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> Larry Fink, who boycotted last year’s event. Fink explained his decision in a post on LinkedIn: “I believe greater economic integration and diversification wi

> Larry Fink, who boycotted last year’s event. Fink explained his decision in a post on LinkedIn: “I believe greater economic integration and diversification will help Saudi Arabia build a more modern and sustainable economy for all of its citizens,” he wrote, adding that “corporate engagement and public dialogue can help with that evolution.” That's the same reasoning used to justify continuing trade with China and other repressive regimes. I think of it as high-minded rationalization to justify continuing profitable business. Excuse me if I don't believe the people saying things like this really give a shit about anything but getting more money.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
Just like it helped china. Is neo-liberalism at this point even a ideology anymore? Or just a fig leave, for doing whatever one wants to do? A ideology should at least have some grounding in facts or at least some desperate searching for idea-traitors, to repair the damage done to it by reality. Neither of those can be seen ..
BeetleB 7y ago
I can't speak for Larry's motives, but consider the counterpoint: It's very easy to list countries where sanctions did not change anything, and possibly worsened the situation. Successful sanctions are the exception. They're a lot like punishment. People do it not because they'll get positive outcomes, but because it feels good morally.
- uncletaco 7y ago
  I told my mom this (among other things) and we’re going on year two of not speaking. It’s like when parents say they hit you because they love you. But they “love” you regardless. They’re just hitting you because they’re mad.
  - isoskeles 7y ago
    Are you saying that you told your mother this because you were explaining why you are imposing 'sanctions' on her, or are you saying the two of you had an argument about politics and are therefore not speaking? (Or something else?)
    - phkahler 7y ago
      "Mom I'm imposing sanctions on you." That's a thing, but saying so is generally not a good idea ;-)
- reitanqild 7y ago
  Another thing to consider: Do sanctions help other countries stay nice? I'm afraid that if it came out that you could do what you wanted and it wouldn't have consequences then we'd see a lot more bad behavior. So, while it hasn't worked on NK who knows what other countries would have tried if they could get away with it (and, I'd say, just look at history to get an idea).
  - nraynaud 7y ago
    Well the US didn't stay nice when there were sanctions all around them.
    - reitanqild 7y ago
      I anticipated this coming up but you kind of see why I guess. If there was an even bigger superpower ready to punish them they might have behaved a whole lot better.
- sterlingmoss 7y ago
  Reuters ran an interesting debate last month on the motion "Sanctions are fair and effective", each side had a senior lawyer and a politician speaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfSheVScFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfSheVScFc
- IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
  South Africa would like you to hold their beer.
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    It's kind of futile to give an example of sanctions working to someone who clearly stated that they some times work.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      That's quite accurate - instead of trying to state any reasoning that would be refutable your statement above doesn't guarantee anything while implying a lot - thus it's pretty unassailable by logic. The implication is rested on a very relaxed statement and will continue to imply even while counter examples are raised.
      - BeetleB 7y ago
        Actually, I made a very refutable statement: > Successful sanctions are the exception. To refute, you just need to look at all sanctions, and enumerate the successful ones, and show the proportion is at least half.[0] If "all" sanctions is onerous, a decent sample (e.g. "sanctions in the last 30 years") would still have weight. But simply giving an example of something that the claimant clearly agrees with - that's not even close to a refutation. [0] Clearly one can disagree on what success means, but then nothing in society can yield to logic
  - lollipop90 7y ago
    Reduction of foreign military expenditure by Gorbachev, political settlement in South-West Africa/Namibia, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union arguably did more to remove any remaining rationale of the segregated government. In any case, sanctions/disinvestment caused many foreign companies to sell their South African divisions at a great discount to white industrialists. These industrialists in turn greatly benefited by opening up in the 90ies.
- buboard 7y ago
  That's like saying "war did not change anything" . Sure , but the possibility that it might change something is why they re done. What's the alternative, assuming diplomacy has been exhausted?
