Population Health, Human Capital Bonds, and Black America
The following document was prepared as a briefing paper for a group working in the population health arena. The intention was to revisit the breadth of my research with a specific focus placed on what it means for Black America. A similar document could have been written for the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. This material is currently under review pending future distribution in a more digestible format. I am long form, always. Since this document was referenced in a panel discussion I recently participated in and was distributed to a wider audience, I feel comfortable sharing it with you here. Please know that this is a work in progress.
Briefing Document:
We find ourselves in this season of the shortest days and longest nights. Yet in these long nights we are graced with guiding stars and hands to hold in the darkness. I have heavy information to share here. But first I want you to know that we were made for these times.
On a knife’s edge, teetering between sacred and profane, I know in my heart that through fortitude and moral courage humanity will prevail. Black America has lived for generations under this nation’s broken social contract. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution pushing to make natural humans obsolete, many more are awakening to the lived experience of Black and Brown America. This nation grew its power on broken treaties and stolen bodies. Now is a moment of profound reckoning to face off against the threat of artificial intelligence stealing the rights of ALL sovereign beings.
Who better to lead the world towards healing and justice than Black and Brown people? Consider WEB DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction,” the general strike, the power of Black bodies to throw a wrench in the gears of anti-life machines. What does that look in this new arena – the World Economic Forum’s Internet of Bodies? In a future run for billionaires by robots, the rich won’t want the labor of the masses after we’ve created the digital prison and trained our mechanized replacements. Instead, they will demand total compliance as debt instruments navigating their technocratic control grid.
My friends that is NOT our destiny. In the spirit of Marimba Ani, our task is to keep the circle unbroken as the disaster of the Great Reset unfolds. Black America must stand in its full power and recognize the true nature, the magnitude, of this struggle. That struggle is against digital chattel slavery tied to global financial markets, the Internet of Bodies, human capital bonds, and smart cities running on layered digital contractual agreements.
In the decade following the global crash of the housing market, which in no small part laid the foundation for what is rolling out now, investors, academics, and non-profits developed pilots testing outcomes-based government contracts that would enable private interests to invest in social service delivery. This idea goes back at least to the mid 1990s with social entrepreneur Steve Rothschild and economist Arthur Rolnick of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.
Advances in digital identity, e-wallets, automated data-capture; Ethereum smart contracts, artificial intelligence, behavioral analytics, machine vision, and bipartisan support for “evidence-based” results are allowing new markets in human capital finance to finally come online at scale. The Davos crowd calls it stakeholder capitalism, and it is aligned to New America’s Bretton Woods II impact investing agenda. What it aims to do is pull the global “un-banked” into the marketplace – not as independent economic actors (homo economicus), but rather as commodities, livestock to be managed by emerging Fourth Sector Benefit Corporations.
There will be an alignment with communities of faith, as they will be tasked with processing the stakeholder capitalists’ “assets” with approved digital “solutions” on dashboards. This is consistent with the Vatican’s foray into “inclusive capitalism,” and builds on three social impact investing conferences co-hosted with the University of Notre Dame’s Business School.
You see history isn’t past; it is very present. What the Black community is facing – the plan to feed the poor into AI algorithms to profit those who are hoarding immense wealth – must be understood as a direct extension of the Doctrine of Discovery. Dr. Justin Leroy speaks eloquently to this in a 2017 lecture given at the Whitney Museum of Art for an exhibit on debt that examined social impact bonds, “Race, Finance, and the Afterlife of Slavery.” That papal bull asserted Black and Brown bodies, non-Christians, and their lands were to be viewed as assets and could thus be claimed by “enlightened” white colonists.
The same dynamic is in play with blockchain identity. Rather than double entry book keeping, which under-pinned maritime trade in stolen bodies, the world is shifting to decentralized cryptographic ledgers. It’s the same depravity, but in a shiny, new wrapper. Keep your eye on London. Vinay Gupta says blockchain law will be based in maritime law. We are entering a world structured by unseen digital contracts designed to advantage financiers. What will the jurisdictions be for lives forced into the cloud? What are the rights of digital twins? How does one hold a Decentralized Autonomous Organization accountable to the rule of law? There are so many questions that remain unanswered. These are the things Davos hopes will stay hidden until their plan is locked firmly in place.
