The Bits and Bytes of The Great Reset: COVID-19 and the Scaling Up of
Data-Capitalism
The so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn
humanity into datasets, which the world's most powerful hedge funds and
transnational corporations can use to create more profits for themselves and
their clients.
by Raul Diego
March 03rd, 2021
Mint Press
By Raul Diego
LONDON - According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, an economy is "the
system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and
used." For the last few centuries, this system has been dominated by the
paradigm of capitalism, in which the private owners of capital, and not the
state, control the trade of goods and services.
The slave trade and plantation economy of the early colonial period in
America were among the original manifestations of this economic paradigm, as
the European propertied classes asserted their newfound power over dwindling
tributary systems and the interim feudal arrangements were replaced with
John Locke's quasi-religious notions of private property, which would come
to conquer Western economic theory for the next three hundred years.
Today, that paradigm has exhausted the moral justifications its proponents
have relied upon to maintain its supremacy and the naked truth of
capitalism's rapaciousness is laid bare, once again, as wealth inequality
skyrockets while millions sink into poverty and resource wars continue to
ravage entire nations across the world.
Having squeezed every last drop of "value" from the earth, and with no more
land to settle or markets to discover, capital's approaching apotheosis
finds it looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where
intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and
behavioral processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labor.
Efforts are now underway to "translate" the real world into a digital
counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and
statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital
markets - an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code
and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized
wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and
updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state.
Led by the world's most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations,
the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn
humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for
themselves and their clients.
For now, they don't have enough to make it happen and we still have the
power to make sure they can't.
Step right up
A return "to anything like normal" will require a Covid vaccination
certificate, according to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has
been among the many world leaders advocating for vaccine passports, which
the European Union expects to roll out as soon as this summer across its
member states. The need for "a digital vaccination certificate" has reached
total consensus in Europe, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
while countries outside of the EU might soon get standards and enforcement
protocols for vaccine credentials designed by a team of researchers and
academics from the UK, Australia, Canada and the Caribbean.
Andy Knight, the University of Alberta political scientist who is leading
the latter endeavor, funded by the Worldwide Universities Network's (WUN)
Research Development Fund, stressed in a recent interview that vaccination
should not be treated as "a nationalistic issue," asserting that global
"security is no longer about military threats - it's about health threats,"
and warned against "a splintering of international cooperation," which he
said should be met through "an intersection between the public and the
private" sectors.
Indeed, Knight's sponsors are committed to the UN's Sustainability
Development Goals (SDG) - a set of 17 climate change-centered objectives,
planned around public-private-philanthropic partnerships, which his research
team will also knit into the six-month policy study. Backed by the
Rockefeller Foundation and its associated philanthropic organizations, the
UN's SDG program stands out as one of the cornerstones of the Great Reset,
which now features Covid-19 as the fulcrum of that project and underlies
what pioneering independent researcher Alison McDowell, interviewed by
MintPress for this article, calls "theological technofascism."
Christened as the fourth sector, this merger of "the corporate state [.]
with nonprofits and religion," as McDowell puts it, operates through
so-called "benefit corporations," a novel incorporation structure the rules
of which were developed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's B Lab.
Based on the "environmental social governance" or ESG framework, Certified B
Corporations allow company executives to be shielded to a considerable
extent from their shareholders and, therefore, provided with an
unprecedented measure of freedom as a result of the ostensibly socially and
environmentally beneficial entity.
This new face of capitalism intends to function under the aegis of what is
referred to as the "Impact Economy" - an idea that arose out of the ashes of
the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which
paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the
world of global capital. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone
Group Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset
management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world's
biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA
database on the planet.
The manufactured outrage of the richest banks and regulatory institutions in
the aftermath of the 2008 subprime mortgage lending debacle elicited calls
for a more "humane" capitalism. As the Great Recession was unfolding, the
term "impact investment" was introduced to describe an economic model that
delivers "social value through market-based practices" while birth was given
to the buzzwords, like "sustainable development" or "carbon neutral," coming
out of organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) or the United
Nations.
Sir Ronald Cohen, whom McDowell identifies as one of the key figures in its
development, as recently as 2019 declared that the impact economy was
"overthrowing the dictatorship of profit and putting impact firmly by its
side to keep it in its place." The sophistry in this statement may not be
immediately apparent, but the cunning words spoken by the chairman of an
impact investment firm called Global Steering Group (CSG) reveal the magic
trick the owners of capital want to pull on the world.
