America’s Largest Teachers’ Unions Push Vaccine Mandates That Will Usher in Technocratic Digital ID

Back in February 2021, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) lobbied the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to extend COVID restrictions that perpetuate public education’s reliance on privatization, specifically from Big Tech companies, which have been raking in record profits by selling schools ed-tech products to deliver online instruction during lockdowns. While the AFT and the NEA appealed to public health and safety rationales, their CDC lobbying efforts were couched in their conflicts of interest with Big Tech companies, such as IBM; corporate philanthropies, including the Rockefeller Foundation; globalist non-governmental organizations, like the Trilateral Commission; and world governance institutions, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  

Lobbying the CDC to add COVID restrictions for in-person learning that perpetuate Big Tech privatization was just a pit-stop on the way toward these same teachers’ unions pushing mandatory coronavirus jabs for students and educators who will be required to verify their vaccination status with compulsory digital immunizations passports platformed on blockchain and other “distributed ledger technologies” (DLTs). Now that President Joe Biden has called on state governors to mandate COVID vaccination for all school employees and students, the AFT and the NEA are fully on board with the state and federal proclamations forcing their dues-paying teachers to get jabbed along with students. By backing government-mandated vaccinations for school employees and students, the AFT and the NEA are rolling out the red carpet for digital vaccine passports through blockchain DLTs that will be used to aggregate students’ electronic health records (EHRs), “learning analytics,” workforce competency algorithms, and criminal histories into “Social Credit” scores which will determine access to the public square and private markets – a technocratic system planned out in detail long before COVID-19 emerged.

The IBM-AFT-NEA Love Triangle Builds Big Databases for Social Credit

For at least sixty years, the AFT and the NEA have been collaborating with IBM to drive the evolution of automated “teaching machines” into digital ed-tech programmed with artificial intelligence (AI) engineered to psychologically condition students for corporate-government workforce compliance. Today, the AFT and the NEA are cheerleading for Biden’s vaccination mandates, which will kickstart a long-anticipated market boom for digital vaccine passports that can be platformed on DLTs, including IBM’s blockchain DLT. IBM’s DLT can be expanded to keep ledgers of students’ learning outcomes and job competences in order to extrapolate “predictive analytics” for Social Credit. At the same time, IBM is also on the front lines of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, which is calling for public-private ed-tech partnerships to “Reimagine Education” through AI algorithms that are programmed to data-mine students’ psychometrics for Social Credit algorithms. Those algorithms, in turn, track students into “career pathways” in order to fill job quotas for the global economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, IBM is also teamed up with UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, which is a consortium of Big Tech companies that facilitate virtual “distance education” through online adaptive-learning courseware and other “predictive” AI ed-tech that can feed student data into Social Credit surveillance grids. 

IBM’s extensive ties to the NEA go back several decades. In 1960, the NEA’s “Educational Implications of Automation” was financed “with an unrestricted grant from IBM.” Later, IBM partnered with the NEA’s “Mastery in Learning Project” in 1986, at the tail end of UNESCO “Study 11,” which orchestrated international public-private partnerships between Big Tech corporations, including IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, along with national government agencies, such as the US Department of Ed, to set up the global “information technology” (IT) infrastructure necessary for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s ed-tech panopticon. In 1988, the NEA-IBM partnership launched the “Mastery in Learning School Renewal Network,” which was “an asynchronous teleconferencing and messaging system using PCs [for] the first electronic network dedicated specifically to school reform.” Two years later, in 1990, UNESCO collaborated with the World Bank to hold the World Conference on Education for All, which was followed up by a conference hosted by the United State Coalition for Education for All (USCEFA) in 1991. According to the USCEFA “Conference Report” titled Learning for All: Bridging Domestic and International Education, USCEFA was sponsored by the NEA, the AFT, IBM, Apple, the US Department of Education, and USAID, which has a long history of fronting for CIA operations.

It is worth noting that, in a 1985 “Special Issue” of Today’s Education, which is the NEA’s journal, there are advertisements for ed-tech products, including an ad for IBM “computerized instruction” for “a single terminal or a whole school system.” This “Special Issue” also contains infographics, including two illustrated graphs titled “High-Tech Happy” and “School Computer Use Soars,” which chart the regional proliferation of computerized ed-tech across the United States from 1981 to 1985 during the rollout of the US Department of Ed’s Project BEST (Basic Education Skills through Technology), which was America’s domestic version of UNESCO Study 11. 

