By Robin Horsley | Brexit Watch | June 25, 2020
DAVOS, is the small town, nestled high in the Swiss Alps, widely known for hosting the annual conference of global business-people, world leaders, activists, and journalists that takes place every January. The organisation that arranges the event, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and its enigmatic founder Klaus Schwab, are less well-known.
The WEF’s exclusive shindig used to be thought of simply as a grandiose talking-shop. The ultimate annual ‘networking’ event where the wealthy and powerful could grand-stand in front of the world’s media. But in recent years, as the ambitions and agenda of the WEF have become clearer, many people have gradually realised there is far more to Davos and the World Economic Forum than they previously thought.
The WEF operates from its own modern, low-rise office complex, overlooking Lake Geneva on some of the most expensive land in the world and now generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from its membership fees paid by what it describes as the world’s top 1,000 companies. According to its most recent annual report, the WEF now has assets valued in excess of half a billion dollars.
In June 2019 the WEF signed an exclusive partnership agreement with the United Nations to accelerate the implementation of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which has been adopted by all 193 UN member countries.
This strategic partnership caused great consternation in many quarters. The Transnational Institute (TNI), a think-tank with its roots in the anti-Vietnam war movement, denounced it for “formalising the corporate capture of the UN and moving towards an increasingly privatised and less democratic global governance.” 400 organisations subsequently signed a letter calling for the termination of the UN/WEF’s agreement.
Far from being inhibited from continuing to develop policy – or using its influence and the resources of its powerful, global corporate membership to persuade or compel national Governments to adopt it’s ideals – the WEF states “now is the time to press the reset button on capitalism”. In essence it is calling for the dismantling of the entire global economic system in order that it can be re-cast to a design complying with its own agenda.
The sheer audacity of this ‘Great Reset’ agenda as it is known, with the scope to impact billions of lives on the planet, is quite simply breath-taking. It is none other than a globalist agenda seductively cloaked in green, equal-opportunity, pro-diversity packaging. In response the TNI has highlighted the combined economic power of WEF’s ‘members’, which utterly dwarfs that of most nation states, represents a serious threat to democratic global governance. Likewise, the history and commercial interest of many of the WEF’s members are, unsurprisingly, completely at odds with its supposedly green credentials.
At Davos 2020, the WEF appeared to install Prince Charles as its titular head placing him, as keynote speaker, on their global stage extravagantly emblazoned with the official heraldic insignia of the Prince of Wales, the three feathers.
It must have been a shattering moment for the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who had previously banned his Government ministers from attending Davos, to see his childhood ambition to become ‘world-king’ apparently thwarted by the future British monarch. For others there are disturbing echoes of a previous Prince of Wales cosying up to another group with similarly grandiose ambitions of pioneering a new global world order.
The rise of the World Economic Forum has been truly remarkable. In 50 years it has grown from a small three-person office in Geneva to a global organisation with a membership whose combined annual turnover, and economic power, is in the tens of trillions of dollars. Klaus Schwab, its founder and still its Executive Chairman 50 years on, has unparalleled access to political leaders across the entire world.
But how did the World Economic Forum come about?
Delving back into the historical archive of the WEF yields some interesting observations. The first Davos conference took place in 1971, the year the WEF was founded and, according to Wikipedia, was funded by the European Commission, the powerful central institution of the European Union.
This connection to, and support from, the European unification movement reveals itself further when looking through the photographic archive. That first Davos conference, or ‘symposium’ as it was then called had, as its keynote speaker, another royal long awaiting his king-ship.
Otto von Habsburg, also known as Archduke Otto of Austria, was the first Davos keynote speaker. Habsburg’s monarch was a casualty of the First World War. He was the last crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, an empire which comprised modern-day Austria, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia – and parts of Italy, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. His father, Charles, was the last emperor until its dissolution in 1919.
Otto Habsburg had been one of the original founders, in 1922, of the Pan-European Union which still exists today and is widely recognised as the oldest European unification movement still in existence. Habsburg went on to be its President in 1973, following the death of his co-founder Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, and subsequently served as a Member of the European Parliament for 20 years following its creation in 1979.
Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s founder, was born in Ravensburg, Germany in 1938 and studied economics and, at the behest of his father, engineering. His father had been Managing Director for a Swiss engineering company, Escher Wyss, who continued operating in Germany throughout World War II. In interviews, Schwab recalls travelling between war-torn Germany and neutral Switzerland as a small child and the impression that the contrast made upon him.
After studying in Germany, Schwab travelled to the USA to attend lectures at Harvard Business School. Here he made some key contacts that he was later able to use, including Henry Kissinger.
It is clear, looking at the history of the World Economic Forum, that Schwab’s aim was not simply to provide a platform for others to use for meeting and making decisions. The WEF launched its first ‘Davos Manifesto’ at its third annual event in 1973. It was always, essentially a political construction but one that lacked any truly democratic foundation.
The theme of the WEF’s forthcoming 50th Annual event in January 2021 is ‘The Great Reset’, a radical plan to completely re-work the mechanics of the entire global economy. Had the Covid-19 virus not emerged this year, bringing the global economy to a shuddering halt, it’s difficult to conceive how this agenda could ever have hoped to have been implemented.
But now, with the prospect of vast and potentially devastating economic impacts ahead – albeit temporarily masked by unsustainable financial interventions by national governments, such as the UK’s furlough scheme – it may be that the people of the world are driven to radical solutions in the near future.
Working with the UN, International banks and the WEF’s stable of global industrial and technology giants it is now possible that together they have the opportunity to create ‘the new normal’ – a world that works as they plan it to work.
The deeply disturbing concern for us mere mortals is that it appears these organisations intend to impose their agenda on us without any democratic consent and without any democratic system of accountability in place to ensure it serves the needs and interests of the people of our planet – rather than the interests of the wealthy and powerful who control this agenda.
The World Economic Forum’s ‘Strategic Partners’ are its top-tier group of 100 global organisations. This group includes major global banks such as Barclays, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered Bank who yield immense financial power.
It also includes major technology and communications companies such as Huawei, Publicis, Omnicom, (two global communications companies) Facebook and Google.
With this combination of enormous financial power, skilled persuasion capabilities and control of the communications infrastructure at their disposal WEF has huge power to mould, influence and control events – while shaping public opinion.
We, the ordinary people, shall have to keep a very close eye on WEF’s activities as its ‘Great Reset’ agenda unfolds over the coming months ahead.
Robin Horsley is the founder of YouPolitics.uk a new online UK politics social media channel. He founded The Great Brexit Debate in 2016 a Facebook site with over 30,000 followers, and has worked with political campaigning organisations such as The Bruges Group and Veterans for Britain and has campaigned on issues in the areas of justice, defence and education.