GSG---Making-Impact-Count
The Global Steering Group, funded by some of the world's most powerful
interests, hope to make "social justice" profitable. Source | GSG
Yet, despite Cohen's brash confidence and that of his fellow evangelizers on
the impact investment bandwagon, not everyone is convinced. Even the
Rockefeller Foundation has found that bringing major players on board can be
an uphill battle, admitting that it has yet to garner "support from funder
collaboratives, despite trying for some of the well-known ones like
MacArthur Foundation" and others. Nevertheless, perhaps no one understands
that "upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity" better than the
Rockefeller Foundation.
The impact investment model is facing a challenge many startups do, which is
a problem of scale. However, that's a challenge it is well-positioned to
meet and a problem that the model's agents have been making sure they
overcome by tapping into the largest horizontal market of all time:
healthcare.
The God complex
In October 2020, MintPress covered an organization called The Commons
Project, which at the time was carrying out the first official tests of its
CommonPass health passport app in Newark, New Jersey in the presence of CDC
officials and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. A cursory look at
the founders' backgrounds revealed their ties to the CDC and covert
intelligence operations around the world. One of the project's founders, in
particular, bears closer examination as we stand on the eve of a worldwide
biosecurity regime.
CommonPass: New COVID Security Measures Make Health a Prerequisite for
Travel
A Swiss-based non-profit is rolling out a COVID-19 "health pass", which will
make the ability to travel contingent on health metrics.
MintPress News | Raul Diego | Nov 6, 2020
Dr. Bradley A. Perkins led the CDC's investigation into the 2001 anthrax
attacks as its Meningitis and Special Pathogens chief, making him the
agency's top anthrax expert. He would later be appointed as the agency's
Deputy Director of the Office of Strategy and Innovation, eventually heading
the division, placing him in charge of a $11.2 billion budget and over 50
branch offices around the world. Perkins had risen in the ranks from his
1989 stint supervising a team of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service
(EIS), a special unit originally formed to "catch the communists if they
started spreading plague over the Korean peninsula." Perkins was head of the
CDC's bioterrorism unit when he was tapped, along with five of his
colleagues, to lead the anthrax investigation.
One could say that Perkins had reached the peak of his public service career
during that time, working closely with then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding to
create a "state-of-the-art" $2 billion emergency response capability for the
Bush administration in the wake of the H5N1 Avian Flu epidemic. He would
remain an influential voice at the nation's top disease prevention outfit,
where he seemed to be very intent on radically overhauling the country's
approach to public health - a desire he has carried over to his endeavors in
the private sector, which include nearly four years as Chief Medical Officer
of Human Longevity, Inc, a DNA sequencing firm founded by Dr. Craig Venter,
the first man to sequence the human genome.
In 2017, just before Perkins would step down as Human Longevity's CMO, he
gave a rather enlightening presentation at the Aspen Institute's Abu Dhabi
Ideas conference. held at NYU that year, in which he went into considerable
detail about what he and his colleagues in the DNA sequencing business
really mean when they talk about changing public health. Sharing the panel
session with other transhumanists pushing the genomic revolution on the
world, like Aubrey de Grey, who currently serves as science advisor to
Jeffrey Epstein's transhumanist project, (now renamed Humanity +), Perkins
expounds on the virtues of genomics as the next frontier in healthcare.
In a talk titled "Synthetic Life to Human Health," Perkins explains how
genomics is "going to be the next accelerant in extending high-performance
human lifespan" and the four factors that have made this possible. First and
foremost is the "radical decrease in the cost of whole genome sequencing,"
which fell from approximately three billion dollars initially to roughly one
thousand dollars or "about three thousand dollars if you include the
analytic component" per DNA code map. The advent of cloud computing, which
according to Perkins is "just barely adequate to begin to host this
voluminous data, [which allows] us to manipulate and analyze it," and the
mainstream adoption of machine learning (AI) to "interpret" the data round
out the next two factors.
Lastly, Perkins highlights the critically important shift from "volume-based
health care to value-based health care." Perkins is referring here to cold,
hard cash as the rest of his seminar makes clear, given how genomics "will
drive tremendous progress in life and health insurance [as well as]
tremendous progress in healthcare delivery by powering a next generation of
healthcare and healthcare models."
"What we are about to embark on," Perkins boldly predicts, is nothing less
than "hacking the software of life," and "for the first time, trying to
understand all the instructions that build, operate and reproduce us as
humans." He illustrates his point with a disturbing anecdote about how
genomic pioneer Venter "sat down at a computer with the notion that he could
actually design a genome, a sequence of DNA letters; produce that genome
artificially; insert it into a membrane and boot up life from scratch."
