On something different, woke capital – Laleh Khalili in LRB

“When the conspiracy theorists, diehard Trumpers and (white) natalists gathered in London in May for the UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies. On the opening day, the conference director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools and woke universities, of course, but also the new nemesis: ‘woke capital’.

Woke capital includes all manner of sinners: globalist financiers, gay-friendly lifestyle and entertainment businesses, and ESG (environmental, social and governance) investors, the bugbears of manly megatruck-driving American men. Woke capitalists’ internationalism is suspicious and effete, their cosmopolitanism is a danger to Christian nationalism, and their efforts to wean the world from fossil fuels so that they can make more money from renewables only delay the end times.”

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“Private equity firms use the companies they own as collateral for loans, which they pay back with the profit from selling off the companies – a strategy perfected in the 1980s by such outfits as KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), Carlyle and Blackstone.”

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“But then came the downfall. In late 2017, a fund manager at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started asking questions about where the foundation’s $100 million investment in Abraaj’s health fund had gone: the promised projects had failed to materialise. Insiders leaked emails and financial documents to Simon Clark and Will Louch at the Wall Street Journal, who started to publish evidence of malfeasance. US federal prosecutors brought fraud charges against Naqvi, and in April 2019 he was arrested on disembarking from a plane in London. He paid £15 million in bail and was electronically tagged and placed under house arrest in his flat in a mansion block in South Kensington, where he began fighting extradition to the US. He was forced to sell his estate in Oxfordshire, where between 2010 and 2012 he held cricket tournaments to raise campaign funds for Imran Khan. He was tried in absentia in the UAE and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for his role in the collapse of Abraaj, and for writing cheques he couldn’t cover. In March this year, the high court ruled that he could be extradited to the US to stand trial for fraud and money laundering.”

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“The concept of economic development as a planned activity is a little more than a hundred years old. In 1920, Sun Yat-Sen published a treatise on The International Development of China. He offered a plan for ‘the vast resources of China to be developed internationally under a socialistic scheme, for the good of the world in general and the Chinese people in particular’. He called for foreign investment in ports, roads, canals, railways, telecommunications infrastructure, steel and cement works, and agricultural and mineral resources. The profits would repay capital investments, increase wages, improve production technology, and reduce the cost of commodities and public services for Chinese consumers. This regulated marriage between local socialism and global capitalism ‘would create an unlimited market for the whole world’.”

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“From the start, the development finance industry resembled the US military: overlapping national, regional and international organisations overseen by fractious bureaucrats, a sprawling domain of operations, ever more elaborate geopolitical and geoeconomic justifications for intervention, and an enthusiasm for impenetrable acronyms. Liberal counterinsurgency doctrine incorporated developmental policies in France’s war in Algeria, Britain’s in Malaya and the US’s in Vietnam. The mantra of every general engaged in guerrilla warfare in Asia and Africa and Latin America became ‘build roads, schools and markets’, not just to civilise and integrate, but to be used for military and intelligence purposes. The term ‘counterinsurgency’ was coined by Kennedy’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, whose paean to economic development, The Stages of Economic Growth, was subtitled ‘A Non-Communist Manifesto’. Rostow was also instrumental in the creation of USAID. Like the military, the development industry has been irresistibly drawn to private firms that boast efficient solutions which skirt public scrutiny and the plodding work of securing popular consent.”

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“In June 2009, President Obama gave a speech at Cairo University supposedly intended ‘to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims ...one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition’. Obama praised the US’s work to eradicate polio alongside the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (while Obama was speaking, a CIA spy disguised as a vaccinator was tracking Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. After the news came out, dozens of vaccination workers were killed around the world, and in Pakistan polio vaccination rates plummeted).”

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“Blair’s tenure as Middle East envoy was memorable for being entirely ineffectual, for his closeness to and passionate defence of successive Israeli governments, and for his varied and extensive Middle East business connections. When he stepped down in 2015, he was replaced by Kito de Boer, a former managing director of McKinsey in the Middle East. De Boer had befriended and mentored Naqvi during his early years in Dubai and in 2002 had encouraged him to start Abraaj with his profits from the sale of Inchcape. De Boer lasted as envoy for two years before becoming a managing partner at Abraaj, just before the firm went up in flames.”

Read the article here.

Delightful sentences, health care is a goldmine.

The side remarks are telling as well. The unintended effects of tracking Osama with the help of a “vaccination worker”.

And then there is Mr. Naqvi himself.

Blair was smarter, probably also a bit poorer, but just a bit.

It’s telling that the leaders of the third way (Clinton, Blair, Schröder) are all despise, mostly by the people who once supported them, the liberals and social-democrats.

They are despised for various reasons (Schröder and Putin) but they symbolic downfall started probably early. They are remnants of the era 1989-2001, that short period of time, overshadowed by the war in Yugoslavia, that it seemed that the free market was the solution for everything.