neverbeenwrongb4

neverbeenwrongb4 t1_jedsi7r wrote

>Second link: apparently no slavery either. Just training ex inmates.

Not training them, using them, for very difficult and even dangerous labor. And paying them well below subsistence wages to do it. That's slavery by the definition of international labor standards organizations.

I have little doubt that China's system of labor camps uses pretty similar incentive structures, the inmates are probably paid a tiny pittance, less than 10 or 20% of what local free laborers would be paid, but still not quite zero. IIRC, even the Soviet gulags often paid their inmates a tiny nominal wage. That is not a defense of them, they were grotesque inhuman death camps, a system of slave labor on a scale almost unprecedented in human history.

3

neverbeenwrongb4 t1_jedoq9s wrote

The asset sell-offs aren't collateral for the loan. They're part of the IMF's "good government" requirements. Some of those requirements are perfectly reasonable, reining in corruption and state embezzlement and such. But they make very politically controversial demands to cut subsidies, lay off government workers, and privatize state-owned industries like railroads, airlines, telecoms, power plants, even minerals and oil. And privatizing those industries means selling them off to the highest bidder: typically Western foreign capital.

8

neverbeenwrongb4 t1_jed7fe3 wrote

>China has a group of peoples in their country that work as slaves to produce goods and work on farms.

What does that have to do with anything though? (The US uses prison slave labor too, though on a smaller scale).

>They also allow slavery within their trade agreements of their “belt and road” plans.

The US does as well. Every country does. Every couple months another major report comes out that the majority of cocoa plantations, cobalt mines, and commercial fishing vessels in the world are using slave labor, and no one does anything. Welcome to globalization, dude. The massive purchasing power of developed-world consumers meets the desperate poverty, lawlessness, and weak human rights of the Third World.

10

neverbeenwrongb4 t1_jed61w1 wrote

Some of China's investment in Africa is quite exploitative, they operate plenty of dangerous mines where the workers get maimed and killed all the time.

But the 'debt trap' accusation just falls flat. The US and other Western countries make the same kinds of loans to African countries through the IMF, and they attach significantly more onerous strings than China's loans. Most humorously, while China makes loans that allow them to seize assets after a default (which is the "trap" being alleged), the IMF makes loans that require these countries to sell off their national assets as a prior condition of receiving the loan at all.

1

neverbeenwrongb4 t1_jdggx6c wrote

The horses live on protected federal land, and the horses themselves are protected wildlife. The federal hunt and slaughter is a cull to keep their numbers in check so they don't devastate the landscape eating every last bit of vegetation and then all starve to death. They want some horses to live there safely and happily. They just can't let all of them live. The horses don't have any natural predators because wolves have been extirpated from most of the US.

2