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The Wonderful World of Corporations, Part IV: Let's MINE for information on mining! Nyuk nyuk nyuk
Since I'm sure all you guys are so thrilled whenever I talk about the evils of capitalism, I'd like to condense it all into one thread. I'll start off with the worst one first, since I'll probably never get around to finishing this. It'll be a thread, periodically updated, about various corporations and how they'ved shaped the world we live in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State
King Leopold II of Belgium was mad. In the Scramble for Africa, his country hadn't yet gained a single acre. Looking to increase his pocketbook, he didn't want to establish a colony like the other European powers were doing. Rather, he wanted to create a corporation, so the vast majority of the money would flow to him. He soon set his eyes on a piece of unconquered territory, deep within the jungles of Africa. In order to claim it for himself, he started a massive propaganda campaign within Britain, claiming that Portugal (also eyeing the territory) had a bad history with slavery (which was true), and that Belgium had not done any wrongs to disqualify them from colonialism. He then proposed an idea: that if he could be the sole owner, no other countries would face any tariffs and could trade freely within the area. The United States and Europe agreed to these terms, in the Berlin Conference.
Leopold II soon got to work. He created a hand-picked list of Belgians for the government of the Congo Free State. In fact, at no point in the entire existence of the Congo Free State was any head of administration at any level African. He then established the idea that any "vacant" plot of land, or land which contained no previous settlement, was property of the corporation. Naturally, this meant that the vast majority of land in the Free State belonged to the corporation. Next, he needed to make sure that the British South African colony didn't venture far too north. So he tried to pay of the leader of the Yeke Kingdom. When that didn't work, he brought guns and took the city of Katanga by force. His men proceeded to cut off the head of said leader and place it on a stick to warn the locals. Classy guys. He also fought a proxy war with African slave traders, which each side providing weapons and inflaming racial and tribal tensions to get the people living in the Congo to fight a war for them. Leopold's army easily slaughtered the slaver's.
All this was happening at the same time as the first stages of settlement. Leopold needed an assurance to his investors that the Congo Free State would be profitable, so he first cut the salaries of his Belgian administrators. But this angered everyone (except the Africans) because a bloo bloo bloo don't cut the pay of the poor helpless Belgians so he instituted a quota system. Not only were Congolese communities forbidden from trading with anybody other than the State, mandatory quotas of rubber, ivory, and food for the local outpost were instituted. To enforce these quotas, Leopold created the Force Publique. It was made up of white Europeans, Africans from areas that hated the Congolese, and prisoners of war.
Here's where the fun begins. The Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages, flogged, and raped Congolese people. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and most wondrously, took human hands as trophies on the orders of their officers to show that bullets hadn't been wasted. You see, the officers of the soldiers required a prize be brought for every bullet shot, since it cut into profits to overuse them. If they shot animals, the soldiers brought a hide. If they shot a person, they took that person's hands.
Speaking of hands, the quotas were enforced by similar means. Failure to meet the rubber quota was punishable by death, but the soldiers and officers figured that a maimed person can do more work than a dead person. So they merely cut off the hand of the offender to make it seem like they had killed said offender. This resulted in entire towns full of men, women, and children with one hand. It eventually led to tribal warfare, as villages raided one another for the hands of their enemies in order to "pay off" the soldiers with them. Here are pictures of children with no hands.
Keep in mind that the rubber quotas were highly unrealistic, and it was nearly impossible for the Congolese to fill them. The Belgians knew this, but didn't care.
The Congo Free State eventually failed when it became unprofitable. Missionaries told of horror stories, but Leopold ran propaganda campaigns to try and discredit them. Eventually, he could no longer stem the tide of truth, and the general public was horrified by what they learned. Yes, the general public of 1908 was horrified by the treatment of Africans by European leaders.
In just over a decade, the Congo Free State managed to kill a lot of people. No official records exist, but it's quite possible that they killed upwards of 10 million people, or one tenth of the total African population at the time.
