to
order tests.
A pandemic corps of 300,000 testers and contact tracers will have to
perform police-like tasks towards a reluctant population – even if the
latter is not stated explicitly in the brochure -, because “the
infection status must be known for people to participate in many
societal functions “. In other words: Those who cannot prove that they
are corona-free will not be allowed to go to work and even less to
participate in social life.
In order to “enable more complete contact tracing”, apps and tracking
software should be used as extensively as possible, recording and
reporting who is close to whom.
The foundation innocently writes that laws must be passed to prevent
dismissal due to infection. As if that had even the slightest chance of
happening in a country where in many states you can be dismissed for any
reason with two weeks’ notice, including when you are being called up
for jury duty.
The global unique ID under a new name
The brochure also promotes the plan to introduce a globally unique
identification number for everyone, which the Rockefeller Foundation has
already been busy pushing forward with the ID2020 total surveillance
project, but now under the name “unique patient identification number”.
Everyone is declared a patient here.
This unique “patient” number will provide information on the viral
status, antibody status and finally the vaccination status of each
citizen. But not only that. The database is to be a hyper database that
will be linked to pretty much any other database with personal
information, from attendance lists in schools, passenger lists of any
kind of transport, or ticket sales at events. Of course, privacy is to
be preserved. What else?
In order to identify populations at risk and to achieve performant
contact tracing and decision support, powerful analytical tools must
operate across any such platform of data. Existing obstacles in
accessing and collating data by such analysis instruments (i.e.
artificial intelligence) need urgently be removed. Recent progress
towards this goal through new regulation is praised.
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