Hacker News Reader

Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

> Larry Fink, who boycotted last year’s event. Fink explained his decision in a post on LinkedIn: “I believe greater economic integration and diversification will help Saudi Arabia build a more modern and sustainable economy for all of its citizens,” he wrote, adding that “corporate engagement and public dialogue can help with that evolution.”

That's the same reasoning used to justify continuing trade with China and other repressive regimes. I think of it as high-minded rationalization to justify continuing profitable business. Excuse me if I don't believe the people saying things like this really give a shit about anything but getting more money.

View on HN

I can't speak for Larry's motives, but consider the counterpoint: It's very easy to list countries where sanctions did not change anything, and possibly worsened the situation.

Successful sanctions are the exception. They're a lot like punishment. People do it not because they'll get positive outcomes, but because it feels good morally.

I told my mom this (among other things) and we’re going on year two of not speaking.

It’s like when parents say they hit you because they love you. But they “love” you regardless. They’re just hitting you because they’re mad.

Are you saying that you told your mother this because you were explaining why you are imposing 'sanctions' on her, or are you saying the two of you had an argument about politics and are therefore not speaking? (Or something else?)

"Mom I'm imposing sanctions on you." That's a thing, but saying so is generally not a good idea ;-)

Another thing to consider:

Do sanctions help other countries stay nice?

I'm afraid that if it came out that you could do what you wanted and it wouldn't have consequences then we'd see a lot more bad behavior.

So, while it hasn't worked on NK who knows what other countries would have tried if they could get away with it (and, I'd say, just look at history to get an idea).

Well the US didn't stay nice when there were sanctions all around them.

I anticipated this coming up but you kind of see why I guess.

If there was an even bigger superpower ready to punish them they might have behaved a whole lot better.

Reuters ran an interesting debate last month on the motion "Sanctions are fair and effective", each side had a senior lawyer and a politician speaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfSheVScFc

South Africa would like you to hold their beer.

It's kind of futile to give an example of sanctions working to someone who clearly stated that they some times work.

That's quite accurate - instead of trying to state any reasoning that would be refutable your statement above doesn't guarantee anything while implying a lot - thus it's pretty unassailable by logic. The implication is rested on a very relaxed statement and will continue to imply even while counter examples are raised.

Actually, I made a very refutable statement:

> Successful sanctions are the exception.

To refute, you just need to look at all sanctions, and enumerate the successful ones, and show the proportion is at least half.[0]

If "all" sanctions is onerous, a decent sample (e.g. "sanctions in the last 30 years") would still have weight.

But simply giving an example of something that the claimant clearly agrees with - that's not even close to a refutation.

[0] Clearly one can disagree on what success means, but then nothing in society can yield to logic

Reduction of foreign military expenditure by Gorbachev, political settlement in South-West Africa/Namibia, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union arguably did more to remove any remaining rationale of the segregated government.

In any case, sanctions/disinvestment caused many foreign companies to sell their South African divisions at a great discount to white industrialists. These industrialists in turn greatly benefited by opening up in the 90ies.

That's like saying "war did not change anything" . Sure , but the possibility that it might change something is why they re done. What's the alternative, assuming diplomacy has been exhausted?

>Sure , but the possibility that it might change something is why they re done.

Don't consider possibilities in one direction only. Consider the possibility that the change may exacerbate the situation. And then compare with the "no action" alternative.

in almost all cases, the "no action" option has already been deemed unpalatable

One person's decision is not "sanctions," it's deciding not to work with a bad client.

Reminds me of this: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I'm starting to really dislike that quote, because these people absolutely understand, they just don't care because it doesn't affect them directly.

“It’s difficult to get a person to care about something when their salary depends on not caring about it”

Updated it for you ;)

Disagree. People rationalize. Change the motivations and you get a different sincerely held rationalization.

Look at TFA. Decades of a top US ally being a human rights disaster, noone in the media cared. Until one journalist is killed..

I think Upton Sinclair assumed roughly that but was being a little sarcastic. In practice the people often do care and will go to great efforts to avoid the truth to further their own interests.

In my opinion, only countries respecting basic human rights should be permitted in the WTO.

Who would be the judge? Some would say the US should be excluded based on that criteria.

As someone that lives in the US I wholeheartedly agree that we should be excluded

I wouldn't want to be in a WTO where the strongest member is China.

and there exists the problem, and that will be the case unless an organization like the UN is actually given teeth

The good news is while the US should be excluded - so should China - it might just be Norway and Sweden sitting at a table eating some lutefisk[1].

