The Great Reset, page 26
“We have to really decide as a country and as a society what kind of world we want to live in. And I don’t think this is it.”118
CHAPTER 9 “One of the Greatest Transfers of Wealth in History”
We’re NOT “all in this together”!
The earnings of billionaires reached new highs during COVID-19 lockdowns. And the promoters of the Great Reset could not have been happier. Where were the progressives outraged over the COVID-19 lockdowns or expressing any concern about how they were making society less economically equal? The only outrage from the Left was in favor of harder, stricter, more oppressive lockdowns. And advocates of economic “degrowth” and “planned recessions” were buoyed by lockdowns crushing economic growth—despite how they hurt the poor.1
“Billionaire wealth reached record high levels amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a report by UBS and PwC found, as a rally in stock prices and gains in technology and healthcare helped the wealth of the world’s richest break the $10 trillion mark,” Reuters reported.2
CNBC business analyst Jim Cramer has said that the lockdowns led to “one of the greatest wealth transfers in history.”
As Cramer pointed out, “This is the first recession where big business… is coming through virtually unscathed.”3
Intended Consequences
In the COVID lockdowns the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.
Was all of this an unintended consequence of the lockdowns—or a very intended consequence?
Regardless of your view on that point, the COVID-19 restrictions served to further advance the Great Reset agenda.
Schwab was very clear that COVID restrictions served his Great Reset. “People assume we are just going back to the good, old world which we had and everything will be normal again in how we are used to normal—in the old fashion. This is, let’s say, fiction. It will not happen,” Klaus said on July 14, 2020, during a livestream while promoting his book, COVID-19: The Great Reset.4
Justin Haskins, the director of the Heartland Institute’s Stopping Socialism Project warned that the WEF and its allies are using COVID as an excuse to implement “an international, digital currency,” Haskins noted. A digital currency will allow “the government to micromanage every aspect of the economy,” he said. Haskins, the coauthor of The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First Century-Fascism, also warned the Great Reset is setting up “a China model of capitalism-authoritarianism.”5
Jay Lehr, writing at CFACT.org, agreed, explaining that the Great Reset’s “goal is the complete removal of cash and banks in their previous form and the introduction of digital money from central banks. The end goal says German economist Ernst Wolf is for us all to have a single account through which all transactions are run.”6
Lockdowns are very effective—but not at stopping viruses. Lockdowns are effective at destroying economies, leveling them down to the ground in order to “Build Back Better,” a favorite slogan of the Biden Administration and other politicians. Economist Sanjeev Sabhlok has aptly described what lockdowns really do. “This is like a mass scale bombing of one’s own economy,” Sabhlok explained.7
Economic collapse, runaway inflation, surging unemployment, small businesses decimated, seemingly endless COVID “relief” payments from the federal government to help “solve” a problem the government needlessly created. The more the economy and society are destroyed through strict government lockdowns, the more dependent the citizens are upon government officials to loosen up restrictions and to send stimulus checks. The economic damage from the lockdowns makes people dependent on the very politicians who did this to them and creates more incentives for even bigger government expansion.
Thus the lockdowns have fast-tracked the progressive dream of a government-supplied “universal basic income” for everyone, instead of a job. In 1972 Democrat candidate George McGovern proposed a guaranteed annual income as a presidential candidate. At the time the idea was so out there that even his fellow Democrats like Hubert Humphrey opposed it.
Universal basic income (UBI) advocate Scott Santens describes how the issue played at the May 8, 1972, presidential debate: “On the night of their debate McGovern took the stage against Humphrey with no real understanding of what the net distributive impact of his [federal guaranteed-income proposal] looked like, and so when Humphrey attacked it upon claims it would increase the taxes of middle class families earning $12,000 by $400 ($75,000 by $2,500 in 2019), McGovern couldn’t defend it…. When one of the moderators responded in complete surprise, ‘But you’re asking us to accept a program that you can’t tell us how much it’s going to cost,’ McGovern answered, ‘That’s exactly right.’ ”8
Fast forward to today. No one seems to care how much anything is going to cost. We have seen broad bipartisan support for massive government “COVID relief” checks to Americans. COVID lockdowns were a gift to the proponents of a universal basic income guaranteed by the government.
Many wondered why governments kept the screws on their populations for years, with lockdowns and other restrictions. Consider this possibility: What if every negative lockdown consequence was actually the desired outcome? Locking down increased the power of the state and gave governors, mayors, and other state and local officials more money from federal bailouts to solve the very problems the government had created in the first place. It was a very attractive move to use a declared “national emergency” to help cover up decades of poor mismanagement of the economy. And the lockdowns were the perfect way to set up the Great Reset.
