The cleansing of Gaza and the Empire’s consultants
People who have followed the news out of Gaza might have heard something about the Boston Consulting Group. It organized the deadly food distribution centers, where emaciated people are regularly shot while trying to pick up food for their families. It also organized a Gaza “redevelopment plan” — which is envisioning the cleansing of at least a half million people and building a new society “from first principles” on top of the ruins Israel made…with areas like the “Gaza Trump Riviera and Islands” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.”
Images obtained by the Financial Times.
Regular people who care about such things, I think, are genuinely shocked that some corporate consulting group from Boston would actively participate in a genocide and very casually make plans for “what comes next”…
Boston Consulting Group is not a name that everyone will recognize — it’s not famous like McKinsey. But it’s not some shady hole-in-the-wall outfit that sees an opportunity to do the empire’s dirty work and make a buck, either. No, it’s a prestigious organization — one of the largest consulting firms in America that does billions in business and has tens of thousands of employees. It has a long (if very gray) history in American society and has seen a lot of very important, very respectable people doing important work pass through its doors.
Here are two connections that jumped out at me after I did a simple search of my research vault — notes and information that I have amassed over the years from various research I’ve done and the rabbit holes I’ve gone down.
Bill Browder, the valiant fighter for democracy and freedom in Russia (who gave up his American citizenship so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes here), worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Poland in 1989, just as the country was being privatized. It was there that Browder realized the insane amount of money that could be made at the privatization game — turning over (read: stealing) formerly public infrastructure and resources into private hands. His experience for Boston Consulting in Poland is what inspired him to open up his own investment firm in Russia in the 1990s and to go on a plundering spree there under Yeltsin and then to ultimately back Putin’s rule. That was all, of course, before he got kicked out of the country because the people charged no longer needed him or wanted to share their wealth with an uppity billionaire American.
After the Obama Administration was over (and before he got a top role running America’s genocidal Gaza policy under Biden), Anthony Bliken got together with other Obama alums from the DoD, CIA, Homeland Security, and State Department to start their own lobby group, WestExec Advisors. In announcing this revolving door move, Bliken’s people said they’d work in partnership with, you guessed it, the Boston Consulting Group. WestExec Advisors was in essence a government in waiting during Trump’s first term — and many of its key people, including Blinken, would end up running the country while Joe Biden was left drooling in the White House basement.
All these people worked with Boston Consulting Group to get their little lobby group off the ground? (Graphics from The Intercept.)
Obviously, these two little factoids I found in my notes are just a tiny subset…bits of info randomly ensnared in unrelated research I was doing, and which I already forgot about. The reason I even mention them is because even these random bits show how entrenched the Boston Consulting Group is with America’s ruling class apparatus. There are other bits I found in my notes, too. It’s mostly random apparatchiks no one’s ever heard of — various Boston Consulting Group employees spread around America’s government and corporate institutions. They’re on the boards of antiracism non-profits, they’re in the State Department, in the Pentagon, the World Bank…in short, they are all over the place. And really, because it’s an international outfit, its people are in and out of top administrative roles for both the private and public sectors around the world. Just look at its top level people…the top of the top of a gray global corporate bureaucracy. You could say that Boston Consulting Group is just one organization for and of the corporate nomenklatura that runs the American Empire — just one institution that provides jobs, growth opportunities, and a chance to see the world, all while representing the interests of American-allied capitalist forces.
The fact that a prestigious outfit like the Boston Consulting Group is involved with the sordid work of managing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is another example of how Israel has the backing of the Empire. This isn’t Israel forcing anyone to do anything. The Empire is glad to be a part of it…glad to help Israel and maybe make a bit of money for its various shareholders. There’s lots of money in military ops and post-war reconstruction. Think of the real estate deals! Trump would approve.
—Yasha
PS: I just realized that the Boston Consulting Group’s plan for Gaza is basically the same as depicted in a viral AI “Trump Gaza” video made by some Israeli filmmaker as a “joke” and which then Trump reposted on his TruthSocial account. Gaza as the new Israeli Dubai.
Want to know more?
A big reason why privatization of UNRWA was broadly acceptable was because of the potential for looting by privatizers like BCG—and hundreds of thousands suffer because of it. This is potential for looting is probably the primary motivator of the US business elite.