1. Joke. In reality there are plenty of moral countries, but a lot of the economic powerhouses have clear exclusion reasons - Canada might get a seat at the table, along with Mexico perhaps.

Well there seem to be some indices available.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

I don't think this is a reason not to use them but... right now no one cares about those indices - but as soon as they're between corporations and their profits then there will be a whole lot of lobbying and you'll likely see an index review committee headed up by Reginald Thomas III (son of Reginald Thomas II - CEO of Megacorp X) suddenly insert themselves into the official publication of those indices - then the quality and neutrality of them will drop.

Everyone is fine with you saying "Don't cut down the rain forest" until you actually stop people from cutting down the rain forest.

Making the US the absolute base level would still eliminate a good chunk of offenders

Historically, it might only eliminate 2-3 of them...

I would also like to see the WTO to be completely empty.

And the US absolutely is not respecting basic human rights. In fact, relative to the fact that the US has previously made significant effort to respect human rights, the current situation with respect to immigrant detainment and family separation (and intentional maltreatment of detainees) is worse than countries that have always oppressed or mistreated their people.

The US currently has no moral ground to preach from, and it should be ostracized until it collectively comes to its senses.

But there's context for all of those things, and I can rationalize them with my 6th grade civics understanding.

Those other people, who's history I don't understand? Oh, they're just bad.

Not a single country here in Europe would be so tolerant on illegal economic immigration, America is extremely accepting. What other country lets people live so many undocumented immigrants in their country? The last refugee crisis literally tored EU apart.

I've lived most of my life in Texas. The Mexican immigrants here generally work as hard or harder than citizens, and they do hot dirty jobs that most Americans won't do. [edit] and the illegals work for less than legal pay because they have few options. They suck less from the government than the US citizens in the southern red states.

I guarantee that the immigrants are not tearing the US apart.

Imho the biggest part if whether you're using economic investments to change something or just to make a quick buck.

Mutual investment is a significant part of Europe's relatively long, relatively peaceful recent history: a war between the great powers will only create losers.

Similarly, if you have no significant relationship (and internationally, the only relevant relationships are of the trading variety), you have no leverage for change. If I wanted to alter your behavior, isolating you won't do much. Trading with you and then, when you see the value of our trades, ask for small, incremental change is much more effective.

Granted, the West hasn't done that a lot with Saudi Arabia (though otoh, women are now allowed to drive etc - would that have happened if China was SA's primary trade partner?), it has been mostly about "sell us oil, buy our weapons, and we'll look the other way when you commit some atrocity", but that doesn't mean that the idea is always wrong.

A diversified economy would also most certainly make Saudi Arabia a better place. Right now, natural resources are pretty much the only relevant industry, and typically, that industry is controlled by a small minority. A modern economy that consists of more than one sector would change the power balance and a change in the power balance would likely curb the Wahabi fundamentalism that the royal family uses to keep their population in check.

It can be a good idea, but that's not to say that it will be successful, or that it will even be intended to be.

> Mutual investment is a significant part of Europe's relatively long, relatively peaceful recent history: a war between the great powers will only create losers.

There was a ton of mutual investment prior to WWI. The real reason for the relatively peaceful recent history is the knowledge that war in Europe would have brought in the US and/or the Soviet Union with really bad consequences for all involved (Europe would become the "shooting gallery of the super powers")

Unfortunately, I'm pretty jaded on our outrage culture when it comes to tragedies. It seems like people are great at virtue signaling through a tweet, an article, a public statement or a sign, but what change are we really willing to affect in the world? How many people who were outraged about this story did anything to change the world beyond saying how bad it was? What was someone willing to risk in order to stand their ground on this issue?

Same goes for other tragedies as well. A lot of talk and no action.

Turning down millions of dollars in Saudi investment is a pretty big action. Basically the opposite of virtue signalling. It has a real cost for the people doing it. Seems like Google, Amazon and Uber are actually doing something in this situation, not just signalling that they care.

Uber's greatest contribution has been losing so much money/having their share price performing so badly that SoftBank, and by extension the Saudis who poured money in the SoftBank Vision Fund, is hundreds of millions of dollars underwater.

I find it telling and amusing that the justification never goes the other way. Businesses never force countries to implement democratic or human rights reforms, even though the belief they are linked implies that the most efficient way to improve business conditions might sometimes be to demand political reform rather than form new business relationships.

