Whether He Intended To Or Not - Trump Put Himself In Direct Opposition To The Great Reset

thescrum |   There are rumblings among the Right and Libertarian factions of Western politics about a horrific plan that Davos Man intends to unleash upon mankind: The Great Reset! While Western conservatives and libertarians depict this as some sort of globalist attempt to take advantage of the disruption caused by the Covid–19 pandemic to impose a global, eco-socialist system of governance, this assessment is incomplete. At bottom, the Great Reset is the expression of a movement based on greenwashing, the fetishization of digital technology, and a neoliberal conceptual nucleus: a corporate structural “reform” called stakeholder capitalism. 

Let us be wary.

If one scratches the surface of the Reset movement one can see why it should be viewed with skepticism and caution. It has many questionable boosters. Credibility is not strong when one’s movement is composed of such figures as Tony Blair, famous for foolishly lending British support to the 2003 Iraq war, or corporations such as Nestlé, notorious for taking worldwide advantage of lax tax laws and, further back in history, its disgraceful exploitation of mothers in developing nations in what is known infamously as “the baby formula scandal.” Indeed, the danger here is that corporations are hurtling towards a complete usurpation of national sovereignty, a global corporate coup intended not to impose a global Green New Deal but to maintain the neoliberal order.

The Reset crowd’s roots in Davos are not to be overlooked. Two prominent apostles of the movement, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, have a strong Davosian pedigree. Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in Davos 40 years ago. He is a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, an organization dedicated to defending “free” market Western capitalism, and helped create the concept of stakeholder capitalism. Malleret is a former investment banker and founded/headed the Global Risk Network at the World Economic Forum. 

To add further fuel to the skepticism fire, TIME recently partnered with the WEF and interviewed a number of Reset advocates, ranging from Doug McMillon, the CEO of Wal–Mart, a company notorious for its poor treatment of employees, to Kristalina Georgieva, the current director of the International Monetary Fund, an organization notorious for inflicting austerity and privatization programs upon nation after nation as conditions for needed multilateral financial assistance. The founders of this movement, Schwab and Malleret, claim in their book, Covid–19: The Great Reset, that this movement is “an attempt to identify and shed light on the changes ahead, and to make a modest contribution in terms of delineating what their more desirable and sustainable form might resemble.”   

“Stakeholder capitalism,”… positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges…There is the prospect, however likely or unlikely, that corporations will eventually be persuaded that stakeholder capitalism is ultimately beneficial to their bottom lines—in effect a new profit-maximization strategy with the added benefit of preserving the social order—and enter in enthusiastically.

The problem I have with the article is that the author seems to discount the full extent to which the ruling elites have already positioned themselves as the “trustees” of the “social order.” It’s as if this were hypothetical planning for the future whereas in it is clearly underscored in a recent Time article, referenced in below link, that the “Shareholders” (aka ruling elites) came out and boasted how they took measures to determine the 2020 Presidential election outcome.

The “great reset” is an ongoing process whose various machinations are documented in many places, including here, at NC. Cloaking it in terms of “Stake Holder” vs. “Shareholder”, in my opinion, masks the more fundamental questions regarding human freedom, agency, and what it means to be human. When making statements that pertain to the relationship between the individual and society without reference once to “class” and or incorporating elements of class analysis, seems odd in an article that seeks to examine structural changes in capitalism

“…It is hard to see corporations voluntarily switching to a stakeholder model after being accustomed to forty years of rapacious shareholder capitalism. What non-corporate entity could possibly force corporations to transform? Governments come to mind as they have, in the past, acted as shapers and regulators of capitalism…”

“…Schwab nonetheless (and very ironically) makes the familiar claim we have come to call TINA since Margaret Thatcher made the phrase familiar—“there is no alternative”—and specifically dismisses state capitalism as a rival: “But while state capitalism may be a good fit for one stage of development, it, too, should gradually evolve into something closer to a stakeholder model, lest it succumb to corruption from within.”

The fundamental requirement of this global neoliberal project is to destroy the capacity of nation-states to regulate economic activity. Perry Anderson’s recent three part opus on the EU illustrated this well. Ideologically, the fundamental requirement is the absolute demonization of “nationalism” and also “populism” as synonymous with fascism. This is why the Establishment reaction against Trump is so ferocious. This is also why the example of China is so threatening, and must be undermined at all costs.
Neither Trump nor China represent my ideal exemplars. But both challenge the TINA arguments of the global elite that “stakeholder capitalism” our only real future.