The affair involving Robert Habeck’s best man and former head of the Agora Think Tank, Patrick Graichen, the state funding of the “united4Rescue” search and rescue organization, whose leader is revealed to be the life partner of Bundestag Vice President Katrin Göring-Eckard, the Open Society Foundation’s continued support for 13 organizations classified as terrorist by Israel even after October 7, 2023 – reports of problematic entanglements of non-profit organizations are accumulating.
NGOs and think tanks attempt to influence the democratically legitimized parliamentary political process in favor of their represented interests, acting as lobbyists for their own cause, so to speak. They derive the right to have a say primarily from the support they receive, especially in terms of contributions received. However, the majority of these incoming funds come from state and philanthropic sources. Since NGOs do not bite the hand that feeds them, their positions primarily align with those of their funders. Consequently, they often do not represent the interests of a significant portion of the democratic society but those of the political class.
In other words, government agencies pay NGOs with taxpayers’ money to provide them with argumentative support as supposedly independent third parties. In such a system, there is no need to wonder about nepotism and biased assessments.
The Mercator Foundation from Essen is particularly active in this area. With the Agora Think Tanks (Energy Transition, Transport Transition), the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and the Clean Energy Wire-operated website klimafakten.de for the dissemination of false information, they support NGOs that all engage in politically aligned preliminary work. Shady actors in this context include Patrick Graichen (Agora), Ottmar Edenhofer (MCC, PIK), Stefan Rahmstorf (PIK), or Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (PIK, Merkel Advisor).
The Mercator Foundation hypocritically claims to want to strengthen democracy. According to their own information, in 2022, they funded over 1,000 projects from approximately 600 NGOs with a total volume of over 67 million EUR. They receive their funds from the affiliated Meridian Foundation based in Zurich. It is clear that the funding volume is not generated from capital gains from the initial capital of 58 million EUR but comes from external contributions. The Meridian/Mercator Foundation complex remains silent on who exactly contributes the additional funds of around 80 million EUR (including administrative costs). There is no legal obligation for charitable foundations to disclose the sources of their funding.
Given the volume of undisclosed contributions, it can be assumed that the donors are philanthropic foundations. These are organizations that generate their funding exclusively through tax-free investment of their endowments in financial markets.
Estimates suggest that the funding volume of the 20 largest philanthropic foundations, primarily located in the USA and the UK, is approximately 25-30 billion USD. The largest among them is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), with other examples including the Oak Foundation (OAK) and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).
Behind these foundations are the wealthiest individuals in the world. They have become rich through globally operating corporations and advocate for open borders, free flows of capital and goods, and global labor markets. While this may sound pleasant at first, it is essentially a neo-capitalist desire to eliminate all forms of regulation.
An example of how philanthropic foundations promote their own interests, which do not necessarily align with their public statements, is the financial support of the WHO. This UN-affiliated organization is currently attempting to gain extensive powers over around 170 member states and national parliaments through the so-called Pandemic Accord. Previously, the WHO had only played an advisory role toward its members. By signing the new Pandemic Accord, states would commit to implementing all of the WHO’s guidelines regarding vaccines and strategies, hospital resources, measures for contact restriction, and lockdowns during a pandemic.
It is already concerning that a democratically unlegitimized organization might receive such powers. What is even more alarming is the fact that the WHO has been financially supported by the BMGF for years. In fact, the BMGF is the second-largest contributor to the WHO after the United States. In light of this financial dependency, national competencies could just as easily be transferred to the BMGF. In other words, to a private foundation known for its pronounced focus on pharmaceuticals and transhumanism?
This is the same foundation that advocated for widespread and mandatory vaccinations during the pandemic and, at the same time, was the largest single investor in BioNTech from 2019 to 2021 (multiplying an initial investment of 18 million EUR to 400 million EUR within two years). The foundation that supports tests of unapproved injectable contraceptives in developing countries and has recently come under scrutiny for the large-scale release of genetically modified mosquitoes.