Perkins considers that Venter's 2010 brainstorm might have been even "more
important" than the sequencing of the human genome, itself. The eureka
moment when a Western scientist developed a God-complex is what will change
"medicine from a clinical science supported by data to a data science
supported by clinicians," according to Perkins, who goes on to warn of the
"profound disruption in our current format for the practice of medicine,"
that he confidently states will no longer "be possible in the place that
we're going very shortly."
Stored in Amazon's cloud servers, Human Longevity's bioinformatics platform
is only one of several next-generation sequencing technologies designed to
perform the type of comparative genome sequencing work Perkins and his life
science industry colleagues are counting on to carry out what he estimates
is "probably the largest scale enterprise ever" of "translating the language
of biology in the form of linear DNA code into the language of health and
disease."
Perkins admits that "the genome in isolation, it's not very useful" and that
what the business of genomics basically boils down to is the "building [of]
integrated health records," in order to be able to correlate "high-quality
clinical data" with the whole genome sequence. "We're in the business of
building a large database," Perkins reveals. Without that, the genomic
revolution is dead in the primordial waters, so to speak.
But, with CommonPass, Perkins is continuing to do all he can to build that
database. After all, a biometric passport required at all ports of entry
would go a long way to procuring a goldmine of genomic data. An opportunity
not lost on the majority shareholders of another company Perkins was
involved with even before launching the nonprofit or joining Human
Longevity.
Fresh out of his long career at the CDC - and just a year after exhorting
his fellow federal employees to pay heed to the "serious game" the agency
was rolling out to "examine the estimated health impacts and costs
associated" with major policy and health system changes "over a five-decade
period" - Perkins joined Vanguard Health System as its Executive Vice
President and Chief Transformation Officer.
The publicly-traded cross-national operator of hospitals and clinics was
controlled by The Blackstone Group from 2004 until it was sold off to Tenet
Healthcare in 2011, forming the third largest investor-held hospital network
in the United States. Tenet, like many other private equity-owned healthcare
operations, has been roiled by controversy and corruption. Perkins took a
tidy $1.9 Million package and moved on from Vanguard just before the merger.
Just last year, Blackstone acquired Ancestry.com Inc. for a cool $4.7
billion, making the world's largest private landlord the owner of the
largest private DNA database in the world as well, containing the genome of
18 million people across 30 countries.
The new wine of slavery
"Everything [needs to be] big and fast and scalable," asserts Alison
McDowell, who has been following the development of the burgeoning impact
investment models being piloted across multiple verticals on her blog
"Wrench in the Gears." Named in honor of Mario Savio's emotional speech to
his fellow Berkeley students at the height of the anti-war movement in the
United States, McDowell has managed to expose many of the "gears" that are
moving this reinvention of capitalism based on the aggregation and
manipulation of data in all its forms.
McDowell credits a talk she attended in 2017 at The Whitney Museum of
American Art called "Race, Finance and the Afterlife of Slavery," delivered
by UC Davis professor Justin Leroy, for waking her up to the machinations
behind the emerging models of financial exploitation and, in particular, the
racialized nature of the novel financial instruments created for them, such
as social impact bonds or SIBs.
Leroy presciently describes them as "racial capitalist instruments" and
traces their lineage to maritime insurance and other financial innovations
of the slave trade, positing that it was the slave trade itself that served
as the "primary motivator leading to the development of robust insurance
networks." His citation of the Zong slave ship massacre - where hundreds of
captive men were thrown overboard and later claimed as insured property by
the ship's captain - dovetails perfectly with the reality of how social
impact bonds replicate capitalism's penchant for commodifying human life.
In layman's terms, a social impact bond secures funding for a given social
program from private investors, who "risk" their money for a return based
upon the "successful" completion of the program's stated goals. As with any
bond, these forms of securitized debt can be traded on the open market just
like a repackaged subprime mortgage loan. More specifically, social impact
bonds are investment vehicles that are tied to the value of a social service
provided by a government entity, such as healthcare, or a function of the
state, such as incarceration. It's net effect, as Leroy points out, results
in the transfer of public wealth into private hands.
Prisons Prime Testing Ground for Dehumanizing Hi-Tech "Advances"
A new form of exploitation known as "stakeholder capitalism," includes
Orwellian tech like social impact bonds and is already being tested in
prisons.
MintPress News | Raul Diego | Feb 24
Alison McDowell's great contribution has been to track down how and where
these kinds of impact investment tools are being tested - drawing the vital
link between smart contracts, which rely on blockchain technology, and these
new forms of dynamic securitized debt. "The data analytics informs the value
of the securitized debt," she told MintPress, stressing that the data itself
will necessarily "be based on 'baseline' predictive profiling," using "very
simple and narrow" metrics in order to satisfy the scale and speed required
by institutions like Goldman Sachs, which will be handling these assets.
