Virgil — The Great Reset Updated: The NGFS Has a Plan for You

Here’s a December 15 headline in the New York Times that should not have been lost in the holiday whirl, nor in the general hubbub of news since: “Fed Joins Climate Network, to Applause From the Left.”

As the article details, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the nation’s central bank, has officially joined the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). That’s “Greening,” as in “environmentalism,” “Greta Thunberg,” “Green New Deal,” and all that. And as the Times makes clear in its headline, the left is loving it. 

NGFS is an organization that few Americans have heard of, and yet it’s potentially one of the most powerful entities on the planet: Its roster of members and observers is nearly 100, including such mighties as the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. And now, the U.S. Federal Reserve. So we can see that just about all the money in the world passes through its institutions. That’s power. 

It’s interesting to note that in the past, the left has been mostly hostile to big financial institutions, seeing them as pillars of Capital. And yet nowadays, the left—at least its huge green faction—is cheering for the financiers. 

Why this turnabout? Because NGFS is an an institution that the green left can control, and thus guide, in its pursuit of “sustainability”—that being the favored buzzword of the ecologically woke. As NGFS says of itself, its mission is to “contribute to the development of environment and climate risk management in the financial sector to mobilize mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy.”

So now we’re starting to get the picture: NGFS is the global fusion of Big Green and Big Money, also known as Woke Capital.  

And yes, it’s that same Woke Capital that’s been leading the push for “The Great Reset”—the wholesale remaking of national and international societies and economies, all in accordance with the politically correct vision of Klaus Schwab and his plutocratic pals at the World Economic Forum—which Virgil, and many others here at Breitbart News, have heartily critiqued. 

In the meantime, conservatives, populists, and sovereigntists—those who believe that the U.S. should retain sovereignty over its own affairs—have been viewing these developments with alarm. Indeed, it’s been pressure from the right that kept the Fed from joining NGFS much earlier. As the Times explains, the Fed’s formal membership in NGFS “is something that Democratic lawmakers have been pushing for and that Republicans have eyed warily.”  

And yet now that Joe Biden is in the White House, pledged to the green agenda, the Fed will feel all the more emboldened to do exactly as the New York Times wishes. 

Fortunately, alert Republicans are on watch: The watch-leader is Rep. Andy Barr of Kentucky, who told the Times of his fears that the Fed and NGFS would crimp, even cripple, American business through the “backdoor” of financial regulation. “I’m going to be raising this issue much more vociferously,” Barr said, adding, “I think my colleagues will as well.”  

Indeed, Barr helped organize a joint letter of protest, in which a total of 47 House Republicans wrote to Fed chairman Jerome Powell on December 9, warning against “politically motivated and public relations-focused decisions to limit credit availability to [politically disfavored] industries.” 

(Of course, since their loss in 2018, House Republicans are now in the minority; if the majority House Democrats all stick together, House Republicans can be mostly ignored. And that’s a hard reminder, to those who see themselves as being above voting: Elections, including the ’18 midterms that cost the GOP its majority, do, in fact, have big consequences.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. Fed has the power to choke off bank financing for any business, or even for a whole industry; that is, if the Fed declares something to be a “systemic credit risk,” lenders will shy away, lest they be labeled as violating their fiduciary responsibilities.  

In this fashion, the Fed could build a blockade against industries despised by the greens, including oil and natural gas, mining, and manufacturing.  As Barr and his allies wrote in their letter, “The enormous power of the Fed should not be weaponized to discriminate against a wide swath of American industry.” 

Of course, such discrimination is exactly what NGFS—now including the Fed—has in mind: to use the power of discriminatory finance to force industries, companies, and people to go green. Either that, or cease to exist altogether.

Virgil should note that NGFS has plenty of friends in high places, including in the private sector, all eager to help in this mandatory greening. One such friend is Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the Manhattan-based financial colossus—assets under management: $7.8 trillion—that has, for years, been pushing a top-down liberal green agenda. Under a December 17 headline, “Larry Fink’s BlackRock Doubles Down on Woke Capitalism,” Breitbart News’s John Carney reported on Fink’s latest letter to investors, which declares, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects … awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

We can see immediately that Fink’s “Fundamental Reshape” is little different from a “Great Reset.” Indeed, BlackRock’s $7.4 trillion represents about a fifth of the value of the U.S. stock market, and so its power to force investment decisions is without question. Moreover, BlackRock is being joined in its green power-playing by the likes of Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and all the rest of the top banks and investment houses—not to mention super-financiers led by George Soros—and so just about anything is possible. 

Thus it’s likely that we’ll see the impact of this Woke Capital SWAT team in the years to come, as NGFS, plus the World Economic Forum—plus BlackRock and all the other Wokesters running billion-, even trillion-dollar outfits—put the green hammer down on politically incorrect sectors.

All this is bad news for, most immediately, American coal. As an aside, we might note that, yes, it’s a bit strange that China is still building new coal plants, while global greens look the other way; greens prefer, instead, to focus on un-employing the last West Virginia coal miner, while accepting China’s promise to fix everything by 2060. Yes, that’s the scenario that China puts forward: Let us do whatever we want now, and four decades in the future, everything will be fine. And the greens are eating it up.

The Hidden Green Hand 

We Americans might ask ourselves: How did we get here? How did we get to the point that control of our lives belongs to institutions—the Fed, NGFS, BlackRock, etc.—that few citizens know about, and that none ever voted for? And how, even if we are properly informed, could we reclaim power over our own destiny?  

Yes, those are interesting questions—which Joe Biden has never had to answer.  

During his campaign, Biden was happy to keep quiet about matters of Woke Capital, because even Democrats know that it’s never a popular-vote getter to say that you’re looking forward to turning over control of the American economy to a shadowy foreign body such as NGFS. 

