{"id":200550,"date":"2021-03-07T19:19:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-08T00:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/03\/07\/this-will-not-end-well-5\/"},"modified":"2021-03-07T19:19:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T00:19:00","slug":"this-will-not-end-well-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/03\/07\/this-will-not-end-well-5\/","title":{"rendered":"This Will Not End Well"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
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This might be the best business meme of 2019 so far. pic.twitter.com\/hTXul3Muy3<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 ArtkoCapital (@ArtkoCapital) March 5, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pretty much<\/i><\/div>\n

As history shows, the appointment of technocratic apolitical experts to run governments does not run well <\/p>\n

This is because if you have a problem, the conventional wisdom, which is ideology that the aforementioned, “Technocratic apolitical experts,” subscribed to, is ALWAYS<\/b> wrong. <\/p>\n

And yes, I mean ALWAYS<\/b>, because if <\/span><\/b> the conventional wisdom were correct, then the problem would have been solved. <\/p>\n

In the latest case of subverting democracy on the alter of “expertise”, the Italian government has been handed to former ECB president Mario Draghi, and he has decided the notoriously corrupt consulting firm McKinsey & Company will help run things<\/a>, because, given their paying of bounties for opioid overdose deaths<\/a>, white-washing of mass layoffs<\/a>, instructing hospitals to game the bailout system that they were managing<\/a>, suggesting that immigration detainees be starved and denied medical care<\/a>, self-dealing in bankruptcies<\/a>, aiding the House of Saud’s persecution of its critics<\/a>, and aiding and abetting corruption in South Africa<\/a>. <\/p>\n

So, going with McKinsey to fix things in Italy is not going to be the panacea that Draghi think it will be: <\/p>\n

Upon its formation last month, Mario Draghi\u2019s new government was heralded by almost all Italian and international media as a rescue operation<\/a>. Where the former European Central Bank (ECB) chief Draghi had \u201csaved the euro\u201d in the 2010s, most outlets gushed over \u201cSuper Mario<\/a>\u201d and his plan to \u201csave Italy<\/a>\u201d by splashing a mooted \u20ac209 billion in European recovery fund cash while \u201creforming<\/a>\u201d its lackluster economy. <\/p>\n

The kind of \u201creforms\u201d this meant went unmentioned \u2014 and after all, this government bears no relation to voter decisions, or the coalitions that ran in the last general election. But for the fourth time since the 1990s, a president called on a technocrat from the world of finance and banking to form a cabinet, halfway through a parliament. Eight of Draghi\u2019s twenty-three ministers are unelected technocrats, in a so-called government of experts. <\/p>\n

If these figures are not party-political, they have similar backgrounds and instincts. Economy minister Daniele Franco is a former Bank of Italy official who drafted the famous 2011 ECB letter<\/a> instructing the government to implement privatizations and cut back collective bargaining. Former Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao \u2014 today innovation and digital transition minister \u2014 is a former partner at private consultants McKinsey & Company. <\/p>\n

Now, it has been revealed that McKinsey is going to be tasked<\/a> with writing Italy\u2019s economic plan for the coming period, to be submitted for review by the European Commission at the end of next month. Notorious for its role in the Enron scandal as well as the 2008 financial crisis \u2014 as it promoted the boundless securitization of mortgage assets \u2014 and the botched vaccine rollout in France<\/a>, the firm is now being called on to shape the Draghi government\u2019s \u201creform\u201d agenda. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The suggestion that this is a purely \u201ctechnical\u201d collaboration \u2014 that McKinsey\u2019s choices will not be political \u2014 is patently absurd, not least given that this claim is also widely made for Draghi\u2019s \u201ctechnical<\/a>\u201d government itself. For decades, the imposition of neoliberal recipes in Italy has been advanced through this same procedure, with the agenda advanced by privatizers couched in the dogma of \u201cunavoidable choices.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

As Lorenzo Zamponi writes<\/a>, it is quite possible that there is some shift since the \u201cexpansive austerity\u201d of the 2010s \u2014 that is, Draghi will put economic reforms above a simple reduction in overall spending. Yet the appointment of McKinsey and Bocconi-school ideologues points toward the same gospel of privatization and deregulation that technocrats have been imposing on Italy for decades, without ever winning popular backing. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Government by experts may sound good \u2014 but only so long as we forget all the previous rounds of such \u201ccures,\u201d which have helped push Italian GDP below the level it was at in 1999. But La Repubblica is, in its own way, quite right to compare this move to a corporation calling in McKinsey. For a failing business isn\u2019t a democracy either \u2014 and when the consultants call for restructuring, it\u2019s the workers who get screwed. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once again, the very serious people in the EU are going to take the wrong actions, based on the wrong world view, on behalf of the people already rich and powerful, and right wing populists will gain yet more ground.<\/p>\n

This will not end well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This might be the best business meme of 2019 so far. pic.twitter.com\/hTXul3Muy3 \u2014 ArtkoCapital (@ArtkoCapital) March 5, 2019 Pretty much As history shows, the appointment of technocratic apolitical experts to run governments does not run well This is because if you have a problem, the conventional wisdom, which is ideology that the aforementioned, “Technocratic apolitical …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}