Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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It's amazing how often the US/West gets away with the exact same scam.

Step one: install tough nationalist leader

Step two: sell the countries natural resources cheap to US/West

Step three: invest that money wisely to grow the nation.

Only joking, you don't need strongmen to sell natural resources cheaply to foreigners, you need them for the real step three when someone points out you're getting rich selling the country's resources and the average person gets nothing.

Real step 3: authoritarian crackdown financed with western cash inflows.

Step Four: slow, then quick, collapse of the above regime during which the big power play is to threaten to stop selling the resources cheaply and jailing, killing, torturing a bunch of actual patriots.

Step five: US/West to the rescue, saving you from those naughty strongmen who sold them the resources.

China got really lucky by not having many natural resources beside their people.

Russia, Iraq, Chile etc. got totally played.

How russia comes into this list? Which regime was installed by the west?

Maybe check out this issue of TIME magazine from 1996 http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

There was a lot of public discussion in nerdy economics circles about the best way to privatize the USSRs industries. Some of the factors they discussed might surprise you. Compared with say Poland there was a lot of emphasis on not having the industries under national control or ownership even though that's not strictly required for 'economic efficiency'.

What really is the difference between an authoritarian dictator controlling Iraq's oil (oh, and all the other bits of Iraq the west doesn't care about) and selling it to the west and getting support and funding from the West in return to build palaces full of gold. Versus Oligarchs, controlling even more strongly the bits of Russia the west cares about and allowing Russians to feel like they control the other bits. But only the oligarchs get the palaces full of gold, and probably in a proper country, in fact why not a superyacht, that's less obviously not in Russia, even though it's clearly not in Russia.

BP owns 20% of Rosneft (do you know how BP started? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bp-and-iran-the-forgotten-histo...)

But wait, this doesn't feel right, you have strong, patriotic leadership (like Iraq) and (like Iraq) your strong leader kills people that look and sound just like you to Americans. And Americans make a lot of noise about that while still buying your oil. Take that America. And (like Iraq) suddenly you're the bad guy when you thought you had a working relationship and power because you had the resources. And (like Iraq) USA is going to own you even more once you finish fucking yourself up.

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