This special edition of the NEA’s journal also included a collection of articles from trailblazers in the computerized ed-tech movement:

• Mary Futrell: The former President of the NEA, Futrell would also later sit on the Board of Directors for K12 Inc., one of America’s largest online virtual charter schools, which was founded by US Secretary of Education, William “Bill” Bennett, who oversaw Project BEST after he took up the mantle from Secretary Terrel H. Bell.

• John Goodlad: The godfather of “community schools,” Goodlad was commissioned by the US National Institute of Education to conduct a three-year “Study of Schooling in the United States” that resulted in four pivotal guidebooks for implementing community education programs which integrate computerized data-tracking to manage public-private “wraparound services,” such as workforce placement, healthcare, and crime prevention “pipelines.” 

• Theodore Sizer: An acolyte of Goodlad’s technocratic model of community schooling, Sizer founded the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) where he advocated for hi-tech “small schools”; and he also founded the Annenberg Institute. The Annenberg Institute oversaw the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where a “community organizer” named Barack Obama served on the Board of Directors alongside Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon and the US Capitol building when he was a member of the infamous Weather Underground.

• Linda Darling-Hammond: The President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, which is nowfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Hewlett and Packard Foundations. Darling-Hammond has been an advisor to President Barack Obama and President Biden and she sits on the Executive Board of Theodore “Ted” Sizer’s CES.

• Harold Howe II: A member of Yale’s Order of Skull and Bones, Howe was the US Commissioner of Education under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Howe sat on the 1982 Advisory Panel on “Informational Technology and Its Impact on American Education,” which was convened by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Technical Assistance.

In sum, the NEA’s 1985 “Special Edition” of Today’s Education included an all-star cast of ed-tech proponents while promoting the expansion of computerized learning during the years of Project BEST and UNESCO Study 11. At the same time, this “Special Edition” advertised IBM ed-tech products just before the NEA partnered with IBM to build the proto-internet Mastery in Learning School Renewal Network, which was followed by another NEA-IBM partnership through America’s domestic spinoff of UNESCO’s Education for All coalition.

Like the NEA, the AFT also has decades-long ties to IBM. In fact, the year that the NEA published this “Special Edition” of Today’s Education, in1985, was the same year that AFT President Albert Shanker was cavorting with “the head of IBM” and unspecified “bankers” at Trilateral Commission meetings. Fast-forward to 2016, when AFT News announced “AFT and IBM Launch New Tool for Teachers.” Through this AFT partnership with the IBM Foundation, AFT-affiliated teachers were given premier “access to Teacher Advisor with Watson, a first-of-its-kind, innovative professional development tool using IBM’s Watson cognitive technology to help strengthen instructional skills and customize lessons.” With the help of the AFT, this early pilot development of IBM’s “Teacher Advisor with Watson was trained by third-grade math teachers and designed . . . to tailor lessons to meet individual classroom needs.” In other words, the AFT lent its teachers to IBM so that Watson AI could data-mine them to develop learning analytics that will automate their jobs with “personalized” cognitive-behavioral algorithms.

Skipping ahead to this year, on May 20, 2021, the AFT-endowed Albert Shanker Institute promoted IBM’s public-private “P-TECH” partnerships through a virtual discussion event entitled “Breaking Barriers: A Conversation with AFT President Randi Weingarten and Stan Litow.” The event also promoted Litow’s book: Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway from High School to College to Career. During the virtual talk, Weingarten, who wrote the foreword for Litow’s book, states that, for several “decades,” she has partnered with Litow, who was the President of the IBM Foundation when he founded P-TECH charter schools that partner with IBM’s Open P-TECH. Those schools work to “orient” students “to the wide world of technology— . . . AI, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Quantum and more,” including “Data Science” and “Blockchain.” Through the public-private P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools) system, students can earn “[i]ndustry-recognized digital badges” enabling them “to demonstrate their knowledge and skills as they apply for employment” through “career pathways” which can be pipelined through a blockchain “pay for success” system. That system, in turn, is funded by “social impact investments” that are part and parcel to the Social Credit economy of the WEF’s Great Reset. Meanwhile, the NEA is also trafficking in “competency-based” teacher-training courses that award “micro-credentials” certified through “digital badges” which can likewise be tracked and traced with Social Credit “smart contracts” through blockchain and other DLT networks financed by pay-for-success impact investments.

