I don't understand why people always make comments when there's a crisis about how nobody's helping. There's always aid! The question is, why do people not read about it, and declare there isn't any?
By no means am I saying the aid is enough, or that it doesn't involve conflicts, that it isn't being wasted or misused, or anything like that. But it is an artificial storyline that the whole world is ignoring any given crisis, that is never accurate.
- Iran has been sending fuel via Hezbollah.
- The US and Turkey have sent aid to Lebanon's military.
- The Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress was calling for "prompt and significant action" from the Secretary of State, around the beginning of October.
- Greece has sent "humanitarian aid".
- The IMF has been talking to the government about a bailout package, off and on for some time.
I don't vouch for the accuracy or political slant of the following, but it's an example of what people write/say about Lebanon:
"The international community has been providing humanitarian relief, but too much of it ends up siphoned off into the corruption networks that rule Lebanon. Some of the aid is smuggled into Syria, circumventing sanctions against the Assad dictatorship, while turning a considerable profit for criminal enterprises, including Hezbollah. More humanitarian relief is needed, but it should be run through reliable international institutions or through closely monitored non-governmental organizations if it is to support the Lebanese people and not the mafia-like syndicates."
A basic problem, obviously, is that different countries and organizations want to help some people and entities in Lebanon, and not others. But it's not an island from humanity.
It is a nice thought but that could not happen. When an event like this happens it is because of huge structural failure.
Corruption would have played a part. If you brought a tanker or free oil, whose business interest, or tax revenue, would be impacted by an influx of cheap oil?
Who is being incentivized not to solve the issue?
Where do you dock the ship?
Who gets the oil for free but then charges the next user down the supply chain?
How can you be sure the majority of the oil does not end up on the black market, exported or not used for grid energy?
Twenty years ago the most advanced economy in the world, California, had blackouts due to fraud and corruption. If it can happen in CA it can happen anywhere.
There's a cold war in the middle east between Saudi Arabia and Iran right now. Surely getting an entire nation state in the region on your side for the cost of a few oil tankers (of which KSA and Iran have no shortage) is worth it?
Because Lebanon is a pawn in the proxy wars between the US, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. All of them want to help, but only if Lebanon does things "their" way, and not the "other's" way, and none of "them" will allow the "other" to help. And the IMF says their government is not giving enough concessions. It's all pretty fucked up.
Foreign intervention is unlikely without government reform. With traditional donors such as Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom and Persian Gulf nations both hesitant to push money into a corrupt system and also dealing with their own economic problems, Lebanon set its hopes on an International Monetary Fund bailout. But after weeks of discussions, there is no agreement in sight to even begin the negotiations.
The U.S, the largest donor to the IMF, wants any bailout to come on the condition that there is a diminution of Hezbollah’s power. The U.S is also the largest donor to the Lebanese army, making for a delicate balancing act. “We are supportive of Lebanon as long as they get the reforms right and they are not a proxy state for Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week.
In an unusual move, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said last week that Hezbollah would be open to receiving help from the U.S. despite calling it “an enemy” of Lebanon. Pompeo’s remarks followed Nasrallah’s comments that Lebanon had an opportunity to buy fuel from “a friend called Iran in exchange for Lebanese pounds.” The secretary of state dismissed the claims as “unacceptable”, adding that the U.S. will do everything necessary to stop Iran from sending crude oil anywhere.
There is little optimism for the future of the IMF talks, which have not even agreed on the balance of losses, let alone the negotiations and have now been stalled. “The government refuses to implement any reform, any prerequisite the IMF had for even continuing the talks,” said Jad Chaaban, an economist at the American University of Beirut. While the political elite argues without much consensus, the refusal to reform is crushing the Lebanese people.
> “We are supportive of Lebanon as long as they get the
reforms right and they are not a proxy state for Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week"
This seems sensible to me; we will help you if you become a friend instead of an enemy.
The issue is that Lebanon is not one coherent socio-ethnic-state, rather a loose conglomeration of diametrically opposed and deeply ingrained mostly-religious-fundamentalists (in government/power).
There is no coherent Lebanon to really even negotiate with, just a bunch of rabid factions playing off each other.
I think it’s actually impossible for ‘Lebanon’ overall to be anyone’s friend without also being their enemy.
The issue there is, there are also no clear and coherent socio-ethnic borders within the country. Everyone lives mixed in with everyone else (mostly).
When other countries historically have ‘solved’ this problem, it ends up being pretty terrible for the minority groups who either have their land seized when they get displaced or get wholesale slaughtered (see partition when India and Pakistan were formed, Bosnia/Herzegovina and the Balkans War, Rwandan genocide, or the active issues in Israel), and in Lebanon EVERYONE is a minority group [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Lebanon#Reli...].
And if you’re going to say ‘Hey, but Muslims have 60%!’, the current Muslim group
are roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shia, which have similar history as Catholics and Protestants - aka they hate each other and have a history of bloody fights. That means each group is actually smaller than the Christians as a whole (who are more like 35-45%), but also larger than any one Christian Sect (which includes said Catholics and Protestants BTw).
