What a disturbing thread.
I’m sure they want that too. It’s just the US and Europe can’t help but keep meddling. Even if they wanted to stop, they can’t give it up. It’s simply not possible.
There’s some decent pushback at least
Oh no. Don't tell me that instead of borrowing from the West and not paying them back, they're going to start borrowing from Russia and China and not pay them back? Be careful what you wish for, the West is a lot gentler than the other creditors you are eyeing.
When my historical literacy is based on vibes
Also true. A lot of these Belt and Road initiatives and funds have proven to be debt traps with useless mega projects in many nations.
Literally the complete exact opposite. Also, “building trains and renewable energy is a ‘mega project.’ They should invest in a hyperloop instead.”
When my historical literacy is based on vibes
Remember that time when China and Russia cut off all those people's hands for not harvesting enough rubber?
No, being a dead weight just means you're useless. The international community is more like a tapeworm that siphons nutrients away from and actively does harm to the host.
The west needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps and fall off a fucking cliff. Fuck off bleach demons.
Honest Accounts 2017 - How the world profits from Africa’s wealth
African countries received $161.6 billion in 2015 – mainly in loans, personal remittances and aid in the form of grants. Yet $203 billion was taken from Africa, either directly – mainly through corporations repatriating profits and by illegally moving money out of the continent – or by costs imposed by the rest of the world through climate change.
- African countries receive around $19 billion in aid in the form of grants but over three times that much ($68 billion) is taken out in capital flight, mainly by multinational companies deliberately misreporting the value of their imports or exports to reduce tax. [2]
- While Africans receive $31 billion in personal remittances from overseas, multinational companies operating on the continent repatriate a similar amount ($32 billion) in profits to their home countries each year.
- African governments received $32.8 billion in loans in 2015 but paid $18 billion in debt interest and principal payments, with the overall level of debt rising rapidly.
- An estimated $29 billion a year is being stolen from Africa in illegal logging, fishing and the trade in wildlife/plants.
This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.
Everyone claims they hate the elites until Africa speaks up. Then suddenly it's all "know your place, poors. Your betters are talking!"
Every time China visits somewhere in Africa, they get a hospital. Every time the west visits, they get a lecture.
it's just LoGiC aNd ReAsOn says the :reddit-logo:
edit: holy fuck further down the racism just keeps amplifying. fucking neoliberal shitgoblins.
Read the first sentence of the top post and noped right out of there
It's not just white people. There is a portion (I've run into one or two, so it's probably like 3%) of wealthy African Americans, especially entertainment personalities, that want people to 'go back to Africa' so that way they can bring all their skills, money, know-how, and entrepreneurship to Africa in order to pick the continent up and lead it into the future. Absolutely delusional ahistorical thinking. Just the worst.
injecting educated people into Africa might actually help the continent but doctors and engineers not entrepreneurs. Europe sent plenty of entrepreneurs to Africa and that's what made them poor in the first place
What's wrong about that? It seems that Africa getting some successful people could really help, especially with teaching the young. Besides it would eliminate the racism problem in these people's lives, and that is a big one. No more getting gunned down by police in broad daylight.
Do you think there are not already successful people in Africa, and have been for centuries? Do you not realize that Africa is already a rapidly developing part of the world economy? Do you think when the bourgeois places a factory in a town, that automatically means that they will help fund the school and hospital as well?
Africa's problems are primarily due to lack of access of the ability to develop human resources. The reasons for this lack of ability to develop human resources is not primarily a problem of educational personnel, but a problem that in order to get the capital to develop their material resources, they normally take structured IMF loans that place strict caps on the amount of social spending that they are allowed to do.
Now, you would think, 'Gee, if these loans are so bad, why would they take them, are they stupid?' They take them because if they attempt to develop their country in any other way, their governments have this weird habit of being overthrown by coups. Coups that are definitely in no way connected to the multiple undisclosed (except by random leaks) U.S., British and French military bases all over Africa. Or if they are not overthrown by coups, they are subjected to international sanctions. Now, theoretically even some of the social spending that is allowed could help, but most of the time, the guys doing the coups are pretty corrupt guys, so they tend to pocket a large percentage of the loan money that comes in. This is done with the full knowledge of the IMF, as multiple U.N. reports have documented this process. At this point, you could even call it sanctioned bribery, but legally it's just development loans.
Wealthy individuals going over and developing education will not change anything if there is not a political or economic system in place that can effectively utilize those talents, which means they will inevitably move to greener pastures. And even if that is rarely what they do, normally they just open up a factory that employees people at far below U.S. minimum wage, though you can argue that it is still higher than most of the local wages, but that is how neo-colonialism works. The exploitative relationship remains the same, and the infrastructure remains undeveloped.
The Chinese generally do things differently, in that they usually bring in their own firms AND workforce to create these large infrastructure projects that they themselves fund. You can argue that this is just imperialism, but it clearly is a completely different relationship. The Chinese generally only work with governments that they trust will allow them to complete the projects they set out to commit. And Chinese firms will hire African labor, engineers (at exploitative rates still but that's the nature of the business) and have been known to donate to engineering scholarships at African universities. As that one African prime minister said, "When the Chinese visit we get a hospital, when the West visits we get a lecture". And it has been showing huge results for African economies helping previously struggling countries grow their economies by even 1-2% a year as these workers then go on to spend the money they earn in the local economy, sometimes at Chinese businesses and sometimes at African businesses. It's still capitalism, but it's a capitalism that is marginally more aimed at partnership and development than Western style business and loan capitalism. We will see how that affects their long term poverty levels, the overall wealth and government corruption, but signs are looking at this being a winning strategy as long as it lasts.
However, the only reason this works is because it is a Chinese foreign policy strategy, organized by their foreign office, and then bid on and executed by Chinese firms. It's not random individuals fucking off and starting their own private "learn how to be an entrepreneur" or "L33t programmer" schools in Africa.
So if African-Americans move there they get overthrown in a coup. Well thanks, Mr. Negativity, I guess we just won't help then. Jesus.
The likelihood of an African-American becoming a political leader in an African country is minimal, the cultural barriers and understanding to accomplish that are incredibly high. It's literally not the problem.
The problem is that if that if wealthy African-Americans going over and educating Africans is the policy you want to pursue, the only way to actually effectively pursue it is with a massive hundred million dollar campaign that ALSO develops the infrastructure to create places of employment for these newly educated Africans to work and earn money. Again, what they need is hospitals, not lectures. Anything else is spitting in a pond to make it a lake. It would almost be more effective for wealthy African Americans to lobby for the U.S. government to loosen it's lending policies to African countries.
I'm not being negative. I am reading the geo-political situation as it exists and why, to the best of my knowledge, it exists, and then attempting to be realistic about the amount of work that actually has to be done to change that situation.
Anyway, now let's talk about how my student loans are exploitative and should be forgiven
