Bring on the Apocalypse by George Monbiot

Author:George Monbiot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

This Is What We Paid for

Tony Blair has lost the election. It’s true he wasn’t standing, but we won’t split hairs. His policies have just been put to the test by an electorate blessed with a viable opposition, and crushed. In throwing him out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic experiment.

Chandrababu Naidu, the state’s chief minister, was the west’s favourite Indian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad, the state capital. Time magazine named him South Asian of the Year; the governor of Illinois created a Naidu Day in his honour, and the British government and the World Bank flooded his state with money. They loved him because he did what he was told.

Naidu realised that to sustain power he must surrender it. He knew that as long as he gave the global powers what they wanted, he would receive the money and stature that count for so much in Indian politics. So, instead of devising his own programme, he handed the job to the US consultancy company McKinsey.

McKinsey’s scheme, Vision 2020, is one of those documents whose summary says one thing and whose contents say another.1 It begins, for example, by insisting that education and healthcare must be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state’s hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by “user charges”.2 It extols small businesses, but, way beyond the point at which most people will stop reading, reveals that it intends to “eliminate” the laws that defend them,3 and replace small investors, who “lack motivation”, with “large corporations”.4 It claims it will “generate employment” in the countryside, and goes on to insist that over 20 million people should be thrown off the land.5

Put all these – and the other proposals for privatisation, deregulation and the shrinking of the state – together, and you see that McKinsey has unwittingly developed a blueprint for mass starvation. You dispossess 20 million farmers from the land just as the state is reducing the number of its employees and foreign corporations are “rationalising” the rest of the workforce, and you end up with millions without work or state support. “The State’s people”, McKinsey warns, “will need to be enlightened about the benefits of change.”6

McKinsey’s vision was not confined to Naidu’s government. Once he had implemented these policies, Andhra Pradesh “should seize opportunities to lead other states in such reform, becoming, in the process, the benchmark state”.7 Foreign donors would pay for the experiment, then seek to persuade other parts of the developing world to follow Naidu’s example.

There is something familiar about all this, and McKinsey have been kind enough to jog our memories. Vision 2020 contains 11 glowing references to Chile’s experiment in the 1980s. General Pinochet handed the economic management of his country to a group of neoliberal economists known as the Chicago Boys. They privatised social provision, tore up the laws protecting workers and the environment, and handed the economy to multinational companies.

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