Whose Agenda Is The Woke Agenda?

From climate change to vaccine mandates, the greater good spreads its tentacles

• As banks collapse, is Woke is a cover for incompetence or corruption?

• Macron raises retirement age without vote in “anti-deliberative” rule by diktat.

• Even wars can be Woke when people know reflexively which side to back.

• Woke policy – BBB, Modern Monetary Theory – finances and drives agenda.

• Politics and ideology provide the foundation for profit-driven climate mitigation.

• DNA-based ID and central bank digital currency are the tyrannical destination.

Related:
Whose Agenda Is The Woke Agenda? - From climate change to vaccine mandates, the greater good spreads its tentacles (Mar 17, 2023)
Can Trump Resist One World Nirvana? - Decoding the lingo, by any means necessary (Nov 08, 2024)

(About 3,400 words or 16 minutes of your company. Substack’s search tool ain’t great but by using the lower “magnifying glass” you can find topics.)

Mar 17, 2023

One always thought of Zimbabwe as an outlier: a cautionary tale about how those with good intentions can end up with 24,000 per cent inflation, and how a country once called the bread basket of Africa can starve its own people. [1]

That was until the Woke thing emerged like Frankenstein’s monster from the lab and gripped its hands around the throat of Western societies.

As with political correctness, we were assured we were just being polite: comply, nicely, and the asphyxial grip will move on to the next person. PC or Woke may not be optional — being canceled can destroy lives — but it is, we are told, for the greater good.

Like all movements of its type it seeks to shape reality to its ideology. It turns out that Woke is not only about being polite. It also comes with very real economic costs that sit at the heart of this crisis.

The current spate of bank runs is a direct consequence. It is not simply sanctions and foreign policy that undermine the petrodollar, or the inflationary spending proposed in the rebranded Green New Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act and the $3 trillion Infrastructure Act, and associated pork barrel boondoggles. It is not even Modern Monetary Theory, which is the voodoo by which such spending is conjured like smoke from the immolated carcass of the economy.

Woke is a mindset that manifests in multitudinous forms but at its root is inversion: the inversion of biology, gender, medicine and science; the meaning of words as they describe social relations; history and its toppled monuments; modern art; literature and its rewritten books; morality and the Just War; the war on masculinity which disguises the war on motherhood and the very soil that humans occupy on this Earth, and whether we have any right to exist at all.

Even wars can be Woke. People swapped their Covid emojis to show support for the First Woke War in Ukraine. It is a war that did not need to happen. There are no victims — certainly not the oligarchs in Kyiv — except for ordinary Ukrainians and Russians and foreign volunteers whose lives are disrupted or destroyed for the profit and careers of warmongers.

Woke corporations plan to reconstruct Ukraine but not before they profit from death. NGOs rattle the collecting tin but aid the war narrative in conflict zones and on the television screens of aggressor nations. BlackRock increased its stake in Lockheed Martin just before the invasion. Would that be ESG or SDG-compliant?

Woke is no longer grassroots. It began as an African-American phrase meaning to be alert to injustice. Like denim jeans, a phenomenon of the dispossessed, the rich found it to be a stealthy disguise. Woke now represents an attempt to remodel society through disruption, to be followed by strangulated control. It has become shorthand for “the greater good,” the means that justifies any end, trampling customs, rights and liberties.

Politicians have become increasingly brazen. The pandemic was used to suspend parliaments, to issue orders by diktat and to extend emergency measures seemingly in perpetuity. Emboldened, those behind the politicians are preparing to introduce central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and to grant the World Health Organisation a mandate to declare us all sick and inject us.

In France the government this week rammed through pension reform by executive order. President Emmanuel Macron does not have a majority, so instead of putting it to a vote in the Assemblée Nationale he used special powers dating from 1958. Opinion polls suggest two-thirds of French people oppose the plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.

Annabelle Lever, professor of political philosophy at Sciences Po, told France 24 that Macron’s move was not anti-democratic but “anti-deliberative,” which sounds even worse. The idea that policies should be negotiated and consensual has gone out the window.

The World Health Organization, largely controlled by private money including that of Bill Gates, wants the power — through the International Health Regulation amendments and the so-called Pandemic Treaty — to set aside national sovereignty and intervene globally on matters of health, imposing vaccine mandates and IDs.

In Brazil the government of Lula da Silva is considering several bills that may result in imprisonment for failure to comply with vaccine mandates. The country’s supreme court justice has set himself up as censor-in-chief or judge, jury and executioner with regards to news and information.

