The first instalment of the 2021 Pritzker Forum on Global Cities, produced by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), was aired “virtually” via Zoom on March 18.
The appearance of “America’s doctor”—longtime medical bureaucrat Anthony Fauci—as the keynote speaker, represented the first-ever high-level connection between the U.S. federal government’s “Covid regime” and the “global cities” movement.
This globalization of cities is radically reorienting how different levels of government operate and relate to one another, while leveraging “Covid” for the purpose of empowering cities to operate in a transnational framework and make sweeping policy changes regardless of national policy direction.
The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett, one of three FT correspondents who, as usual, served as moderators for this most recent Forum on Global Cities—rather than impartially reporting on it—verbalized the essence of it when, during one of the forum’s panel discussions, she stated: “We’re living in a post-national world …”
The forum’s organizers and guests haven’t always been so explicit. The inaugural Forum on Global Cities took place in 2016 in the Chicago Art Institute’s auditorium, where this writer spent the day burning up notebooks while trying to grasp what “global cities” are and where this project is heading.
At that forum, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman noted in a speech that by 2050 or so, the expectation was that the vast majority of Americans would have migrated to large metropolitan areas. Several other participants spoke of sundry matters regarding global cities and most of what was said sounded tentative and largely academic.
There were reasonable suggestions for improving mass transit and helping marginalized people find better city employment, along with calls for creating more open spaces and adopting highly efficient “green” energy plans, expanding the “internet of things” etc.
While one might bicker about the details of such things, there wasn’t anything of ultra-grave concern at that time, other than the tendency of CCGA President Ivo Daadler (a former U.S. envoy to NATO), his fellow CCGA “fellows” and some of the esteemed guests to hint that the nation-state is an outmoded political entity. Still, much of it came across as armchair banter.
But by February 2018, Daalder attended a global cities confab at Chatham House, which is an ideological cousin of the infamous Council on Foreign Relations, founded 100 years ago in New York City.
By extension, the CCGA, formerly called the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, was founded in 1922 and is eyeing its own centennial. So, some heavy-hitters in the private policy-shaping network took part in that February 2018 forum in the UK—where the attending internationalists upped the ante by asking the question: “Should cities have their own foreign policy?”
Thus, the loose academic talk out of Chicago in 2016 had become significantly more explicit a little less than two years later. And by March of 2020, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared on CSPAN to promote his new book, revealingly entitled: “The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World.” How’s that for subtlety?
It’s important to note that “Mayor Rahm,” as the Windy City’s first-ever Jewish mayor, understandably received his fair share of accolades for that cultural achievement, mainly from high flyers in the social register. But he generally flunked in terms of popularity with the average Chicagoan. Having established himself early-on as the first unabashed globalist mayor of Chicago by hosting the 2012 NATO Summit there, Rahm was, and remains, a close friend of the CCGA—which hosted a bevy of speakers to address geo-political concerns while NATO officials were in town.
And while Chicagoans over time began to sense that Rahm’s worldview was a bit too lofty for him to be an effective leader in a city with chronic problems at the grassroots level, Rahm, just before he stepped down as mayor, visited a CCGA meeting for the unveiling of the “Resilient Chicago” plan, which was put together in tandem with the Rockefeller Foundation.
“Resilient Chicago is more than environmental policy, and more than climate change,” Mayor Rahm, who had served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff before his mayoral stint, cryptically told the CCGA’s audience at its Randolph Street conference center, while declining to clarify that the words “more than” represented an oblique reference to a new type of governance being developed to make Chicago a leading light in the global cities movement.
Notably, Mayor Rahm had already signed an Executive Order in Dec. 2017, coinciding with the first-ever meeting, in Chicago, of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, led by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In signing the order, Rahm re-committed unwitting Chicagoans to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, not only as pushback against President Trump for backing the U.S. out of that pact earlier in 2017—but also because, under the global-cities rubric, the nation-state itself is being constantly marginalized as participating mayors unconstitutionally act as international ambassadors and deal-brokers.