Examples of blockchain ID social impact projects include the Amply blockchain identity app for toddlers attending daycare in Cape Town; blockchain babies in Tanzania where compliance with pre-natal appointments can be tracked for “impact;” DAPP blockchain software that uses machine vision and videos to trigger tokenized payments after documentation of proper parenting in poor households is uploaded; and the blockchain birth certificate program the state of Illinois launched with Evernym.
What I am laying out here might sound like science fiction, but it’s not. These efforts are backed by the United Nations in coordination with World Bank’s Human Capital Project. The World Bank has developed “smart” social impact bonds on blockchain, call bond-i. Many of these technologies, including retinal scan payments and digital currency have been developed using refugee communities through development aid channels. All the pieces were there waiting for the right catalyst. That catalyst is Covid. We must recognize this “totalitarian” software-as-a-service is now in play and could end up anywhere in the world in an instant – wherever there is money to be made.
To the tender ministrations of Ronald Cohen’s Social Finance; George Overholser’s Third Sector Capital Partners; Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab; Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society; New Profit’s impact investing arm America Forward; the human capital innovators at ReadyNation and Council For A Strong America; add seed money from the Social Innovation Fund and the Social Impact Partnerships Pay For Result Act. Take that combination and pour it into the nation’s 8,700+ “Opportunity Zones,” where thanks to the decimation of the global economy the world’s largest asset holders are able to scoop up property and business in low income neighborhoods at rock bottom prices, and if they hold them for a decade they never have to pay capital gains taxes. Almost as if it had been planned.
No provisions are in place to protect local communities. Black families, who could be forced out by displacement or managed as impact commodities will have no protection under the law. Those who remain will likely become fodder for social entrepreneur wrap around services. Such programs have been perfected over thirty years in the Harlem Children’s Zone by Geoffrey Canada and George Soros’s former fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller with financial support from Paul Tudor Jones, hedge fund billionaire who got his start trading cotton futures and founded the Robin Hood Foundation. His foundation underwrote an entire book of equations linking social investments to economic rates of return. Feel free to browse all 168 pages published here. None of this is about eliminating poverty, but rather refining ways of growing it steadily and managing it profitably.
These arrangements, which have been set up as social impact bonds and pay for success deals, are designed to be data-driven. It is the “impact metrics” that enable the world’s richest to profit off misery. The general idea is that social problems are assigned a cost, which creates an offset that is used to fund “evidence-based” “solutions.” The prison industrial complex, built to brutally extract profit from the Black bodies that were excessed by the previous phase of globalization, is one of the largest cost-offsets. But chronic illnesses like asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and lead poisoning are big ones, too. The premise is that if you “fix” a poor person before they become incarcerated, diabetic, underemployed, or mentally-ill, you reduce the cost to tax-payers, and the investor can take a slice of the cost differential as a return on investment. Philanthropists, acting on behalf of finance and technology interests, fund academics at elite institutions to formulate “human capital” equations that justify this predatory enterprise.
Examples include:
- Early Childhood Education and Home Visits – Heckman Equation, James Heckman, University of Chicago
- Social Emotional Learning ROI – Clive Belfield, Teachers College Columbia University
- Mental Health and Labour Economics – Richard Layard, Centre for Economic Performance London School of Economics
On the basis of such equations global investors are financing data-driven “solutions” for social problems with the understanding that they will continue to make money on poverty, misery and trauma as long as it remains well managed. In addition the people being run through such systems are turned into commodities for mining, not for their well-being, but to remake them as interoperable data on dashboards for investment portfolios. This is where we have landed. If we don’t resist now, our fate will be sealed. Life reduced to metrics stored by the National Interoperability Collaborative by Stewards of Change for artificial intelligence predictive profiling.
The World Economic Forum makes it very clear that through artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 6G, and synthetic biology the global elite intend to reengineer humanity to their own twisted ends. They envision an exclusive resort world meant for the rich and their robots. The masses, useless eaters, shall be disposed of, but profitably through creative debt structuring. The next “big short” won’t be toxic bundled mortgages, but rather human capital futures comprised of poor toddlers, returning citizens, the disabled and the elderly.
