vancouver companies profiting from third world dictators
I heard an interesting story this morning from one of the coworkers i was carpooling with. He was telling us about a company where he used to work, and how they made most of their money. You see, they were a communications technology company, but they weren’t really big enough to compete head-to-head with the big guns at Cisco and Nortel. Instead, they sold to several dictatorships in africa.
now, given an opportunity to profit in africa, why weren’t cisco and nortel down there too? well, they probably were, but the advantage for these vancouver guys was that they did mostly wireless networks. The big advantage there (for the dictators) is that when any kind of rebels try to attack, the dictator just places his thugs around the wireless transmitters, and the communication channels are secure. No pesky wires that can be cut by the attacking rebels. Also, the poor peasants in the countryside tend to cut the copper wires so they can make some money selling the copper.
This example is a piece of the puzzle of how canadian “development funds” and “international aid” works. The canadian government pays out some money to the dictators (or to the business elites of ‘democracies’) so they can purchase fancy shit from these big corporations, and this all helps them hold their power, while making a tidy profit for the elites here at home….all made possible by the huge national debts accrued through the IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment policies” where they’re obligated to sell off all their public services and eliminate tariffs to give easy access to corporations in the rich countries.
isn’t canada generous? ;)
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