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    >Sure , but the possibility that it might change something is why they re done. Don't consider possibilities in one direction only. Consider the possibility that the change may exacerbate the situation. And then compare with the "no action" alternative.
    - buboard 7y ago
      in almost all cases, the "no action" option has already been deemed unpalatable
- rhizome 7y ago
  One person's decision is not "sanctions," it's deciding not to work with a bad client.
tomp 7y ago
What else should we do? Did economic isolation help with the case of North Korea? To the extent I see, the rise of tourism has helped / is helping Cuba to become more and more integrated, as it's increasingly hard for the government to keep modern technology etc. from the hands of locals.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  China has kept NK afloat all these years; it's a special case.
- option 7y ago
  yes, economic isolation helps - compare the amount of influence N. Korea (isolated) has in the world to the one of China (not isolated).
  - EGreg 7y ago
    Sorry but I don’t agree this mentality Unless you are an extreme nationalist, you have got to be happy that China lifted a billion people out of grinding poverty in 20-30 years? Now they need to work to maintain that standard of living. I hope soon they will transition to UBI and robots but in the meantime they need to earn a wage. So you’re not happy because the people lifted out of poverty were Chinese? If North Korea didnt have sanctions they would probably have never gotten nukes and the Kim regime would be far more benign to its own people. Making people and families independently wealthy gives a counterweight to the government. What we should have actually done is get off Saudi oil and stop subsidizing fossil fuels decades ago, to protect our citizens from OPEC. Then we could have actually had electric cars by now. Instead we buy oil and sell weapons. Creating jobs in this economy — oil and weapons are often closely linked. We should care about MILLIONS OF REGULAR PEOPLE in Libya, Yemen, North Korea etc. but instead we care about Kashoggi and Libyan embassy only!
    - option 7y ago
      I am not happy about dictatorship having a sizable influence on the world - long term, I believe, it is a dead end (I have lived in USSR). I am even less happy about Saudi Arabia. IMHO, it is the worst regime in the world (worse than NK) and I am appalled that my home country (USA) considers them “allies”
dukoid 7y ago
In my opinion, only countries respecting basic human rights should be permitted in the WTO.
- epanchin 7y ago
  Who would be the judge? Some would say the US should be excluded based on that criteria.
  - 0_gravitas 7y ago
    As someone that lives in the US I wholeheartedly agree that we should be excluded
    - buboard 7y ago
      I wouldn't want to be in a WTO where the strongest member is China.
      - 0_gravitas 7y ago
        and there exists the problem, and that will be the case unless an organization like the UN is actually given teeth
      - munk-a 7y ago
        The good news is while the US should be excluded - so should China - it might just be Norway and Sweden sitting at a table eating some lutefisk[1]. 1. Joke. In reality there are plenty of moral countries, but a lot of the economic powerhouses have clear exclusion reasons - Canada might get a seat at the table, along with Mexico perhaps.
  - dukoid 7y ago
    Well there seem to be some indices available.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
kareemm 7y ago
Reminds me of this: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  I'm starting to really dislike that quote, because these people absolutely understand, they just don't care because it doesn't affect them directly.
  - yourbandsucks 7y ago
    Disagree. People rationalize. Change the motivations and you get a different sincerely held rationalization. Look at TFA. Decades of a top US ally being a human rights disaster, noone in the media cared. Until one journalist is killed..
  - chewbacha 7y ago
    “It’s difficult to get a person to care about something when their salary depends on not caring about it” Updated it for you ;)
  - tim333 7y ago
    I think Upton Sinclair assumed roughly that but was being a little sarcastic. In practice the people often do care and will go to great efforts to avoid the truth to further their own interests.
everdev 7y ago
Unfortunately, I'm pretty jaded on our outrage culture when it comes to tragedies. It seems like people are great at virtue signaling through a tweet, an article, a public statement or a sign, but what change are we really willing to affect in the world? How many people who were outraged about this story did anything to change the world beyond saying how bad it was? What was someone willing to risk in order to stand their ground on this issue? Same goes for other tragedies as well. A lot of talk and no action.
- adamch 7y ago