Society is staring down high-tech eugenics, and it is being sold to Black America as disruptive innovation. The chains meant to bind families into this new economic system as tradable data commodities are biometric health passports. The Commons Project, a partnership of the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF), intends to control the masses using real-time health data that will dictate rights to access work, education, and employment. Digital vaccination records will, in effect, become slave passes. One of the architects of the system, JP Pollak, is based at Cornell-Tech with another Commons Project board member and Internet of Things pioneer Deborah Estrin. I doubt many people realize that our future mobility options are being plotted in swank LEED certified buildings in the middle of the East River.
Having waged military and economic warfare against the peoples of the world, having looted the earth’s resources and saddled the poor with insurmountable debt, imperial interests are closing in on the final frontier, taking over our bodies cell by cell with mRNA “therapeutics.” Those who won’t submit to joining this population level bioengineering program may soon find themselves locked out of a normal life.
For centuries the Black community has resisted an unrelenting colonial project. Now we are faced with the “software of life,” settler-colonialism in single-use bar-coded syringes. Colonization shrunk to the cellular level. We must face the very real prospect of a cyborg future where natural humans are wiped from the face of the earth.
We have no choice other than to do everything in our power to derail such plans. We will stand not only against the merger of man with machine, but against the privatization of public benefit systems as pay for success investment opportunities. Attempts to defund the police and reform the judicial system will be for nothing unless we see that the end game is to turn the entire world into a digital jail run on blockchain from space using satellites and 5G. They want to track the “useless eaters” like livestock, and monitor us in the panopticon of smart cities using phones with vaccination passports (slave passes) and eventually wearable and implantable (chip) technologies.
When James Bullard, the CEO of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, called for testing every person every day this spring, you have to wonder if he was thinking about Graphene biosensors that transmit health data in real time to smart sensing environments. In this brave new world of pandemic preparedness, health security finance, vaccine bonds, and Goldman Sachs’ lockdown indices, the central banks intend to lay claim to bodies and minds.
They’ve been priming the children already, awarding skills points and badges for excellence in STEM and cyber-security (GCHQ) and robotics (Lego). They earn good behavior scrip while consuming “personalized” AI curricula funded by defense contractors. UNICEF is backing “innovative” educational software where children wouldn’t even have to know how to read – they would code using gestures in virtual reality headsets with haptic controllers. Look at the branding of Nubian VR that UNICEF is rolling out in Kenya. These African children are literally having their god given senses stolen from them and are being turned into batteries to power the hive mind of a completely militarized and dying planet. Deprived of history, humanities, art, music, sports, free play, and nature, the next generation will know no life outside of Google’s box.
In the coming years, the billionaires intend to force the masses, who’ve been pushed out of their previous jobs by the lockdowns, to code this biosecurity state into reality. The plan is for re-skilling for Fourth Industrial Revolution industries be done through Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) in which people sign contracts to have their future wages garnished to pay back “investors” in their training. In 2018, David Cooper of Purdue Research Foundation, participated in a panel on ISAs at the annual Arizona State University – Global Silicon Valley conference. He was very clear that they anticipated the opening of a very large equity market in securitized debt for higher education (now post-Covid re-training, framed as lifelong learning). The platform to securitize the debt is Edly. Edly was co-founded by Christopher Ricciardi, the grandfather of Collateralized Debt Obligations. As you may remember it was CDOs that played a major role crashing the global economy the last time around. Once again history is not in the past, it is very much present. Each time to poor get played by the powerful.
Governor Jack Murphy, former Goldman Sachs executive, is rolling out an ISA program now in New Jersey in the form of Career Impact Bonds. This effort pairs nicely with United Way’s ALICE (Assets Limited Income Constrained Employed – the working poor) campaign, which originated out of their Northern New Jersey office. There is considerable overlap between the United Way and the Federal Reserve branches on the topic of fin-clusion (financial inclusion). In fact James Bullard, the test-every person-every day guy, was former board chair of United Way USA while serving as CEO of the St. Louis Federal Reserve branch. I don’t suppose it’s any coincidence that two hedge fund billionaires, John Overdeck and David Siegel who have heavily subsidized ed-tech software and workforce-aligned education programs through their foundations, live in that part of the state, too.