See Moneycircus: Brazil A Testing Ground For The NWO? (Jan 14, 2023)

Woke in this context is a cover. The collapsed cryptocurrency trader FTX made much of its Woke credentials through Effective Altruism. It is a slippery slope: with a straight face the journal Vox raised the question with SBF of whether it is okay to do unethical things “for the greater good.” [2]

If you want to know how deep this self-justification goes, read Ben Gross on The Problem of Justificatory Ethics. [3]

There may be more humour than relevance in the role of Joseph Gentile, chief administration officer of the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank Investments (not of the parent company SVB as reported). The former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers fixed income division, before its collapse in 2007-08, began his career at Arthur Andersen, the big four accountant that helped Enron cook the books.

Perhaps it is just a small world. Like BCCI, Enron was not simply a case of corporate fraud, nor a run-of-the-mill money laundering operation but a CIA-linked octopus that manipulated energy supply for political purposes at home, and engaged in geopolitics and Halliburton-style buccaneering abroad. (Dennis Bernstein, 2002 — Enron: The Anatomy of a Cover-Up)

The Enron insolvency chief was helicoptered in to FTX as CEO to replace Sam Bankman-Fried.

Did the rot begin in the shoulder-rubbing with deep state interests or the month-long Pride shenanigans of SVB’s head of risk management Jay Ersapah? Or is this internal Wokeness the compromise that buys silence — for there is an equal argument that SVB was toppled by powerful industry intersets, from Peter Thiel to Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase?

$50 trillion carbon

It may be hard to perceive the Wokeness from NYC or the soon-to-be Harare-on-Thames but it seems very clear from the vantage point of an old-school, traditional country like Georgia from which these words are written.

Woke, or environmental social and governance (ESGs) in its corporate form, is promoted from the top of the social system: the universities, the financial services industry and corporations.

Almost 300 companies launched the Net Zero Alliance in 2020 to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

This month Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana asked leading bankers and investors what it would cost to make the U.S. carbon-neutral by 2050. One estimate, from the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, was $50 trillion.

Corporations opened their wallets for the Black Lives Matter movement — BLM raked in almost $83 billion according to the Claremont Institute. But the climate campaign dwarfs even that. [4]

None of the experts at the Senate hearing could say by how much it would lower temperatures if they spent $50 trillion of our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s wealth.

The asset manager Dr. Robert Litterman, head of the Risk Committee at Kepos Capital, and a former Goldman Sachs partner, said repeatedly that “we are in this together,” but could not say if India and China would match U.S. efforts.

One of the top two asset managers in the world, Vanguard, pulled out in December from the Net Zero Alliance, saying that ESGs should be managed on a case-by-case basis. This highlights the problem of ESGs and any effort at central control such as CBDCs. [5]

What is happening is that these impulses to centralise control not only offend against rights and liberties but also conflict with productive activity and profitability.

Corporate Wokeness does not seem to be profitable although the CEO of the world’s third-largest fast-moving consumer goods company has declared he won’t back down.

Alan Jope said “this anti-Woke backlash is incredibly dangerous for the world and the first thing that Unilever will do is we will not back down on this agenda.” [6]

What is less clear is if Woke is a cover for incompetence or corruption. Solari Report’s Catherine Austin Fitts argues that ESG has been weaponised as another way to centralise control.

What that means is “the printing of trillions and trillions of dollars in exchange for a highly conceptual promise that is not grounded in reality.”

More importantly the U.S. government makes a mockery of disclosure since it has passed laws, namely FASAB 56, that allows federal entities to manipulate financial data and even hide spending altogether when reporting on the grounds of national security. [7]

Few people are willing to speak out against Woke. Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus told Fox business news that the institutional system had pushed companies to worry more about social and climate policy than shareholders and employees:

“These banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns.” [8]

Small businesses create more than 70 per cent of jobs. A Job Creators’ Network informal survey suggests 60 per cent of small companies fear they won’t survive this year. The Biden administration proposes raising taxes, in part to fund the aforementioned policies.

Woke policies come from the elite. The academic Rob Henderson formulated the concept of luxury beliefs to explain how ideas that confer status on the upper class impose unbearable costs on poorer social classes.

As an individual who grew up in foster homes and served in the military before becoming an undergraduate at Yale, he noted that his fellows had replaced material emblems of status with beliefs — perhaps because the mass consumer market now makes it harder for elites to stand out merely with clothes or accessories, so they compete instead by virtue signaling.