While IBM and the AFT partnered together in the development of Watson AI and P-TECH “micro-credentialing” through “digital badges,” which are likewise being disseminated by the NEA, IBM is also an active member of UNESCO’s NEA-endorsed Global Education Coalition. That coalition has teamed up with Chainlink DLTs to service social impact investments. Specifically, this partnership between Chainlink and UNESCO is financing a grant program to “inspire developers to build universally connected smart contracts that positively impact humanity in any number of ways,” including: 

• “Dynamic NFTs powered by Chainlink VRF [Verified Random Function] that incentivize and gamify education to reduce school dropout rates and support lifelong learning . . .”

• “IoT-based [internet-of-things] projects that leverage Chainlink External Adapters to connect smart contracts to real-world sensors and automate outdated, paper-based processes.”

• “Educational certificates, for both formal university and skills-based courses, that are recorded on-chain and in universal passports.”

In brief, through UNESCO’s NEA-endorsed Global Education Coalition, which includes Chainlink and IBM, social impact investments are being funneled into DLT innovations that incorporate Chainlink “middleware” to integrate “real world sensors” for tracking “gamified” learning analytics into tokenized “educational certificates,” such as NEA and IBM “digital badges.” Those “badges” are supported by the AFT through “smart contracts” that are logged onto “universal” blockchain passports, such as IBM’s Excelsior platform, and linked to the internet-of-things. 

In a December 2020 article for the Activist Post, I documented how an infrastructure of Chainlink middleware has been in the works to integrate blockchain and “hashgraph” DLTs with “off-chain” data in order to streamline the ubiquitous monetization, or tokenization, of all digital forms of personal data for the purposes of tracking Social Credit metrics through the “internet-of-everything” in a “surveillance capitalist” Fourth Industrial Revolution. Now that UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition is impact-financing Chainlink applications for connecting off-chain and on-chain data, IBM’s blockchain platform for vaccine passports, such as New York’s Excelsior, is primed to be Chainlinked to aggregate off-chain learning analytics and digital “workforce competency” badges that can be algorithmically tracked into a global Social Credit system bankrolled by impact investments under the world governance bodies of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

To tie it all together, IBM has spent at least sixty years collaborating with the AFT and the NEA in order to evolve Skinnerian teaching machines into AI adaptive-learning computers which data-mine students’ psychometrics for Social Credit algorithms that can be monetized, or tokenized, through blockchain passports linked to the internet-of-everything. Now that the adaptive AI learning infrastructure is firmly in place, thanks to COVID lockdowns which have forced schools to install Big Data ed-tech, all that’s left is to hook up these psychometric data-mining technologies to a blockchain passport system. IBM is already platforming this through its contract with New York’s Excelsior vaccine passport. To put the nail in the Orwellian coffin, the NEA and the AFT are now championing Biden’s federal vaccination mandates, which are ushering in blockchain vaccine passports that will allow for the laying of the cornerstone for the DLT digital ID system that is necessary for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Social Credit panopticon.

NEA and AFT “Reimagine Education” with Google, Gates Foundation, UNESCO, and WEF

The NEA and the AFT are further accelerating the COVID “leap forward” into the Fourth Industrial Revolution as both national unions are calling for teachers to “reimagine” schooling through the public–private ed-tech partnerships touted by UNESCO and the World Economic Forum. Meanwhile, those organizations are also parroting the Reimagine Education campaign of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with former Alphabet/Google head Eric Schmidt. Of course, the NEA and the AFT both have a history of being funded with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, which is a member of the WEF, and both unions have also endorsed school integration of ed-tech products from Google, which is also a member of the WEF. At the same time, both the NEA and the AFT have collaborated with the Gates-owned Microsoft corporation, which signed a 2004 “Cooperation Agreement” with UNESCO, contracting to globalize “Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)” through “community-based” public-private ed-tech partnerships. 