"These are not meaningful numbers in terms of the person who's in the
[social] program," McDowell says; since the success metrics will not be
based on "an individual [data] quarry, it would be [from] groups of people"
instead. This crucial fact - reflecting the predatory, common-denominator
nature of capitalism - is vital to grasping the inherent danger built into
these forms of "social finance" and how the noble-sounding names they're
wrapped in do not mitigate the harm that will inevitably result.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in the healthcare space, where massive
quarries of genomic data are being hoarded by Blackstone and others, like
Richard Branson's recent acquisition of 23andMe in January through a
special-purpose vehicle, in order to take the consumer DNA company public.
"When it comes to genetics, you need extraordinarily large data sets," says
Federation Bio CEO Emily Drabant Conley in regard to questions about
Blackstone's DNA trove. The former 23andMe executive explains that since
"the genome itself is so vast and complicated and there's so many
differences between people," the "low end of the bar" for potential
customers like Big Pharma hovers around datasets of 10 million people.
Blackstone's ability to monetize our DNA is not limited by existing markets,
however. Its significant stake in healthcare, insurance and retail companies
gives the private equity firm the capacity to mix-and-match the collective
data sets they own to spin off new segments, along the lines of
Ancestry.com's Spotify partnership to design "DNA-designed music playlists"
and other less benign behavioral and genetic dataset combinations.
An "all-encompassing picture of consumer behavior," as a University of
Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business finance professor describes
Blackstone's enviable position, is only one side of the dystopian coin.
Merged with genomic data, these data can produce truly nightmarish scenarios
of fascist control. Much of McDowell's research has focused on the education
side of impact investing, which relies heavily on behavioral data via facial
recognition and AI to create the financial social investment instruments
around schooling.
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman (left), pictured with the prime minister
of Singapore and his wife, Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Henry Kissinger at an
event for the "Appeal of Conscience Foundation." Diane Bondareff | AP
Initiatives like the World Bank's Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition
(BSIC) are promoting the creation of "Ethereum blockchain solutions and
applications that address global social and environmental issues" through
its IXO protocol, which "enables anyone to deliver, evaluate or invest in
sustainable development impacts, with crypto-economic proof of Impact."
Outfits like Social Finance Israel, founded by Sir Ronald Cohen, are driving
the implementation of such protocols through multiple pilot programs to
assess metrics like real-time data analytics, last-mile impact verification,
and the viability of impact tokens (bond-specific cryptocurrencies) in
education and other areas.
The Hong Kong-based Impact Oxygen Foundation (iO2) operates a social impact
service platform in China called ShanZhai City, which deploys
blockchain-based impact projects in that country as well as in Myanmar,
Laos, Thailand and Brazil. In 2018, the social impact startup's CEO was
invited to attend a two-day workshop created by banking giant UBS and the
IXO Foundation "to create the next generation of impact financing
mechanisms, using Web3 and blockchain technologies." Earlier that year,
ShanZhai City entered into a "strategic partnership" with IXO to
"revolutionize social finance infrastructure.
This revolution entails the ability to "measure, evaluate, value, and
tokenize verified impact data" obtained through our ubiquitous
data-gathering, surveillance technologies, which will, in turn, hand it over
to financial institutions to profit from the bets they make on poverty and
misery around the world. In the meantime, the problem of scale persists and,
as McDowell points out, all of their pilot programs put together do not add
up to anything substantial. "My sense," McDowell proposes, "is that the
biometric health passport is what they'll need" to achieve critical mass and
finally kick off the fourth industrial revolution.
Interlocking Web of deceit
When Donald Trump cut funding to USAID's PREDICT program in March 2020,
there was some chatter about the irresponsibility of ending a program that
for the last ten years had focused on collecting bat-borne coronaviruses in
Asia just as a coronavirus pandemic was being declared. But, for all intents
and purposes, the program had long been concluded.
The program's creator Dr. Dennis Carroll; its global director Dr. Jonna
Mazet; and Peter Daszak, the star scientist who had deposited thousands of
coronavirus samples in the Wuhan Institute of Virology's database, had
already gone on to form a new nonprofit to develop "a strategic response to
the growing need to better predict, prevent, and respond to future viral
pandemic threats and to protect us all from their worst consequences."