And what of the aftermath? Leopold II of Belgium died a fat fuck in Antwerp in 1909, with no punishment whatsoever. European powers, shocked as they may have been about the Congo Free State, came to the "obvious" conclusion that the Congolese weren't fit to rule themselves, duh, so they allowed the government of Belgium - the same government that had turned a blind eye when reports of atrocities had begun trickling in - to rule over the Congo. And then in the 1960s the Belgians were assisted by the United States in trying to depose a Soviet-friendly government after independence from Belgium. Hooray for a century of indiscriminate murder and turmoil that has yet to be repaid by any Western power whatsoever!
Today, Leopold II is a fairly well-respected man in Belgium. He is remembered as a guy who built buildings and, to be fair, the buildings he built are really pretty and stuff. He also got his own European Union-official commemorative coin.
You can find out more by looking at these various sources:
- King Leopold's Ghost, a novel and subsequent documentary
- Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is only really a fictional approximation of the Congo Free State but a great read nonetheless
e: as a bonus
Comments
Sounds tricky to consider it an evil of capitalism. Perhaps Yank fun times in the Central America would make for purer example?
I'm working on Shell/ExxonMobil next (stay tuned for the literal genocide!) but United Fruit Co. is definitely on my list.
Why part one if it's contained in one thread? Not that I object to trolling our southern neighbours with their sordid past while simultaneously enjoying their beers, but the title was curious.
I'm planning on just changing the thread title whenever I make a new installment.
After mulling about and twiddling my thumbs for a bit, I decided that I am planning on doing five more installments so far. They would be categorized into five lines of work:
However, since this series is planned by me as a general indictment of free-market capitalism and neoliberal economic policy, I am going to include the various ways governments have played a role in these areas. So I'll talk about things like the relationship between the United Fruit Co. and Guatemalan Civil War, or the 1979 energy crisis and OPEC (I'm still hesitant as to if I should even include OPEC, since doing so would require a heavy discussion into the Israel-Palestine conflict and the USSR's Middle Eastern proxy states, but it's still heavily dependent on asserting neoliberal capitalist ideology and thus has some pertinent role to play).
I'm also going to include selected media for you to enjoy more in-depth examinations about the topic at hand. If you want any specific requests or clarifications (about anything, not just a specific company), just let me know.
Ooh! Ooh! Do an instalment on how even ideas are being taken over by corporations!
I suppose I could create a broader post on how things like marketing and advertising have affected the way we conduct our lives Buy American! Buy Coke! and don't even notice it.
And if you want a more in-depth discussion as to how these things affect the way we carry ourselves, don't worry, you can just listen to Radiohead's OK Computer and Kid A for the best sources of millennial technological malfeasance!
Staying tuned, because I am not really that cool with this "capitalism" thing.
^^ I meant more on copyrights and how it keeps getting warped because Corporations only see the money part and ignore the whole innovation part of it
Sorry, patents was what I meant
Patents don't really get blown out of proportion like copyright does. It only lasts 20 years.
The Belgian government annexed the colony from their own king after a 6 year investigation.
Syndicalism.
I'd argue that they do more damage though. I mean, if someone owns the rights to a character, that isn't really a big deal, but people can and do patent things like having an arrow pointing to your objective in a videogame, which limits the entire industry.
The Oil Industry
There are six oil "supermajors" in existence. These companies hold approximately 6% of the world's oil reserves, but before OPEC's initiation of the 1973 oil crisis, they held 85%. This was when they were distributed differently, but the point is that for the majority of the 20th century, a few select corporations and groups have controlled the most important energy source in the world. This, of course, is bad. Let me first run down the list of supermajors and their misdeeds.
BP p.l.c.
They've perfected the art of greenwashing. Their logo is a green sun, for god's sakes, and yet their investment into alternative energy has never exceeded 4% of their budget and they closed their green energy headquarters years ago. But their logo is green so flowers and pretty children!!!
