ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2021, the heads of state of the world’s 20 largest economies and their staff gathered for the G-20 meeting in Rome, just two weeks after Italy’s government had passed one of the world’s most draconian de facto vaccine mandates. To guarantee the “peaceful conduct” of the meeting (in the words of Italian press agency ANSA), a 10 square kilometer maximum security area was erected around Rome’s Nuvolo, equipped with manned access gates, snipers at select points, and an antidrone system.1 It was a perfect illustration of the gaping distance between the governors and the governed.
Two days later, many of the same heads of state converged on the city of Glasgow for the COP26 summit on climate change, where they were joined by thousands of environmental activists, NGO workers, and some of the world’s richest billionaires, many of whom arrived on private jets. So, too, did many heads of state. Scotland’s Mail on Sunday reported that as many as 400 landed at Glasgow’s international airport, where they disgorged more than 1,000 VIPs and their staff, all for an event ostensibly aimed at “bring[ing] together world leaders to commit to urgent global climate action.”2
The genuine environmentalists in attendance were not impressed. Private aircraft emit between 10 and 60 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as scheduled flights, and up to 140 times as much as a diesel-powered train.
“It can’t be stressed enough how bad private jets are for the environment—it is the worst way to travel by miles,” said the European advocacy group Transport and Environment. “Private jets are very prestigious, but it is difficult to avoid the hypocrisy of using one while claiming to be fighting climate change.”
But there was an even more egregious example of double standards on display, although it received much less attention in the legacy media: The 30,000 attendees, who had come from all corners of the world including countries with severe COVID-19 outbreaks, were not required to use the Scottish Government’s vaccine passport system to enter the country or the conference. Instead, they were asked to take a daily lateral flow device test—a luxury not afforded to the six million people of Scotland, who must show a vaccine passport if they want to attend a nightclub or an indoor event with more than 500 people in the audience.
The Scottish Hospitality Group was enraged by the exemption for COP26. Stephen Montgomery, a spokesman for the group, said:
To have thousands of people descend on Glasgow from all around the world with no need for vaccine certification, it undermines the reason why we are doing this in the first place.
Are the Government in the same situation as we are in that they cannot find the staff to police it or are they finally realising there is no point?
Where is the bigger risk? 30,000 people from all over the world at the SEC or 400 people in a nightclub?3
This is not the first time authorities in the UK have been accused of applying COVID-19 rules unevenly. In June, Boris Johnson’s government granted quarantine exemptions to business leaders arriving from countries with high levels of infection. While everyone else had to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel, well-connected business leaders were free to go about their business, as long as they submitted to a PCR test before and on their arrival in the country. To qualify, executives working at multinational companies simply have to apply for written permission from the government in advance of their journey, demonstrating that their work in the UK would “probably” preserve an existing UK-based business with at least 500 employees, or create a new one within two years.
“Yet again it is one rule for those at the top and another for everyone else,” said the Labour Party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayer. “This makes a total mockery of the sacrifices of the British people during this pandemic and this double standard is an insult to frontline workers that the British people will rightly be disgusted by.”4
It seems clear that many governmental rules and policies set up to control the virus will serve only to widen the chasm between privileged citizens and the rest of society.
Politicians themselves have been flouting many of the emergency laws they have enacted over the past two years. The UK’s former Health Minister Matt Hancock was forced to resign in June 2021 after being caught in flagrante with a married colleague at a time when the rest of the country was banned from hugging people from different households.5 Professor Neil Ferguson, the renowned epidemiologist whose advice to the UK government had led to the first lockdown, continued meeting his mistress during the lockdown. In neither case were criminal charges filed.
In late November 2021, an even bigger scandal erupted when it emerged that in December 2020—when the UK’s deadly third wave of coronavirus infections had led many local authorities to ban people from meeting indoors with members of other households—the prime minister’s staffers had organized a Christmas party at 10 Downing Street. “Officials knocked back glasses of wine during a Christmas quiz and a Secret Santa while the rest of the country was forced to stay home,” the Daily Mirror claimed in a report in late November. Since then, more reports have emerged of British government ministers and civil servants partying boozily while the rest of the country was banned from even meeting with members from other households.
