117: Patrick Alley | Blood Diamonds, Kleptocrats, Very Bad People & The Investigations Of Global Witness
Curious Worldview
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What's the Short Answer to the Resource Curse?
I think what we've seen since the beginning of global witness is something that's come to be called the resource curse. Companies will pay off top politicians and officials to get illegal access or, you know, to bypass the legal procedures to get access to those resources. The people who suffer are the people who live in those countries because of the poverty that ensues. It's why the regime is the authoritarian,. even if you're a democratically elected person, as Hun Sen was, as one of the prime ministers in Cambodia in the early 90s. If you start getting really, really rich, you want to protect that... You end up very often creating a dictatorship out of a democracy, precisely
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