RANT: AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL: WILL IT HAPPEN? THE GREAT RESET: SHOULD IT?

 

SOME POTENTIALLY GOOD NEWS ON THE WAR in Afghanistan. U.S. President Joe Biden announced in mid-April that all American troops will be leaving by September 11/21, and so far, it looks like a pretty firm commitment. On the other hand, Trump already had an agreement to pull troops out by May 1, this year, so what is the reason for the delay besides Biden not wanting to honour policies made by the previous prez? (Also, the disposition of American “contractors”, i.e., mercenaries, in Afghanistan is undecided, and it's unclear whether they will continue to be funded* after the withdrawal.)

And to be honest, I’ll believe it when I see it; the last three administration said the same thing, and it’s been twenty years now. Canadian troops died over there (158) and American losses total (thus far) 2,372 soldiers, along with other Coalition forces over the years, not to mention all the death and destruction suffered by the Afghan people, and if we’re being honest, the reasons for continuing to fight over there have gotten seriously muddy over the years. I don’t think Afghanistan is much of a security threat to America, if it ever was, and it's time for that war-torn country’s government (or cabal of warlords) to come to terms with the rebel Taliban and end their civil war. Or not. It should be up to them. America’s withdrawal will hopefully allow a reconciliation process to begin. So, let’s see if Biden will be true to his word, or will it be more of the same blah-blah-blah and broken promises we’ve heard for so long.**

 

BUT FOR NOW, LET'S SET THAT CHEERY TOPIC ASIDE because I’d like to talk about something called the “Great Reset”, a term we’ve heard more of recently, and one which represents either a rich-dude’s wet dream or something more problematic.

In 2010, Richard Florida, an urban development theorist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management wrote a book called The Great Reset which envisioned how society could use the fallout from the financial crash of 2008-09 to “reinvent” or “reset” planning policies for cities going forward—to allow certain cities, because of their location, population mix, and global connectivity, to more readily adopt planning practices, public policies and infrastructure development which will ensure their dominant position in what Florida calls the “Third Great Reset” in America (The other two  resets being, IIRC: First, the industrialization and urbanization movements of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Second: the growth of consumerism and suburbanization, beginning in the 1930s, with both government and business reorienting industries to take advantage of new technologies such as electricity, the telephone, the automobile, mass-production techniques, and so on.) The Third Reset entails using next generation technologies of the internet, AI, Blockchain and 5G systems, robotics and quantum computing. This powerful group of tools, Florida speculates, should be used by cities such as New York, Boston, and London that already have advantageous resources of infrastructure and “creative” populations (at least in certain districts).

    "Well! Babel me gob-smacked, Cap'n!"

To summarize his vision, think: “smart” cities and interconnectivity, rainbows and unicorns for tech-savvy, “start-up” promoters, information workers, blockchain 'miners' and the like. Florida envisions certain cities thriving and becoming hubs of productivity and “creativity” that would generate GDP growth and benefits for the rest of the country (apparently). Sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like gated communities with whip cream and sprinkles on top, and stale doughnuts for the rest of us. But that’s where the term “Great Reset” originally comes; it's the title of a book written by and for society's professional elites.

 

In an interesting turn of events, Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau made a bit of a flap in September, last year, when he mused in a “virtual” United Nations meeting about using the pandemic as an opportunity for the world to “reset” their economies. To be fair, he said it was “our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change."

Ah, me! So many words, so little said! He makes nice mouth sounds, but what do they mean? Are they “code” for an international left wing (or right wing—it gets confusing!) conspiracy to activate a global master plan to turn nine-tenths of us into serfs and slaves, while the rich harvest the rest of the world’s wealth, raking in pension funds, public lands and services, and people’s savings?  Fun times, indeed.

 

Another recent uttering of the words “Great Reset” came from the famed, golden city of Davos, Switzerland with the World Economic Forum (read: Uber-rich schmooze fest) that proclaimed:

“There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

 

For the last decade or so, the WEF annual meeting in the Swiss Alps has come equipped with heavy-duty themes and schemes which mostly boil down to making more money for people who can’t possibly need any more.  Klaus Schwab, confab organizer and chief courtier for the assembled lords and ladies of finance and industry, even wrote a book in 2020 with the Twitter-trending title of Covid-19: The Great Reset. (Please don’t buy it; Klaus doesn’t need the dough.) In it, he outlines a technocratic, globalist agenda which would involve, among other adaptations, biometric scanning and monitoring systems along the lines of those being adopted today in China.