To be sure, Biden has been happy to talk, in suitably vague terms, about his plans for greening the economy, and yet the message was always that Americans would do this, because it was good for America and for the world.  Meanwhile, the lurking reality—that the world would be dictating to America, without much regard for American jobs or prosperity—was never in Biden’s vocabulary. 

Indeed, Biden was able to “stealth” the green’s true agenda, and now, in the first days of the 46th presidency, here we are: The Fed is in NGFS, and so Fed chair Powell will soon be working with the world’s central banks, joined by Fink of BlackRock, et al., to chart out our future. Who elected them? Nobody, of course—and yet the Biden administration will be happy to give the unelected globalists the whip. In the meantime, a look at NGFS’s Twitter feed these past few weeks shows that it has been busy working with central banks and companies around the world to assure “green sustainability” in all economic activities. In fact, BlackRock has managed to insinuate two of its executives into senior economic jobs in the Biden administration, one running the White House National Economic Council, and the other moving in as deputy secretary of the Treasury Department.

So what comes next? What will happen in 2021? An early straw in the wind came on January 16, when Breitbart News reported that global greens associated with the United Nations Environmental Programme say that the price of the U.S. reentering the Paris Climate Framework (the one negotiated by Barack Obama in 2015, and from which Donald Trump withdrew in 2017) will be $50 billion a year, minimum, and perhaps as much as $500 billion a year. If so, that will be an example of the sort of payments that Uncle Sam is making, even as the Biden administration says, “Hey, don’t look at us—it’s the U.N.!”

Furthermore, we can assume that American coal mines will be goners, as the Fed joins, most obviously, with the Biden Environmental Protection Agency to shut them all down. Then the next target will likely be the oil and gas companies, starting with the biggest, Exxon. The greens can’t shut Exxon and Big Oil and Gas down right away, of course, lest the economy come to a literal standstill. (And Republican strength in the 2020 elections convinced Democrats that they have to be careful.)

Instead, the Democrats will stand by as the Fed and NGFS begin a slow squeeze, screwing down on the energy companies’ access to credit and capital—which will in turn hurt their ability to finance their operations and depress their stock prices, thereby leaving them even more vulnerable to financial pressures. The key, as far as NGFS and its allies are concerned, is to be indirect, so as not to rile up the Deplorables if they can help it. As globalist Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group, wrote on January 4, “Policy will have to come through executive action, given resolute Republican opposition in Congress, but there is still much the administration can do, from new methane pollution rules to fuel efficiency standards and the integration of climate considerations into financial regulation.” Thus we can see: Bremmer and his allies want to put as little as possible before actual voters, preferring hidden-hand rulemaking by distant bureaucracies.

Following this sneaky playbook, the Fed will simply declare that Exxon and the others are credit risks, and that ruling will keep the banks away, lest they be accused of violating their fiduciary duties—a serious legal charge in the finance world. And if the banks shrink away, the capital markets, too, will back off.  

As a result, gasoline could get a bit scarce, and maybe the price of a gallon will go up a dollar or two. Consumers at the pump will become angry, of course, but will they figure out the cause? Perhaps not: Perhaps they’ll blame “Big Oil,” or “middlemen,” or “OPEC.” In other words, it’s possible that consumers will fail to figure out the true reason for the shortages and price increases.

Of course, some figures, such as Kentucky’s Andy Barr, can be counted on to point out the true cause of the coming gas crisis—and yet will smart voices be heard above the din of demagoguery? Can we count on the Main Stream Media to explain the facts and the causes of the problem?  

But okay, let’s suppose that the three-way choking of Exxon—as the hands of the Fed, NGFS, and BlackRock wrap around the company’s throat—were to become a salient political issue. What then? 

It’s a safe bet that the Biden administration would say that there’s nothing it can do. Bidenites will say that the “free market,” informed, of course, by dire environmental reality, is simply passing a harsh verdict on Exxon. That is, world capitalism has decided that oil is so dangerous and catastrophic that it must be shunned. Whereupon all the titans of finance would say, “The president is correct, Exxon is a bad investment!” (And yes, there’ll be lots of winks all around, as the top players hope that the masses never wise up to their green game-playing.) 

Such a shape-shifting stance, of course, would save Democratic lawmakers in Congress the trouble—and the risk—of taking responsibility for any of these changes, to say nothing of actually voting for them. That is, the Democrats will be able to say, “Don’t look at us! We didn’t vote for any of this! These decisions are being made by international organizations, and international law, way above our pay grade!”  

Yes, politicians in a potentially dicey situation—irate voters! pitch forks!—are always happy to pass the buck to someone else. The more nameless and faceless, the better. And NGFS fits that description to a tee. 

Under such a scenario, would the Republican opposition be able to explain a path forward? A path that would save the American economy from being greened into a palsy? Or a coma? Would Republicans—perhaps joined by a few Democrats, such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin—be able to articulate a way to get the Fed out of NGFS, out of the Paris Climate Agreement (that being the carbon-reduction deal that Barack Obama put us in, that Donald Trump took us out of, and that Biden plans to put us back into), and out of whatever other obscure regulatory restrictions, national and international, that the Biden administration has imposed?  

We’ve learned that once the U.S. enters into an international agreement, it’s hard to exit; heck, the U.S. can’t even get out of Afghanistan. 

Back to NGFS: The U.S. is now in. Do Americans understand what that entry will mean for their future? And if they ever were to gain understanding, could the U.S. ever find the will, or the way, to extricate itself from NGFS? Or will the green financiers keep this country in their grip forever?  

As of now, we don’t know the answers. All we know is that the struggle to maintain American sovereignty now has a new flashpoint: NGFS.