#neocolonialism

"The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. The World Bank will lend money to this or that country to finance a huge dam project that displaces thousands of families while providing cheap irrigation for export agriculture and cheap power for a private company. Or a poor country may borrow from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it most borrow again, this time from the IMF. But the IMF imposes a 'structural adjustment programme' (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce local wages, and make no attempt to protect native enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers.

In accordance with SAP rulings, the debtor nations are pressured to privatise their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to transnational corporations. They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must reduce or eliminate subsidies for health, education, transportation, and food, spending less on public needs in order to have more money to meet debt payments. So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point at which debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries' export earnings—leaving the debtor even less able to provide for the minimal needs of its population."

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters are committing war crimes in the Darfur town of el-Fasher, the rights group Amnesty International has alleged in a new report.

The report was published on Tuesday, just hours after the RSF declared that it would immediately enter into a three-month humanitarian truce “in response to international efforts” led by United States President Donald Trump.

Sudan plunged into chaos in April 2023 when a power struggle between the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country.

In its latest report, Amnesty said it had collected testimonies from 28 survivors describing atrocities in el-Fasher ranging from the summary execution of unarmed men to the rape of girls and women.

“This persistent, widespread violence against civilians constitutes war crimes and may also constitute other crimes under international law,” Amnesty chief Agnes Callamard said. [...]

Mediation has so far failed to end the fighting as both sides try to secure military gains before talks are held.

On Sunday, Burhan [de facto leader of Sudan] rejected a US truce proposal from the Quad group of mediators as the “worst yet” and unacceptable. The Quad group comprises the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Burhan claimed that the presence of the UAE – which he accused of supporting the RSF – in the Quad meant that the proposals could not be seen as unbiased.

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this deal is harmful because everything that the US and our government promise (more jobs, better economy, and stability) are nothing beyond that. they are just there to convince every filipino that this deal of building more data centers are for the improvement of our society.

farmers are already being displaced as we speak, and if they really push for this deal to be signed, mining expansion will follow suit because of the need for copper and nickel, which our country has, and it has a LOT).

the fact that there are already places in america that are suffering the effects of ai infrastructures is a huge warning sign that our government should not be taking this lightly.

just put this into perspective: rice farms here need 7-15 million liters of water to operate for 3-5 months. pax silica's ai hubs are projected to need 20 million liters and more to operate for a day. there are already places here in the philippines who are struggling to get water, add the el niño on top of that and it's just crisis after crisis. if these data centers get built in exchange for agricultural land, our country will also suffer from food insecurity.

i know ai is here to stay, but there are ways to create and maintain it without destroying the environment. if our government blindly trusts this deal, we are essentially allowing our country and people to be exploited again. and the freedom that we have fought for so many centuries would end up being compromised again. this is just straight up neocolonialism happening again before our very eyes.

i feel very helpless writing this. i hope i'm someone in power to do something about this. but if you're reading this, please at least help us sign the petition.

we are all very tired of other countries profiting off of and exploiting our resources, our culture, and our people.

“This tainted state of alterity delivered meaning and urgency onto a new model of being, an optimal status criterion under constant threat of contagion. Out of bourgeois fears of racial impurity, disease, moral degradation, and pollution was born a new mode of humanness realizable only through proper bourgeois behavior, status, and the embodiment of whiteness. Anne McClintock alludes to the emergence of this status in her discussion of Victorian fetishism of soap. She outlines how the purifying symbolism evoked by soap—having become highly commodified during this era—was informed by the cultivation of emergent middle-class values, including, ‘monogamy ('clean' sex, which has value), industrial capital ('clean' money, which has value), Christianity ('being washed in the blood of the lamb'), class control ('cleansing the great unwashed'), and the imperial civilizing mission ('washing and clothing the savage').’[23] Soap became the mark of the white bourgeois subject, a necessary consumptive tool for pursuing the fulfillment of bourgeois selfhood. In the sense that cleansing oneself in the appropriate fashion was the mark of humanness, soap, and more generally the hygienic regime, served as a disciplinary and regulatory mechanism, instilling in the body politic a mode of subjective understanding in which the discourse of purity configured which thoughts and actions were deemed normative or transgressive.”

from “Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment” by Bench Ansfield in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis by Katherine McKittrick, ed.