Cuomo Blunders Big by Tying NY Recovery to CCP Apologists at McKinsey

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gives a press briefing about the CCP virus crisis in Albany, New York, on April 17, 2020. (Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images)

Commentary

The headline in The Hill screams, “New York state hires McKinsey to create science-based, ‘Trump-proof’ plan for the safe economic reopening.”

Okay, we live in an era where propaganda dominates our media to an almost unprecedented degree, but this is beyond the proverbial pale and headed for Alpha Centauri.

The consulting firm McKinsey? Whose science are we talking about here? That of the Wuhan Institute of Virology—the laboratory, consensus now accepts, from whence the pandemic that destroyed the health and economies of nearly the entire globe emanated? It would seem so.

To put it bluntly, McKinsey & Co., the giant U.S. consulting firm with 127 offices worldwide and some 27,000 employees, has been in bed with communist China for decades.

But don’t believe me. Believe the unstintingly liberal New York Times, which did an extensive exposé of the company in 2018, titled “How McKinsey Has Raised the Stature of Totalitarian Governments”:

“This year’s McKinsey & Company retreat in China was one to remember.

“Hundreds of the company’s consultants frolicked in the desert, riding camels over sand dunes and mingling in tents linked by red carpets. Meetings took place in a cavernous banquet hall that resembled a sultan’s ornate court, with a sign overhead to capture the mood.

“‘I can’t keep calm, I work at McKinsey & Company,’ it said.

“Especially remarkable was the location: Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road city in China’s Far West that is experiencing a major humanitarian crisis.

“About four miles from where the McKinsey consultants discussed their work, which includes advising some of China’s most important state-owned companies, a sprawling internment camp had sprung up to hold thousands of ethnic Uighurs—part of a vast archipelago of indoctrination camps where the Chinese government has locked up as many as one million people.”

Belt and Road

While the repulsiveness of this frolicking near concentration camps is bad enough, the company’s actual activities in and for the People’s Republic of China are even worse.

McKinsey advises a good swath of China’s state-owned companies, including those building the artificial islands in the South China Sea that the United States and much of the West, not to mention the World Bank, holds to be illegal. These islands are an integral part of the escalating Chinese military threat.

McKinsey has also been deeply involved with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a program that many see as the linchpin of communist imperialist expansionism. The company has reassured Third World countries about China’s “benign” intentions with this project in places as far-flung as Malaysia only to find themselves embroiled in corruption scandals, according to the Times.

Domestically, McKinsey, quite recently (November 2019), has also been dealing with a criminal inquiry over bankruptcy case conduct. McKinsey has denied wrongdoing.

Globalism

But even more troubling than the degree to which the company is alleged to have skirted the edges of the law is its formative, and in some ways decisive, role in a once-accepted concept that has lately come under tremendous scrutiny because of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) behavior—globalism.

In a Tablet article—“The Coronavirus Didn’t Cause This Crisis by Itself. McKinsey Helped”— Michael Lind wrote:

“If we ignore our ritual partisan debates and try to be as objective as possible, I think we can agree that the pandemic has exposed two weaknesses in contemporary American society: the loss of critical manufacturing capabilities and the decline of the one-earner family.

“The loss of manufacturing capacity means that the U.S. is forced to import from China and other countries essential products that it used to make inside its own borders: many drugs and their chemical precursors, large supplies of ventilators and safety masks, and so on.”

This loss of manufacturing capacity stems from the concept of “unbundling”—sometimes known as “off-shoring”—that originated with McKinsey (plus some others of similar bent) decades ago.

They opposed the vertical integration of U.S. companies such as GM and IBM that generated all aspects of their products and suggested menial tasks (in essence, actual manufacturing) be sent abroad where it could be done more cheaply. McKinsey (and those others) are responsible for the situation we are in now.

In McKinsey’s defense, believing that enriching China was the road to its democratization was a common belief for many years accepted by several administrations of both parties (actually, it may have been an excuse for good old-fashioned greed). But that belief has been shattered by recent events as we all sit locked in our apartments and houses, the People’s Republic of China having again shown its Maoist totalitarian roots.

(Of course, we could have seen the handwriting on the wall in 1989, when the tanks of Tiananmen ran over the demonstrators, but the lure of mammon proved to be too great then, too.)

Biden Connections

So why would Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in the attempt to make New York state’s recovery “Trump-proof” (if we are to believe The Hill), choose McKinsey of all companies to lead the reconstruction?

Does the governor want to resurrect McKinsey’s brand of globalism, which means more appeasement of the People’s Republic of China, which caused the pandemic in the first place?

After all this, does he want to hold our supply chain (from antibiotics to face masks) hostage to despots?

I hope not. But I admit I’m flummoxed here. Cuomo would seem to be an intelligent man. He reads The New York Times, doesn’t he?

But there is one possible clue discoverable on LinkedIn. The deputy general counsel/head of public affairs for McKinsey is Louisa Terrell, which apparently isn’t well known because Terrell’s post at McKinsey is quite new (November 2019). Before then, she was the executive director of... the Biden Foundation, and was also a senior visiting faculty at the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.

I realize this can be construed as guilt-by-association, and in a sense, it is. But it’s interesting that one of the great vulnerabilities that Joe Biden has—and that Cuomo is beginning to demonstrate—in the coming election is Biden’s, shall we say, overly friendly relationship with the People’s Republic of China.

Charles Lifson—an emeritus professor from the University of Chicago—writes of this problem in “The More Anger at China, the Worse for Biden” on Real Clear Politics on April 17. As Lifson points out, during a 2019 campaign stop in Iowa, the former vice president declared:

“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the West. They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. They’re not bad folks, folks. ... They’re not competition for us.”

Given Biden’s son’s association with the Bank of China, this can’t be ascribed merely to being addle-brained. The Democrats, in general, are going to have to face up to their relationships with the People’s Republic. (Michael Bloomberg, if he’s really a Democrat, is in deeper than anyone.)

They all, including Biden, are going to have to learn to separate from the PRC if they hope to win in November.

Cuomo’s choice of McKinsey to solve New York’s economic problems isn’t going to help. It’s certainly not too late to reconsider. But if the governor doesn’t, he can expect a lot of questions. Not only that, he will be betraying not only his state, but his country. And he will indeed be complicit in raising the stature of a totalitarian government.

Roger L. Simon—the Epoch Times’ senior political columnist—is the co-founder of PJ Media. He is also an award-winning novelist and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. His most recent book is “The GOAT.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.