So for the most part since no one has enough of a majority to assert who belongs where (and it certainly isn’t obvious to everyone else either) or who would be naturally ‘in charge’, it’s endless jockeying for position, extremist recruiting within their groups, corruption to benefit their minority group and screw over the others behind everyone’s back, and the occasional terrorist bombing.
> When other countries historically have ‘solved’ this problem, it ends up being pretty terrible for the minority groups
It's pretty terrible in Lebanon now as well, and there was a horrible civil war between 1975 - 1990 which could happen again. I'm just saying - yes change could be for the worse, but it's not like things are peachy now.
A split up has advantages even if people need to relocate. Cyprus is a pretty good example on how it could work out. Also as horrible as the clusterf** of Bosnia was, it seems the more separated the different ethnicities are the better.
Very well could happen, I wish the regular folks luck as they’re the ones who usually get the worst of it anytime something like that happens.
It seems like a Lose-lose proposition to me frankly, they’d be better off (IMO) trying to minimize the divisions and working together as Lebanese instead of all these fragmented groups, but that seems unlikely considering the history.
> they’d be better off (IMO) trying to minimize the divisions and working together as Lebanese instead of all these fragmented groups
Yes that would be awesome. But indeed it doesn't seem likely, seems like religion or ethnicity plays a bigger role in that area of the world than nationality.
That would be like someone giving the United States 5 Trillion dollars to fix its budget problems. Would it help? Sure. How could it not? Would it also cause more problems? Sure.
The problem the US faces isn't a lack of money directly - it's that there's either an unwillingness to make trade offs or a perception that trade offs are not necessary.
I'm not an expert on Lebanon but from what I've read I think the problems are not dissimilar. A tanker full of fuel would help Lebanon. Who in Lebanon it would help is at least an open question. In anything except the very short term I think the main problem is one of politics. It's going to be hard for people not directly involved in Lebanese politics to fix those problems.
- State collapse is more common than we think, but not impossible to recover from (Germany post WW2, Iraq post 2010?)
- The international community is willing to cooperate during major natural disasters (2004 earthquake, Japanese earthquake, Haiti earthquake)
- The international community is less willing to cooperate during man-made political disasters with humanitarian consequences (Somalia 1980s, Russia 1990s), though there are notable exceptions (Bosnian War, Kosovo War)
- No one really cares about genocides happening in other countries
- Successful nation building directed by a foreign power is the exception, not the norm.
Prosperity is unfortunately a zero sum game. Until we develop the means to fully automate the creation of all of humanity's needs and wants, there will be winners and losers at the national level.
That is definitely not true. Many of the things we value the most are found in abundance in all countries, if the society is well organized to achieve these ends. Leisure, food, space to live, friends, peace, safety, etc. There are some few goods whose production is truly limited by our ability to extract raw resources, but these are the exception, not the norm.
This is a good point, but I'd point out that well-organized societies are much rarer (and shorter-lived) than any vein of gold, one of the biggest enemies of having a well-organized society being the politics of envy and resentment as displayed in the post you were replying to.
When that type of culture is ascendant, then things are not only zero sum, but often negative-sum, since the party takes a cut of transferring wealth from winners to losers, and often just transfers wealth to itself.
Mugabe took land away from successful white farmers in Zimbabwe and gave the land mostly to friends and black people who wanted to start farms but had no ability to do so.
The former category might be extorting consumers and workers but he is "doing his job", he definitively values the land. When you give the land for free to friends those friends don't give a damn about the land because they got it for free. It's not difficult to see how this transaction is destructive. Every person involved is less happy than they could be.
The second class of black people who wanted to become farmers faced a completely different problem. They couldn't get loans to start their farms and they didn't get any financial support from the state to start farming, instead farmers were banned from selling their food when the government introduced price controls.
It doesn't take much to understand that hyperinflation results in absurd prices and a ban on absurd prices when every price is absurd is a ban on trade itself.
Now back to money. Money is zero sum. One person's dollar is another person's debt. That's not wrong but holding onto money for no reason will require better conditions on the debt (e.g. lower interest rates) or more debt overall to satisfy the savers. So telling the savers to get lost with inflation or negative interest rates will tell them that working to earn money that they don't intend to spend on consumption or investment is not wanted by anyone and they should either start working less or they should spend more. Letting money sit idle for no reason just doesn't make any sense from a societal perspective.
Only if you delude yourself that full time jobs and money are equivalent to prosperity, many have deluded themselves that this is the case but I did not, I live in reality instead of a financial world of made up work.
Why doesn't every country do balanced trade? The goodwill would be immense and we would pull billions of humans out of poverty into the global middle class. The goodwill would be immense.
Only recently can people access "the world" goods. In the past there was limited range to provision from outside. Mostly boats and carriages. Famines could then occur because of a bad harvest or a few in a row. Farming has never been a surefire thing!
As far back as the Irish potato famine, there was plenty of food - the problem was caused by the political power structures and rent seeking which would not bend an inch to help the peasantry.
In the modern era, we have more then enough food to feed everyone: no one goes hungry because there is not enough.
ever? The first entry in the wikipedia article for "list of famines" points to "4.2-kiloyear event", which was apparently global. At that scale it doesn't seem hard for the deficit to negate any meager surplus that non-affected societies can produce.
