Crude World

"Yes, this was written before the spill in the Gulf but it is a very well-written and detailed account of how countries have been affected and infected by the oil industry and how their politics have been distorted. It covers places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, New Guinea and Ecuador. They are all places where, particularly with those last three, the power of the corporations is larger and more organised than the structure of governance. It shows the way in which business of that scale, even if practised under what passes for law in those countries, ends up as corruption. So there is this evil of greed and disequilibrium of one substance taking over an entire economy and the effects that has on the possibility of any other kind of development. What is interesting to me is how different countries deal with this situation. It is so different in Africa to, say, in the United Arab Emirates or in other places where populations are less dense and the existing clan structure means the wealth is spread through a somewhat larger network of people; of course, those people then hire millions of guest workers to perform the labour of their budding service economies, and that creates a different, more nominally legal form of exploitation and neglect. It is certainly true that press coverage changes everything so that the amount of attention it gets is a function of how much media the US has to spend on it. But I think the quantities are so high at the moment that it’s difficult to overestimate the long-term consequences of this event."