I wouldn't say this is the case. Business almost always does consider property rights and rule of law when making overseas investments. Both of those factors are strongly linked to human rights and democracy.

In general, the countries with the worst human rights abuses (North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Eritrea) tend to be the ones with the most anti-business policies. The correlation between the country-level ranking of political freedom and civil liberties[0], and their World Bank ease of doing business rating is over 50%[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World [1]https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/media/An...

Do you know of any examples of a particular business insisting an authoritarian regime implement pro-democratic changes before opening a business venture?

Even just drawing from American history, big business interests lobbied extremely hard for desegregation and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even today in America, big business is one of the most powerful interests in favor of LGBT-rights[1].

Another example was big business' demands for reform in the apartheid regime of South Africa[2].

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/the-u-s-c... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_principles

More economic trading means more interaction with the rest of the world. People learn and grow from being exposed to new experiences and thoughts.

Sure, the leadership may not change their stance but overtime everyone else might.

Great, so why not the same reasoning with Iran too?

What else should we do? Did economic isolation help with the case of North Korea? To the extent I see, the rise of tourism has helped / is helping Cuba to become more and more integrated, as it's increasingly hard for the government to keep modern technology etc. from the hands of locals.

China has kept NK afloat all these years; it's a special case.

yes, economic isolation helps - compare the amount of influence N. Korea (isolated) has in the world to the one of China (not isolated).

Sorry but I don’t agree this mentality

Unless you are an extreme nationalist, you have got to be happy that China lifted a billion people out of grinding poverty in 20-30 years? Now they need to work to maintain that standard of living. I hope soon they will transition to UBI and robots but in the meantime they need to earn a wage.

So you’re not happy because the people lifted out of poverty were Chinese?

If North Korea didnt have sanctions they would probably have never gotten nukes and the Kim regime would be far more benign to its own people.

Making people and families independently wealthy gives a counterweight to the government.

What we should have actually done is get off Saudi oil and stop subsidizing fossil fuels decades ago, to protect our citizens from OPEC. Then we could have actually had electric cars by now. Instead we buy oil and sell weapons. Creating jobs in this economy — oil and weapons are often closely linked.

We should care about MILLIONS OF REGULAR PEOPLE in Libya, Yemen, North Korea etc. but instead we care about Kashoggi and Libyan embassy only!

I am not happy about dictatorship having a sizable influence on the world - long term, I believe, it is a dead end (I have lived in USSR).

I am even less happy about Saudi Arabia. IMHO, it is the worst regime in the world (worse than NK) and I am appalled that my home country (USA) considers them “allies”

Yes, I agree with your humanitarian concern for people. That’s my point. Sanctions have hardly ever worked, but often led to far worse outcomes. The Versailles treaty is probably one of the biggest examples.

The tool should NOT be sanctions and economic isolation. It should be empowering the people on the ground, so they can build humanitarian institutions that can put a check on the government. The problem in China right now is all those institutions are being systematically dismantled. Human rights are the issue, for sure.

But remember, calling someone a dictator is very one sided. You live in the USA so you don’t get to see what USA does around the world. Mainstream media keeps quiet about it. No country is such a great “leader” which is why if we could I would argue for MORE globalism and LESS nationalism. I would want an international police force to replace all national armies, and its only job would be to de-escalate all world conflicts and force everyone to resolve conflicts through diplomacy or courts. There would need to be tons of safeguards in place to make sure we don’t concentrate power even further in the administrators of this international police force. That last part is the architectural problem. But if we don’t solve it, we will always have pockets of terrible human rights violations in sovereign countries. To nationalists — you have to care more about the sovereignty of a country’s government than human rights, every time. Caste rapes in India? Bride killings? Uyghurs in China? Bolsonaro wants to decimate the native population and chop down the rainforest for soy? Duterte killing people? Gotta stay out.

Hey I know let’s put some sanctions on it! That oughtta fix things. Eventually.

So... when will someone put sanctions on the US for Iraq or any other regime change war? Oh now we get the real rules on this level... might makes right. Well, instead of sanctions and trusting ONE country to be world police, I’d rather have more globalism, not less. But a benign kind — promoting conflict resolution and coordinating collective action solutions to global crises by design. Like making every country implement a carbon tax and dividend, to their own people, and then have corporations buy carbon credits from this fund, which would pay out to developing nations and others for reforestation and healing ecosystems (as verified from space).

