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Mayor Pete made his bones as a neocolonial number-cruncher
“Economic stabilization” projects like the one Buttigieg worked on serve as cover for war profiteering
This week, Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg secured a partial release from a nondisclosure agreement he signed with his former employer McKinsey & Co., allowing him to provide a list of his former clients. He had previously provided a summary of his time with the massive consulting firm that included only vague descriptions of the accounts he worked on but no proper names.
Having McKinsey on his resume has been a liability for Buttigieg, given the consulting firm’s dodgy history of working with authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia as well as its contracts with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency under the Trump Administration. His inability to talk about his tenure there enabled his detractors to let their imaginations run wild.
Buttigieg’s release confirmed a lot of things had already been pieced together based on his previous statements, such as the revelation that he worked as a consultant for Blue Cross Blue Shield, when it decided to “streamline,” i.e. downsize, its operations.
Unsurprisingly, given the centrality of health care in the current race, a lot of…