  Turning down millions of dollars in Saudi investment is a pretty big action. Basically the opposite of virtue signalling. It has a real cost for the people doing it. Seems like Google, Amazon and Uber are actually doing something in this situation, not just signalling that they care.
  - gautamnarula 7y ago
    Uber's greatest contribution has been losing so much money/having their share price performing so badly that SoftBank, and by extension the Saudis who poured money in the SoftBank Vision Fund, is hundreds of millions of dollars underwater.
- JohnClark1337 7y ago
  The outrage over this served the political/economic purposes of those who pull our strings and now no longer serves a purpose. Nothing complicated about it. It's all just a game.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
luckylion 7y ago
Imho the biggest part if whether you're using economic investments to change something or just to make a quick buck. Mutual investment is a significant part of Europe's relatively long, relatively peaceful recent history: a war between the great powers will only create losers. Similarly, if you have no significant relationship (and internationally, the only relevant relationships are of the trading variety), you have no leverage for change. If I wanted to alter your behavior, isolating you won't do much. Trading with you and then, when you see the value of our trades, ask for small, incremental change is much more effective. Granted, the West hasn't done that a lot with Saudi Arabia (though otoh, women are now allowed to drive etc - would that have happened if China was SA's primary trade partner?), it has been mostly about "sell us oil, buy our weapons, and we'll look the other way when you commit some atrocity", but that doesn't mean that the idea is always wrong. A diversified economy would also most certainly make Saudi Arabia a better place. Right now, natural resources are pretty much the only relevant industry, and typically, that industry is controlled by a small minority. A modern economy that consists of more than one sector would change the power balance and a change in the power balance would likely curb the Wahabi fundamentalism that the royal family uses to keep their population in check. It can be a good idea, but that's not to say that it will be successful, or that it will even be intended to be.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  > Mutual investment is a significant part of Europe's relatively long, relatively peaceful recent history: a war between the great powers will only create losers. There was a ton of mutual investment prior to WWI. The real reason for the relatively peaceful recent history is the knowledge that war in Europe would have brought in the US and/or the Soviet Union with really bad consequences for all involved (Europe would become the "shooting gallery of the super powers")
aeturnum 7y ago
I find it telling and amusing that the justification never goes the other way. Businesses never force countries to implement democratic or human rights reforms, even though the belief they are linked implies that the most efficient way to improve business conditions might sometimes be to demand political reform rather than form new business relationships.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  I wouldn't say this is the case. Business almost always does consider property rights and rule of law when making overseas investments. Both of those factors are strongly linked to human rights and democracy. In general, the countries with the worst human rights abuses (North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Eritrea) tend to be the ones with the most anti-business policies. The correlation between the country-level ranking of political freedom and civil liberties[0], and their World Bank ease of doing business rating is over 50%[1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World [1]https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/media/Annual-Reports/English/DB2019-report_web-version.pdf https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/media/An...
  - aeturnum 7y ago
    Do you know of any examples of a particular business insisting an authoritarian regime implement pro-democratic changes before opening a business venture?
    - dcolkitt 7y ago
      Even just drawing from American history, big business interests lobbied extremely hard for desegregation and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even today in America, big business is one of the most powerful interests in favor of LGBT-rights[1]. Another example was big business' demands for reform in the apartheid regime of South Africa[2]. [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/the-u-s-chamber-of-commerce-has-a-coming-out-party https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/the-u-s-c... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_principles
tarsinge 7y ago
Great, so why not the same reasoning with Iran too?
yahwrong 7y ago
More economic trading means more interaction with the rest of the world. People learn and grow from being exposed to new experiences and thoughts. Sure, the leadership may not change their stance but overtime everyone else might.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