In any case, overarching philanthropic goals, such as the example of the BMGF gaining power over the WHO, require a broad, transnational consensus among the affected political decision-makers as a prerequisite. For this reason, philanthropic foundations allocate the majority of their budgets to support a variety of smaller NGOs. These organizations act as lobbying groups and influence political opinion formation at various government levels through their projects. Simultaneously, they help pave the way for overarching goals.
In an alliance between philanthropic globalists and governments, wealthy and politically influential do-gooders team up with left-leaning do-gooders, both of whom want to take control of the planet’s fate. However, they operate from different motivations: some want to make a profit, while others want to feel good.
Strangely enough, the business interests of one group align well with the ideological motives of the other. Actually, this complementarity might only appear strange if one understands socialism as the creation of wealth through expropriation and redistribution of capital. Is socialism, at least as empirically observed, not more of an approach to centralize and control wealth among a few elites? Then socialism would not be the uprising of the proletariat but rather a transformation driven by economic elites. As writer Michael Klonowsky put it: socialism becomes a parasite on capitalism.
In reality, the assumption that liberalism and socialism are always antagonistic is open to discussion. In today’s political landscape, the differences are hardly discernible. Perhaps the newfound proximity between the two ideologies is due to the fact that they ultimately share the same materialistic worldview of the world and humanity. In that case, it is not surprising that they can merge despite superficial contradictions and find a point of balance where they become one.
This combination of the forces of capitalism and socialism creates a societal order that closely resembles the “billionaire socialism” predicted by Oswald Spengler in many aspects. A central element is the elimination of the middle class. What remains, as described by philosopher and historian David Engels, is, on one side (liberal), an unimaginably rich elite that controls governments and media through its financial resources and systemic relevance. On the other side (socialist), there is a impoverished and disenfranchised population kept content through bread and circuses, political indoctrination, ethnic-cultural fragmentation, and, not least, through fear of terrorism or pandemics, which diminishes their sense of solidarity and resistance.
The elites can carry out their businesses more freely and without ethical standards other than the pursuit of success. They view the political state as their agent, which they can instruct in all matters, from legislation to warfare, as they please.
Towards the public, the elites present themselves as benevolent and caring, one might even say philanthropic, or better yet, “woke.” They know that their philanthropic donations will ultimately increase their wealth. At the same time, they hope that the billions spent for (supposedly) good purposes will make people forget how they earned the money in the first place. Above all, they are immune to anti-capitalist criticisms when dressed in the garb of moral superiority.
In November 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF), itself a foundation and NGO, published an ideological future scenario for a better world that far surpasses the Orwellian dystopian potential of the aforementioned societal order. The WEF describes the ideal society of 2030 as one in which private property is abolished, goods and services are distributed in a sharing economy, and citizens are under constant surveillance.
The consistent development of this future scenario led to the WEF’s “Great Reset” initiative launched in June 2020. Just a few months later, in July 2020—only four months after the pandemic began—Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret published the book “Covid-19: The Great Reset,” detailing the desired future societal order. The publicly available documents on the WEF’s website describe “Global Governance” as a strategic goal. This concept implies a form of rule by elites that goes beyond the democratic authority of nation-states to advance globalization, with the hypocritical argument that only “Global Governance” can solve global problems like climate change, racism, war, social injustice, and so on. However, it does not openly acknowledge that achieving “Global Governance” entails gradually disempowering national parliaments and dissolving national cultures.
The stated intentions for implementing a fundamental economic and socio-political transformation can only be understood as a draft of a new post-democratic world order led by an empowered and opaque group.
Among the implementation measures, the WEF’s Global Young Leaders Program plays a crucial role. The program aims to promote and connect the global elite of the future, or as Klaus Schwab puts it, “We penetrate the cabinets.” Among its 1,400 members are names like Angela Merkel, Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, Annalena Baerbrock, or Vladimir Putin. This is another way to influence politics. Incidentally, the Global Young Leaders Program is also an NGO.
A closer examination of the topic and the above analysis inevitably raise the question of whether the world is already on the path to the new societal order. What do you think, are we truly on our way to the “Great Reset”?”