To further compound this, they have quite the environmental record. Everybody knows about Deepwater Horizon by this point, but did you know that in the 1990s, they illegally dumped toxic waste in the Arctic Ocean? Or that 5,000 barels of oil leaked into Prudhoe Bay, Alaska? Or that they've attempted to drill on a mountain a few miles from Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park? Or that their Texas City refinery exploded in 2005, and that they did such a piss-poor deal of cleaning it up afterwards that the new refinery they built proceeded to leak tons of toxic gas into the air? In fact, their record of safety is so poor that, between 2007 and June 2010, accidents at their facilities accounted for 97 percent of all oil industry fatalities.
They've done a great job of covering that up, though. They bribed the Azerbaijan government to cover up gas leaks in the Caspian Sea. They funded the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan by funding the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The Aliyev regime committed human rights violations during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. They funded Colombian paramilitaries to protect their oil in Colombia. Finally, they have manipulated oil prices all over the globe to create artificial inflation.
BP is basically St. Peter compared to the rest of these companies.
Total S.A.
They haven't done quite as much as BP has, but they make up for it by doing even worse things in comparison. Their least-worst act of misconduct is bribing the Italian government. They also bribed the Iraqi government during Saddam Hussein's reign, and redirected critical food supplies for the Iraqi people in order to fund their lust for money. Despite economic sanctions, they have continued to do business with Iran and have covered up its extent. They went against the express wishes of the citizens and even governments of Thailand and Western Sahara by drilling offshore in international waters. Finally, they used and continue to operate the Yadana natural gas pipeline in Myanmar, which was knowingly constructed using slave labor.
Chevron
Chevron was formed after a merger of Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil in 1986. Way back in 1950, Standard Oil of California participated with Firestone and General Motors in the Great American streetcar scandal, which involved the buying up of streetcars and other public transportation in order to force Americans to buy cars. Yes, the plot to Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based on a true story, and if you've ever wondered why Los Angeles is an asphalt hellscape of horrid highways, there's your answer as to why!
Just two decades after its inception, Chevron tried a repeat performance by attempting to block any and all hybrid vehicles from being built. A rather complicated string of legal shenanigans involving General Motors buying ECD Ovonics and then Texaco buying GM's shares and then Chevron buying Texaco a mere six days later ended up with Chevron using completely made-up loopholes in the contract GM had with ECD that resulted in them trying to buy up all rights to the nickel-metal hybrid batteries ECD had developed.
From 1972 to 1993, Texaco developed the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador. They had such poor management there that thousands of people were poisoned and millions of barels of oil were spilled in the Amazon rainforest, with no repercussions for the company at all. Remember how Chevron bought Texaco? The residents who had had their relatives die of cancer all those years because of the environmental degradation asked for reparations. Chevron's respons? "Lol, fuck you."
They spilled oil off the coast of Rio. They let a fire burn in a national forest full of endangered species in Bangladesh and refused to clean up for it. They have violated the Clean Air Act so much it'd make your head spin. They explicitly decided to screw over a small community in California in which their plant was located by claiming that their property taxes of $3 billion (note that Chevron makes over $40 billion a year) were too high, even though later assessment of the property found that they had been tax evading for years and their property was undervalued.
Chevron's African outings are its most notable. There are continuos oil spills in Angola that Chevron has refused to clean up, and they sponsor terror regimes in Angola that have tried to kill the Cabinda people. They even pay employees of Cabindan heritage half as much as they do others. The most fun part comes from Nigeria, though. Nigeria has had an... interesting history concerning oil corporations that I'll expound upon more in the Shell section. But Chevron, wondrous people that they are, decided to fuel some more flames of dissent by, in 1988, sending Nigerian soldiers in Chevron-branded helicopters (I guess they ran out of black paint) to fire at peaceful protestors. It was a massacre; two activists died and the other 98 were gravely wounded. They have suffered no repercussions.