 

It is a digitalized future that Klaus and his Davos buddies think the world should adopt, along with a  "stakeholder" capitalism and surveillance systems designed to monitor all aspects of an individual's life. It echoes Ida Auken's short dystopian WEF "thought experiment" article envisioning a city of the future, "our city", where the "internet of things" is ubiquitous and private ownership unnecessary in a world run by next generation Amazons and Ubers. Happy Days! 

Frankly, it should keep thinking persons awake at night unless, of course, personal monitoring devices on our night-tables chime-in to remind us to take a sleeping tablet. (But not the whole bottle!) Auken, a Danish Member of Parliament describes, with unintended irony, the "left-behinds" as quaint rustics, living obscure, disconnected lives in rural settings and abandoned villages, with everyone 'in-the-know' having moved into "our city". (No thanks, lady!) Oddly, the right wing government of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro is critical of the 2021 WEF agenda and its "Great Reset" theme, calling the proposals "totalitarian"  and a vector for world-wide communism. (Stop with the irony already, you guys!) I guess they want their own, homegrown brand of totalitarianism. Each to their own.  

 

But, environmentalist Naomi Klein put the matter into perspective when she wrote late last year, in an article at The Intercept website, a crisp criticism of the Davos scheme: “In short, the Great Reset encompasses some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of “green” billionaires readying rockets for Mars.” Ouch! And scholar and food sovereignty advocate Vandana Shiva offers her analysis of the Davos initiative to reorganize the world's economic system, which the WEF website earnestly promises will “build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being” (with a trust fund). She says:

 

“The Great Reset is about multinational corporate stakeholders at the World Economic Forum controlling as many elements of planetary life as they possibly can. From the digital data humans produce to each morsel of food we eat.”

 

Couldn’t have said it better myself! The “Great Reset” is simply the latest clown mask the usual suspects wear on their way to steal what’s left in the bank vault; it’s a cash-grab, no matter how you try to disguise it.

 

So, the point I’m laboriously trying to make is this: while there are large-scale government and private sector initiatives currently tackling our struggles with the Coronavirus and planning for what comes next, in the end I feel small is beautiful⁺, and that our future will increasingly come to rely on local resources and local initiatives. Some cities will be important, others will fade from prominence depending on where they are and how they function for the people who live in them and in their surrounding communities--not, as Richard Florida envisions, re-developed for an elite “creative class” of professionals living in artificial, high-tech, gated communities. Small will be beautiful again, whether we like the idea or not.

There’s more to say on this, but I think that’s enough for now.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

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* It looks now quite probable these corporate 'guns-for-hire' will receive American backing after September and remain to perform a variety of functions going forward, but to what extent, if any, they will replace American combat troops in Afghanistan remains to be seen. Also, I wonder if Biden will withdraw American air power or will this move by his administration be just more smoke and mirrors? For so long now, Afghanistan has been a huge grifting operation for all the 'stakeholders' making piles of dough over there, and it's usually a messy and unrewarding task to cut down the money tree, so it's easier to just let the conflict continue. The whole thing is obscene! [And for those who are not fans of George Bush II, the Prez who got America into Afghanistan in the first place, here's a great short Rant by Richard Medhurst, a young, articulate and passionate blogger on YouTube.]

 

** Excellent interview on Aaron Mate's YouTube podcast "Pushback" with Scott Horton, the editorial director of "Antiwar.com" on some of the complexities surrounding the war in Afghanistan and a withdrawl of America's forces.  

+ small is beautiful is the title of a 1973 book by E.F. Schumacher which fell off my bookshelf the other day and hit me on the head. The subtitle reads: Economics AS If People Mattered, and that gives you an idea of what the book is about—local, small-scale solutions, sustainable and ecologically sound. Makes more sense, a lot more, than all the globalist wet dreams found at Davos.