There have been countless similar examples of “do as I say, not as I do” behavior among the political class across the world. The mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser, went maskless at a wedding reception less than a day after imposing a new mask mandate on the city’s citizens. New Zealand’s health minister, David Clark, also broke strict lockdown rules his government put in place.
The fact that many policymakers seem to believe they are above the laws they themselves are passing should be a major cause of public concern, especially given that governments around the world have awarded themselves unprecedented new emergency powers under the guise of combating the pandemic, as data collated from the COVID-19 Digital Rights Tracker and Civic Freedom Tracker shows. Many governments have used digital technologies to expand their control of the population. To monitor rule-breakers, 22 countries have used surveillance drones. Facial recognition programs have been expanded, internet censorship has intensified, and 13 countries have resorted to internet shutdowns.6
“The defining feature … of this great transformation that they are attempting to impose is that the mechanism which renders it formally possible is not a new body of laws, but a state of exception—in other words, not an affirmation of, but the suspension of constitutional guarantees,” wrote the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the introduction to his collection of writings on the COVID-19 pandemic, Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as Politics.7
For most countries emergency powers are nothing new. They serve an important function, allowing governments to respond robustly and swiftly to temporary crises. But they are prone to overuse and abuse. And they are being used liberally by so-called liberal democracies and dictatorships alike. One problem is that most governments do not like to relinquish the temporary powers once they have served their purpose. In the United States, 39 temporary national emergencies were still in effect as of February 2020, one of which—Executive Order 12170, blocking Iranian government property after Iran’s Islamic Revolution—dates all the way back to 1979.8
Arguably of even greater concern is the increasing use of so-called “emergency responses,” warns Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, in a BBC article titled “The ‘Stomp Reflex’: When Governments Abuse Emergency Powers”:
[This is] exceptional legislation that is not designated as an emergency power, but is either passed during or in reaction to a threat. Many of the counter-terrorism acts passed in the UK during the last two decades were ordinary legislation, but would make most emergency powers seem tame. Similarly, the current UK Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill contains what some critics consider to be sweeping provisions, but is being passed during a time that is less than ideal for public deliberation and scrutiny.
Many members of the public are too distracted or paralyzed by fear to question the motives behind the increasingly draconian rules or consider their potential long-term implications. As Agamben wrote in the early days of the pandemic, “For fear of getting sick, Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything—their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.”9
It is not just governments that seek to benefit from this huge expansion of emergency powers and emergency responses; so, too, do many large companies, particularly those in the tech sphere. Many of the world’s biggest corporations, international banks, finance institutions, and billionaire-backed private foundations have been lobbying for and helping to implement digital immunity passports since even before the pandemic.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has influenced COVID-19 policies around the world, from facilitating the worldwide rollout of digital vaccine passports to intervening against the waiving of vaccine patent restrictions. Bill Gates himself has given countless interviews—often to media organizations his foundation helps fund—about COVID-19 and vaccines, despite having no medical qualifications to speak of. The Gates Foundation is the second largest donor to the World Health Organization (WHO), second only to the United States. So pervasive is the Foundation’s influence over the policies adopted by the WHO that inside sources told Politico in 2017: “Gates’ priorities have become the WHO’s.” Those priorities include spending a disproportionate amount of the WHO’s resources on projects with the measurable outcomes Gates prefers, such as the effort to eradicate polio.”10
The heavily conflicted Gates Foundation has invested billions in some of the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturers including Pfizer and BioNTech. It is also a leading partner alongside Big Pharma in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, whose stated aim is to solve global health problems through vaccines. Both the Gates Foundation and Gavi have pushed the WHO to prioritize vaccine development and distribution above all other public health initiatives. It also recently helped finance a WHO paper providing “implementation guidance” for proof of vaccination certifications across the world. Also involved in the project was the Rockefeller Foundation and several high-level representatives of the World Bank.
Another institution pushing vaccine passports is the WEF. Best known for organizing the annual shindig of the global business, political, and cultural elite at Davos, Switzerland, the WEF is an NGO and think tank that claims to be “committed to improving the state of the world.” In reality it is a hugely powerful global pressure group representing some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people and corporations that plays a leading role in shaping the global economy as well as social and environmental movements. As Foreign Affairs put it, “the WEF has no formal authority, but it has become the major forum for elites to discuss policy ideas and priorities.”
