An Unnecessary Expense

The Accession That Leaves Us Stuck with the World’s Most Expensive Advisers

AN UNNECESSARY EXPENSE
The Accession That Leaves Us Stuck with the World’s Most Expensive Advisers
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

For Uruguay, the OECD is like turning to an expensive nutritionist after local analysts have already given you, free of charge, the prescription for all your ailments; she charges you to hand you a prescription saying that you are morbidly obese, demands that you follow a strict diet to lose weight in 15 days, and exercise 24 hours a day on an electric treadmill so that you can try to run 5 km within the next 10 days, only to become frustrated again because you failed to do it.
And at the next follow-up appointment, she charges you just as much again to measure you, tell you that you are worse off than established athletes, according to a chart that the local doctor had given you for free and that you flushed down the toilet.
The question is why there is such insistence on joining this organization without first having done the homework that national specialists have been shouting about for years, with the successful failure of being heard by the political system.
Let us attempt, within the framework of freedom of thought, to consider one possible bad intention:
The technocratic chameleon’s handbook: From studio panelist to elder statesman of international organizations
Ah, blessed be the homeland and its endearing crises, always so prolific in producing that enlightened elite that saves us from ourselves.
We are talking about that superior breed of consultants, panelists, and after-dinner technocrats who, with the precision of a Swiss watch and the moral flexibility of a reed in the middle of a storm, manage to achieve the most difficult feat in modern physics: becoming supporters of the winning party exactly one second and four tenths after the election result is confirmed.
Forget the old grassroots militant who hands out lists in the rain and believes in party-list ballots; the true hero of our time wears loafers without socks and elegantly despises local underdevelopment while recovering from the tensions of his last round of golf at the Country Club.

Anatomy of the enlightened turncoat

Perfect timing: His antenna for detecting which way the wind is blowing is infallible.
If the trend shows an inconvenient change in the results he himself had predicted, he is already drafting in his mind an X thread (formerly Twitter) titled: “That was the way forward, the self-criticism they would not let us make.”

An allergy to the mud: He detests the committee, party headquarters, and the smell of grilled sausage. For him, local politics is a zoo populated by “dialectical apes” arguing over the budget while he calculates in euros the consulting contract the OECD will sign with him.

The narrative of “technical efficiency”: It does not matter if yesterday he advised the speculator on income, on neoliberal adjustment, and today advises rampant social statism; for him, numbers have no ideology, they have commissions.
What matters is that the macroeconomic model adds up… and that his bank account gets fatter.

The road to consecration: From the office to Lake Como
Enduring legislative questioning by those “ferocious little kittens fighting over a peso” is the temporary ordeal that destiny imposes on the chosen one.
But every sacrifice has its reward.
After a couple of press conferences in which he recites OECD manuals and metrics from memory —convinced that a bureaucrat in Paris knows better than anyone how many times a day one of his compatriots who barely makes it to 15 eats— the grand prize arrives.
The golden retirement does not finance itself: it takes years of polishing guilty smiles at diplomatic cocktail parties, trips to New York (New York), until that regional management position in a multilateral organization finally comes along. Bilateral organizations are for the riffraff.
Because, let us be frank, what better way to redeem patriotic suffering than to spend the final years of one’s life sipping a Nespresso in front of Lake Geneva, enjoying the included chalet along with the lavish trips to (tax) havens or good hotels courtesy of the long-suffering “technical assistance for development”?
After all, as the “rubes” down below like to say: the seventh circle of hell is much more comfortable if it has central air conditioning, a good heated swimming pool, and the status of “international civil servant.”
Let the old men at the Committee keep arguing about sovereignty; we true patriots know that the real homeland has an IBAN code and is quoted in hard currency. Cheers

OECD accession
Technocracy and power
International consultancy

Global Order and Geopolitics