From Social Credit Scores to Societal Control

Joan Sammon • 4 Min Read

While attending the APEC CEO Summit in Bangkok, World Economic Forum founder and Chairman Klaus Schwab was interviewed by a Chinese state media outlet and made a stunning series of comments about the People's Republic of China. The 84-year-old mastermind behind the Great Reset described China as a “role model for many countries” and expressed admiration for what the communist dictatorship has accomplished over the last four decades.

Schwab's comments provide a look at the kind of world for which he and other WEF member corporations currently advocate. With Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reign resting solely, if tenuously, on his government's ability to control the lives, opinions, currency, capital flows, and social interactions of Chinese citizens, Schwab’s fawning over Xi's achievements should set off alarm bells for the entire free world. It suggests that Schwab and his corporate WEF partners believe that all people should be similarly controlled, in defiance of national borders and democratic processes and institutions, with the capital flows of the U.S. and other nations redirected toward what WEF members describe as global goals. Conspicuously absent from their vision of a transformed world are the opinions, rights, and liberties of the governed.

Schwab claims that a great societal transformation is coming, led by people tasked with specific duties to ensure its success. Enter the ever-feckless financial sector, including BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, State Street, Wells Fargo and most other banking and financial sector corporations.

Always willing to place profit above principle, they are ideal partners in a campaign to rob investors of their sole-interest rights, while abdicating their own fiduciary obligations. These are the partners Schwab has in mind when he refers to the best people and most relevant people:

We have to try, with a collaborative platform where we integrate the best people -- the most relevant people. Where we work for progress. Now the base has been formed, but we have to go one step further.

This is where the Environmental Social, and governance (ESG) construct comes in. An initiative launched by the WEF over two decades ago and introduced through its multi-layered non-profit eco-system, ESG is a mechanism to re-orient capital flows toward political and social objectives that include government regulation, communal property rights and, ultimately, social scoring. It is an organized effort to wrest control of private property from the hands of owners and transfer it to WEF-minded interests under the guise of "protecting" the environment and repairing the "damage" done by capitalism.

According to Schwab, “We [WEF members] have to define specific elements of the global system. For example, nature and environment, climate change…to see what areas we can make... real progress.”

To underscore this, consider the report “Accelerating the Rate of Change: 2021-2025,” produced by the WEF-funded non-profit, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which contends that the most pressing objective to ensure the culmination of a transitioned world is to define the concept of natural capital as having parity with financial capital. "Natural capital," under the ESG scheme, refers to the entire planet's stocks of water, land, air, and renewable and non-renewable resources such as plant and animal species, forests, and minerals. If natural capital is given partiy with financial capital, as the WEF desires, there is no longer any private property. If property can be controlled by everyone, it is owned by no one. 

To garner insight into what Schwab's world might look like in practice, one need only observe the protests that broke out throughout China only days after Schwab spoke so highly of Xi's achievements. They were held in defiance of lockdown measures that are purportedly in place to control the spread of Covid-19. But these methods are not new in Xi's China. They have been previously used against China's Uyghur population and other enemies of the Communist state, but now they are enveloping the entire Chinese population.

Chinese citizens are not free to move around or leave the country without the permission of government officials. They are not free to drive where they want and do not have unfettered access to their own money. They cannot freely communicate with anyone over their phones, and are under continuous surveillance by means of cameras equipped with facial-recognition technology. With the assistance of U.S. tech companies like Microsoft and Apple, Xi has waged war against his own people. He uses social credit scores and digital surveillance to perfect the societal control that Schwab finds so inspiring. No doubt this is what Schwab had in mind when he said,

In reality I think the world has moved closer together because we are moving from a physical world much more into a digital world. And a digital world is by nature a much more globally oriented.... We have to construct the world of tomorrow. It’s a systemic transformation of the world.

If unchallenged, ESG will similarly evolve into a tool to ascribe social scores to private companies, and ultimately to individuals. As is the case in China today, a good score will allow one to participate in society. Disobey the arbiters of the permissible, and your score will preclude you from living freely. This has already begun in North America, where ESG scoring has been used to redirect capital away from the U.S. oil and gas industry, while the likes of Goldman Sachs and BlackRock invest in China -- including in Petro China. In the meantime in Canada, prime minister and Schwab acolyte, Justin Trudeau locked Canadians out of their own bank accounts for participating in peaceful protests against his administration’s policies last winter. An unprecedented breach of societal trust in a purported democracy, it set a precedent other nations will be happy to follow.

So while Klaus Schwab strives for his vision of a transformed world, we too must seek transformation -- from a world of mediocre corporate group-think to one in which excellence eviscerates arrogance. American business leaders who prefer coercion and control over liberty and freedom must be made to learn that they have no future here, digital or otherwise. No matter what Schwab says or does.

(Originally appeared in The Pipeline).

Joan Sammon is the founder of a boutique oil and gas advisory firm that develops strategies for an array of business & market challenges. As an ESG expert she explains the threat of ESG to her corporate clients.