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the WEF called for a “Great Reset,” at the heart of which are WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s concepts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and stakeholder capitalism. In its essence, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) denotes the breakneck digital transformation we are currently living through, where just about everything becomes digitized, automated, and connected—all of it facilitated by big data. The 4IR will revolutionize the way people “live, work, and relate to one another,” with implications “unlike anything humankind has experienced,” says Schwab.11
The basic idea behind stakeholder capitalism is that the current model of global capitalism is no longer fit for purpose and should be reconfigured so that corporations no longer focus exclusively on serving shareholders but instead become custodians of society by creating value for all “stakeholders,” including customers, suppliers, employees, and local communities. Under the new model a confluence of “multi-stakeholder partnerships” would bring together the private sector, governments, and civil society across all areas of global governance.
The idea sounds harmless enough—perhaps even desirable—until you realize that what it actually means is giving corporations even more power over society, at the expense of national democratic institutions. In the WEF’s vision—laid out in its Global Redesign Initiative, drafted after the 2008 economic crisis—“the government voice would be one among many without always being the final arbiter.” The question is: Who will be?
The ongoing global response to climate change may provide a few pointers. Despite playing a pivotal role in financing the world’s biggest polluters for decades, some of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions are now writing the rules of “sustainable lending” for the future, warns a report jointly published by the Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory:
Since the agreement in Paris in late 2015, different constellations of financial corporations have worked to define methods for banks, investment funds, insurance companies and others to address the threat of a deeper climate crisis. Much of this work now, controversially, forms part of the official UN process. Not only this, but the corporations have been invited in not just to contribute to the event, but in fact to take over the implementation of the UN agenda on private finance and climate change. When the light is turned off and the doors are shut at the conclusion of COP26, the likes of BlackRock, Bank of America, Citigroup and Santander will take it from there …
[I]n some quarters there will be nods of appreciation when COP26 sees a parade of financial corporations committing to “net zero by 2050.” Hundreds of financial institutions have signed up to UN-convened coalitions of companies promising to do their bit to fight climate change. But there are three serious problems with this approach: first, the commitments are so vague that they open the door to a potentially massive greenwash. Banks, asset managers and investment funds with massive holdings in fossil fuels and no concrete ambitions to change course can exploit the UN’s programme to strengthen their image. Second, there is a risk that the presence of private finance in the overall architecture will be used by high-income countries to scale down their own financial commitments. Third, the corporations are not only signing up to statements and making commitments, they are in fact taking over the whole show.12
A similar process is occurring with the roll out of vaccine passports. The WEF, whose membership list reads like a Who’s Who of the world’s biggest banks and corporations, wields significant influence over the United Nations after signing a strategic partnership agreement with the multilateral body in June 2019 aimed at “accelerat[ing] the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
From its inception the agreement sparked accusations of a corporate takeover of the UN’s decision-making process. “[It] formalises a disturbing corporate capture of the UN. It moves the world dangerously towards privatized and undemocratic global governance,” said Gonzalo Berrón of Transnational Institute in presenting a letter signed by 240 civil society organizations and 40 international networks. “The agreement gives transnational corporations preferential and deferential access to the UN System at the expense of States and public interest actors,” warned the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which connects over 280 NGOs, social movements, and advocates across more than 75 countries.13
The WEF has used its newfound clout at the UN to push the roll out of both vaccine passports and digital IDs. It has even proposed doing away with paper passports altogether, under the pretext of promoting mobility across nations.14 In a white paper titled “Three Ways to Accelerate a Digital-Led Recovery,” the WEF argues that “to ignite the spark of commercial and human progress, every person should have a unique digital identity so that they have full access to the digital world in the economic, social, and political realm.” The white paper even suggests that small and medium-sized businesses will benefit from this development—a claim that could not be further from the truth.15
Small businesses have already borne the brunt of the economic fallout from the COVID-19-induced lockdowns, slowdowns, and work-from-home ordinances. As the white paper notes, these measures, applied in countries all over the world, have led “many in-person businesses to close their doors” while “helping digital-first businesses to grow.” A lot of the small in-person businesses that remain standing took on huge amounts of debt to weather the lockdowns. Many of them are now struggling to repay that debt. According to research by the Bank of England (BoE), 33 percent of small businesses in the UK now have a high level of debt compared with 14 percent before COVID-19.