The grand deception is that, with the people within several nation states shunning full-bore world government amid occasional outbursts of nationalist-populist resistance, the institutional structures, personnel and ideology of global governance is being increasingly marshalled in through the back door, via cities, states and regions.
2020-2021 A Major Turning Point—Via ‘Covid’
The arrival of the “Covid-19 pandemic,” which in several key respects was eerily foretold at a New York pandemic-simulation exercise called Event 201 in October of 2019—sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johns-Hopkins, and the ubiquitous World Economic Forum—prompted the Forum on Global Cities, which by now had been underwritten by the ultra-wealthy Pritzker family of Chicago, to shift into “virtual” mode.
No longer would the Pritzker Forum on Global Cities be one big in-person event each June; instead, the CCGA divided the forum into shorter, more frequent presentations.
The first Zoom-based forum took place in October 2020. There, Daalder made it clear that while Covid-19, in his view, represented a grave medical crisis, today’s cities, with their large populations and “first-responder” perspective, must take the lead and confront the “pandemic” head-on; this, he said, meant that Covid would serve as catalyst, incentivizing cities around the world to network with one another and strengthen their political position.
At that event, Daalder stated:
The global pandemic has changed global cities as we know them. The resulting economic, social and cultural transformations of our cities have truly been unprecedented. The cities are frontline actors, responding to a public health emergency . . . . [U.S.] cities had to get to work and find creative ways to stay connected, with each other and [with cities] around the world.”
Also at that fall 2020 forum (read a more complete report on that forum by clicking here) Daalder noted, “Over the next 12 months, we will explore the new reality facing cities,” while listing three planks in this plan: 1) “adapting governance”; 2) “pursuing equity”; and 3) “reimagining resilience.” He continued: “The virus has exposed strengths and weaknesses in the way counties, states and cities prepare for [crises, including Covid],” while highlighting “how different levels of government work together—or not.”
Daalder’s comments represent the often-vague, highly deceptive “doublespeak” language that this writer calls “globalese”—used by globalist groups the world over.
While his remarks may at first sound reasonable, references to “adapting governance” and various “transformations” comprise a classic case of subtly invoking the well-known dictum of none other than Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
The adaptation being sought involves cities becoming as independent as possible from the nation states they geographically inhabit. As Mayor Rahm, who closed two area coal-fired power plants as part of the Windy City’s “climate change” battle plan, noted in a late-2017 news release:
Even as Washington fails to act, cities have the power and will to take decisive action.
To which Mr. Bloomberg more bluntly added:
All the U.S. cities signing the [Chicago Climate Charter] . . . sends a strong signal to the world that we will keep moving forward toward our Paris goal, with or without Washington.
Covid Trumps Climate Change
While climate change was trotted out to paint a picture of a dying planet unless we act, the Covid pandemic—regardless of its many debatable aspects in terms of grossly inflated and distorted “case” and “death” data, as well as Covid-related government crackdowns that increasingly qualify as abject tyranny—soon took over and became “the perfect storm” with which to accelerate and solidify global government.
The global cities movement is the perfect tool to intensify this momentum, since it gets practically no news coverage and at first blush appears to be a relatively innocent means of establishing more “local control” and sprucing up the cityscape.
The catch, however, is that preference for, and adherence to, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is a major part of what makes today’s global cities global in character. National laws, up to and including immigration enforcement, have been downplayed, ignored or even flouted by a number of big city mayors, such as when Oakland, California Mayor Libby Schaff, who has been a guest at CCGA events, in 2017 forewarned illegal aliens, some of whom reportedly had serious criminal records, that federal ICE officials were soon coming to make arrests and carry out possible deportations. This rebellion was done under the “sanctuary cities” model that a number of large cities that consider themselves “global” have adopted.
All of the foregoing provides sufficient context to understand the essentials of the global cities movement. At its March 18, 2021 Pritzker forum, the CCGA decided to adopt the theme “Pursuing Equity,” in line with item number two that Daalder listed at the October 2020 forum.
