The Faustian Bargain

I recently finished reading a very interesting book called 'The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich' by Daniel Ammann. The book, as the title clearly mentions, is the biography of the most infamous and most powerful white-collar criminal in the history of the USA, March Rich, who was accused of evading $48 million in taxes and trading commodities with enemies of the USA while circumventing all embargoes and was at large from the US since 1983. After getting a very controversial last minute pardon by the then US President Bill Clinton in his last day in office, Marc Rich has still remained in Switzerland, his adopted country. The book also chronicles his lesser known achievements such as the invention of the spot market for oil trading in the 1970s and breaking the virtual oligopoly of the 7 giant oil companies. While the book showed that Marc Rich did not exactly stick to a very moralistic stance in his business dealings with all the countries he traded with, a lot of his vilification in front of the US public seemed to be the handiwork of people such as Rudi Guiliani, the former mayor of New York, who championed the cause of the American public against corporate greed. I have already read about his expolits in another book called 'The Den of Thieves' which was an account of how the Junk Bond king Michael Milken was caught by the US attorneys on charges of insider trading and indicted.

More importantly, the book was an eye opener for me with regards to global politics and the double standards practised by almost every major state involved in the production/consumption of some of the world's most precious resources such as oil. I was stunned to read that while Ayotollah Khomeini's Iran did not recognise the existence of Israel along with the rest of Arab nations, there existed a secret pipeline that supplied Iranian oil to Israel for a long long time and the transportation of oil was authorised by none other than the Iranian state owned oil company!!! I was shocked to read how most of the world's most important commodites come from countries that have been war torn and ruled by the most corrupt governments for decades while the liberal democracies have turned a blind eye to all of this while looking for fulfilling their own needs. On one hand, we see embargoes and sanctions against nations that refuse to accord the basic human rights to their citizens and are ruled by oppressive governements, on the other hand, the same liberal democracies made secret deals through middlemen to acquire those resources they most coveted paying top dollar to those same oppressive and corrupt governments.

I want to ask why this sham of self-righteousness even exists???? What purpose does it fulfil except global summits that make media headlines and ultimately lead to no concrete resolutions whatsoever???? As far as my understanding goes, it's a simple case of 'you scratch my back and I scratch yours'. While developed and developing democracies need commodities for their survival, the corrupt regimes that hold control over these resources need a lot of cash to sustain their rule and fill their coffers with this cash, whether any of this trickles down to the poor is a different matter altogether.

Now comes the question of morality. While no one wants to know that the material making up their mobile phones is coltan that comes Congo which is one of the most war torn places in the world and the bauxite used to make aluminum is mined in Guinea which is a terrible dictatorship, people are more comfortable resting in ignorance and choose to turn a blind eye to these events that tend to disturb their lifestyle that has become accustomed to these things.