They push ideas like polyamorism yet, in one-on-one research, he found that the same people mostly planned to have conventional, monogamous, child-rearing lives with the family home providing the stable centre of their universe. Meanwhile many a poor 19 year-old woman follows the influencers, only to struggle with the cost and diminished social status of being a single mother.

See Moneycircus — Chronicle of Dissent: Organized Crime: Luxury beliefs, tyranny's origins and fronting for the kosher nostra (Sep 22, 2021)

Central tyranny

The forthcoming central bank digital currencies (CBDC) are the tipping point for society. How they are structured will decide whether Woke triumphs over rights and liberties.

CBDC must run on a digital ledger, tracking and recording every transaction. Banks already collect information about their customers, sharing some of it with governments. CBDC would build that surveillance capability into the money itself, warns the American Enterprise Institute.

It could be possible to record that transactions occurred, without recording what was transacted. The privately-owned central bank, the Federal Reserve, is researching this privacy-friendly option under Project Hamilton with MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. [9]

The Woke or ESG movement, however, wants to use “surveillance coins” to monitor spending.

It is all about compliance and before enforcement comes surveillance. The leaders of the Council on Inclusive Capitalism call themselves The Guardians and claim their objective is to be sustainable and inclusive. What that means is summarized in a recent article by Queen Máxima of the Netherlands and Agustín Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements. In 2020 Agustín Carstens said: [10]

“A key difference with the CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use… and also, we will have the technology to enforce that.”

The pretext is, of course, the climate: to limit your carbon footprint.

That means controlling what you buy and where. If inflation threatens, the banks will limit or block your account. In the case of falling prices, you might get a small extra allowance each month. In order to make such a system work you would not be able to save your money. What you don’t spend expires. In this format CBDC would not be a currency but more like a book of ration vouchers.

In order to habituate the population to such intrusive control, at least two generations have been indoctrinated in school.

Does it surprise you to learn that before Bill Gates sponsored the “decade of vaccines” he promoted Common Core — a uniform U.S. curriculum laying out how teachers teach, who should decide expectations for children and how high those expectations should be?

States were then pressured to adopt the educational regimen during president Barack Obama’s administration. Common Core State Standards belied the fact that it excluded teaching protocols that had served well down the centuries, including fiction literature which is key to firing children’s imaginations. Teachers say this led to a sharp fall in students reading and teaching of literature; too much “close reading” of nonfiction texts, with a failure to learn context or broader content.

Politicians and bureaucrats (who tend not to be creative minds) have long sought to direct education from above, while billionaires serve their own interest behind the pretence of philanthropy. According to Brightwork Research, Gates used Common Core to create the appearance or reality of a skills gap, so that tech companies could hire cheaper foreign workers. Yet another top-down teaching project, like No Child Left Behind, and the obsession in many countries with testing and scores, has produced a less educated public.

Alt media researcher Sophia Smallstorm came up with another phenomenon: the marketing of every product in a children’s variant: food, clothes, content, culture which she argues makes it harder to grow up.

This infantilisation is a deliberate marketing strategy. It is everywhere: from cosplay, or costume play, to drag queen story hour. “Natalia Vashko, director of the television channel 2x2, stated: ‘We cater for young viewers, where ‘young’ has nothing to do with age, it’s rather a lifestyle attitude’.” [11]

It is presented, of course, as carefree and liberating, and if you point to its deleterious effects you are a kill-joy if not a hater.

Bernardini wrote in 2013 that the content of television news and the language of politics has been “simplified, depleted, and dogmatized and has lost the complexity of a typically adult morality.” Likewise films and books (think Harry Potter or Twilight).

The result is a people who indulge in “childishness without pleasure, indolence without innocence, dresses without formality, has sex without reproducing, works without discipline, plays without spontaneity, buys without a purpose, lives without responsibility, wisdom or humility (Linn 2004; Barber 2007).”

Kinship and responsibility no longer stratify society or convey respect. Instead the media comes to the rescue, telling, or increasingly, showing, people the latest ways to look and things to say.

Is it any surprise that young people, or infantilised older people, should be hostile and defensive to aging, desire to live in the present fear the future? Even the past must be carefully constructed, so that the individual can re-live past experiences as a shelter from what’s next. See the fashion for nostalgia, retro and anything old school.

Is this preparing for the elimination of old age, or even adulthood. Shall people, as in Logan’s Run, live only to the age of 30?