The main guests at the March event were: Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, London Mayor Sadiq Kahn, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Capetown South Africa Executive Mayor Dan Plato, and former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who’s now America’s first openly (and self-proclaimed) homosexual Secretary of Transportation.
While Ms. Tett of the Financial Times interviewed these mayors, her colleague, Mr. Luce, interviewed Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale-educated member of President Joe Biden’s Health Equity Task Force under the DHHS. Along with Fauci’s remarks and Daalder’s observations and announcements, that represented the bulk of the first 2021 forum.
Nunez-Smith said: “Race and place are extraordinary drivers of health inequities.” Such remarks were common throughout the 2021 forum, as the presenters doubled-down on the premise that, while “black and brown people” allegedly are dying in greater numbers, specifically due to Covid, they’re not getting nearly enough vaccinations.
Of course, this begs the question: What if the vaccines are not as safe as they’re portrayed to be? How does that affect the ideal of helping minorities? Why doesn’t anyone at these forums or in major media at least mention that, as of March 11, according to data released by the CDC that there were 38,444 recorded adverse events, including 1,739 suspected deaths following injections of the experimental Covid “vaccines”?
For his part, Luce added that, in Washington D.C. where he works, he understands that 76% of the “Covid deaths” are among blacks “but only about a quarter of the vaccinations” go TO the black community.
Nunez-Smith responded by saying that “access and acceptance” are critical, meaning she sees the need to build “trust” about the Covid vaccines among minority populations. “So it’s critical that everybody has the information they need about the vaccines,” she said. “Vaccination needs to be easy, convenient [and] it’s free.” Community centers and pharmacies located in minority communities, and mobile vaccination units that visit those areas, are all being utilized under President Biden’s “transformative” $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, she added. “We’re very intentional about access.”
To his credit, Luce stressed that, historically, there are reasons for vulnerable populations, including minorities, to distrust the medical system (such as the 40 years of experimentation by the U.S. government against the black population to monitor the natural history of untreated syphilis without the knowledge of the subjects, which, oddly, no one mentioned at the 2021 global cities forum).
Nunez-Smith then claimed that one way to address “healthy skepticism” by minorities about big brother’s medical system is “by making access convenient and easy” for vaccines. While that was a meaningless cheap shot on her part, she summarized by saying that President Biden understands that minorities and others “have not always been treated with the dignity and respect that they deserve from scientific institutions or from the federal government.” Yet Nunez-Smith, who’s a black woman, was quick to add: “But that is not a reason to deny one’s family access to this scientific discovery [vaccines] that is life-protecting and preserving.”
Without elaboration, Nunez-Smith couldn’t conclude without mentioning that “disinformation and misinformation campaigns are out there, sometimes targeting these very communities. That is unacceptable and has the potential to be devastating.” And though she breezily mentioned “non-vax” options such as therapeutics, she championed the three vaccines being rolled out via the Biden pandemic spending. She said the vaccines will reach “over 19,000 cities and towns—all the communities and all their residents.” In other words, a planned medical dragnet that will come to you if you don’t go to it, regardless of race or place.
Economic Slump is Government’s Fault
During a brief lead-up to the panel discussion featuring most of the participating mayors, statistics posted on the Zoom screen included the statement: “Nearly two million women left the workforce in 2020” …,” along with, “it is estimated that the pandemic will push 96 million people into extreme poverty in 2021.”
Both statements are based on the supremely specious claim that the pandemic itself is wreaking such havoc on the population, when, in fact, it is extremist government policies that have caused such devastation, all based on the premise that Covid-19 is a super-spreading, super-deadly disease, rather than a largely manageable flu-like outbreak with a 98% or better world recovery rate—which strongly suggests that rolling out highly experimental vaccines via emergency-use decrees (which means they remain experimental, even though subjecting populations to medical experiments without their express knowledge and consent is unlawful) is unnecessary to begin with, and that therapeutics, better nutrition, proper hydration, exercise, fresh air, sunshine and other non-coercive, non-experimental approaches would have sufficed.