“Although debt appears affordable in the near term, insolvencies are likely to rise from 2021 Q4 as government support is withdrawn as planned,” stated the BoE’s Financial Policy Committee. Britain’s employee furlough support program expired at the end of September, 2021, while the government’s most generous support loans—part of the Bounce Back Loan Scheme—were phased out in March and replaced with the Recovery Loan Scheme.16
In China many small and micro businesses are also falling by the wayside as inflation fuels rising costs and the central government increasingly favors large state enterprises, according to a report by the South China Morning Post. There are roughly 139 million small businesses in China, according to one official tally. In China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index in July 2021, many small and micro businesses complained of worsening conditions for the second straight month while large businesses said they saw slight growth.17
By their very nature, most small businesses depend heavily on local customers for their revenues, be they local people or other local businesses. They are the cornerstone of local communities, providing basic products and services, creating jobs, allowing local economies to flourish, and providing spaces and places for people to meet and engage with each other. Small and micro businesses are also essential to the health of the global economy. They make up the vast majority of businesses worldwide, representing around 90 percent of businesses and more than half of employment globally.
By essentially excluding unvaccinated people from small business premises, thus dramatically eroding their customer base, the vaccine passports will make it even harder for these businesses to survive. What’s more, WEF hopes the vaccine passports will soon become digital IDs. All this will impose an extra layer of regulatory burdens and costs on small companies that do not have the resources and technical or legal know-how of large corporations.
In Scotland, business associations warned First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that her government’s vaccine passport rules risked pushing already struggling companies over the cliff’s edge. Liz Cameron, chief executive of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, penned a letter to Sturgeon warning that firms “continue to operate in survival mode,” adding that the “economic recovery is fragile and the long-term viability of many businesses and jobs remains in the balance.”18 The government stuck to its guns, becoming the first country in the United Kingdom to introduce vaccine passports.19
Representatives of the hospitality sector in Wales issued similar warnings about the Welsh Government’s vaccine passport rules. “The news that COVID passports are to be required for entry into Welsh nightclubs and some large events from 11th October is incredibly disappointing,” UKHospitality Executive Director for Wales David Chapman said. “This decision comes despite several weeks of meetings in which UKHospitality Cymru has repeatedly made the case against vaccine passports because of compliance difficulties over definitions of business, concerns over conflicts with customers, and a range of other implementational problems, all while the industry struggles to maintain viability and is trying to cope with desperately short staffing.”20
Small businesses all over the world are facing a slew of supply chain headaches and labor issues. In the United States, 45 percent of small businesses were suffering domestic supplier delays in October 2021, up from 26.7 percent at the beginning of the year, according to the US Census Small Business Pulse Survey.21 Supplies that small businesses depend upon are becoming harder to source, especially given that owners cannot always buy in bulk or in advance like larger companies. On top of that, a record 50 percent of the members of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), the largest trade organization of small businesses, reported having job openings that couldn’t be filled, up from 23 percent a year ago.
“Unfortunately, the challenge for small business owners is that the economy is breaking records in the wrong direction,” said Bill G. Smith, NFIB state director in Wisconsin. “A record 50 percent of our small business owners are reporting they are unable to fill job openings. That’s a 48-year low. Another low is that small business optimism over the next six months has decreased to the lowest reading since 2012.”22
It is against this backdrop that the US federal government decided in early November 2020 to expand its vaccine mandate to cover 80 million workers. President Biden announced that businesses with more than 100 workers on their payroll had until January 4 to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated, or tested weekly. If not, they could face federal fines starting at tens of thousands of dollars per offense.
Governments’ vaccine passport policies also risk intensifying the centrifugal forces that have been crushing the global economy for the last year and a half. At a time when the world needs more workers than ever, governments and corporations are consigning millions of perfectly capable workers to the scrap heap for not taking a vaccine that does not prevent transmission of COVID-19 and only partially blocks infection.
