When there are accusations of what American businesses have
done in other countries, and how we have ripped them off or exploited their resources,
I always wonder what the speaker thinks the role of that country’s government
was. At least over the last 60 years,
was this not a government the UN recognised as representing the nation? Prior to that, was it not at least some sort
of recognised entity that other nations were bound to deal with? Didn’t they have the general right to
negotiate on behalf of their people?
Perhaps the tradeoffs (assuming that the accusers acknowledge that there
were tradeoffs at all) looked different then.
Who do they think Americans should have dealt with instead?
I’m sure we have broken agreements, or skirted them. Well, that’s worthy of condemnation,
certainly. And we may have been
deceitful in making the agreements – that should be right out as well. But this whole idea that if anyone made more
money than someone thinks they should, the default assumption is that this was
exploitation doesn’t seem well thought-out.
There’s an inconsistency here.
If one thinks that a lot of these governments are not properly
representing their people, then why do we think they should have a vote at the
UN? Who do you think we should be calling on the phone instead? If the Elbonian government in 1962 thought a
mining deal with Amerizinc was in the country’s best interest, wasn’t that
their call to make? If we now say they
were always corrupt nepotists representing only a few families*, wasn’t that
Elbonia’s problem to fix, not ours? What
do they think we should have done about that?
There may still be plenty to legitimately criticise
Amerizinc about. I am objecting to the
mindset that fails to recognise that economic decisions are always tradeoffs
that need to be seen in their context, not through the prism of what we think
later. Because what we think later
usually involves looking at only one side of the scales: wars or coups or
deaths from poverty that we think could never have happened because they did
not happen in this scenario. It’s rather
like resenting all the money you spent on insurance because of things that didn’t
go wrong after all.
*Like that narrows it down
Another example of 20-20 tunnel-vision hindsight.
ReplyDeleteIt's always sad when the people living nearest the valuable resources don't benefit much from their extraction. But the resources were never going to be valuable unless someone who knew how came and extracted them and put them to a use that the locals had no idea how to implement. And as you say, if the locals themselves don't share the wealth that the resources bring in, that's a problem with the local arrangement. It's very tempting to say we ought to do something about that, but we generally don't have the appetite to do that militarily. We're not interested in letting the locals emigrate en masse and join us here. We don't usually have any useful suggestions to make at all. I think it's just a way for people here to adopt cheap attitudes of superiority.
ReplyDeleteAs for the UN, it can bite me.
To be fair, there were some times in South America where the scuttlebutt is that US businesses managed to replace the local government. But I can't think of any recent cases.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough. It's an ugly thing to intervene only to install an even worse government.
ReplyDeleteTexan99, the UN definitely wants to bite you. Teh rest of us, as well.
ReplyDelete