Undeterred by any such common-sense notions, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, in the mayoral panel discussion entitled “Building Back Better Toward an Equitable City,” said “vaccine inequities across the globe” matter just as much as within local communities. “We all have to be committed to a global solution in all cities,” he said, while noting that, despite America’s problems, it’s supposedly so much better than places “where they haven’t vaccinated at all.”
Garcetti stressed what he called “the four Ts”— meaning “the truth” that the Covid vaccines are “safe”; “trust” of the clinicians giving the shots; “technology,” meaning “you’ve got to meet people where they are,”; and “the fourth T is transportation; you must help people get to a clinic or take it to them. Uber is supplying 20,000 rides, free or half off,” he added. And because “60 percent of Covid cases are in the Latino community of Los Angeles but only 20% of the vaccines are reaching that population,” Garcetti announced that text messages for vaccine clinics are being mass-texted to that community.
In New Orleans, Mayor Cantrell said there are community health clinics in neighborhoods that didn’t exist 15 years ago, having been built since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “And that enabled us to reach out to those stakeholders that have already been planted in communities, talking about health and testing and mobilizing—meeting people where they are . . .,” she said, while repeating the mantra that “black and brown communities” have been “disproportionately impacted” by Covid.
Cantrell specified that 770 city residents (allegedly) were “lost, due to Covid,” of which 558 were “African American.” New Orleans, she claimed, leads the U.S. with 21% of its overall population vaccinated. Minorities going to vaccine clinics can feel even more reassured, she went on to awkwardly say, if “people who look like them are getting the vaccines.”
Bristol Mayor Rees, with regards to a question from Tett about adapting governance, said that, beyond handling the pandemic, what matters is “the way countries are led … there are no levers in national capitals that you can just pull and get good outcomes.”
He also ventured to say that building “trust” is easier between local governments and the people than it is between national governments and the people. That may be generally true, except when cities are quietly adopting governing structures that are alienated from national constitutions and are based instead on internationalist ideologies and corporate connections that mean vast profits and power for the few, and a bleak powerless existence for the many.
Regarding how Bristol has handled Covid, Rees had this to say: “It’s not just about putting restrictions in place but making sure people understand that . . . Covid spreads person to person through droplets and through shared contact with surfaces; if you understand those principles, then we empower you to make better decisions about how you manage yourself. We took that kind of citizen-empowerment approach in concert with our local institutions” via what he called Bristol’s “one-city approach.”
So, suddenly public “empowerment” consists of pushing the unproven contagion narrative while sternly disallowing other opinions on how Covid cases “spread” so quickly? That’s how Mr. Dees framed the issue—as if it’s out of the question that scores of false positives via the notoriously unreliable and widely used PCR test best explain the apparent high numbers of Covid “cases.”
London Mayor Kahn, in a short separate segment, rattled off remarks about the need for “well paid jobs in the green community” while calling for a London “where racial justice and gender equality are assured.”
As for Dr. Fauci, he summed up the forum by claiming there’s a “race between the Covid vaccinations” and the “variants” of the virus that allegedly have arisen and represent a looming danger. In the meantime, he declared, getting as many people vaccinated as possible, as quickly as possible, must be the top priority, as he sees it.
But the lifelong medical bureaucrat then lamented that “vaccine hesitancy” could get in the way as a sizable number of people decline to get “the jab,” or at least drag their feet. Fauci also speculated that due to “vaccine nationalism,” where certain advanced countries don’t do enough to get the vaccine to less-advanced countries, the supposed Covid “variants” may “smolder” and “mutate” in non-vaccinated nations and come back to haunt the “protected” ones.
One over-arching thing became crystal clear at the 2021 Pritzker Forum on Global Cities: the event’s monolithic narrative management where dissent is nonexistent, and the unwavering lust to advance a medical regime, using a gene-altering mRNA “virtual vaccine” that’s never been used on mass populations before, will indeed lead to equity—equitable tyranny for all, regardless of race or place.