Just like it helped china. Is neo-liberalism at this point even a ideology anymore? Or just a fig leave, for doing whatever one wants to do? A ideology should at least have some grounding in facts or at least some desperate searching for idea-traitors, to repair the damage done to it by reality. Neither of those can be seen ..

BeetleB 7y ago

I can't speak for Larry's motives, but consider the counterpoint: It's very easy to list countries where sanctions did not change anything, and possibly worsened the situation. Successful sanctions are the exception. They're a lot like punishment. People do it not because they'll get positive outcomes, but because it feels good morally.

uncletaco 7y ago
I told my mom this (among other things) and we’re going on year two of not speaking. It’s like when parents say they hit you because they love you. But they “love” you regardless. They’re just hitting you because they’re mad.
- isoskeles 7y ago
  Are you saying that you told your mother this because you were explaining why you are imposing 'sanctions' on her, or are you saying the two of you had an argument about politics and are therefore not speaking? (Or something else?)
  - phkahler 7y ago
    "Mom I'm imposing sanctions on you." That's a thing, but saying so is generally not a good idea ;-)
reitanqild 7y ago
Another thing to consider: Do sanctions help other countries stay nice? I'm afraid that if it came out that you could do what you wanted and it wouldn't have consequences then we'd see a lot more bad behavior. So, while it hasn't worked on NK who knows what other countries would have tried if they could get away with it (and, I'd say, just look at history to get an idea).
- nraynaud 7y ago
  Well the US didn't stay nice when there were sanctions all around them.
  - reitanqild 7y ago
    I anticipated this coming up but you kind of see why I guess. If there was an even bigger superpower ready to punish them they might have behaved a whole lot better.
sterlingmoss 7y ago
Reuters ran an interesting debate last month on the motion "Sanctions are fair and effective", each side had a senior lawyer and a politician speaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfSheVScFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfSheVScFc
IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
South Africa would like you to hold their beer.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  It's kind of futile to give an example of sanctions working to someone who clearly stated that they some times work.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    That's quite accurate - instead of trying to state any reasoning that would be refutable your statement above doesn't guarantee anything while implying a lot - thus it's pretty unassailable by logic. The implication is rested on a very relaxed statement and will continue to imply even while counter examples are raised.
    - BeetleB 7y ago
      Actually, I made a very refutable statement: > Successful sanctions are the exception. To refute, you just need to look at all sanctions, and enumerate the successful ones, and show the proportion is at least half.[0] If "all" sanctions is onerous, a decent sample (e.g. "sanctions in the last 30 years") would still have weight. But simply giving an example of something that the claimant clearly agrees with - that's not even close to a refutation. [0] Clearly one can disagree on what success means, but then nothing in society can yield to logic
- lollipop90 7y ago
  Reduction of foreign military expenditure by Gorbachev, political settlement in South-West Africa/Namibia, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union arguably did more to remove any remaining rationale of the segregated government. In any case, sanctions/disinvestment caused many foreign companies to sell their South African divisions at a great discount to white industrialists. These industrialists in turn greatly benefited by opening up in the 90ies.
buboard 7y ago
That's like saying "war did not change anything" . Sure , but the possibility that it might change something is why they re done. What's the alternative, assuming diplomacy has been exhausted?
- BeetleB 7y ago
  >Sure , but the possibility that it might change something is why they re done. Don't consider possibilities in one direction only. Consider the possibility that the change may exacerbate the situation. And then compare with the "no action" alternative.
  - buboard 7y ago
    in almost all cases, the "no action" option has already been deemed unpalatable
rhizome 7y ago
One person's decision is not "sanctions," it's deciding not to work with a bad client.

tomp 7y ago

What else should we do? Did economic isolation help with the case of North Korea? To the extent I see, the rise of tourism has helped / is helping Cuba to become more and more integrated, as it's increasingly hard for the government to keep modern technology etc. from the hands of locals.

_bxg1 7y ago
China has kept NK afloat all these years; it's a special case.
option 7y ago
yes, economic isolation helps - compare the amount of influence N. Korea (isolated) has in the world to the one of China (not isolated).
- EGreg 7y ago
  Sorry but I don’t agree this mentality Unless you are an extreme nationalist, you have got to be happy that China lifted a billion people out of grinding poverty in 20-30 years? Now they need to work to maintain that standard of living. I hope soon they will transition to UBI and robots but in the meantime they need to earn a wage. So you’re not happy because the people lifted out of poverty were Chinese? If North Korea didnt have sanctions they would probably have never gotten nukes and the Kim regime would be far more benign to its own people. Making people and families independently wealthy gives a counterweight to the government. What we should have actually done is get off Saudi oil and stop subsidizing fossil fuels decades ago, to protect our citizens from OPEC. Then we could have actually had electric cars by now. Instead we buy oil and sell weapons. Creating jobs in this economy — oil and weapons are often closely linked. We should care about MILLIONS OF REGULAR PEOPLE in Libya, Yemen, North Korea etc. but instead we care about Kashoggi and Libyan embassy only!
  - option 7y ago
    I am not happy about dictatorship having a sizable influence on the world - long term, I believe, it is a dead end (I have lived in USSR). I am even less happy about Saudi Arabia. IMHO, it is the worst regime in the world (worse than NK) and I am appalled that my home country (USA) considers them “allies”

dukoid 7y ago

In my opinion, only countries respecting basic human rights should be permitted in the WTO.

epanchin 7y ago
Who would be the judge? Some would say the US should be excluded based on that criteria.
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  As someone that lives in the US I wholeheartedly agree that we should be excluded
  - buboard 7y ago
    I wouldn't want to be in a WTO where the strongest member is China.
    - 0_gravitas 7y ago
      and there exists the problem, and that will be the case unless an organization like the UN is actually given teeth
    - munk-a 7y ago
      The good news is while the US should be excluded - so should China - it might just be Norway and Sweden sitting at a table eating some lutefisk[1]. 1. Joke. In reality there are plenty of moral countries, but a lot of the economic powerhouses have clear exclusion reasons - Canada might get a seat at the table, along with Mexico perhaps.
- dukoid 7y ago
  Well there seem to be some indices available.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

kareemm 7y ago

Reminds me of this: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

mrguyorama 7y ago
I'm starting to really dislike that quote, because these people absolutely understand, they just don't care because it doesn't affect them directly.
- yourbandsucks 7y ago
  Disagree. People rationalize. Change the motivations and you get a different sincerely held rationalization. Look at TFA. Decades of a top US ally being a human rights disaster, noone in the media cared. Until one journalist is killed..
- chewbacha 7y ago
  “It’s difficult to get a person to care about something when their salary depends on not caring about it” Updated it for you ;)
- tim333 7y ago
  I think Upton Sinclair assumed roughly that but was being a little sarcastic. In practice the people often do care and will go to great efforts to avoid the truth to further their own interests.

