The so-called Great Reset is nothing but the extension and violent #acceleration of a longstanding process.
It is the increase of centralising power, the tightening of control, the growth of “the #economy ”, the ever-closer convergence of #power and #money.
Continuous #industrial #development has been the background to all our lives, but it is not necessarily something of which we are always conscious.
The first thing I observed was that there was always local opposition to any proposed development on a greenfield area – the bigger the project, the greater the opposition.
Several methods were used to ensure that development triumphed over the wishes of the local people.
The first was for local politicians and officials to denigrate opponents of the scheme in question, in which ever way seemed most appropriate.
If the #opponents were local people living close to the proposed development, they were selfish individuals termed NIMBYs – Not In My Back Yard.
If people from further away were involved, who could not be accused of having a purely personal interest, they were dubbed “outside agitators” or “rent-a-mob troublemakers”.
In this way, no #dissent could ever be seen as legitimate.
I also came across a degree of #corruption, of course, of very close connections between local officials and the property development businesses whose projects they authorised.
But behind these levels of #propaganda and corruption was something else, something even more important: the “need” for development was written into the bureaucratic planning structures devised by central government, with which local authorities had to comply.
The overall process of development itself was sacrosanct and officially ensured.
All the language and arguments in favour of development therefore served not so much to convince people that it was necessary, as to cloak the reality that it would in any case be imposed on them against their will by central power.
A narrative is always needed to dress up development and sell it to the public.
This idea of “underdevelopment” is, he concludes, “a manipulative trick to involve people in struggles for getting what the powerful want to impose on them”
Those pushing this #agenda are happy to cynically exploit the naivety of those who fall for the lie and enthusiastically jump aboard the bandwagon of “helping” those who have not yet been turned into what Otto Ulrich calls “a mechanical cog in a great production apparatus dominated by the world market”.
In #Europe, a key #institution promoting development is The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, founded sixty years ago
The “First UN Development Decade” between 1960 and 1970, which claimed to identify a problem with “underdeveloped” people, again insisted that its aim was to improve the quality of their lives
In 1970 it launched an International Development Strategy and an associated UN resolution announced a unified approach to development and planning, “which would fully integrate the economic and social components in the formulation of policies and programmes”.
In 1986 the #UN went even further when it published its Declaration on the Right to Development.
Although this text clearly identified the aim of establishing what it called “a new international economic order”, it hid this agenda behind the absurd statement that “the right to development is an inalienable human right”.
“States have the duty to co-operate with each other in ensuring development and eliminating obstacles to development”.
In 1990 the United Nations Development Programme published its first Human Development Report, defending the inalienable right of all human beings to be developed.
then ten years later, in 2000, it launched its Millennium Development Goals, based on the International Development Goals drawn up at Chateau de la Muette by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee
Private-public partnerships were very much encouraged. Goal 8 was “to develop a global partnership for development”, which could mean “cooperation with #pharmaceutical #companies” or making available the “benefits of new technologies” by working with Big Tech
It has also long been interested in so-called “rural development”, aiming to “increase #production and raise #productivity” by means of what it calls a “transition from traditional isolation”. The #World #Bank would like to enable the “transfer of people out of low productivity #agriculture into more rewarding pursuits”.
It is not for nothing that the World Bank/IFC use the #slogan “Creating #Markets, Creating #> Opportunities” (21). For all the do-good language, the bottom line is that investment, like development, is really about making money and accumulating power.
The World Bank has been peddling the #greenwashing scam of so-called “sustainable development” for quite a while now.
In reality, the “sustainable” development they are promoting is every bit of an oxymoron as “equitable” development, being just another aspect of the camouflage with which its proponents hide the reality of their insidious agenda from public view.
*As Esteva writes, “Sustainable development has been explicitly conceived as a strategy for sustaining ‘development’, not for supporting the flourishing and enduring of an infinitely diverse natural and social life”. *
But because they don’t want this profoundly undemocratic situation to be visible, they also construct the propaganda layer which aims, like the propaganda about the need for local “development”, to conceal the true nature of the process.
Because the development mafia depicts itself as representing “good”, all those who go against its agenda must necessarily be “bad” – reactionary, right-wing, conspiracy theorists.
###The process which calls itself “development” in fact equates to nothing other than #destruction, in every context.
As Sachs writes: “Suspicion grows that development was a misconceived enterprise from the beginning. Indeed, it is not the failure of development which has to be feared, but its success. What would a completely developed world look like?” (28)