Crucially, they include millions of workers in key strategic industries, such as shipping, logistics, transport, law enforcement, and health care. When Italy’s government imposed its blanket “no jab, no job” mandate on October 15, 2021, 40 percent of the dockworkers at the country’s most important commercial port, Trieste, were unvaccinated. Most of those workers refused to cave and began a weeks-long strike. The port became a focal point in Italy’s anti–vaccine passport movement. After days of protests and blockages, the local police used force to evict the striking workers from the port. So they began gathering in Trieste’s main square instead. But even that was not allowed. At the end of October, the local government banned all forms of protest in the main square until the end of the year, on the thin or specious grounds that the demonstrations had fueled a recent rise in COVID-19 infections.
Trieste’s top law enforcement official, Valerio Valenti, said that the outbreak was “strictly correlated” to the antivaccine protests. “When balancing interests, in my opinion, the right to health prevails over the right to demonstrate.”23
Other Italian cities, including Rome, Milan, and Bologna, have followed suit and cracked down on anti–Green Pass protests.24
But one thing authorities cannot do is force the port workers to work. And that is a problem given the importance of the port of Trieste to Europe’s supply chains. Trieste is at the nexus of one of Europe’s trade corridors, the Baltic–Adriatic Corridor, which is one of the most important trans-European road and railway axes in Central Europe. The longer the strike goes on, the more it threatens to exacerbate Europe’s supply-chain crisis. The Draghi government’s vaccine mandate also risks providing a huge boost to Italy’s already large informal cash economy. Italy’s Mafia families are no doubt rubbing their hands in glee, as unvaccinated workers are forced to work under the radar.
Given as much, the vaccine mandate should be seen as a huge, high-stakes bluff on the part of the Draghi government. If it pays off, the vast majority of Italy’s vaccine holdouts will fall into line, take the vaccine, download the vaccine passport, and go back to work; and other governments across Europe will follow suit with similar “no jab, no job” mandates. But Draghi may have his work cut out given that vaccine cases in the country have done nothing but rise since the mandate was implemented. By the end of 2021 Italy was racking up 145,000 new cases per day—almost four times its previous record, registered in November 2020. If Draghi’s ruse doesn’t pay off and popular resistance rises, Italy’s economy could be plunged into chaos and the Draghi government could be forced into an embarrassing retreat.
In the United States, the stakes are arguably even higher, given how important the country is to the global economy as well as the fact that it has more vaccine holdouts than most other Western countries. As in Italy, many logistics, transportation, and frontline workers refuse to relinquish their bodily autonomy. At the end of 2021 the United States was facing huge worker shortages despite the fact there were still 3.5 million fewer registered workers than two years prior.25 Even before the mandate, the country already had a shortage of around 80,000 truckers. Jon Samson, an executive director at the American Trucking Associations, said that large trucking firms fear the mandate could trigger an exodus of workers to smaller firms or out of the industry altogether. The effect on America’s already overstretched supply chains could be catastrophic.26
Other vital sectors are facing similar issues. Forty percent of the Transportation Security Administration’s 50,000 agents remain unvaccinated. In October Southwest Airlines cancelled over 2,000 flights due to an alleged pilot “sick-out” over the company’s vaccine mandate, although the company has denied this. Shortly after the cancellations the company’s management softened its mandates policy, allowing unvaccinated workers to continue working as long as they seek exemption on medical or religious grounds. As Alex Gutentag writes in “Revolt of the Essential Workers”, “Each local mandate battle ultimately contributes to a national high-stakes game of chicken that pits working people against a wealthy, increasingly authoritarian overclass.”
While all this is happening, the disconnect between the real economy and the financial markets has never been greater. Although the world witnessed a massive surge in pent-up demand during the first six months of 2021, the recovery had already begun to fizzle out by the third quarter. The US economy grew at an annualized rate of only 2 percent in Q3—the slowest rate of economic growth since the start of the recovery. The highly infectious Delta variant, supply-chain chaos, worker shortages, rising inflation, and the fading effects of the stimulus sugar rush were all weighing on economic activity.
