The following article discusses the interconnections among the most powerful movers and shakers in the world, some of whom are well-known to everyone, while others are more shadowy. When I look at the net wealth of the richest people, a back-of-the-envelope calculation informs me that I could live comfortably for the rest of my life (even if I live to be 100) on one thousandth of one percent of their net worth. And those are just the individuals — the corporations and organizations control an unfathomably huge portion of the world’s resources, with a small oligarchy acting to manage the assets.

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from Apolut.net:

The Wolff of Wall Street SPECIAL: Deep State and Digital Financial Complex

It is the end of December 2021, and we are in an economic and social transition period of historic dimensions. For nearly 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 approximately 200 current 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, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, formerly Facebook, and on the financial side the largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard.

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 Third 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 that, 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 today. 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, 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 most important strategic role is played by the central banks, which officially gave up their independence at the latest during the world financial crisis of 2007-2008. Since then, BlackRock has been advising the two largest central banks in the world, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the American Federal Reserve. So Blackrock has a decisive say when it comes to distributing the huge sums of newly created money in the financial sector.

From the central banks’ point of view, there is no other way of doing this. BlackRock, together with its main shareholder Vanguard, manage almost $17 trillion, which roughly corresponds to the sum of the balance sheets of the ECB and the Fed, and with 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 Greece in 2015: 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 leadership collapsed and achieved exactly the opposite of what it had promised the people in the election campaign.

The interplay between the central banks is orchestrated by the Bank for International Settlements BIS in Basel, Switzerland, which has a total of 63 central banks among its members.

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 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 the IT billionaire Michael Bloomberg has donated more than $3.5 billion to date. Harvard University’s medical school is named TH Chan School of Medicine in honor of a Hong Kong billionaire and donor.

The World Health Organization (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 the IT billionaire Bill Gates, the richest foundation in the world with assets of almost $50 billion.

Gates’ foundation has been very active for two decades in advancing the interests of its founder. In 2000 they founded the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), in 2012 they co-founded and co-financed the Better Than Cash Alliance for the worldwide abolition of cash, and they distribute 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, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair, Emmanuel Macron, Annalena Baerbock and Cem Özdemir, on the corporate side, among others, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Balmer 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-19 — The Great Reset”.

All of this information is just individual pieces of the mosaic, but it shows 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 via a wide variety of channels and move things globally in the direction it wants.

The concept of a 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 states of all the nations of the world, and which now exercises far more influence than any single deep state would 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 — as we have just experienced in the past two years — every further step inevitably brings it into ever sharper opposition to the mass of the population.

And that is exactly what will ultimately be its undoing.