Quote:
On what basis do you support the notion that the US wants "domination", I think we want access to the oil at a far price.
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ace--here's a good example of the problem i have interacting with you.
in a debate you make assumptions about who the interlocutor is and what he or she knows about and i generally am a pollyanna sort this so way assume that folk know something of the basic history of the topic being discussed.
in this case, though, i dont think that you know the outlines of the history of american foreign policy toward latin america. all i can do about this really is suggest that you read some stuff. try walter lefeber's work. he has a political stance but it is explicit so you can control for it--it is systematic and well-written and repays the reading: Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1984, 1992)...which is a good place to get the general outlines of fp-history toward latin america as a whole, even though its focus is only on central america. he gives a good view of the dynamics that much american policy have triggered. or you could simply do a subject heading search in a library catalogue.
i hope this sounds as i mean it--a suggestion for how an actual debate could happen--and not patronizing--but seriously, there is no point in this without some expansion of the information you have to work from. so were you to read something like this (if you havent) then we could have a common starting point and maybe this sort of conversation could be productive.
your first 4 questions above to me are all predicated on you not seeming to know the outlines of the history.
i am not inclined toward potted summaries and think in this case that even if i were so inclined, i still wouldnt post one here.
summary: i dont think we have enough of a common dataset to have a coherent conversation about this. you will say "i dont understand" i will say "read a book" and things will grow snippy from there and there's no point. so if you want to pursue this, just do a bit of research so that we have a place to start. it isnt onerous.
b.
regarding your notion of "the long view"---this is a simple frame question. if you are tracking capital markets to the exclusion of other factors--even those which would be integrated into corporate self-auditing via the idea of the triple bottom line, then you are excluding so much data (if the idea is to consider economic activity and the consequences of that activity--which is among the goals in a thread like this) that no matter how extended in time your data is within that datafield, the field itself is so truncated that it does not provide you with adequate information.
c.
your statements about debt as lever of american domination: again the underlying problem here is that you dont know the history enough to enable an actual discussion to get started.
general:
it is not a problem that you dont know the history in itself--no-one is born knowing this stuff (unless you like in the area affected)--so we all have to acquire the information somehow--and we all have to read to get it--so get some better historical information.