 Hello and welcome. I'm Lynne Freese, producer of Global Political Economy, or GB News Docs. Today I'm joined by Nick Buxton. He's going to be giving us some big picture context on the great Reset, a World Economic Forum initiative to reset the world's system of global governance. A worldwide movement crossing not only borders but all walks of life from peasant farmers to techies is fighting against this initiative on the grounds that it represents a major threat to democracy. Key voices from the health, food, education, Indigenous people, and high tech movements explained why in the great takeover how we fight the Davos capture of global governance. A recent webinar hosted by the Transnational Institute. Today's guest, Nick Buxton, is a publications editor and future labs coordinator at the Transnational Institute. He's the founder and chief editor of TNI's flagship state of power report. Welcome, Nick. Thank you very much, Lynne. Nick, the Transnational Institute was co-organizer of the great takeover webinar. So what is it that you're mobilizing against in opposing this great reset initiative? What we're really concerned about is this initiative by the World Economic Forum actually looks to entrench the power of those most responsible for the crises we're facing. And in many ways it's a trick. It's a sleight of hand to make sure that things continue as they are to continue the same that will create more of these crises, more of these pandemics will deepen the climate crisis, which will deepen inequality. It's not a great reset at all. It's a great corporate takeover and that's what we were trying to draw attention to. What we've been finding in in recent years is that really there is something I would call it a kind of a global silent coup d'etat going on in terms of global governance. Most people don't see it and people are familiar, have become familiar with the way that corporations have far more influence and are being integrated into policymaking at a national level. They see that more in front of them. People see their services being privatized. They see the influence of the oil companies or the banking sector that has stopped actions such as regulations of banks or are dealing with a climate crisis. What people don't realize is that at global level there has been something much more silent going on, which is that their governance, which used to be by nations, is now increasingly be done by unaccountable bodies dominated by corporations. And part of the problem is that that has been happening in lots of different sectors, but people haven't been connecting the dots. So what we've been trying to do in the last year is to talk with people in the health movement, for example, people involved in public education, people involved in food sector to say what has happened in your sector and what we found is that in each of these sectors global decisions used to be discussed by bodies such as the WHO or such as the food and agriculture organization were increasingly done by these these unaccountable bodies. Just to give an example, we have now the global pandemic and one of the key bodies that is now making the decision is a facility called COVAX. You'd have thought global health should be run by the World Health Organization. It's accountable to the United Nations. It has a system of accountability. Well, what's actually happening is that World Health Organization is just one of the few partners, but really it's been controlled by corporations and corporate interests. In this case, it's GAVI and CEPI and they are both bodies which don't have a system of accountability where it's not clear who chose them, who they're accountable to, or how they can be held to account. And what we do see is that there's a lot of corporate influence in each of these bodies. What this webinar was about was bringing all these sectors together who were seeing this silent coup d'etat going on in their own sector to map it out. And so one of the things that you've seen in the webinar is this mapping of the different sectors who are seeing this going on. And the idea is just to give a global picture that this is something happening. We've had more than 100 of these multi-stakeholder bodies coming to the fore in the last 20 years. And there's been very little kind of taking note of that and taking stock of what's emerging and what's emerging is this silent global coup d'etat. So what you find then in the big picture that you're getting is that a global coup d'etat has been silently emerging and at the heart of it is a move towards multi-stakeholder model of global governance and that this is the model that's the path and mechanism of a corporate hijack of global and national governance structures. And the World Economic Forum agenda fits into all this as the WEF of course is one of the world's most powerful multi-stakeholder institutions. So Nick, in explaining what all this means, let's start with some of your thoughts on the history of how we got here. I think what we had was in the 90s was the kind of height of neoliberalism. We had the increasing role of corporations and the deregulation of the state and it really started to come through in 2000 with the Global Compact where the UN invited in corporations. And the idea was that we're going to need to involve corporations, one because we will need private finance became the mantra. So we need to involve corporations, they can be part of the solution. So it was partly finance, it was partly the withdrawal of state from kind of global cooperation and that started to invite corporations into global governance where corporations were increasingly being invited into these kind of bodies. That dovetailed with this whole movement called corporate social responsibility that said corporations weren't just profit-making vehicles they could be socially responsible actors. And so increasingly corporations were pitching themselves as not just corporate entities but as global citizens. And one of the key vehicles for that of course was the World Economic Forum which has really been articulating through Klaus Schwab and through their whole work this idea that corporations should firstly be social responsible and secondly as part of that they should be treated as social entities and should be integrated into governance and decision-making. That we needed to move from what was considered a kind of antiquated state-led multilateral approach to a much more agile governance system and this is again the kind of mantra of coming in of the private sector being efficient that the private sector if you involved them in decision-making you would get more faster decisions, you get agile decisions, you'd get better decisions. So this all really came together and in some ways it's even been consolidated even further. The irony is that as you've had nationalist governments come to power the