Named the Global Virome Project (GVP), it quickly partnered with The Trinity
Challenge, a global coalition "of partners united by the common aim of
developing insights and actions to contribute to a world better protected
from global health emergencies." Its "founding members" include the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, Google, The London School of Economics,
Glaxo-Smith Klein, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Tencent and many others.
Perhaps more interesting is its list of ostensibly regular members, among
whom we find
Pierre Omidyar's Palantir, which has a controversial data management deal
with the UK's NHS; the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), whose board
member and former chief medical advisor to the UK, Dame Sally Davies, leads
the Trinity Challenge itself; and the ever-present Tsinghua University, to
name just a few.
The web of interlocking memberships and associations between virtually all
of these groups is an interminable and recursive rabbit hole, that
eventually leads to the conclusion that it is all one big club striving to
reach the same goal. In one particularly salient case, one of the most
notorious names associated with the drive for global vaccination regimes,
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is linked to a "boutique" social impact
investment firm that backs a Trinity Challenge member.
Trinity Challenge membership map
The Trinity Challenge's web of interlocking memberships. Source |
thetrinitychallenge.org
Global Impact Advisors is a consulting firm out of San Mateo, California,
which is headed by CEO Amy Adelberger, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
alum who had the unique distinction of launching a $33 million tuberculosis
mitigation partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology
during her time there. Focusing "on the application of market-based
solutions to global health and development challenges," Adelberger's firm
seems to draw most of its clients from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and - given her role as the program manager of the TB program in China, her
company's continued focus on TB-related issues, and a nuanced reading of the
section on public-private partnerships on the company website - it seems
more than likely that Adleberger is simply fulfilling Gates Foundation's own
"hope" to effectuate the "national scale-up of [the] innovations across
China" for which this and other multi-million-dollar partnerships with the
same Chinese government entity were intended.
The Commons Project, as well, shares many of the same intertwining
relationships with Big Pharma, Big Tech, academia and federal organizations
on its board, leaving us with the inescapable feeling that a very
well-organized, but relatively small collection of power brokers are hell
bent on fashioning a data-driven economy in a desperate attempt to breathe
new life into a system that nobody can buy into any more.
The missionaries of "free-market economics" are pulling out all the stops to
convince us that they really do have the people's best interest at heart
this time, after centuries of ceaseless war, ruthless corruption and
environmental devastation. Suddenly, a public health emergency has managed
to peer into their soulless chasm and not only sparked a long-dead sense of
compassion, but coincidentally provided them with all the solutions. The
only catch is that we have to give up our humanity and live behind screens
and speak to each other via encrypted messaging apps only.
Other than that, they assure us, everything is as it always should have
been. They've seen the error of their ways and are ready to usher in a more
humane, a more "sustainable" economic paradigm, in which the wealthy finally
invest in the poor, the sick and the homeless as part of a new "moral"
economy. But, the obvious question is, if misery becomes profitable, what
incentive is there for its eradication?
A human economy
Capitalism has invested in misery as long as it has existed and always found
it immensely profitable. Creating a "digital twin" of the world affords
immeasurably greater opportunities for profit, but also takes real human
life offline and replaces it with "dots and dashes and electrical signals"
that McDowell understands are of any use only to the financial markets.
A long, protracted, manufactured Cold War with China and revamped Eastern
bloc has the potential to produce more refugees, more poverty, more trauma
and more prisoners. In other words, more assets for the human capital
markets. But, before that happens, they need our DNA to scale the pilot
project and feed the starving leviathan as it thrashes about in a finite
planet.
The Disarticulation of Pandemic War Propaganda
Taking apart a hackneyed piece of anti-China propaganda authored by an
international alt-right clique with links to the Pentagon.
MintPress News | Raul Diego | Mar 1
In his moving presentation about race, slavery and finance, Justin Leroy
quoted America's first African American doctor, James McCune Smith, to
elucidate how the true nature of capitalism is never lost on its most
exploited classes. The relevance of Smith's exposition demands that this,
the third and final part of "Dragon's Blood Harvest at the Dawn of Human
Capital Markets," end with the physician's seminal words published just
before the end of the Civil War in 1864.
Smith's clarity of vision allowed him to appreciate the treacherous heart of
the system he knew was a slaver's system, no matter what it chooses to label
itself:
There is no political, religious or philanthropic agency at work that can
encompass the entire abolition of slavery. In slave society, labor lies
prostrate and capital dictates its own terms, which are perpetual
subjugation. In other words, perpetual slavery. Far from this war
diminishing the wish or power for capital to own labor, it will increase
both. Colossal monopolies are parceling out even the free states for their
ownership. The slave in the South will have namesakes in fact, if not in
title, north of the Mason/Dixon line."