alt Hacker News> minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country
I don’t want to sound like I’m running coverage for the Americans, but wasn’t a lot of that infrastructure built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?
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Your comment triggers so many thoughts, but the first one is I'm so friggin' naive, which is embarrassing. In my fantasy world corporations make investment decisions based on risk. They invest in a country like Venezuela and part of the due diligence is evaluating whether things may go sideways, like in any investment, and what plan b is if they do. And if plan b is getting the government to backstop you with money, guns and/or regulations then that would not be a viable strategy.
But, at every level in the US, that plan b is viable. And it's used over and over and over again, from small local businesses with local politicians to the US Federal Government and military for the likes of the oil industry.
At what point do you just accept the truth: that you (me!) are the dumb one because you hold onto this fantasy of how you think things ought to be as opposed to how they are?
That’s the story in every oil producing third world country. Without western countries, and these days China, they would just have oil in the ground because they lack the technology and capital to explore for it and extract it. They want the colonizers to come just long enough to install the oil spigots then leave.
As someone living in a country where all of our oil wealth is being extracted by American corporations - America has a very special talent for "convincing" government officials to sign away their citizen's oil wealth. Not repairing that theft by nationalizing the oil seems more criminal than allowing the corporations to continue
If it was done in a legal process then it should be litigated in that country.
What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported? Does the USA somehow reverse it and make it disappear?
Such a line of reasoning used to justify this kind of extrajudicial and warlike activity is somewhat similar to France’s nonsensical demand for long term reparations from Haiti for colonial infrastructure.
> built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?
If you follow this reasoning - after what happened today - you will get Iran 2.0: Venezuelan boogaloo
I have zero optimism that after this - ordinary Venezuelans will have better outcomes in 10 years time.
Current USA government is some weird klepto-oligrachy. Hates brown people. It’s not doing it out of benevolence to Venezuelans. Venezuelans will get either colonialist resource extraction treatment or some power vacuum will bring just another despot.