Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and other billionaires are cashing in big from the COVID-19 pandemic, in a variety of different ways
The COVID-19
pandemic is being used to usher in highly controversial changes that are
unmistakably totalitarian-building, including the private take-over of
government through public-private partnerships
New York
governor Andrew Cuomo is partnering with Gates to reinvent the state’s
post-COVID reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating
technology into every aspect of civic life
New York is
also partnering with Google. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is leading a
new panel to plan the state’s technological infrastructure
Partners in
Health — the group selected by Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker to
conduct COVID-19 contact tracing — is funded by Gates and one of the
richest men in the world, George Soros. Chelsey Clinton sits is on the
board of trustees, and one of its co-founders, Jim Kim, is also
president of the World Bank
Bill Gates has built a global empire
around his technologies and “philanthropic” endeavors. His sheer wealth
has allowed him to become a veritable superpower in his own right,
rising to become the unelected global health tsar on COVID-19. Indeed,
the World Health Organization and the White House pandemic response team
even kowtows to his nonexistent medical expertise.
Life cannot and will not go back to normal until we can vaccinate
the entire global population, Gates says, and that same sentiment is
being echoed from government leaders and health authorities around the
world. Never mind the fact that actual scientists and medical
researchers are finding all sorts of simple, inexpensive and safe
strategies to address this illness.
But vaccinating the global population isn’t enough, in Gates’ eyes.
We must also implement surveillance of infection and vaccination
status. Not surprisingly, Gates’ recommendations benefit himself most
of all.
As discussed in “Bill Gates — Most Dangerous Philanthropist in Modern History?”
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donates billions to the very
same companies and industries that the Foundation owns stocks and bonds
in.
Using nonprofit money to advance research for companies you're
invested in is illegal, yet he’s been getting away with this for many
years. At the same time, his Foundation gets tax breaks for the
charitable donations it makes money from. Remember, he has “donated”
tens of billions, yet his net worth has doubled. This is largely
because his “donations” are tax deductible investments.
Pandemic Fear-Mongering Pays Off for Tech Companies
While unemployment has reached a historical high during this
pandemic, the financial crush is not felt by some. In fact, Gates and
other tech billionaires are cashing in big, in a variety of different
ways.
In a May 8, 2020, article1
in The Intercept, Naomi Klein reports on how New York is tasking Gates
with reinventing the state’s “post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on
permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.”
May 6, 2020, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state is
partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a
smarter education system” focused on online learning. This, despite the
fact that the Common Core curriculum — the Gates Foundation’s previous
attempt at remaking American education2 — has been an abysmal failure.3
The state is also partnering with Google, and Cuomo has asked former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a new panel to plan the state’s
technological infrastructure.4
Schmidt joined Cuomo during a briefing, saying “The first priorities …
are focused on telehealth, remote learning and broadband …” As noted
by Klein:5
“It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge.
Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we
have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed
into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical
isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living
laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future …
It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively
personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our
schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the
state, our jails …
It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every
relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by
unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because, pre-Covid, this
precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name
of friction-free convenience and personalization. But many of us had
concerns …
Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being
swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is
going through a rush-job rebranding.
Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being
sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only
possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to
keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe …
At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of
government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public
schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all
outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private
tech companies.”
In her article — which is well worth reading in its entirety — Klein
reviews how Schmidt and Gates have been working and pushing toward the
future that is now staring us square in the face, and how the
surveillance apparatus that consumers have been railing against is now
being rebranded as the answer to everyone’s health concerns.
In a May 6, 2020, article, Vox’s Theodore Schleifer weighed in on
Cuomo’s decision to hand over the proverbial keys to the state to tech
billionaires whose philanthropy always ends up benefiting themselves
the most:6
“Details are scarce about exactly how much power these groups
will have beyond issuing recommendations or whether their work will be
public. But Gates could suddenly have the ability to recommend what
types of things are taught to the state’s students in a ‘reimagined’
system.
Schmidt could encourage the state to significantly embrace
remote health care services that could be controversial. While both
have been successful business leaders, the concern would mirror the
broader criticism of billionaire philanthropy: that this ‘help’ offers a
few wealthy people some undemocratic influence over American public
policy.”
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Schmidt Futures Wants to Make Private Data Public
While less visible than Gates, Schmidt can hardly be trusted any
more than Gates. Schmidt Futures — Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s
philanthropic initiative, which “seeks to improve societal outcomes
through the thoughtful development of emerging science and technologies
that can benefit humanity”7 — admits that one of its approaches is to “liberate private data with a public purpose.”8
Clearly, infection status falls into a category of private data that
is now rebranded as having a “public purpose.” As noted on its
website:9
“There is a tremendous opportunity to use data collected by the
private sector to solve societal challenges, and in doing so create the
platforms needed to reach people at scale. Examples of data
types include mobile, social media, e-commerce, remote
sensing/satellite, and sensor data. Advances in data science and
machine learning are increasing our capacity to use and interpret these
data.”