Now, as the WEF spearheads the technocratic Great Reset, these alliances between the NEA, the AFT, Google, the Gates Foundation, the WEF, and UNESCO are coming together as the global Reimagine Education movement, which aims to exploit COVID lockdowns in order to permanently lock in a “Screen New Deal” that deploys ed-tech to data-mine students’ learning algorithms for predictive analytics. This ed-tech system of Big Data-mining is being built to lay the groundwork for a Social Credit surveillance network plugged in to an AI internet-of-things hooked up to a transhumanist internet-of-bodies (IoB). Meanwhile, Gates’s Microsoft corporation has been advancing the ID2020 project to set up a global digital ID apparatus through DLT platforms that can aggregate off-chain and on-chain biopsychosocial data, including blockchain vaccine passports and learning analytics, which can be tracked on Social Credit ledgers through the IoT and the IoB.

In 2019, a whole year before the global COVID lockdowns, the NEA’s newsletter, NEA Today,published an article entitled “The Reimagined Classroom,” which showcased classrooms where teachers “personalize” lessons through Google Docs data along with “QR codes, Apple TV, and a smartboard”. This “reimagined classroom” also envisioned students typing their essays on their smartphones and Google Chromebooks in addition to posting Twitter comments for discussion assignments. Just a few months after COVID lockdowns began in the United States, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his own Reimagine Education partnership with the Gates Foundation and Bilderberger Eric Schmidt, who is still the Technical Advisor of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google where he was previously the CEO. In several articles published by the Activist Post, I documented how the Gates-Google Reimagine projects are building Social Credit Big Databases through data-sharing arrangements between InnovateEDU, which is funded by the Gates Foundation, and Google’s BigQuery datahub, which contracts with the Chainlink DLT middleware that services social impact investments through its partnership with UNESCO.

In the meantime, the Gates-Google Reimagine initiative is currently being advanced by the NEA Foundation. In July of 2021, just a few months after the National Education Association lobbied the CDC to tighten up COVID-mitigation policies perpetuating virtual blended learning, the NEA Foundation announced that it would begin offering “Reimagining Education Grants” designed to “support broad systemic changes and a reinvention of schools.” 

Prior to announcing these Reimagine Grants, the NEA and the Gates-owned Microsoft corporation co-financed a 2010 coalition between the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, which were also funded by Intel, and Pearson, the latter of which partners with IBM’s Watson AI and is the largest edu-corporation in the world. As a result of this funding from the NEA and the ed-tech industry, the AACTE and the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills published a white paper titled “21^st Century Knowledge and Skills in Educator Preparation.” That document calls for “the application of technology to support more robust instructional methods” grounded in “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) theory and research” with the “outcomes-based” goal of developing workforce “competences” for “21^st century skills” in a “global economy.” In the interim between this 21^st Century technology project and the Reimagine Education partnerships, the NEA has also been funded by multiple Gates Foundation grants, totaling at least $9,227,812. 

Similarly, beginning in 2009, the Gates Foundation bankrolled the AFT’s Innovation Fund to the tune of $1 million dollars each year until 2014 after public backlash emerged concerning the financial relationships between the AFT and the Gates Foundation. According to Department of Labor filings, AFT President “Weingarten earned nearly $560,000 in total compensation during the 2013-2014 school year.” Additionally, the Gates Foundation also endowed the AFT Foundation with at least $1,922,200, including a grant “[t]o enable the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation to support the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools to become a self-sustaining organization.” Last year, on August 20, 2020, the Gates-owned Microsoft corporation sponsored an Axios Event titled “The Future of Employment” where AFT President Weingarten and Microsoft President Brad Smith called for policies and programs that would “bridg[e] the digital divide” by expanding “broadband access” to accommodate “distance learning and distance working.”

This year, on May 13, 2021, the AFT, which has adopted the Google Certified Educator Exam, published a white paper titled “Return, Recover, and Reimagine: Toward a Renaissance in America’s Public Schools,” which calls for schools to “Reimagine Teaching and Learning” by preparing students for “[f]ascinating breakthroughs and vexing challenges [that] are all around us—nanotechnology, gene editing, sustainable cities, even advances in 3-D printed organs. What seemed like the future is here—so it must be in our schools.” Stated differently, the AFT’s “Reimagine Teaching and Learning” campaign seeks to assimilate students into the transhumanist future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This “revolution” essentially aims to “reimagine” the human species into a cyborg collective of human resources commodified through biotech and nanotech that are controlled by AI for the purposes of “human capital management” in a Social Credit-based technocracy. Meanwhile, to facilitate this post-humanist Social Credit system, Microsoft is advancing the ID2020 project to set up a global digital ID grid linked to blockchain vaccine passports and other DLTs that can log Social Scores based on biopsychosocial data, including EEG algorithms from transhumanist brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