everdev 7y ago

Unfortunately, I'm pretty jaded on our outrage culture when it comes to tragedies. It seems like people are great at virtue signaling through a tweet, an article, a public statement or a sign, but what change are we really willing to affect in the world? How many people who were outraged about this story did anything to change the world beyond saying how bad it was? What was someone willing to risk in order to stand their ground on this issue? Same goes for other tragedies as well. A lot of talk and no action.

adamch 7y ago
Turning down millions of dollars in Saudi investment is a pretty big action. Basically the opposite of virtue signalling. It has a real cost for the people doing it. Seems like Google, Amazon and Uber are actually doing something in this situation, not just signalling that they care.
- gautamnarula 7y ago
  Uber's greatest contribution has been losing so much money/having their share price performing so badly that SoftBank, and by extension the Saudis who poured money in the SoftBank Vision Fund, is hundreds of millions of dollars underwater.
JohnClark1337 7y ago
The outrage over this served the political/economic purposes of those who pull our strings and now no longer serves a purpose. Nothing complicated about it. It's all just a game.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

luckylion 7y ago

Imho the biggest part if whether you're using economic investments to change something or just to make a quick buck. Mutual investment is a significant part of Europe's relatively long, relatively peaceful recent history: a war between the great powers will only create losers. Similarly, if you have no significant relationship (and internationally, the only relevant relationships are of the trading variety), you have no leverage for change. If I wanted to alter your behavior, isolating you won't do much. Trading with you and then, when you see the value of our trades, ask for small, incremental change is much more effective. Granted, the West hasn't done that a lot with Saudi Arabia (though otoh, women are now allowed to drive etc - would that have happened if China was SA's primary trade partner?), it has been mostly about "sell us oil, buy our weapons, and we'll look the other way when you commit some atrocity", but that doesn't mean that the idea is always wrong. A diversified economy would also most certainly make Saudi Arabia a better place. Right now, natural resources are pretty much the only relevant industry, and typically, that industry is controlled by a small minority. A modern economy that consists of more than one sector would change the power balance and a change in the power balance would likely curb the Wahabi fundamentalism that the royal family uses to keep their population in check. It can be a good idea, but that's not to say that it will be successful, or that it will even be intended to be.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> Mutual investment is a significant part of Europe's relatively long, relatively peaceful recent history: a war between the great powers will only create losers. There was a ton of mutual investment prior to WWI. The real reason for the relatively peaceful recent history is the knowledge that war in Europe would have brought in the US and/or the Soviet Union with really bad consequences for all involved (Europe would become the "shooting gallery of the super powers")

aeturnum 7y ago

I find it telling and amusing that the justification never goes the other way. Businesses never force countries to implement democratic or human rights reforms, even though the belief they are linked implies that the most efficient way to improve business conditions might sometimes be to demand political reform rather than form new business relationships.

dcolkitt 7y ago
I wouldn't say this is the case. Business almost always does consider property rights and rule of law when making overseas investments. Both of those factors are strongly linked to human rights and democracy. In general, the countries with the worst human rights abuses (North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Eritrea) tend to be the ones with the most anti-business policies. The correlation between the country-level ranking of political freedom and civil liberties[0], and their World Bank ease of doing business rating is over 50%[1]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World [1]https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/media/Annual-Reports/English/DB2019-report_web-version.pdf https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/media/An...
- aeturnum 7y ago
  Do you know of any examples of a particular business insisting an authoritarian regime implement pro-democratic changes before opening a business venture?
  - dcolkitt 7y ago
    Even just drawing from American history, big business interests lobbied extremely hard for desegregation and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even today in America, big business is one of the most powerful interests in favor of LGBT-rights[1]. Another example was big business' demands for reform in the apartheid regime of South Africa[2]. [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/the-u-s-chamber-of-commerce-has-a-coming-out-party https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/the-u-s-c... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_principles

tarsinge 7y ago

Great, so why not the same reasoning with Iran too?

yahwrong 7y ago

More economic trading means more interaction with the rest of the world. People learn and grow from being exposed to new experiences and thoughts. Sure, the leadership may not change their stance but overtime everyone else might.