During the pandemic, states and cities were essentially bribed by the federal government to lock down their local economies. Keeping the declared health emergency was key to ensuring that the federal assistance money spigots kept flowing.9 It turns out it was not about following the science. It was about following the money.
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti was “ecstatic” when, in March of 2021, his long, brutal lockdown was rewarded with the tidy sum of $1.35 billion in COVID relief from the federal government.10 In short, the federal bailout of COVID “relief” from the Biden administration was paying for the lockdown that bankrupted the city.
Mayor Eric Garcetti beamed, “Now with this money, we can put that money back into the savings account, we can pay off the credit card, deliver life-saving mental health services, and unarmed response as we reimagine public safety, money to improve our pensions, lower people’s healthcare costs, support students with disabilities.”11
Los Angeles controller Ron Galperin said the huge federal bailout of the city would “transform a very dire financial situation into a much better one, maintain services, build equity and jumpstart the economy.”12
“Cancel Everything”
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti boldly declared in December 2020, “It’s time to cancel everything.” He added, “Just be smart and stay apart,” and he issued a proclamation to that effect: “All persons living within the City of Los Angeles are hereby ordered to remain in their homes.”13
Garcetti even banned… walking! Okay, only the “unnecessary” kind of walking, The Daily Caller reported. Aside from “limited exceptions,” the Los Angeles COVID order prohibited “all travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.”14
Amazon was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the lockdowns, doubling its profit to $5.2 billion as stay-at-home orders and curfews created a boom in online shopping.15
And in April 2020 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos suggested that “regular testing on a global scale” was necessary so that “everyone who tests negative could reenter the economy with confidence.”16
At the time I commented, “Bezos says more testing is necessary before the economy can be reopened. Hmm, might Mr. Bezos have an interest in keeping retail stores closed?”17
And Amazon was not alone in profiting during the lockdowns. As The Guardian reported, “Tech giants’ shares soar as companies benefit from Covid-19 pandemic: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google reported positive quarterly results even as overall US economic growth fell by 32.9%.”18
“Obliterate the Middle Class”
Activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was very clear on who benefits from lockdowns and who the victims are. “The pandemic is a crisis of convenience—for the elites who are dictating these policies. It gives them the ability to obliterate the middle class, to destroy the institutions of democracy, to shift all of our wealth, from all of us, to a handful of billionaires to make themselves rich by impoverishing the rest of us,” Kennedy declared at an anti-lockdown protest rally in Berlin in 2020.19
Amidst the coronavirus lockdowns in October 2020, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index found that “the world’s 500 richest people are a combined $813 billion richer now than they were at the beginning of the year.”20
If lockdowns are imposed for long enough, all that will be left are big corporate businesses. Lockdowns are the greatest and most rapid accelerator of corporate power and the consolidation of our economy in our history. This is all part of the Great Reset. Small businesses are destroyed while billionaires and national corporate-retail chains benefit.
Ironically, this crushing of small businesses, the mom-and-pop operations that drive America, was being pushed and overseen by the very people supposed to be the nemesis of big businesses and the champions of the little guy—progressives and the Democrat Party.
“New York City Is Dead Forever”
In 2020, New York City nightclub owner and former hedge-fund manager James Altucher wrote an epitaph for the Big Apple. New York City is “completely dead,” he wrote in an essay for the New York Post. “ ‘But NYC always always bounces back.’ No. Not this time. ‘But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again.’ Not this time,” Altucher wrote. “ ‘NYC has experienced worse.’ No, it hasn’t,” he argued.21
Why would progressives be copacetic with corporations growing enormously in power? The simple answer that is progressives are no longer opposed to “big business” because they now control the corporate boardrooms with their woke agenda and their green virtue signaling. Why would the Left be opposed to big corporations when those corporations are at the beck and call of the woke left, terrified to offend against any aspect of the progressive agenda—critical race theory, transgenderism, climate change, vaccine passports, lockdowns, and so on.
Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, author of the book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, explained how financial policy drives the Great Reset. “We’re going through this thing that everyone calls The Great Reset, the stakeholder capitalism revolution, where we dissolve the boundaries between government actors and private companies to advance a single progressive globalist agenda,” Ramaswamy explained.22
And that “progressive globalist agenda” relies on pushing wokeness to achieve its goals. “A bunch of woke millennials get together with a bunch of big banks—together they birth woke capitalism, and then they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption. And that’s really when wokeness met capitalism,” Ramaswamy explained.
“It’s an arranged marriage, but not of love. It is more like mutual prostitution because each side in this marriage secretly has contempt for the other…. And any marriage in which each side secretly disdains the other isn’t going to end well,” he added. “This bilateral arranged marriage actually turns into what I call a threesome, which is the Communist Party of China getting in on the act.”