‘Unaccountable Monopolists’ Replace Elected Representatives
In a May 14, 2020, Guardian article, Zephyr Teachout and Pat Garofalo comment:10
“Even if Schmidt and Gates had good policies, Cuomo’s knighting
of them is offensive to American self-government. Nobody voted for them
and they are accountable to no one. Cuomo, often accused of being too
close to big campaign donors, is tripling down: he is simply allowing
billionaires to plan our future directly, taking out the middlemen.
In case you had any doubt that this is a new form of government
worming its way into our old democratic ways, Cuomo anointed these
tsars at the exact same time that he took vast new powers away from the
state legislature,11 which has not been holding regular legislative hearings since 1 April …
Turning away from locally-elected representatives, and towards
billionaires with no accountability, represents a terrible erosion of
democratic decision-making: Cuomo is quite literally replacing elected
representatives with private, unaccountable monopolists. And too many
other lawmakers across the U.S. are doing the same thing.”
The Gates, Soros and Clinton Contact Tracing Group
Whether preplanned or not, the COVID-19 pandemic
is clearly being used to usher in highly controversial changes that
are unmistakably totalitarian-building, including the private take-over
of government through public-private partnerships. Contact tracing serves as a convenient bridge12
for this hostile takeover parading as “aid.” Not only is Big Tech
offering up contact tracing apps, self-serving billionaires are also
funding contact tracing groups that will provide “boots on the ground”
services.
For example, Partners in Health — the group selected by
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing
using teams of investigators to interview people who test positive — is
funded by Gates and one of the richest men in the world, George Soros.
The William J. Clinton Foundation has also funded Partners in Health
in the past.13
Chelsey Clinton sits on its board of trustees, and one of the group’s co-founders, Jim Kim, spent three years at the WHO14 and is currently the president of the World Bank. He rejoined Partners in Health’s board of directors in January 2019.15
UK Demands Answers About COVID Data Deal
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, OpenDemocracy and the tech
start-up Foxglove are demanding the U.K. government share the details
of its patient data deals with Big Tech. In a May 7, 2020, post,
OpenDemocracy.net writes:16
“Outside of the horrific death toll, perhaps the most
far-reaching global consequence of the pandemic is the rapid expansion
of surveillance in our daily lives. In the name of beating back the
pandemic, governments around the world are giving tech giants extensive
access to valuable stores of health data.
Britain is no different. On 28 March, a blog17
quietly appeared on the website of the cherished National Health
Service. It announced what might be the largest handover of NHS patient
data to private corporations in history.
U.S. tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — plus two
controversial AI films called Faculty and Palantir — are apparently
assisting the NHS in tracking hospital resources and in providing a
‘single source of truth’ about the epidemic, in order to stem its
spread.”
While the amount of British health data being shared with these
companies has been described as “unprecedented,” the U.K. government
has yet to release the details about the partnership.
Suspiciously, Palantir is reportedly providing its COVID-19 Datastore services to the NHS for just £1.18 This despite the fact that its services are estimated to cost around £88,000 a week, and that’s just for salaries.19
How and why is Palantir giving away its services for free? The old
adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” seems applicable here.
OpenDemocracy also questions how the artificial intelligence (AI)
startup Faculty has managed to land seven different government
contracts worth nearly £1 million in the last 18 months.20
“We have laws in Britain which mean journalists and
members of the public can access information about such deals, so that
they can answer precisely these sorts of questions. But now the UK
government is acting as though these laws no longer apply,” OpenDemocracy writes.
UK Government Ignores FOIA Request
Foxglove submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to
the U.K. government on April 3, 2020. A reply is required within 20
working days, yet no response has been forthcoming. The British
Information Commissioner’s Office, the independent regulator
responsible for FOIA enforcement, has announced21 it has relaxed enforcement for the duration of the pandemic crisis.
That seems suspiciously convenient, considering deals are being made
in secret that shouldn’t be, and panic is being drummed up without
much real-world data to support the narrative that we’re still in a
high-risk situation.22
“Although the wording of the announcement was vague, it
risks leaving the public with no practical way to hold the government
to account — indefinitely,” OpenDemocracy states, adding:
“We have given the UK government until 11 May to release the
information requested about these massive COVID data deals. If they
fail to do so, we will consider seeking answers in the courts.
The public urgently needs to know not only how their personal
information is being traded, and who has access to it. But also whether
this pandemic means that our rights to ask questions, and to
scrutinize the actions of our leaders, are fundamentally compromised.
COVID-19 cannot be an excuse for governments and corporations to avoid
accountability.”
Tech Initiative Seeks to Alter Global Behavior
Anyone still living under the misguided spell that governments’
responses to this pandemic are simply temporary emergency measures need
to rapidly reassess. As reported by Vox,23
tech billionaires like Gates and Schmidt are hard at work trying to
convince governments and the public at large that only they can save us
from another pandemic.