kind of Trump America firsts of the world or Modi India first. They articulate a nationalist agenda but they haven't actually questioned the role of corporations in any way whatsoever and as they've retreated from multilateral forums like the United Nations they've left a vacuum that corporations have been able to fill. Corporations now say we can be the global actors, we can be the responsible actors, we're the ones who can tackle the big crisis we face such as inequality such as climate change such as the pandemic. So really we've had this convergence of forces coming together where as states have retreated corporations have filled the vacuum. You mentioned earlier that the World Economic Forum was one of the key vehicles for these ideas and the WEF also went big in filling that vacuum that you're talking about. T&I reported the WEF Global Redesign Initiative stretching back to 2009 created something like 40 global agenda councils and industry sector bodies. So in the sphere of global governance the WEF created space for corporate actors across the whole spectrum of governance issues from cyber security to climate change you name it. So yeah the Global Redesign Initiative was one of the first initiatives that the World Economic Forum launched in the wake of the financial crisis and their idea was that we needed to replace what was an inefficient multilateral system that was not able to solve problems with a new form of things. So they were saying instead of a multilateral where nations make decisions in global cooperation we needed a multistakeholder approach which would bring together all the interested parties in small groups to make decisions and the Global Redesign Initiative was really a model of that. They were trying to say okay how do we resolve issues such as the governance of the digital economy and their answer to it is we bring the big tech companies together, we bring the governments together and we bring a few civil society players and we'll work out a system that makes that makes sense. And so you had a similar thing going on in all these other redesign councils really they're models for how they think governments should be done and some of them have not just become models they've actually become the real thing. So many of the multistakeholder initiatives we've seen emerge today have emerged out of some of these councils. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness one of the key ones leading COVAX right now the response to the pandemic was launched at the World Economic Forum so the World Economic Forum is now becoming a launchpad for many of these multistakeholder bodies. We should also note the World Economic Forum is a very well funded launchpad as a powerpoint from the great takeover webinar put it corporations do not pay tax but donate to multistakeholder institutions and the WEF of course is funded by powerful corporations and business leaders. The powerpoint also noted the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the main funders of multistakeholder institutions. In contrast multilateral institutions are being defunded on the back of falling corporate tax revenues for nation states. Given it depends on government donors the UN regular budget that's the backbone of funding for the one country one vote multilateral processes of inter governmental cooperation and decision making has taken a big hit. Perhaps you could comment on some big picture implications on this kind of changing dynamic that's going on between corporate actors and nation states. Yeah I think what we're seeing is that as gradually the corporations have become more powerful they have weakened the capacity of the state so they have reduced the tax basis you know most corporations have seen corporate tax rates drop forward dramatically and even more trillions are now siphoned away in tax havens so the the entire corporate tax base which used to play a much bigger role in state funding has reduced at the same time they their influence over policies which benefit corporations has increased so they're reducing the regulations that were on them they're reducing all the costs that used to be opposed on on the thing so you've had a weakening of the state and the strengthening of corporations and what's happened at a global governance level is that they have also moved not just from influencing dramatically through their power their economic power political decision making but in an easing global governance thing it's the next step forward because they're not just saying that we want to be considered and we will lobby to have our position heard they're saying we want to actually be part of the decision making bodies themselves and the classic again is if we look at the pandemic with COVAX is that I looked actually at just at the board of GAVI the the global alliance of vaccines and if you look at the body it's the board is dominated firstly by big pharmaceutical companies secondly you have some nations and some and civil society representatives but you have far more interestingly almost a large number of the board are financiers they come from the finance sector they come from big banks so there I don't know what they have to do with public health and WHO is just one of the players so it's it's suddenly overcrowded by others who have no public health representation they've been dominated by finance and pharmaceutical companies starting to really shape and guide decision making and and on the finance side of course Bill Gates Foundation is now the big player in many of these things and it's it's it's not just donating it's also involved now in shaping policy so those who give money in a philanthropic way no matter how they earn that money or no matter what their remit is and who they're accountable to they're only accountable to Bill and Melinda Gates ultimately are now part of the decision making process as well and and this has become so normalized that there seems to be very little questioning of it and we will bring together these players now who chose them who who chose this body to come together who's it accountable to there was a British parliamentarian called Tony Ben he says if you want to understand democracy you need to ask five questions what what power do you have who did you get it from whose interests do you serve to whom you're accountable and how can we get rid of you if you look at a body like such as Kovacs um who who where did they get the power from they just self-convened they just brought together a group of powerful actors they will make us to token effort to involve one or two civil society representatives but the power very much lies with with the corporations and and with the financiers those who are financing it um and it's not accountable they chose their body uh if the interests are very clear who it serves it it serves the pharmaceutical companies they will