At a global level the economic impact of last year’s lockdowns and slowdowns continues to mount. By late October poverty, inequality, and unemployment were bigger concerns than the coronavirus pandemic, according to an Ipsos MORI poll of twenty-eight countries. Sixty-four percent of the survey’s respondents said they thought their country was heading in the wrong direction.27 Much of the data suggests we are in the early stages of economic collapse. Many of the causes of the last economic crisis—including the huge levels of private debt (much of which was shifted onto public ledgers), unfettered speculation in the financial markets, and the creation of ever-more destructive financial instruments—were never properly addressed. Most of the policy choices of governments and central banks have merely served to exacerbate economic risks and inequality.
A crisis is already brewing in China, the world’s second largest economy that almost single-handedly lifted the global economy out of the last financial crisis. The Chinese government’s decision to reduce the economy’s reliance on real estate, while certainly salient, is fraught with risks. In a worst-case scenario it could spark a disorderly collapse of the world’s biggest property market. By late summer 2021, local governments were scrambling to launch rescue funds worth billions of dollars to bail out state-owned groups after a flurry of defaults. In August, China Huarong Asset Management received a $16 billion rescue package. But government support has been less forthcoming for other struggling borrowers, including property developers. On December 10, China Evergrande Group, the world’s most debt-saddled property developer, entered default, while many smaller Chinese real estate developers teetered on the edge.
As Bloomberg reported on January 2, 2022, “China’s property developers have mounting bills to pay and shrinking options to raise necessary funds.” In January alone, “the industry will need to find at least $197 billion to cover maturing bonds, coupons, trust products and deferred wages to millions of migrant workers, according to Bloomberg calculations and analyst estimates.”28 Smaller construction companies in particular are struggling to find funding. If fallout from Evergrande’s default is not contained, it could spark another global financial crisis.
Yet investors in the West remain sanguine. Financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic were still hitting record highs on a regular basis. By November 1, 2021, the S&P 500 had registered more than 50 new highs in 2021 alone and the Nasdaq was over 80 percent higher than its pre-pandemic level. By the end of the year, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq Composite Index, the FTSE 100, Germany’s DAX 30, and France’s CAC 40 were all at or near record highs.
One obvious reason for this is that many of the world’s biggest publicly listed banks and corporations, awash with stimulus money, were once again buying back their own shares rather than investing in new products, machinery, or workers. This is a great way to enrich shareholders but is a net negative for the overall economy, since all it does is further inflate asset prices, enriching the 10 percent of the population that owns most financial assets, while creating no new products or services. Not so long ago, share buybacks were deemed a form of market manipulation and were banned under US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. Then in 1982 the SEC issued Rule 10b-18, which provided corporations a “safe harbor” to buy back their own shares under certain conditions. Since then, the practice has exploded. As the San Francisco-based financial analyst Wolf Richter reported in March 2020, S&P 500 companies squandered $4.5 trillion on share buybacks between 2012 and 2020.29 In 2021, both Apple and Microsoft executed their biggest ever share buybacks, propelling their stock to even greater highs.
But record stock valuations are normally a sign that a correction is probably in order. By the end of 2021, the bottom lines of even the world’s biggest companies, including Amazon, were beginning to feel the effects of rising inflation, surging global labor costs and operational disruptions. Financial risks were once again on the rise. To respond to rising inflation, many central banks have begun hiking interest rates and tapering their quantitative easing (QE) programs. The Federal Reserve has signaled that it will do the same in early 2022. A sudden tightening of central bank monetary policy around the world, while almost certainly necessary to contain inflation, is likely to trigger a sharp correction in stock and bond markets, as already happened in late 2018. It will also probably lead to a stronger dollar, heaping even more pressure on emerging market currencies and economies.
After little more than a year, the global economic recovery is fizzling at the same time that inequality, poverty, and unemployment are weighing on the minds and pockets of the billions of people who can’t afford to buy Apple and Microsoft shares. When this boom turns to bust, leaving even more unemployment and inequality in its wake, those people are going to be desperate and angry. Many will even be hungry. If 2019 was the year of protest, 2022 could be the year of unbottled rage. But before that happens, governments and global corporations are determined to rush into existence vaccine passport and digital ID systems that provide them much greater control of the world’s restive populations.