Connor Tomlinson: The World Economic Forum’s Woke War on Business

It took some time for the authoritarian ideas of the World Economic Forum (WEF) to become excoriated in the mainstream press. But one of the most nefarious elements of Stakeholder Capitalism are Universal  Environmental, Social, and Government (ESG) Scores.  But what are ESG scores, and could they be a gateway to a social credit system?

Stakeholder Capitalism is WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s model for imposing his ethical prescriptions onto free-market exchange. Businesses will no longer be beholden to “the prevailing shareholder-primacy model of profit maximization”, but instead to “more socially conscious” stakeholders: experts in fields like environmental sustainability, racial and gender equity, and increased immigration. These stakeholder criteria are determined by the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals: including the elimination of all poverty (relative and absolute), gender equality, and economic equity between nations. This is an aspect of his ““Great Reset” of capitalism.”

Schwab asks us to envision a world where these values are totalised across “every sector.” The union of monopolistic business and government policy is a core tenet of fascism. Under lockdowns, businesses and governments accrued unprecedented power and profits while we were under house arrest. Politicians have stocks and shares in many of the businesses they legislate against — and big businesses support measures like universal corporation tax rates to impair their opposition. The unification of the public and private spheres to form a national body politic — a corpus — is the etymology of the term corporation. As emissaries of the WEF’s ethic, all commerce and governing bodies become organs of an international state, which everything is for, and nothing is outside or against.

Businesses will be subjected to performance evaluations concerning compliance with ESG targets, to ensure their continued eligibility for WEF partnership perks. This involves gathering data on their employees and customers. This requires a vast digital infrastructure with algorithms tracking everything from purchasing habits to demographic trends. Your consumer behaviour will be scored on its carbon footprint, or proportion of patronage of “Black owned business”. The disparity between the targets and a business’ performance will provide an incentive for businesses to nudge their customer bases toward partaking in what they see as “ethical” and “sustainable” consumer behaviours.

To accelerate the process, businesses will form special interest lobbying groups to pressure governments into passing legislation that increases compliance with environmental and social policies. Eventually, boycotts will be done on your behalf. Dissidents to this new public-private ideology will not be able to buy from any business working with the WEF. Given the WEF’s partnerships with governments, monopolistic enterprises like Amazon and Silicon Valley social media giants, and international bodies like the WHO and WTO: that will be the majority of businesses.

Soon, there could be speakeasies for groceries — like in Lithuania, which banned those not vaccinated against COVID from supermarkets and pharmacies. Your social media posts could bar you from buying essential goods. Like store signs swearing Party support in Soviet occupied Europe, or Mom and Pop shops begging to be spared from 2020’s riots, adopting ESG scores are the new pledge of fealty to the WEF’s authoritarian international rule.

But that is only if world leaders acquiesce to this public-private corporate partnership. Why would Prime Ministers and Presidents pay patronage to an unelected Bond villain in Davos?

In many instances, the WEF’s is responsible for their rise through a Party apparatus to elected office. Their Global Leadership Fellows programme has coached many influential political figures in their doctrine of international cooperation, utilitarian policymaking, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Graduates of their related Young Global Leaders initiative include Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, French President Emmanuel Macron, the Prime Minister of Belgium, the Prime Minister of Finland, the Crown Prince of Norway. Those not listed on the website, but cited by Schwab, include Vladimir Putin, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

It will be difficult to seek safe harbour from compliance with this digital commerce system when most world leaders attended the same political summer-school.

However, as the Canadian truckers’ protest goes to show, the best laid plans of this globalist Internationale aren’t going over as well as they had hoped. In their ivory-tower elitism, they forgot the working man and woman have more conscience than they do. The internet has liberalised access to information like the printing press did the Good Word from the clutches of corrupt Churches. All it takes is for goods distributors, businesses, and everyday consumers to conscientiously object, and their great narrative comes undone.

The only fear is that this grassroots uprising will be the excuse to expedite automation, and put the heavy-goods haulers out of business. It may take a few luddites to resist the algorithmic determination of our lives, and expropriation of our property, lest we end up nihilistic and immiserated.

Reject their tenets of the new institutional religion. Buy and make American. Follow the example of the freedom convoy, and don’t allow any political figure — elected or otherwise — to tell you what to put in your body or thoughts to have in your head.

Connor Tomlinson is the Head of Research at the British Conservation Alliance, and a political commentator with Young Voices UK. He appears regularly in C3 Magazine, AIER, and on talkRadio.