The Reach of the Major Companies for World Domination

Norbert Haering – norberthaering.de | The World Economic Forum and the United Nations (UN) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to intensify their cooperation. The UN is clearly embarrassed – for good reason. It is another step in the UN’s self-empowerment and another milestone for the Multis Club on its way to its declared goal – world domination. Too much tobacco? Read for yourself what the World Economic Forum has to say about this topic.
In order to classify the most recent declaration of cooperation between the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, it is necessary to go back 10 years, to 2009, when a “Global Redesign Initiative” (GRI) of the World Economic Forum published a report after 18 months of work by many working and advisory groups on how the future world government (global governance) envisages it.
The World Economic Forum is a lobby of the 1000 largest multinational corporations called “THE international organization for public-private cooperation”. The Forum, in its own words, “draws on the main political economic and other leaders of society to determine global, regional and industry agendas”. The direction is determined by the 100 largest and most influential who contribute the most money. In all important countries, the Forum has “hubs” in the largest cities, where the “Global Shapers” are networked with each other. These are selected, influential or aspiring people from companies, the cultural scene and citizens’ movements. The annual meetings of the Forum in Davos, at which the Who’s Who of the international heads of government pay their respects to the corporate powers, are thus only the tip of the iceberg of influence.
The GRI final report was named “Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World” and was 600 pages long. The forum seems to have removed him from his website in the meantime. The link to download the report on the relevant page of the forum no longer works. (Addendum: Thanks to Andrew McQuinn, who sent me a working archive link to “Everybody’s Business”, from Jonathan Mai I got a link to the report via Harvard-Uni.) There is an abridged version in the form of a Readers’ Guide, on the website of the University of Massachusetts Boston, from which I will quote below (each my own unofficial translations).
Let us begin by saying that corporations have long been more powerful than the UN. The corporations want to see this recognised and transformed into formal co-government rights: In the original:
“In the case of multinationals, their effective reach as de facto institutions of global governance has long outstripped that of the UN system. (…) Multinational corporations and civil society organisations must be recognised as full players in the global governance system, not just as lobbyists.”
This should then look like the corporations taking the decisions and the UN and the governments selling these decisions to the people and legitimizing them afterwards:
Coalitions of the willing and able should take the lead in tackling unresolved global problems.
“The Forum’s approach is to elevate the Davos model to the status of a new explicit form of global governance. Multi-stakeholder groups’, ‘public-private partnerships’ or ‘coalitions of the willing and able’, as they are called in the Everybody’s Business report, should take the lead in tackling unresolved global problems. It is not necessary to wait until the intergovernmental system has reached general consensus to act. The official intergovernmental system can provide de facto recognition to the multi-stakeholder process and can, subsequently, provide legal legitimacy to the results of a particular public-private partnership”.
Why this is better than the previous system is explained in this way:
“Identified problems can be tackled more quickly, without hesitant governments, old-fashioned, narrow-minded managers and dissenting opinions in civil society. Those who find the right combination of partners will lead the way as long as the other key institutions of international governance do not overrebel.”
Problems can be tackled more quickly, without hesitant governments and dissenting opinions in civil society.
The role that is to remain for the United Nations has been formulated in more detail by the Forum. It provides for four “essential new roles” for the UN:
“They can participate in various roles as players in multi-stakeholder coalitions outside the UN system (i.e. without any democratic control and supervision by N.H.).
They can give their blessing or consent to global public-private partnerships and their outcomes.
You can take care of those global issues that are not addressed by multi-stakeholder coalitions or the G20.
And they can open their doors to non-state actors, especially concerned multinationals, to help the UN develop its own policies and to help implement UN programmes in developing countries. (…) Including managers of multinational corporations and selected leaders of civil society in the formal leadership of global institutions increases the effectiveness of these global organizations and the legitimacy of globalization.”
Including managers of multinational corporations in the leadership of global institutions increases the legitimacy and effectiveness of these organizations.
When “civil society organisations” are repeatedly mentioned alongside corporations, this should give the impression that the corporations are not exclusively concerned with increasing their own power. But this is deceptive, as one quickly discovers, when one turns to the chapter describing the role the Forum has assigned to these organisations. It consists, on the one hand, in providing the top managers of the multinationals with information from their field of action and, on the other hand, in providing a channel for the propaganda of international capital:
“These leaders of civil society can be important channels to help send important ideological messages from the international elite to diverse communities around the world.
The following quotation makes clear what the advantages of cooperation with the UN are for the corporations and at the same time indicates that in the long term one is not satisfied with an equal role but wants to take the lead:
“The advantages of merging the informal, market-based system with the official, state-centered system would be that multinationals would no longer be outside the gates, but would enter a transformed UN system as equal or even more equal partners.
Multinationals would enter a transformed UN system as equal or even more equal partners.
But what are the advantages for the United Nations of its self-empowerment in favour of corporations? There’s not much there. It’s not a voluntarily chosen self-disempowerment. Rather, the rich industrial nations, especially the USA, are keeping the United Nations financially ever scarcer. They are urged to get the missing money from the rich corporations that are controlled from these rich industrial countries, especially the USA. This money does not exist for nothing, of course, and so the corporations have a very long lever to exchange their money for power and direct participation in “global governance”, aka world domination or world government.
Barbara Adams and Jens Martens have analysed this strategy in detail and critically, and the great progress that the companies have already made along this path, in the 2015 study “Fit for whose purpose? Private funding and corporate influence in the United Nations” and in the 2018 published study “The UN Foundation – A Foundation for the UN? Adams has also served as UN Deputy Coordinator for Relations with Non-Governmental Organisations and Head of Strategic Partnerships and Communication for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
Because no corporation is forced to participate, but the strict voluntary principle applies, the Forum’s agreements with the UN contain nothing that could disturb the corporations. For example, on the subject of financing development and others, it is never mentioned that multinationals should move to paying taxes instead of moving their profits to Caribbean tax havens. They are merely invited to leave some of the unpaid taxes earmarked for the UN to carry out some of the tasks for which the artificially scarce developing countries lack the money.
The United Nations has a role – albeit one not provided for in the UN Charter – in transforming global governance in the spirit of the World Economic Forum.
Because the submission of the UN to the corporate lobby has no good press (see studies above) and is viewed critically by many of the less powerful countries, it is no wonder that the UN is laying a cloak of silence over the memorandum it has concluded with the corporate lobby. On the website of the UN you won’t find anything about the content or even the memrandum itself. Not even the signing ceremony with the people involved is shown. Only a photograph of a fountain pen allegedly used to sign the agreement can be found on the website. For information on the content, you must go to the World Economic Forum website. There the latest success is proudly presented to the members.
As a precaution, UN Secretary-General António Guterres also refrained from submitting the agreement to the member states for discussion and voting in advance. This would have been appropriate because the ever closer involvement of corporations in the work and decision-making of the UN runs counter to the Charter of the United Nations. At least that’s how the World Economic Forum sees it. This is what the Readers’ Guide to the “Everybody’s Business” study says:
“The United Nations has a role – albeit one not provided for in the UN Charter – in transforming global governance in the spirit of the World Economic Forum. Finding the right balance between the state-centred governance system provided for in the UN Charter and a company-centred, multi-stakeholder governance system will, in the eyes of the World Economic Forum, make both systems more effective”.