Comment by lurk2
6 days ago
> minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country
I don’t want to sound like I’m running coverage for the Americans, but wasn’t a lot of that infrastructure built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?
> built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?
If you follow this reasoning - after what happened today - you will get Iran 2.0: Venezuelan boogaloo
I have zero optimism that after this - ordinary Venezuelans will have better outcomes in 10 years time.
Current USA government is some weird klepto-oligrachy. Hates brown people. It’s not doing it out of benevolence to Venezuelans. Venezuelans will get either colonialist resource extraction treatment or some power vacuum will bring just another despot.
Ask the Guyanese next door if they think they are getting a good deal from oil exploitation: https://ieefa.org/articles/guyana-paying-oil-costs-20-years-...
What is Guyana’s GDP without western oil technology? https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Guyana/GDP_per_capita_const...
We have already seen this plot in Iraq!
> Hates brown people
You're reading tealeaves to support your own hate-fueled nonsense belief. Correlation doesn't equal causation and all that.
It blows my mind anyone can hold this opinion after 10+ years of Trump very publicly spewing racist garbage. Let's just review a few recent examples:
- Claimed Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors' pets
- Currently claiming Somalian immigrants have setup vast networks of fraudulent daycares
- While he's worked diligently to stop immigration from, what he calls, "shithole countries" like Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan, he's advocated for increased immigration from "nice" or "beautiful" countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. He also specially carved out a special South African Afrikaner refugee status for white South Africans.
- Habitually calls predominantly non-white opponents "low-iq individuals".
- Repeatedly called SARS-CoV-2 the Chinese virus, "kung-flu", etc.
- Told four congresswomen of color (3 of whom were born in the U.S.) to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came". A bipartisan resolution was passed in The House condemning these comments as racist.
- And we can go back a long time ago, and remember the Central Park Five, where he relentlessly attacked five innocent black and latino children, calling for the death penalty for them. Even after DNA evidence proved their innocence, Trump never apologized or acknowledged wrongdoing.
Each of these you could try to individually explain away as a misunderstanding or whatever. But there's an abundantly clear pattern of racism, not just with Trump, but much of his administration.
Venezuela is the new Africa [or India [or Philipins]]
Your comment triggers so many thoughts, but the first one is I'm so friggin' naive, which is embarrassing. In my fantasy world corporations make investment decisions based on risk. They invest in a country like Venezuela and part of the due diligence is evaluating whether things may go sideways, like in any investment, and what plan b is if they do. And if plan b is getting the government to backstop you with money, guns and/or regulations then that would not be a viable strategy.
But, at every level in the US, that plan b is viable. And it's used over and over and over again, from small local businesses with local politicians to the US Federal Government and military for the likes of the oil industry.
At what point do you just accept the truth: that you (me!) are the dumb one because you hold onto this fantasy of how you think things ought to be as opposed to how they are?
Why is plan (b) bad? From my perspective it is certainly how things ought to be. If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.
And what is to say that plan (b) isn't taken into account when doing the risk assessment in plan (a)?
In your world everybody will be at war with each other. The way to deal with the risk of foreign nationalization of your assets is to price it in or to forego the opportunity. Expecting your country to go to war for your private interests is ridiculous. You can go to court if you want and if you lose you'll have to take your lumps.
1898 is a while ago (the Banana wars).
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Imagine you start a business in another country where the law says your business assets will be seized if you don't file tax form 123(a) before August. That is to say, non-filers don't have any business property rights. And you don't file the form.
Do you:
(Plan A) Realize you fucked up
Or
(Plan B) Send in the military to kidnap the president and take over the country, retroactively claim the law wasn't the law, undo its effects (but only for you) and then change the law so that property rights work exactly the same way they work in your country.
Now you see why people are saying plan B is bad, and would cause everyone to be at war all the time.
> If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.
In this case your property is actually not your property though. Assuming property == oil, then it belongs in Venezuela - you seized control of it but it’s not really yours.
> swinging its dick around
I'm sorry, I can't resist extending your metaphor:
The problem comes when "swinging your dick around" you accidentally get the other country pregnant. Then you have to co-parent the resulting child government, and they are always moody, rebellious, and ungrateful.
As soon as they're standing they run all over the house, painting the walls, breaking things, and costing you gobs of money. You can't ever go out, because the moment your attention wanders even a little they throw a party and invite their hooligan friends over; and wrapping up the party and throwing out their friends is another expensive debacle.
Not to mention the endless shady boyfriends/ girlfriends that parade through the place. They're "just experimenting" they claim: fascism, communism, and dictatorship are just phases they're going through as they explore who they really are.
Eventually they get resentful and want to live on their own. To accomplish this they kick you out of the house, and you end up leaving your car and many other possessions behind, and many times they trash the place as you leave.
If you're lucky, you both mature and you can develop an adult relationship in time. If you're not, they end up beating up their cousins and you have to break up the fights and pay for the broken furniture.
In short: don't swing your dick around, and if you must, be sure to use protection. I'm not sure what that equates to in this metaphor, but it's obvious the U.S. flunked sex-ed.
Of course it's taken into account. Feel like you didn't read what I wrote.
Question back to you: who decides when the government gets involved in getting your property back? You cool with it if they don't do anything to get your property back because of the size of your property; the cost to make it happen; you're not friends with the right person; etc.? Or better yet they don't get yours back but they get your competitor's/neighbor's back? Seems like the thing that happens in these situations is that someone maybe gets their property back and then the dick swings to piss on the people who didn't.
Like I said, fantasyland over here.
what do you think nationalise means? it wasn't taken without compensation.
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And Venezuela was well aware of plan b when accepting the investment.
That’s the story in every oil producing third world country. Without western countries, and these days China, they would just have oil in the ground because they lack the technology and capital to explore for it and extract it. They want the colonizers to come just long enough to install the oil spigots then leave.
I admittedly don’t know much about the industry, but didn’t most other countries not elect to expropriate the infrastructure? My understanding was that a lot of the problems the Venezuelans are having now arose from alienating themselves from the international supply chains and expertise necessary to maintain the equipment used to extract and refine petroleum.
They just do not want colonizers to steal their country and interfere in their internal decisions. Unfortunately, this is the story with every First World colonizer: they do not agree with that.
They want to have their cake and eat it too. Here, the Venezuelan government invited western oil companies to develop its oil fields. Then they broke the deal and stole the infrastructure the western countries had built.
That’s very different from actual colonization, where countries showed up and expropriated resources the natives were already developing.
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As someone living in a country where all of our oil wealth is being extracted by American corporations - America has a very special talent for "convincing" government officials to sign away their citizen's oil wealth. Not repairing that theft by nationalizing the oil seems more criminal than allowing the corporations to continue
At least you are paid fair share of taxes instead of being sent to gulag for questioning your dictator.
If it was done in a legal process then it should be litigated in that country.
What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported? Does the USA somehow reverse it and make it disappear?
Such a line of reasoning used to justify this kind of extrajudicial and warlike activity is somewhat similar to France’s nonsensical demand for long term reparations from Haiti for colonial infrastructure.
> What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported?
I believe “built” here refers to the financiers. Like when someone says “I’m building a house” they mean they’re paying to have a house built, unless they’re actually in the construction business, etc.