Part of the whole "sweetheart deal" arrangement with the Saudis was that, in exchange for extracting their oil, that US companies like Halliburton would build their cities to modern standards. Now, they did a good job, no doubt about that; the quality of the construction is excellent. But the whole arrangement, top to bottom, was oriented around using American companies to provide as many services as possible. We extracted their oil, we provided financial services, we did their construction, we absorbed their investment money into Wall Street. Saudi Arabia, more than any other country in the world, is the creation of the US oil elite.
I didn't read about this on the Web, so I don't have a direct link for you. My primary source is Tales of an Economic Hitman, which was an amazing book. Conservatives hate it, and savage it mercilessly, but I've done my own research on many of his claims, and I found excellent backing for his belief that we have, by and large, used debt as a weapon to assimilate poor countries worldwide.
In country after country throughout the world, we promised too much economic growth, and overbuilt their infrastructure, knowingly putting them into debt that their economies couldn't service. This eventually destroyed their middle class, throwing most of the population into permanent poverty, and putting a hyper-elite into permanent power. This gives us immense leverage over these countries; in exchange for some debt relief, we can get amazing rates on new resource deals. Further, we can also get them to do nearly anything we want, including voting the way we wish in the U.N.
When you look at resource-rich countries all over the world, if the US has been deeply involved there, it's very rare for the population to be doing at all well. There will almost always be a hyper-wealthy, corrupt elite, and a huge population of, essentially, chattel.
The Saudis, being so much richer than the other resource countries, couldn't be put into debt the same way, but we nonetheless arranged things so that a very few people had direct control over the immense oil revenues, and the typical corruption and nepotism took over there as it has almost everywhere else.
This is part of why I'm so terrified of what's happening with the national budget in this country; I believe that the same primary weapon (lack of understanding of the toxicity of long-term government debt) is being turned by the same corporations that benefited in the third world against the American people that birthed them.
Read Tales of an Economic Hitman, and do your own research. I think you'll find it holds up exceedingly well.
posted by Malor at 9:19 AM on March 1 [37 favorites]
There's plenty of blame to go around! I have been a "quit your job!" evangelist. I have hustled entrepreneurism in magazines; we even run a quit yer job column right here (and there's a good interview coming later today!). I have a great rationale for this position: it is that working conditions have turned to a state of serious suck over the last decade and many employers have demonstrated that they don't give a flying fig about workers, and the only way to even consider retirement in the future is either on your own dime or on the streets.
So yes, do it! And but also… The air in this bubble isn't being recycled very well. The biosphere is a little stinky! No offense to a smart little idea, but LaunchRock is what did me in, and now the NYC Startup Bus is driving over my soul on its way to SXSW.
LaunchRock is a startup that services startups with a jazzy signup-for-beta-invite page and… no, wait, that's it! LaunchRock is incredibly useful, in that you can keep track of all the startups that are about to startup! Like Elephant. What could it be? WHO KNOWS, let's sign up. I hope it's for dream journalling! Social networked dream journalling, man, I would almost pay money for that.
And if you're not glued to the live updates from the Startup Bus that is on its way to Austin, you are missing out. They are starting startups on the startup bus! It's been a tough morning, clearly:
8:57 a.m. — Buspreneurs are pitching their startup ideas, and other buspreneurs are trying to shoot them down. "The whole bar trivia thing isn't really monetized yet."
You know what I wish someone would start-up for me? A widget that would autorefresh that page in a window every 10 minutes so that I don't miss a single absurd word.
There's still good news about the bubble. Like, all my friends are going to get insane money to run their companies. Let's hope some of them show a return! There's going to be nothing sadder than a bunch of 34-year-olds that have given up and been worn down, wearing their kryptonite neck-irons of expansive bubble burn-rate in the isolation of their grey office cubicles.
Let's hope they remember the fun of the crazy times! We're living in a world where venture capitalists have the time to write blog posts about how to write email subject lines that will get them to open your email due to them not having any time.
Even the most zealous haven't forgotten that something killed the dinosaurs, is what the people who are down on this fun little segment of upturn say. Terrorism, swine flu 2.0, war, a derivatives market disaster, the elimination of government-run services, President Palin, something something China, all the palladium gets mined, Google gets MySpaced—who can tell in advance? The fun thing about our modern age is that the meteor is always already about to hit the roof of the bubble, it's just not identifiable until afterwards (hello, Nevada's housing market!), when we're picking up the pieces and working at Walgreen's.
Or you know what else might happen? Nothing! People might just keep making money in one company out of eight or whatever, and everything just shuffles along. The free market, baby.
All that being said, I bet if you wanted to put a little money into a smart and successful editorial company, drop me an email, I bet we could work something out. Couldn't we? While the incubators and angels are awesome—low-cost, high-adventure quotient, great schemes—the real future of startups isn't investment money. It's very little money, because the person with the big checkbook actually almost always turns out to be your boss.
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