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As the prospect of huge new investments in their rural corner of the world beckoned, villagers anticipated a whole new life: jobs, houses, education, and even free food.

Some resource-rich countries in Africa have managed to turn mineral wealth into broad-based development. Ghana, which recently discovered oil, has won praise for its careful planning for poverty alleviation. Botswana’s diamonds have turned what was one of the world’s most impoverished nations into a middle-income country.

The government has signed up to be part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a program set up by Britain and supported by the World Bank to ensure that governments and companies are honest about revenues. The government also says it plans to invest the proceeds of mining into antipoverty programs and to help rural farmers.

Earlier this year, the people of Cateme sent a letter to local government officials and Vale demanding that their complaints about the resettlement process be addressed, threatening to block the railway line that passes through their village carrying coal to the port. When they received no reply, they occupied the rail line. The police descended upon them, chasing them away and roughing up those who resisted removal.

“There were some problems after the relocation,” said Vale’s country manager, Ricardo Saad, adding that the company was trying to fix them. Local people, he said, should not think that mining would bring instant prosperity. “One of the things that we have to manage very carefully are the expectations,” Mr. Saad said.

the focus of politics is now on an American troop withdrawal. It has been forgotten that during the Soleimani strike a senior member of Popular Mobilizations Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was also killed. This political group holds the second-largest bloc in parliament. A week earlier, a U.S. air strike on several of their bases killed 25 of their members leading to the attack on the American embassy. They have publicly stated that their revenge on the United States will be fierce and forthcoming.

Democratic transitions demand political stability.

They had basically expended the world that they were living in.

When you grow with the land you learn how to make an even exchange. But when you come into a new place with another worldview from a another land and another culture, it’s a little harder unless you’re open to understanding what’s really happening here, what reality is in this place.

the philosophical error that undergirds everything, almost everything, is dualism.

Let’s talk about the physical: Plato, Socrates, and the Utopian vision are all about a spiritual or a mind perfection. The physical becomes less important. You have this Utopian vision of this place that you’re supposed to reach, this plane of thinking.

We pay people who think generally higher wages than those who do physical labor. With theology, for example, we have people with PhDs that are are higher than what we call “practical” theologians.

We went through whole ceremonies and things to make sure that we thanked the animal, we thanked the earth, we thanked the creator, but most of all to remind ourselves that we’re taking a life here.

The problem is that we’re all affected to one degree or another by this Western worldview which is a handicap to understanding what the possibilities are. And secondly we’re never on the land long enough to understand how the relationship worked.

What I believe sustains our people and makes community possible and made this relationship possible are the values that developed over time. For me it seems frustrating if people are trying to adapt Native things without Native values.

I don’t know the ultimate answer to this but I can at least trace it to the Greek idea of dualism, right? And the higher mind philosophy, and all this. I can trace the influence in America from that.

I know the things I can see in the Greek culture that created the Western worldview: the physical dualism, the moral dualism, the religious intolerance, the individualism, the extrinsic categories, the hierarchy, the competitiveness, the Utopianism, all the anthropocentric “humans are over nature,” the triumphalism, the patriarchy. All of those things can be traced through those movements.

Also, Greece and Rome and England and America all have been very young civilizations. I think perhaps their brief age shows the immaturity of thinking. When civilizations are older, like many Indigenous civilizations, they have more time to learn, perhaps they come to understand that war, competition, capitalism, individualism, etc., all eventually lead to instability and are simply bad for everyone, including the ecosystems, and this type thinking should be avoided as much as possible.

Unlike Augustine, the famous Christian theologian so revered among Christians, I do not believe people are born corrupted or sinful and are such “by nature.” I believe we are all born with choices to make.

Buchanan and Devletoglou suggested an overhaul of higher education aimed at bringing the student movement to heel. At the time, California had proposed a master plan of universal free higher education across its system. But the authors of Academia in Anarchy argued that the proposal suffered from a lack of basic economics — meaning not simply economic calculation, but Buchanan’s conception of economics as an all-encompassing moral and behavioral philosophy. “Almost alone among social scientists,” they wrote, “the economist brings with him a model of human behavior which allows predictions about human action.”

Treating education as a “free good” meant that those who received it had no incentive to value it, and thus spent their years at university behaving as “man-children” playing a “psychedelic game.” Buchanan and Devletoglou recommended a student-loan system. “The scarcity value of a university education would at least be brought home to the student,”

In a twist that would become characteristic of later libertarian arguments, with softer echoes among technocratic liberals like Buttigieg, economically disciplining students was a matter of social justice for society at large. Free tuition that was intended to provide a path of mobility for less-fortunate citizens, especially racial minorities who suffered from centuries of accumulated exclusion, was actually a “gift to the gifted” — “a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich” — with the “poor taxpayer” cleverly but dubiously painted by Buchanan and Devletoglou as working-class citizens excluded from higher education.

This is the language invoked in the secret tribunals that adjudicate these cases to rule in favor of corporate plunder and against regulations.

No Party shall expropriate or nationalize a covered investment either directly or indirectly through measures equivalent to expropriation or nationalization (expropriation).” The word “indirectly” is crucial here.

Here’s Article 14.17 in full: “The Parties reaffirm the importance of each Party encouraging enterprises operating within its territory or subject to its jurisdiction to voluntarily incorporate into their internal policies those internationally recognized standards, guidelines, and principles of corporate social responsibility that have been endorsed or are supported by that Party, which may include the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. These standards, guidelines, and principles may address areas such as labor, environment, gender equality, human rights, indigenous and aboriginal peoples’ rights, and corruption” (emphasis added).

Article 17.5 explicitly bans any limitations on the activities of financial institutions and Article 17.6 prohibits any restrictions on taking capital out of a country.

In disputes between the U.S. and Mexico, Article 14.D.3 states that disputes will be settled in the ICSID, but the two sides can agree to have it heard in another forum.

So even if ICSID, or the other two secret tribunals, are not used and instead a new panel specific to the USMCA becomes the new forum, the same conditions and same cast of characters, using the same precedents, will be in force. There is no reason to expect any effective difference from NAFTA.

Not only are these types of rulings precedents, but recall, as noted above, that Article 14, which elevates expectations of profits above any conflicting consideration, supersedes all other articles. And to repeat a point made earlier, WTO standards are obligatory. “Technical barriers” to trade as the WTO defines them won’t be exceptions.