The country now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo is well-known as hell on Earth. Millions have been killed in an ongoing civil war, which has been fueled by profits from mining and powered by foreign (largely Rwandan former genocidists, the Interahamwe) soldiers. Its standard of living is very low, and its future looks bleak.
This is not a diary about the Congo. It's about America.
The Congo was destroyed by foreigners seeking to extract its riches. The people who lived there were always expendable. When Belgium conquered it, they made it King Leopold's personal property, including the population. They were barely even slaves; roughly half of the population died under his horrible rule. It was a genocide that taught the 20th century genocidists that the world would accept almost anything, if driven by racial prejudice.
And yet Congo today provides profits to the mining and extractive industries. Welcome to the New Congo.
The Congo is the extreme case, but it demonstrates what an extraction-based economy can look like. The actual laborers are paid very little. A small coterie of technical experts and managers, often foreign, make better money, and the real profits go to investor-owners who don't actually touch the place. There is no need for widespread education, and little is provided. When Belgium finally granted independence, there were almost no university-educated Congolese; a half-century later, there still aren't many, and those who can leave tend to stay away.
Mining doesn't need a lot of educated people. Oil-rich countries are rarely helped by that resource (oil drilling is simply a form of mining; it extracts and depletes wealth from the ground). The money goes to the leaders and corrupts the country. There is usually massive unemployment and great inequality, held together by despotic rule.
The countries with the highest standard of living are often resource-poor. Germany, for instance, has a thriving economy and a very high standard of living. It is a manufacturing economy, based on high quality work by a well-trained and educated work force. They import many resources and add value. There is less inequality than in many countries. Many other EU states are rather similar, if not quite as successful. And what resources does Singapore have, other than the smarts of its people? And what resources does Japan have? The world's third-largest economy (now that China, with about 15 times the population, has taken second) is based on high-end engineering and manufacturing, again requiring widespread education. It has human resources, which I don't mean in the usual "people are just commodities" way. China is moving in that direction.
Congo has great natural resources and by conventional accounts should be rich. But it's not; the riches are extracted and go elsewhere. Its col-tan provides vital ore for making electronic components. Col-tan, the ore, is refined in Germany and the United States (Bayer's H.C. Starck unit has a tantalum refinery here in Massachusetts) and used in making the capacitors found in computers, cell phones, and many other devices. Even China's sweatshop economy is heavenly compared to Congo's.
And that brings us to the Congo Scenario. The Koch brothers are calling the shots now; the Republican Party is dancing to their tune. But they're not alone. The Bush-Cheney-Rove regime was also little more than a front for the oil and coal industry, and extractives in general.
What does Koch Industries need from a country? They are in the oil refining business, of course; that's how Fred Koch started the company and made the first small fortune. We learn from a recent diary, Meet the Kochers, by nekkidtruth, that Fred Koch developed a new oil refining process in the 1920s. But he couldn't use it here because he lost patent fights over it. Now that means that one of two things is probably true. One is that he didn't really invent it and it infringed; the other is that the patent system was corrupt. I'll give the old man benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. So Koch went to Soviet Russia and sold his refineries to Papa Joe Stalin. Yep, the original fortune came from the USSR. As part of the First Five-Year Plan. When the USSR was still undeveloped, uneducated, and of course run by an iron-fisted despot. Amazing hypocrisy for a Bircher!
Oil drilling and refining, coal mining, paper mills (Koch owns Georgia-Pacific). These industries do not need a large, educated work force. They could use some cheap labor, though. So they want to get rid of unions. They want to get rid of high-quality public schooling, too, since it costs tax money and the few highly-skilled people they need could come from private schools (the upper class).
Koch's America, the teabaggers' America, the Republicans' America, is not like the America we have known and loved in the past. It's more like the Congo, a violent (gun fetish), superstitious (fundamentalism), impoverished place where a wealthy few can make money from the natural resources. That's the crossroads we're at now. Will it be a more equal, educated, first world America like the one we used to have, or will it be just a bigger Congo?