By Patricia Lee Sharpe
After I had finished and posted yesterday’s piece, I came across a letter in the NYT by Senator Richard Lugar. It mentions a recent staff study entitled “The Petroleum and Poverty Paradox,” which perhaps I should have known about, but didn't. The purpose of a recommended “Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative [EITI],” the Senator says, “is to promote responsible and honest management of oil and mineral revenues, which are too often a source of corruption.” The central assumption is that what’s not hidden can’t corrupt, which is true in most cases. Less corruption would then lead to healthier economies which would lesson the need for U.S. aid to Africa especially but to other areas as well, resulting hopefully in less strain on the U.S. budget.
However, it is equally true that extremely entrenched regimes or individuals often do not care if everyone knows that rights or lives are being trampled on. They have the power, and the resources they control are indispensable to potential buyers. Like oil. Let’s mention the Burmese junta as an example of a regime that’s staying in power by selling its natural resources to those who don’t care what happens to the Burmese people. Let’s also mention the distortion of U.S. foreign policy as a result of our addiction to cheap or costly oil. (Read the chapter on “The Crisis of Profligacy” in Andrew J. Bacevich’s The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.)
At any rate, I googled the Lugar report, which is eminently worth reading and even supporting, although the barn door is already well nigh slammed shut, if Ian Bremmer is right. Private corporations, he says, are giving way to state-owned entities, which cannot be controlled from the outside, as Shell and Chevron can, given a certain amount of courage by regulators. Perhaps if those corporations had been subject all along to serious scrutiny, perhaps if they had been required to be more transparent about their extractions and transactions, as Lugar now wants them to be, they would have been less greedy about profits and less negligent about the environment. Then, perhaps, they would not have been pushed out by statists in industry after industry, country after country.
However, whether a company is controlled by private stockholders or by a national government, the potentially destabilizing internal questions I asked in my piece are the same. Is the wealth being fairly distributed? Is the welfare of those most affected by environmental degradation being considered? Better yet, do the affected ones have an actual voice in the decision-making? Economic justice is one of the best ways to avert protest, insurrection, war.