of course do certain things um within the remit um but ultimately they will not undermine their bus business model even if that business model is getting in the way of an effective response to the pandemic we can't get rid of them because we never chose them in the first place so it fails really the very fundamental principles of democracy and yet it's now been normalized that this is the way that global governance should happen. Nick comment briefly on an agreement that was quite a milestone in this process of normalization of multi-stakeholderism as the way global governance should happen. I'm thinking of the strategic partnership agreement signed by the office of the UN Secretary General with the World Economic Forum in 2019 so what's some background in your response to that UNWEF agreement? Well the World Economic Forum has been um advocating this model of multi-stakeholder capitalism to replace multilateralism for a long time um and and they have been gradually I would say kind of setting up parallel bodies these multi-stakeholder bodies to make decisions um on major issues of global governance whether it's the digital economy or whether it's how to respond to a pandemic um and and so they've they've been advancing this model um alongside the UN for some time but what's what was really concerning to us is that they're starting um to um increasingly um uh engage with the UN and start to impose this model within the United Nations um and the classic example was this strategic partnership which was signed in I believe June of 2019. I don't think it went even in front of the General Assembly so it wasn't discussed amongst the members it was a decision by the Secretariat of the UN without any at least any formal systems of accountability to sign a deal with the World Economic Forum. They would essentially start to involve you World Economic Forum staff within the departments of the UN. They would become so-called kind of whisper advisors so that the World Economic Forum would start to have its staff mingling with UN staff and starting to make decisions um and there was no system of accountability there was no system of of um of consulting more widely and and we know the World Economic Forum is isn't a business forum if you look at its board it's completely controlled uh by by some of the most wealthy and powerful corporations and many of those corporations are responsible for many of the crises we face and yet here they were being open open armed and welcomed into the United Nations to play a very significant role and and we we we protested that we said that this is not this is not a way to solve global problems to involve those who have actually responsible for the crises to resolve it will only lead to solutions that are either ineffective or actually deepen the crises we face um we understand why the UN is doing it it's because of this lack of national support it's because of the defunding they're looking to kind of survive as an organization and they're going to the most powerful players in the world which are the corporations but what they're going to end up doing is ultimately undermining the United Nations it will actually damage the United Nations because it will remove all the democratic legitimacy that it currently has um we desperately need global collaboration and cooperation um but it must be based on public and democratic systems of governance not um unaccountable secretive forms of governance dominated by corporations so that's pretty clear you oppose multi-stakeholderism because it's an unaccountable secretive form of governance dominated by corporations so as well as being unaccountable the multi-stakeholder model is a voluntary and a market-based approach to problem solving comment on how that also fits into why you oppose the multi-stakeholderism yeah the the solutions they're looking for are volunteeristic where you can come in or out and they're market-based so they will never actually challenge the business model as it is ultimately what happens is they make decisions which are not binding and actually force actors like corporations to do certain things they're based entirely on this voluntary method model um but it's a kind of to take it or leave governance where you can do things that you that look good for your for your annual report but don't actually uh change the way you actually operate um and so ultimately they won't resolve the crisis that we're facing so it's not just that they're unaccountable but they're ultimately very ineffective so if we look at the climate crisis for example we'll say the only way that we can deal with the climate crisis is market solutions even if we know that really the scale of the climate crisis the urgency and the timing requires us to take much more drastic solutions which will be state-led which will require corporations to reduce emissions that will start to transform economies that will have to be taken in these kind of public decisions we're ignoring that entirely for a model which is based on kind of market incentives which really do nothing to change the business model that is created the climate crisis okay so that goes a long way in explaining why you say the world economic form great reset initiative is no reset at all nick briefly touch on some of your further observations like why is the multi stakeholder model is based on market solutions when push comes to shove the profit motive will always win out under this approach to global governance yeah no absolutely i mean corporations will accept market solutions which give them the power to to really control the pace of change and so you'll see it they're they're very happy to to produce these corporate social responsibility reports but they will fight tooth and nail for any regulation which actually enforces social environmental goals and so and they will fight on an international level to have trade rules to actually prevent states imposing social environmental goals so so there's very much an approach where they're willing to have been washed they're willing to have the propaganda around social environmental goals but they will absolutely oppose and in any rules would actually control their environmental and social impacts they do not want anything which actually requires regulation and and impacts which will actually force them to do certain changes they want their changes to be very much ones that they control and which they shape and ultimately that they can ditch at the moment it starts to challenge the profits that they want to make let's turn now to the coalition in in fighting for a democratic reset on global governance so a future where decision-making over the governance of global commons like for example food water health and the internet is is done in the public interest and i see this coalition full together resources and it's posted on your website you're in