In sum, the Gates Foundation has been dumping millions of dollars into the AFT and the NEA while both unions have been partnering with Gates’s Microsoft. Now, as the Gates Foundation is calling to Reimagine Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the AFT and the NEA are following suit with post-humanist “reimagine” initiatives. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, which partners with the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, is spinning off global “reimagine” campaigns. Altogether, these Reimagine Education projects are installing the ed-tech infrastructure to data-mine students’ psychometrics, including BCI EEGs, for Social Credit algorithms that can be tracked and traced through blockchain digital IDs and passports being developed through the ID2020 project, which partners with Microsoft. 

AFT and NEA Champion Vaccination Mandates That Will Integrate Digital ID for Social Credit

In the wake of the AFT’s and the NEA’s efforts to petition the CDC to tighten classroom COVID restrictions that perpetuate schools’ reliance on “reimagine” partnerships with Big Tech corporations, such as Microsoft and IBM, both teachers’ unions have applauded Biden’s “COVID-19 Action Plan: Path out of the Pandemic,” which pushes state governors to mandate coronavirus vaccinations for all school employees. Thanks to help from the AFT’s and the NEA’s lobbying efforts, schools have been properly fitted with the ed-tech infrastructure necessary to data-mine students, just in time for Biden’s call for vaccination mandates, which are ushering in digital immunity passports through mobile blockchain apps that can be expanded to track and trace ed-tech data, including students’ “learning metrics” from online courseware algorithms and other “predictive learning” analytics. By backing Biden’s beckon for mandatory COVID jabs and, in turn, digital vaccine passports, the NEA and the AFT are championing the blockchain infrastructure necessary to aggregate students’ psychometric and biometric algorithms into Social Credit databases that can restrict students’ access to education, jobs, housing, transportation, healthcare, due process, and even food. 

Even before Biden’s COVID-19 Action Plan, both the NEA and the AFT were floating their support for mandating that students, teachers, and all other school employees be required to show proof of coronavirus vaccination as a condition for entering schoolgrounds. From June 30^th to July 3^rd this year, the NEA’s “Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly” debated “New Business Item 30,” which “call[ed] for mandatory safe and effective COVID-19 vaccinations and testing for all students and staff before returning to face-to-face instruction in the fall, subject to medical exceptions in accordance with existing law.” Similarly, AFT President Weingarten has also said that the American Federation of Teachers “would support that [mandatory COVID vaccination]. . . Just like we have vaccines we require kids to take to be in school in normal times.” 

Although the National Education Association’s “New Business Item 30” was voted down by the NEA’s “Representative Assembly” delegates, the national union has since lauded Biden’s mandatory vaccination measures. On September 9, 2021, NEA President Becky Pringle announced that “the National Education Association strongly supports President Biden’s new COVID-19 vaccinate-or-test requirements in workplaces with 100 or more employees and call for state vaccination requirements for all educators.” Similarly, in response to Biden’s COVID-19 Action Plan, AFT President Weingarten professed that “[w]e [the AFT] stand in complete support of this plan and of the [Biden] administration’s effort to protect as many people as possible.”

While the AFT and the NEA rhetorically appeal to health and safety rationales for compulsory COVID jabs, digital vaccine passports are being plotted to capitalize off of current health fears, opening backdoors for biosecurity surveillance by stacking the immunity passport DLTs with other “electronic health records (EHRs),” including mental wellness records. At the same time, blockchain vaccine passports are being developing as stepping stones for “identity management” DLTs that are programmed to track and trace other forms of personal biopsychosocial data, such as education “competencies” and job-specific “micro-credentials.” Those data are already being tracked with “digital badges” issued by IBM and the NEA, along with criminal background histories that are already being scanned by artificial intelligence to flag “pre-crime” algorithms for “predictive policing.” 