ExxonMobil
This is probably the most well-known company on this list. The Exxon Valdez spill is also one of the most well-known oil catastrophes. But they've also spilt in Brooklyn, Baton Rouge, the Yellowstone River, and Eastern Russia. They enjoy wheel-and-deal contracts with unstable governments to monopolize their oil control in a certain area and prevent the residents from gaining any of the revenue. In fact, the people who live there are often either forced into work by the local government or forced to move due to pollution. They aided and abetted human rights abuses in Indonesia against protestors who, for some reason, didn't want to have to move from their homes of decades and didn't want to see the environment polluted horrendously. Finally, they hate gay people.
Royal Dutch Shell
Royal Dutch Shell, or Shell, for short. This is the worst company. The worst oil company on this list. Why? Well, their list of abuses is surprisingly short for a company pf this magnitude. They bribed governor Tim Corbett of Pennsylvania in order to access fracking sites (which I'll go over in a bit). Their North Sea platforms are in poor condition. Blah blah blah, standard for any corporation. So why are they the worst company on this list?
Ken Saro-Wiwa was an Ogoni activist. He wrote books, appeared on TV, and protested with the Ogoni against shell and the Nigerian government. He is one of the greatest activists the world has ever known. The Ogoni people are oftentimes marginalized and hated by the government, since the majority of their peoples reside on land deemed valuable for its oil and gas reserves. When Shell learned this and informed the Nigerian government, there was a massive effort to "remove" them, since 80% of Nigeria's GDP is oil money. And by remove, I mean commit genocide against them. They were killed just for living on land that a corporation wanted to exploit. And exploit it they did! The Niger River Delta is one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet, so of course Shell took the greatest care in hahaha just kidding, they continue to let oil spills cover the land in tar and they're not doing anything about it. Oh yeah, they're still doing this. Why is it relevant that this is coninuing? After all, plenty of oil companies continue to destroy the environment.
But most companies don't do it after murdering their political enemies.
To wit: On May 21, 1994, every Ogoni chief was murdered. Ken was denied entry into Ogoniland to pay his respects, and subsequently arrested, along with the other leaders of the Movement For the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). A mock trial was held, and he and the others were executed on trumped-up charges. Shell has suffered a mere $15 million for literally funding genocide and continuing its indiscriminate killing of one of the most biologically significant areas on the planet by settling out of court with the Wiwa family, who sued for these reasons.
Stuff everybody does because fuck all of them
Tax evasion. Yeah, I know that pretty much every company does this, but it's completely inexcusable that oil companies try to collect more money when they have by far the biggest profit margins of any industry.
Fracking. Fracking fracking fracking. I cannot emphasize enough how much these companies are fucking over the residents of small towns by destroying their water supplies and destabilizing the ground underneath them.
For more information on this:
Really, the tar sands seem mild compared to all that =/
Where on Earth did you find the time to read all this?
This helps: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2882549&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
Ain't no better reference than FYAD.
Hrm, yes, I see your point. Clearly none of the things said in that thread are true. Guess I better wrap it in.
Don't worry, I was joking.
I was too (sorry).
Speaking of which, it's "amusing" what a messed up guy Cecil Rhodes was. A proto-Hitler.
The Africans must have had it fun with people like him and King Leopold II fighting over them.
Don't worry, I'm going to talk about Cecil Rhodes when I talk about De Beers.
I'd say that Cecil Rhodes was worse than Hitler.
Fracking is that oil-from-shale stuff? Fun fact:
a) fracking
b) buy oil from Russia and better be a good wife. Oh, I just fell down some stairs! It's my fault, the soup was too salty anyway! He was in a bad mood after work, but he loves me, he does!
So you can see sometimes it's not fracking itself that is a problem, but whether the local cronies strike deals and the people get no cash from it, heh heh.
Funny you should say that because thats how people would describe their relationship with the United States