Ramaswamy detailed China’s role in this arrangement, explaining that China says, “If we can get those companies to criticize the United States in the United States, but stay silent about our actual human rights abuses here in China, we can do the thing that we could have never done with our nuclear arsenal, and that is to undermine the moral standing of the United States on the global stage.”23
The pro-lockdown forces know it is easier to impose the Great Reset with small businesses destroyed, the middle class decimated, and a dominant and growing corporate culture under the control of progressive activists. While small independent stores could serve as the hotbed of rebellion, it is much easier to get big retail to be compliant to the agenda of academia, Big Tech, and our government overlords. So eliminate the rebels through lockdown policies.
“A Doubling of World Poverty”
By the end of 2020, the evidence of the massive redistribution of wealth to the elite classes was too much to go unnoticed by even the World Health Organization. David Nabarro, the WHO’s special envoy for COVID-19, called the lockdowns “a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe” in an interview with The Spectator.
“Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school, and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” he added. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Nabarro pointed out, “Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented.”24
UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) warned that lockdowns could kill more than COVID-19. “ ‘Indiscriminate lockdowns’ are an ineffective way to control Covid and could contribute to a 45 per cent rise in child mortality,” UNICEF explained, according to The Telegraph—1.2 million child deaths.25
“Covid-19 has reversed years of gains in the war on poverty. Politicians deserve much of the blame,” blared The Economist in September 2020, adding that the authorities were “failing the poor.”
The article stated that the “coronavirus affects everyone, but not equally.”
“The rich shrug off the economic shock; the poor cannot. Because of covid-19, the number of extremely poor people (i.e., those making less than $1.90 a day) will rise by 70m–100m this year, the World Bank predicts. Using a broader measure, including those who lack basic shelter or clean water and children who go hungry, the ranks of the poor will swell by 240m–490m this year, says the UN,” setting the stage for future years in which “malnutrition will have stunted a tragic number of children’s bodies and minds.”26
Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal, a former writer for The Nation and now the editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, detailed the inequity of the lockdowns. “Throughout 2020 in New York City, Black and Latino residents received a whopping 80% of police summonses for supposedly violating social distancing measures, leading civil rights groups including a local chapter of Black Lives Matter to complain that Covid restrictions were being exploited to bring back dreaded ‘stop and frisk’ policies,” they wrote. “For governments across the world, Covid provided an opportunity to pummel their most vulnerable residents, as well as those who dissented from the official order.”27
In early 2020, the pre–coronavirus-lockdown economy was booming. Black and Hispanic unemployment were at or near record lows.28 COVID lockdowns changed those facts almost overnight.
As I commented on Twitter on November 6, 2020, Donald Trump “allowed Fauci to set narrative of fear & lockdowns & tanked the economy.” I also pointed out that the virus fears stoked by Fauci had justified the mail-in ballots that guaranteed the president’s defeat in the 2020 election: “Trump set up his own loss.”29
Government Shutdowns BAD, COVID Lockdowns GOOD
One of the most telling revelations of the COVID pandemic was how the media and progressives, who freak out when the federal government is shut down for weeks or even days during a budget battle, fully supported the COVID lockdowns that shut down the entire economy and society for months and years. On January 7, 2019, the New York Times reported of a government shutdown that at that point had lasted for less than two and a half weeks: “The standoff is beginning to inflict pain on Americans, whose lives are affected, in one way or another, by the federal government” and “delayed mortgage applications, missed paychecks and stymied farmers are among the repercussions of a shutdown with no end in sight.”30
There seemed to be no similar concern on the part of the media for Americans whose lives were devastated by the seemingly endless COVID lockdowns.
The lockdowns were very good for the wealthy across the globe. “Between April 7 and July 31 this year, billionaires across every industry covered by the study saw their wealth rise by double digits, with billionaires in the technology, healthcare and industrial sectors leading the pack with 36%–44% gains,” Reuters reported.31
Other studies shed more light on the billionaires’ ball. “American billionaires haven’t been just immune to the pandemic, they have been thriving in it, drastically increasing their collective wealth,” explained Niall McCarthy of Statista.
“An analysis by Chuck Collins at the Institute for Policy Studies found that American billionaires have seen their wealth grow by $1 trillion since March of [2020]—more than 34 percent,” Mccarthy reported.
“There were numerous impressive financial gains among notable billionaires on the list with Jeff Bezos growing his fortune by $69.4 billion between March 17 and November 24. The Amazon boss and richest man on the planet is now worth $182.4 billion.”
No Equity in the Lockdowns