What good is nationalism if we consume all the resources and make the planet hardly inhabitable? That’s the biggest question of all. What good are your national sovereignty principles when Mexico City runs out of water or Honduras and many African countries are emptied of its inhabitants due to drought?

> What else should we do?

stand up for something?

Why is it acceptable to sell your soul for money, but not your body?

Why should Iran be sanctioned while Saudi Arabia isn't?

This double-standard is precisely why people don't trust the USA any more.

From a high-level: the Iranian state hasn’t apologised for the 1970s US/Iran hostage crisis, nor its stated anti-Israeli position (see also: AIPAC lobbying), but most ostensibly because the IRGC continues to fund terrorism around the world - especially against US, European, Israeli, and Saudi interests.

SA escapes criticism because ostensibly they’re an ally(TM) of Israel and the US - and SA hasn’t committed state-sponsored acts of terrorism against western interests (9/11 wasn’t backed by the Saudi state - just by non-executive members of the extended royal family) and the economic and geopolitical leverage they get by being hosts of large numbers of US bases and getting OPEC to agree to use the Petrodollar which cemented the US at the centre of the world’s economy.

Well, has U.S. ever apologized for operation Ajax? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27état

"the Iranian state hasn’t apologised for the 1970s US/Iran hostage crisis"

This. The USA takes a looong time to forgive countries that humiliate it (or that it perceives to have humiliated it). I can't see any other reason for the USA to so strongly favour the headchoppers of SA over the headchoppers of Iran; they both have lots of ahl.

[Edit: the SA headchoppers are friends of Israel, the Iran headchoppers are friends of Hezbollah. So maybe it's to do with the evangelical obsession with the Rapture, and the return of all Jews to biblical Israel; I don't know if that was a thing back in Carter's day.]

But Iran should had forgiven the toppling of its legitimate president?

Their country their business. They don't need to apologize to anyone for ousting a dictator no matter who they chose to replace him with.

No, I mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

The sanctions on North Korea were constantly violated by China though. That's a bad example. Cuba was sanctioned by the US but not the rest of the world so that's a bad example as well. I am of mixed feelings on the efficacy of sanctions but North Korea and Cuba are not examples of countries that were effectively sanctioned.

>the rise of tourism has helped / is helping Cuba to become more and more integrated, as it's increasingly hard for the government to keep modern technology etc. from the hands of locals.

I can't speak to the situation of these other nations, but I've been going to Cuba for a long, long time. (Was at the University of Havana for a bit in the 90's, been visiting since.) Even during the Special Period there were tourists. Lots of them. I can tell you that there is no real "rise" in tourism.

There have been small changes in Cuban government economic policy over time, as well as changes in American policy towards Cuba. But if you ask the average Cuban on the island, I'm sure they'd tell you both of these changes in policy are precipitated more by the North Cuba Basin than they are by tourism. I generally agree with that assessment. Being that most of the movement towards these changes happened post-2004, despite the fact that there was no rise in tourism over the same period.

Cuba had 1.8 million tourists in 99, 2.4 million in 04, and 4.7 in 2017. Meanwhile, their population has risen from 11.1 million in 99 to 11.2 million in 2017. And though oil reserves were found, production has stayed roughly the same since 2004.

Those are registered numbers. Tourism from the nineties until Obama, especially from the US, was completely unregistered. Not only that, but Cuba facilitated tourism scofflaws by making it policy not to stamp certain Western passports. (I was there legally, and I can tell you that even the legal visitors, did not get stamped. At least as an American they didn't. They went the extra mile to cover your tracks.)

Point being, reported tourist numbers from Cuba are completely unreliable. (Really any reported numbers from Cuba are unreliable but that's a whole other story.) They report whatever serves the government's story in Cuba. Full stop.

So what government story prompted the gradual growth of reported tourists?

I looked at the data a bit more in an attempt to find sources skeptical of the reported tourists, and I couldn't find anything. I did find the reported tourism revenue though, and though it still seems like far more tourists are visiting, the expenses per person has dropped a fair amount leading to the % of GNP from tourism dropping since 98.

This would explain why the economy doesn't seem to be benefitting despite the high rise in tourism.

Sorry to nitpick but North Korea has historically chosen to be economically isolated (read about their government philosophy called “juche”), so it’s a weak example imo even in the presence of sanctions.

I mean, for at least a few years, my sense of NK has been that the world hates them because they want to be left alone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com