The global reskilling will be done under the banner of a Green New Deal, a faux-rebellion staged to profit corporate masters using the best behavioral engineering money can buy. It will involve deployment of massive embedded sensor networks that will transmit information and create a layered, digital, “mixed-reality.” Given how racialized the training data is, it is frightening to imagine what is will be like to navigate this “new” terrain built on a foundation of redlining, environmental racism, state violence, and deprivation.
The human capital commodities markets run on data. For this reason we must agree to push education, medicine, therapy and other services into the cloud, so data analysts can gather the metrics in service of “pay for success.” We are supposed to ignore the fact that children in Congo are mining the cobalt for the devices and that the energy and water requirements needed to run server farms are unsustainable. We are supposed to overlook the e-waste. We are not meant to know that while our children are being put into artificial intelligence feedback loops (sold as “personalized learning”) on HP laptops, another division of the company is running biometric border control in Palestine. They don’t want us to make those connections, that this machine that is “learning” our children in intimate detail, is fabricated by a company that will likely running future geo-fencing and facial recognition operations for the biosecurity state.
Picture life as a Pokémon-Go experience. Niantic and the Knight Foundation describe this as augmented cities. Now imagine a virtual fence, the kind you might use for a pet, adjusted in real time from a phone. To this mix add digital welfare benefits that are conditional and activated only upon demonstrated completion of assigned “self-improvement” tasks. Throw in low-cost mobile devices for digital wallets, stick QR codes in key locations, add drones and robot police dogs, slave patrols remade for mega-city asymmetrical warfare. In Australia they are already pitching the idea of “walk for the dole,” and they have remade their disability benefits as tokens on blockchain. They call it “programmable money.” Folks know it’s always been about playing the game, but this new game is going to have a lot less wriggle room after they make money “smart.”
This “social improvement” plan has been in the works for years, set up by the “Giving Pledge” signers, “The Good Club.” The billionaires know what’s best for you, and are going to “help” whether you like it or not. Once caught in their web of digital “social care” you’ll be expected to submit to operant conditioning and digital nudges. They’ll call it “social prescribing.” They’ll call it “cradle to career” pathways.” They’ll call it “continuum of care”. But really, it’s digital slavery, and they aim to harvest your life force, and that of your children, and send it to the cloud to be harvested by misers.
The billionaires are using Covid to attempt to sell this control system to Black America with soothing, progressive-sounding words like “equity,” “inclusion,” and “sustainability.” If this sounds like a stretch, I encourage you to read this Harvard Business Review op-ed from April that advocates Macro Eyes satellite surveillance of African children tied to vaccine compliance.
We know colonial powers have used Africa as a sacrificial zone of extraction and cheap labor for centuries. Well, the new extractive industry, according to former Alphabet / Google chairman Eric Schmidt, is data. Black bodies are being targeted as primary sites of extraction under the next phase of globalization, Globalization 4.0. Schmidt should know. His Alphabet spin-off CityBlock was set up three years ago to coordinate health-related wrap around services for urban populations. They pitch “healthy communities,” but their profit center must be understood within the larger framework of human capital finance tied to data profiling.
The plan is to turn social determinants of health into a weapon that will further oppress those most in need of housing, nutrition, employment, and education. They cover the big game (Sidewalk Labs, smart city infrastructure) and the small game (the NEST unit that controls your home environment). Eric Schmidt is working with Cuomo to “Reimagine New York,” including vaccine mandates. The “show me your papers” digital control mechanism works only as far as you can require continuous upgrades to that Gates Foundation-backed “software of life.”
All of this runs on health data, so Google’s involvement with Michael Bloomberg, ambassador to the WHO, impact investor and major proponent of ed-tech and social prescribing, in the development of the Cornell-Technion campus on Roosevelt Island is important. Their intent is to manage us through our digital dust linked to our actions within smart environments. All of that dust feeds signals intelligence informing hedge fund artificial intelligence that will be betting for us and against us in the near future.
