Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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It has recently become more interesting to the rest of the world for two main reasons: the fact that it is experiencing one of the world’s worst debt crises, and the discovery of offshore oil and gas in immense quantities.
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dual reality. In the present, there is a brutal austerity program imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), wreaking the usual havoc on people’s lives. At the same time, politicians assure them that the country has a bright future ahead in which abundant oil revenues will solve all problems and benefit everyone.
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Suriname is an important case study in the way financialized neocolonialism works in the twenty-first century
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Dutch settlers took over coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations from the British in 1667 and established what was arguably the most brutal slave economy in the region.
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before the country gained its independence from the Netherlands, US commercial interests were transforming the landscape. Vast tracts of forest were flooded, forcing the Maroon Saamaka community from its lands in order to build the Afobaka Dam, which would generate hydroelectric power for the bauxite factory of the Aluminum Company of America
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company packed up and left, having managed to sell the dam back to Suriname. Thanks to unfair deals that doubled electricity prices and left Suriname exposed to swings in commodity markets, the country even owed Alcoa more than $100 million for electricity that was produced using its own natural resources.
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Private creditors receive 46 percent of external debt payments from the Global South and own 38 percent of Suriname’s debts.
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bondholders have laid claim to Suriname’s future oil revenues through a value-recovery instrument. If all goes according to plan, this will line their pockets with a staggering windfall of 30 percent of future oil revenues, up to a total of £689 million. Meanwhile, Suriname will continue to spend 27 percent of its government revenues on external debt payments over the next five years.
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the agreement with the bondholders is dependent on Suriname changing the legislation of its sovereign wealth fund by December 2024. Fifty years after Suriname’s official independence from the Netherlands, foreign bodies are once again dictating how Suriname uses its resources and what legislation it should pass. This is the new form of colonialism, using debt to gain access to resources.
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The result, for the people of Suriname, is austerity. The IMF demanded savage cuts, based on a flawed methodology that prioritizes capital flows over human rights and the sustainability of life.
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plunging the country into political, economic, and social chaos, with strikes and uprisings. Health care has collapsed, medicines are scarce, and operating rooms are empty for lack of materials and qualified personnel. Essential workers such as teachers and health care workers have left the country in droves,
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feminized care work, disavowed and unpaid, has always been an essential precondition for capitalist profits, even though it is ignored in economic models or deemed “unproductive” in contrast with “productive” paid labor.
✏️ Unlike cops, soldiers and firefighters, which are ostensibly social work.. but these are masculinized and therefore worthwhile and productive-ish.. or at least important to focus on. Teaching and care work is feminine.. so not as important or considered a productive thing. 👓 masculinity capitalism 🔗 View Highlight
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Austerity forces carers to work longer hours, in more precarious conditions, for lower salaries. Women are disproportionately employed in the public services that face redundancies due to IMF demands to balance the books
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The same tool that drains resources from communities simultaneously works to make that process of extraction invisible, individual, and shameful, in stark contrast to the collective exploitation of workers on the factory floor. Whereas unionized workers have strength in numbers for their collective struggle against identifiable exploitative employers, the individual stands alone with their debts before the invisible ranks of banks and creditors, while society tells them that it is their own fault.
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When Burkina Faso’s president Thomas Sankara attempted to organize African states to stand in solidarity against neocolonial debt, he was swiftly deposed in a coup and murdered, allegedly with the support of the French state.