the nexus of all this so this time around in the wake of the covid pandemic what's your read on the situation of peoples versus corporate power this global coup d'etat that's been going on silently in so many different sectors has been advancing because there hasn't been enough information and knowledge about it and also people haven't been connecting the dots to see this is happening in every sector so what's really important this year in as as and i think it's particularly important in the wake of the pandemic is that so many movements are coming together people's health movement has come together a lot of groups involved in food sovereignty the trade union sector is coming together they're all saying we do this this is not in our name and of course these are all groups that you'll never see in a in a in a multistakeholder initiative whenever they do have civil society partners they don't involve people in the front lines you won't find one one health union worker in in the covax initiative you won't have public health people really represented represented so these are movements now starting to come together to say that we don't want this and one of the things we did was launch this letter it's an open letter and it's really saying that it's really alerting people to what's going on it's saying that we're facing this in so many different sectors the un is is opening the door the un secretary i should say is opening the door wide open to the world economic forum which is the key body advance in multistakeholderism and and it's changing governments as we know it it's and it has no systems of accountability or justice embedded in it and these movements are now coming together to say we we're opposing this we're uniting our forces and we're going to fight back against this and we know more than ever before with the pandemic that nationalist solutions to the global crisis will not work we need global cooperation we need global collaboration but if we hand over all that decision making to the pharmaceutical companies for example we won't be dealing with the real issues or such as as trade protection and trips and i am patents and everything that that really benefit pharmaceutical companies and don't advance public health because they are in control of the process they won't allow things that affect their profits so we need global solutions but they cannot be led by the corporations which are actually worsening deepening the crisis we face so as we close i just wanted to play a clip of a comment you made back in 2015 about a book you had co-edited titled the secure and the dispossessed i found a review of the book so relevant to our chat today i just want to cite a few lines it said among the books that attempt to model the coming century this one stands out for its sense of plausibility and danger it examines several current trends in our responses to climate change which if combined would result in a kind of oligarchic police state dedicated to extending capitalist hegemony this will not work and yet powerful forces are advocating for it rather than imagining and working for a more just resilient and democratic way forward all the processes analyzed here are already happening now making this book a crucial contribution to our cognitive mapping in our ability to form a better plan so nick in wrapping up briefly comment on that book and then i'll play the clip yeah back in 2011 we noticed a trend going on in terms of climate change where there was was was a lack of willingness to really tackle the climate crisis on the scale it needs and with the tools and instruments that it needs but there was increasingly plans by both the military and corporations for dealing with the impacts of climate change and they very much looked at it in terms of how do we secure the wealth of those and secure those who already have power and wealth and and and what that would mean so in the face of climate crisis the solution was very much a security solution we've already seen really an increasing role of military and policing and security and a real process of militarization of responses to climate change the most obviously in the area of the borders we see we see border walls going up everywhere the response to a crisis has been has been to kind of retreat between behind fortified fortifications no matter the consequences and so that that was really that's that's really a trend that we that we see increasingly is that climate our response to climate abdication by the richest countries is really to military to militarize our response to it and that's that's a and that's a real as that quote you just read that's a real concern because it's the kind of politics of the armed lifeboat where basically you rescue a few and then you and then you have a gun trained on the rest and it's it's both totally immoral and it's also ultimately one that will sacrifice all of our humanity because we need to collaborate to respond to the climate crisis we need to find solutions that protect the vulnerable we cannot just keep building higher and higher walls against the consequences of our decisions and we need to actually start to tackle the root causes of those crises and that that was very much a picture we started to paint back in 2015 with the launch of the book the secure and the dispossessed but if anything it's more pertinent and more pressing than ever before Nick Vakson thank you thanks even the profits the huge profits rolling even though it's wrecking the planet so they have no intention long term of changing their business model their business model is wrecking the planet and their determination is how to keep that going and what we see in all of this is that corporations in the military are very much responding in a in a paradigm of control it's it's security and that this word security is suddenly infected every part of daily debate we see it food security we've seen it very recently now with everyone saying we need security of our borders to protect against refugees we need water security and in all of these cases what you see is those who are being secured are the corporations and those who have wealth and those who are losing out and those are actually suffering the most from climate change so the peasant who has their land grabbed in the name of food security the community that no long has control of their river because a corporation has has taken it in the name of water security or the protesters against coal power station are actually trying to stop the climate crisis being repressed and having the civil liberties taken away in the name of energy security in each of these cases the security is quite clearly for a small proportion of people and insecurity for the vast majority I think this is one of the most important issues of our age is is do we want to leave our future in the hands of corporations and the military