The human capital bond market program is running through the central banking system and is closely tied to the adoption of digital wallets designed hold all sorts of tokenized assets including currencies, civil records, public benefits, and even rights and privileges. The state of Illinois, home of the commodities futures market in Chicago, has already been toying with this concept, imagining the many ways they could use innovative technologies to further control the poor.
A 2018 report to the Illinois Blockchain Task Force advanced the idea of programmable food assistance vouchers that would incentivize approved food purchases. Now combine that with the Imperial College of London’s spin off DNA nudge band, which supposedly aligns food items to your DNA, using samples gathered from Covid testing. Next combine food-tracking wearables with good behavior scrip, as is being used in the school-based Houston food pantry, and you see the trap being laid out piece by piece until the monstrous totality of it can be sprung on the Black community under the guise of keeping everyone “safe” and “healthy.”
The economic devastation wrought by the lockdowns will make many people wards of the state. Housing and food insecurity will put families at risk of being accused of neglect. A particular concern given that many of them are required to have surveillance devices on in their homes all day as a condition of their child “attending” school. Then, through a combination of welfare to work policies, public private partnerships, and predatory income sharing agreements like New Jersey’s Career Impact Bond program, they will reskill people as fodder for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The health passports are the gateway to creating digital civil registries that will eventually track public benefit access and indebtedness.
Reduced to collections of ones and zeros our individual and collective traumas will be run through algorithms and magically transformed into investment opportunities to be packaged as securities for human capital portfolios. These bonds will be aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and marketed as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) compliant.
Criminalized poverty will put families on pathways of compulsory self-improvement. E-carceration takes on a whole new meaning in this era of the Internet of Bodies that is being advanced by the WEF. CoreCivic and Geo Group have already been shifting resources into social work, continuum of care. Their guards will be replaced by growing cadres of social workers, therapists, educators, and health care providers, agents of a corporate state.
Lives reduced to impact metrics feeding “pay for success” finance deals, deals that allow pension funds to say their investments are “socially-responsible.” Very few realize that ESG investments aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are mostly about managing the poor as data. Goal 1 is poverty. Goal 2 is Hunger. Goal 3 is health. Goal 4 is education. No one stops to consider that creating profitable markets in poverty management is no way to solve poverty.
All of this is profoundly anti-life, the idea of using digital nudges coded into smart environments to shape our behaviors and compel us conform to a world whose rulers do not have our best interests at heart. Life is not a game for entertainment or profit. We have the right to say no, to revoke consent for ourselves and for future generations. We will not submit to e-government civil registries to be put on blockchain, a coffle for the twenty-first century. Our lives are not meant for social impact processing to remake us as compliant machines for industrially engineered society. That is not our destiny.
Take this stand for the children, the babies, and those yet unborn that they may remain grounded in the real world, not the digital one. With deep spirit refuse to accept the future being forced on the masses by a small group of sociopathic billionaires, a future that would have everyone predictively profiled as burdens on society so hedge funds can gamble our lives as futures commodities.
Dismantle the human capital bond markets plotted out in the aftermath of the last economic crash by the Federal Reserve, the United Way, pension funds, insurers, accounting firms, health management organizations, and banks. With a visceral understanding of the intergenerational trauma wrought by slavery and America’s broken social compact, it is Black America that shine a light on the puppet masters advancing this program. It is rolling out because the Davos crowd has the money to buy off everyone. Electoral politics, non-profit institutions, and communities of faith are all under their thumb.
It is time to wake up to the reality that social entrepreneurship is about mining poverty for profit within a police state that is increasingly being run by artificial intelligence with drone surveillance. The Global Impact Investment Network and the Impact Management Project are calling the shots – over two thousand of the world’s largest asset holders. Philanthropists like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Pierre Omidyar have created these destructive forms of innovative finance. It is called “Stakeholder Capitalism;” it operates out of Davos, and it intends to mine our lives to increase their wealth and power over the earth.
But we are David and in our hands we hold the pebbles that can take Goliath down. Think of Hercules, George Washington’s cook at the President’s House in Philadelphia, intentionally kept in slavery in a city of Free Blacks. He bided his time; he learned the ways of the machine; and then made his escape to freedom.
All of humanity, including the ancestors and the unborn are counting on us.
This is the moment.v