Such is the focus of the Pandemic Action Network, responsible for
the #MaskingForAFriend Twitter campaign, pushed by Hillary Clinton and
other celebrities.24
“… the #MaskingForAFriend campaign … seeks to change personal
behavior. But its more important ambition is to change government
behavior,” Vox writes.
“This
initiative is one of the more forward-looking attempts from
philanthropy to shape what the world looks like after the crisis, and
one of the few focused on political advocacy. The push is small for
now, with just $1.5 million in initial cash from Schmidt Futures, the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other backers.
But the Pandemic Action Network aims to lead a pressure campaign
that shapes the policy debate, a debate that will be at the fore of
the next wave of pandemic response efforts.”
Digital Health Passports Coming to 15 Nations
A lead-in to global totalitarianism, predicated on protecting public
health and preventing another pandemic, is the issuance of “digital
health passports.” According to the British tech magazine Verdict,25 coronavirus digital health passports are now being supplied to 15 nations.
The passport is “designed to make it easier for individuals to
return to work after the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic” — as if we’ve
never been able to return to normal life after any other epidemic or
pandemic scare. In a May 11, 2020, article Verdict reports:26
“These countries will include Italy, Portugal, France, Panama,
India, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United
Arab Emirates and The Netherlands, with the goal of supplying 50 million
digital health passports … The Covi-pass27
will work using a color system of green, amber, red to indicate
whether the individual has tested positive or negative for Covid-19 and
relevant health information.
Firstly, the user downloads the app and enters key information
such as name, address, age and verifies their identity using their
fingerprint or a facial scan.
They then take a Covid-19 test, administered by an authorized
healthcare professional, and the results are scanned into the
Covi-pass. They can then use the digital health passport to
authenticate their health status to enable ‘a safe return to work, life,
and safe travel.’”
According to Covipass.com,28 the app will display “your COVID-19 test history and immunoresponse and other relevant health information.”
As
I’ve stated before, a RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain
reaction) test result is basically worthless, since a) it merely detects
the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, not the actual virus,
and b) you can get infected at any time after you get your test
results, rendering the “verification” of your infection status null and
void.
According to a recent speech by U.S. President Donald Trump, his
administration is mobilizing the military to distribute the vaccine
once ready, which could be as early as the end of 2020.
At the same time, the U.S. Senate has voted to renew federal surveillance powers that would otherwise have expired,29
and an ill-named bill, HR 6666, would put the government in charge of
COVID-19 tracking and tracing, costing taxpayers a whopping $100
billion.30
Virus Surveillance and Civil Liberties Collide
As predicted in a Law360 article31 published April 26, 2020, virus surveillance is now colliding head-on with civil liberties:
“Imagine your phone buzzing with an alert: Someone who passed you
at the grocery store has tested positive for COVID-19. Based on
location data transmitted through a smart phone app, authorities
believe the stranger exposed you to the coronavirus. You might be
infected.
The alert directs you to self-quarantine for 14 days to prevent
further spread of the deadly disease. In the app, a map of color-coded
dots displays the population of your home town. You notice the dot
associated with you, previously green, has turned to yellow — now
everyone else with the app knows you could be dangerous.
Whether the scenario sounds Orwellian or absolutely necessary
could depend on your answer to a rhetorical question Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
recently posed during a live Snapchat interview. ‘Do you give up a little liberty to get a little protection?’ he said.”
The answer to that question should be a resounding “no.” The idea
that government can keep you safe against a virus by giving up your
civil liberties is a fantasy that must be outgrown. As noted by CNN
Business:32
“It took the attacks of September 11, 2001 to shove aside the
previous decade's phobia of mass surveillance, and usher in an era
where many of us imagined the state was probably skimming our emails,
in exchange for keeping us safe from terror.
Over the next 15 years, billions of people agreed to a tacit
deal where Facebook or Google were permitted to learn a staggering
amount about them in exchange for free access to messaging apps, news,
and shared pictures … Eventually, that mutated into the heights
exemplified by Cambridge Analytica — private companies hoovering up
the online lives of tens of millions in order to try to sway elections.
But the challenge presented by Covid-19 — and the urgent need to
trace contacts and movements — is of another scale of intimacy …
Technology is again claiming the mantle of the savior … embedding into
our phones anonymous methods of knowing who we may have infected and
when … If they become ubiquitous, where does this new scrutiny end? …
Will we look back at 2020 as the moment privacy finally evaporated?”
It’s time to fully recognize that surveillance has become the
biggest for-profit industry on the planet, and your entire existence is
now being targeted for profit.
For a better understanding of what you’re giving up by going along
with the mainstream narrative that we need Big Tech to save us, see my
article about social psychologist and Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff and her extraordinary book, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
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