Terence Corcoran: The Great Reset and the COVID pandemic

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lit up some of the highly flammable sections of social media the other day after excerpts from a two-month-old virtual speech he gave to a United Nations’ event made their way onto computer screens. The Twitter/Facebook fires were set by these words:

“The pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges, like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.” He also used the trending global powercrats’ slogan for post-COVID-19 recovery: “Building back better,” said Trudeau, “means getting support for the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.”

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The video, picked up by The Rebel and other online media, drove thousands of hits and fired up the political right, including Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who ran with the idea that Trudeau was part of a global push to use the COVID-19 pandemic to promote a radical leftist reorganization of the global economy.

Then came a bit of pushback from the media left. The New York Times ran a piece dismissing the anti-Trudeau social media outburst under a headline “The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises again.” The BBC’s conspiracy theory beat reporter ridiculed the social media outbursts. How absurd, he said, to believe that dum-dum politicians “all came together to brilliantly execute a global master plan.”

But they have come together. There is a master plan. There is no great secret global backroom conspiracy developed behind closed doors. What we have is an upfront, publicly co-ordinated, globe-spanning political power campaign to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a launch pad for a reshaping of the global economy.

The main driving force behind The Great Reset is the World Economic Forum and its founder, Klaus Schwab.

I have this on the authority of Wikipedia: “In May 2020, the WEF and the Prince of Wales’ Sustainable Markets Initiative launched ‘The Great Reset’ project, a five-point plan concerned with enhancing sustainable economic growth following the global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.”

In June, the 82-year-old Schwab — who has been plotting to bring down market capitalism at least since the 1970s — co-authored “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” a book that claimed the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns opened the door for the economic reforms he has long sought. “The possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination.”

In June, the Prince of Wales, flanked by the IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva, and UN chief António Guterres, said, “There is a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis … global crises know no borders, and highlight how interdependent we are as one people sharing one planet.”

So it is not by verbal chance that Trudeau used the word “reset” in his video conference speech. The pandemic also made a cameo appearance Thursday when Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson spoke at a press conference to announce Ottawa’s new net-zero 2050 carbon emissions legislation. The new law, he said, is a “key piece of the government’s overall plan to build back better as we emerge from the pandemic into a brighter, cleaner and more prosperous future.”

Other world leaders are also set to reset, especially Joe Biden, whom Schwab sees as a fellow-traveller who will “boost multilateralism” and join The Great Reset.

Schwab and the WEF should remain the focus of critical attention as his movement to reset the fundamental principles of a freedom-based market economy grabs the COVID spotlight in coming weeks. A major WEF reset summit is set for January 2021.

The WEF website is the global agit-prop central launch pad for pandemic-driven policy activism. Schwab is also backed by the powercrats at the UN, IMF and other global governance agencies — along with hundreds of private-sector players. The global business consultancy McKinsey, a “strategic” WEF partner, recently issued a report titled “Rethinking the future of American capitalism.”

In a new book coming in January 2021, Stakeholder Capitalism, Schwab will trumpet the merits of breaking down the shareholder model for corporate control and replacing it with a new governance system that will shift political power into the hands of corporate executives backed by governments and bureaucrats.

With the book, Schwab is closing in on where much of The Great Reset began, back in 1973 when he issued the first Davos Manifesto, sub-titled “A Code of Ethics for Business Leaders.” The manifesto was intended as a direct hit on Nobel economist Milton Friedman’s powerful and influential 1970 essay: “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

Earlier this year, Schwab told the Financial Times that his aim has been to beat back Friedman. “What was for me always disturbing was that Milton Friedman gave a moral reasoning to shareholder capitalism — [he argued] the role of business was to make business earn as much as possible and then the money would flow back from the company to the government in the form of taxes. I had to fight against the wave.”

Through the last quarter of the 20th century, Friedman’s ideas were the wave that drove much of corporate governance and government policy, based on economic freedom and competition. Today, Klaus Schwab is leading a wave to use the pandemic to reset the world economic order.

Financial Post

• Email: tcorcoran@postmedia.com | Twitter: terencecorcoran