It is the end of December 2021 and we are in an economic and social transition period of historical dimensions. For almost two years now, almost all countries in the world – regardless of whether they are dictatorships or parliamentary democracies – have by and large been following the same agenda.
This global synchronization shows that there is a force that has more power than any of the currently around 200 governments on our planet. This force has a name: it is the digital-financial complex. At its head are the five largest IT companies in the world on the digital side: Apple, Alphabet [owns Google which owns YouTube], Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, formerly Facebook,† and on the financial side the largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard.††The Emergence of The Digital-Financial Complex
But how exactly could this complex become so powerful and how does it manage to assert its interests around the globe at the same time?
Let’s start with the first question. For centuries, power rested on a single base: money. Whoever had money had power and whoever had a lot of money had a lot of power.
That still applies, but no longer exclusively. Since the use of computers and the triumphant advance of the Internet as part of the 3rd industrial revolution, there has been a second base of power, namely data. Whoever has data has power and whoever has large amounts of data has a lot of power.
However, anyone who, like IT companies, organizes the data flows of entire industries and also those of governments in the context of digitization, gets an additional insight into their innermost being – and can thus make them dependent and in this way also submissive.
It is precisely this process that has resulted in the large IT corporations being far above all other companies and governments in the world. Whether armaments, food, pharmaceuticals, energy or media – all these industries and all state institutions, including the secret services, are now on the drip from the digital corporations, which have also built up their own global media power with social networks.
The financial industry, on the other hand, which is always on the lookout for new investment opportunities, has promoted this process from the start and is now involved in all leading IT groups through its most powerful representatives – the large asset management companies. Since it is also dependent on them at the same time, both are merged in this way into a kind of community of interests.
BlackRock and Microsoft provide a particularly vivid example of this: BlackRock uploaded its data analysis system Aladdin [Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network], by far the most important database in global finance, to Microsoft’s Azure cloud in April 2020, so it is now dependent on Microsoft for data.
Microsoft, in turn, is a public company and therefore dependent on its largest shareholders, and these are none other than Vanguard and BlackRock, with Vanguard also being the largest shareholder in BlackRock.
So much for the emergence of the new world power. But how exactly does the digital-financial complex enforce its interests? Which mechanisms and which channels does it use?
The Role of The Central Banks
The most important strategic role is played by the Central Banks, which officially gave up their independence at the latest in the world financial crisis of 2007-08. Since then, Blackrock has been advising the two largest central banks in the world, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the American Federal Reserve. Blackrock has a decisive say when it comes to distributing the huge sums of newly created money in the financial sector.
From the central bank’s point of view there is no other way of doing this. Blackrock, together with its main shareholder, Vanguard, manages almost 17 trillion dollars which roughly corresponds to the sum of the balance sheets of the ECB and the FED and with the Aladdin, has a much larger pool of data than any central bank in the world and could easily sabotage any decision that is not made in its own interest.
How well the use of the Central Banks works was already shown in 2015 in Greece. When Syriza, a political force unacceptable for the digital financial complex, came to power, the ECB cut the country off from all money flows until the Syriza (the leadership) collapsed and achieved exactly the opposite of what it had promised to the people in the election campaign.
The interplay between the Central Banks is orchestrated by the Bank for International Settlements, the BIS, in Basel, Switzerland, which has a total of 63 Central Banks among its members.
NGOs, Think Tanks, Universities & The UN
In addition to the Central Banks, the Digital Financial Complex, with its money and data, control has also subjected itself to another network of extremely influential institutions. These include universities, think tanks, NGOs, numerous sub organizations of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and above all, numerous extremely powerful foundations.
How effectively this network works can be seen particularly well in the current health crisis. Here are just a few examples.
The medical faculty at Johns Hopkins University, which provides the authorities around the world with medical data, has been called the Bloomberg School of Medicine since 2014 because IT billionaire Michael Bloomberg has to date donated more than 3.5 billion dollars to them.
Harvard University’s Medical School is named T H Chan School of Medicine in honor of a Hong Kong billionaire and donor.
The World Health Organization, the WHO, founded and financed by several countries after the Second World War, now receives more than 80 percent of its money from donors. The largest donor is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, founded by IT billionaire Bill Gates, the richest foundation in the world, with assets of almost 50 billion dollars.
Gates Foundation has been very active for two decades when it comes to promoting the interests of its founder. In 2000, it founded the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, GAVI. In 2012 it co-founded and co-financed the Better Than Cash Alliance for the worldwide abolition of cash and distributes millions to media companies every year in order to ensure benevolent reporting.
By far the politically most important foundation is likely to be the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum under the direction of the German Professor Klaus Schwab. The WEF has not only gathered and networked the rich and powerful of the world every year for half a century, it has also trained the international political and corporate elite since the early 1990s.
On the political side these include Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Tony Blair, Emmanuel Macron, Annalena Baerbock, and Cem Özdemir. On the corporate side among others, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, and Jack Ma.
So it’s no wonder that the man who founded the WEF and brought all these people together even wrote the script for the current world crisis with his work, Covid-1919: The Great Reset.
All of this information is just individual pieces of the mosaic but they show how the Digital-Financial Complex was able to either hijack an increasingly dense spider web of organizations over four decades or even develop it itself and thus exert influence by a wide variety of channels and to move things globally in the direction it wanted.
The Deep State is a Thing Of The Past
The concept of the deep state, by which one understands the entirety of powerful, non-democratically legitimized organizations that pull the strings in the background within a country is thus a thing of the past.
The Digital-Financial Complex has given us a new global power that has long since incorporated the deep state of all nations on earth and which now exercises much more influence than any individual deep state could ever have been able to do.
And yet the Digital-Financial Complex is facing an insoluble problem in our time. Its rise is accompanied by a process of concentration of money and power in fewer and fewer hands which forces it to act more and more authoritarian and dictatorial and therefore, how we have just experienced in the past two years, with every further step, inevitably brings it into ever sharper contradiction to the mass of the population. And that is exactly what will ultimately be its undoing.
The time is ripe for a democratic system of money and governance.