For instance, “ImmuniTrax” brand digital vaccine passports are linked to a mobile “VerifyStudents” app, which logs student competency certificates, through a company called “Corporate Screening.” Corporate Screening specializes in “compliance” services for employee hiring, including criminal background checks and “electronic fingerprinting.” If that weren’t enough, Corporate Screening also provides a blockchain “self-sovereign identity verification” platform, which can aggregate together ImmuniTrax EHRs, VerifyStudents competency certifications, and criminal background records all on a single mobile DLT app that can be synchronized with an individual’s biometric signatures, such as digitalized fingerprints and facial-recognition scans. In brief, Corporate Screening is an exemplary case study of how a single company is already piecing together the full spectrum of education, workforce, healthcare, and criminal compliance tracking in conjunction with digital vaccine passports and blockchain IDs linked to biometric algorithms that can be aggregated into a Social Credit surveillance system, which can restrict human freedoms based on a person’s “Social Score.”

For another window into how Social Credit infrastructures are being constructed through vaccination EHRs linked to blockchain digital IDs, consider the overlaps between the Illinois Department of Public Health’s (IDPH) Vax Verify database, the Illinois General Assembly’s Blockchain Taskforce, and Illinois Senator Bill Foster’s push for the adoption of ID2020. 

In Illinois, COVID vaccination records are being tracked through the IDPH’s Vax Verify portal, which partners with Experian: the world’s largest credit-reporting broker, which also provides health insurance through its Experian Health division. By managing vaccination EHRs with the credit-reporting analytics of Experian, which is advocating for “blockchain or equivalent technology to provide individuals with a unique digital identifier” that “enables seamless, secure access to services—governmental, financial, or otherwise,” the IDPH’s Vax Verify registry is primed to tie credit scores to COVID vaccination compliance. In turn, Experian’s financialization of medical compliance would expand credit scoring to the realm of “social scoring” as public health behaviors would be fiscally incentivized with monetary rewards and punishments just like consumer spending habits. With Experian’s “fintech” algorithms coercing obedience to public health orders, the first layer of a Social Credit control grid would be installed as access to employment and affordable goods and services would be restricted based on compliance with medical mandates, such as COVID-19 vaccination.

If this sounds far-fetched, it is important to note that, in 2018, the Illinois General Assembly set up a Blockchain Taskforce, which mapped out how social welfare services will be electronically automated and micromanaged through a blockchain internet-of-things that dispenses crypto food stamps based on a recipient’s “healthy living” algorithms tied to digital IDs. The “Final Report” of the Blockchain Taskforce proposes that: 

“[a]n interesting application could be an ‘entitlements digital currency’ for benefit programs such as food stamps. Providing a digital identity verification would help the program accurately verify applicants and reduce fraud. Smart contracts could precisely determine eligibility efficiently and effectively. An additional ‘healthy eating token’ incentive system could be offered to achieve ancillary health policy goals, providing additional cost savings for other health benefits systems.”

This “Final Report” even invokes the Gates Foundation’s “reimagine” rhetoric in a section titled “Convergence: Reimagining Public Services,” which forecasts how “Illinois could also explore the feasibility of integrating other emerging technologies such as IoT or Artificial Intelligence with blockchain to . . . reinvent traditional services.” Additionally, in 2020, US Congressman Bill Foster, a blockchain programmer and Illinois Representative who authored the federal “Improving Digital Identity Act of 2020” (H. R. 8215), attended an international ID2020 conference where he touted the post-COVID need for blockchain digital IDs and DLT immunity passports. 

To sum up, at the state level, the Illinois General Assembly has already drafted the legal framework to operate a Social Credit network of blockchain digital IDs that log health data to permit or restrict access to the basic necessities of life. At the same time, Congressman Foster, who represents Illinois’ 11^th District as the Chair of the US House of Representatives’ Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, has been working to federalize these state-level digital ID infrastructures in order to align them with the global blockchain-IoT matrix that is being spearheaded by the ID2020 initiative, which is being driven by Mastercard, Accenture, the Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft, the United Nations International Computing Centre, and the Gates-funded Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). 

Now that Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has mandated COVID vaccinations for state employees, healthcare workers, schoolteachers and students, the IDPH’s public-private Vax Verify partnership with Experian is setting the stage for the first layer of Social Scoring in Illinois’ blockchain digital identity management grid, which can be expanded through Foster’s federal “Improving Digital Identity Act” and the corporate-globalist ID2020 project that is endorsed by Foster.

Of course, Experian’s Vax Verify EHRs, which are primed for integration with Illinois’ blockchain IoT, and the ImmuniTrax passport, which is linked with Corporate Screening’s blockchain “self-sovereign identity management,” are just the tips of the worldwide digital ID iceberg that is being floated by multinational corporations, international foundations, national governments, and global governance institutions. In an effort to “guide the future of digital identity globally,” the ID2020 project, which is spearheaded by Microsoft and the Gates-funded GAVI, is launching the “Good Health” digital vaccine passport. Likewise, IBM has engineered a blockchain app that is being implemented to platform New York’s Excelsior digital vaccine passport while Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle are teaming up to develop another digital immunization passport. Abroad, the European Union (EU) has rolled out “digital COVID certificate[s],” and Israel has issued a digital “Green Pass” that tracks vaccination records while Russia has piloted QR codes which verify proof of vaccination through smartphones and other mobile devices. At the international level, the World Economic Forum is sponsoring the CommonPass immunity passport while the United Nations (UN) is endorsing the COVI-PASS™ Digital Health Passport, which is also built upon a blockchain platform.

To put this all in perspective, by bolstering Biden’s push for mandatory COVID vaccinations, the AFT and the NEA are pushing public schools to register with medical compliance databases, including Illinois’ Vax Verify portal, which will track and trace digital immunity passports, such as Corporate Screening’s ImmuniTrax, ID2020’s Good Health pass, IBM’s Excelsior, the WEF’s CommonPass, and the UN’s COVI-PASS. In turn, the AFT and the NEA are ostensibly spurring public schools into adopting blockchain digital IDs, such as those proposed by the Illinois Blockchain Taskforce, US Congressman Bill Foster’s “Improving Digital Identity Act,” Microsoft’s ID2020, the WEF’s “Platform for Good Digital Identity,” and the United Nations International Computing Centre’s “UN Digital ID.” In the final equation, thanks to staunch support from the AFT and the NEA, school vaccination mandates will roll out the blockchain digital ID infrastructure necessary to institute an IoT-IoB Social Credit matrix that can data-mine psychometrics from ed-tech products in order to profile students with Social Scores which will determine their access to educational advancement, job placement, healthcare treatment, social welfare entitlements, and even civil and criminal due process.

The State of the Teachers’ Unions

Make no mistake: bottom-up organized labor is indispensable to the struggle for democracies that truly represent working-class people. But to the contrary, the AFT and the NEA have proven to be top-down institutions that have sold out to multinational technology corporations that are in bed with state and federal bureaucrats and under the directives of global governance institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. 

If there is any hope that compulsory vaccinations and digital immunity passports could be effectively challenged by organized unions of teachers, then there would have to be mass exoduses of dues-paying members from the AFT and the NEA. Unionized teachers would need to follow the example of Michael Kane, who has led the charge for New York Teachers for Choice: a coalition of educators who have broken away from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which is a satellite of the AFT, in protest against Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s vaccination mandates for school employees. 

Full speed ahead, Kane is calling for all UFT members to resign from the union in order to dry up the United Federation of Teachers’ dues revenues. By starving the UFT of its dues collections, the upper brass of the union may be pressured into reconsidering their support of vaccination mandates, and if this strategy is copied by members of other teachers’ unions, such as the AFT and the NEA, it is possible that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association might also be pressured into rescinding their support of vaccination mandates as well. 

To be sure, it is likely that pulling out of the UFT, the AFT, and the NEA will not sway union bosses to defend the bodily autonomy and medical freedom of teachers and other school employees. Nevertheless, it still makes sense for educators and school staff to pull their money out of these unions since these organizations are dominated by bureaucrats who are actively refusing to protect the individual human rights of all their dues-paying constituents. In the long run, perhaps coalitions of UFT, AFT, and NEA defectors can reorganize together to form new grassroots unions that are chartered to enshrine the somatic rights and medical liberties of teachers and other school employees. One way or another, it appears that the time has come for organized labor to rebuild “parallel structures” through organic movements from the ground up.

Endnote:  If you are interested in connecting with other teachers, students, and workers who are strategizing ways to resist COVID vaccination mandates, please consider visiting the Telegram and/or Facebook links for “Students and Workers for Choice.”