Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [200]
Jackie, however, stood up in that same meeting, to take the Boonean position that everything ought to be put to use in the cause. She was contemptuous of those rejecting Fort on principle. “Since you’re going to take visitors hostage,” she said sharply to her father, “why not put them to use? Why not talk to them?”
So in effect they had a new split to add to all their others: isolationists and two-worlders.
In the next few days Fort handled the controversy surrounding him by ignoring it, to the extent that it seemed to Nadia that he might not even be aware of it. The Swiss asked him to run a workshop on the current Terran situation, and this was packed, with Fort and his companions answering questions at length in every session. In these sessions Fort seemed content to accept whatever they told him about Mars, and regarding it he advocated nothing. He stuck to Terra, and he only described. “The transnationals have collapsed down into the couple dozen largest of them,” he said in response to one question, “all of which have entered into development contracts with more than one national government. We call those the metanationals. The biggest are Subarashii, Mitsubishi, Consolidated, Amexx, Armscor, Mahjari, and Praxis. The next ten or fifteen are also quite big, and after that you’re back down to transnat size, but these are being quickly incorporated into the metanats. The big metanats are now the major world powers, insofar as they control the IMF, the World Bank, the Group of Eleven, and all their client countries.”
Sax asked him to define a metanational in more detail.
“About a decade ago we at Praxis were asked by Sri Lanka to come into their country and take over the economy and work on arbitration between the Tamils and the Singhalese. We did that and the results were good, but during the time of the arrangement it was clear that our relationship with a national government was a new kind of thing. It got noticed in certain circles. Then some years ago Amexx got into a disagreement with the Group of Eleven, and pulled all of its assets out of the Eleven and relocated them in the Philippines. The mismatch between Amexx and the Philippines, estimated in gross yearly product to be on the order of a hundred to one, resulted in a situation where Amexx in effect took that country over. That was the first real metanational, though it wasn’t clear that it was a new thing until their arrangement was imitated by Subarashii, when they shifted many of their operations into Brazil. It became clear that this was something new, not like the old flag-of-convenience relationship. A metanational takes over the foreign debt and the internal economy of its client countries, kind of like the UN did in Cambodia, or Praxis in Sri Lanka, but much more comprehensively. In these arrangements the client government becomes the enforcement agency of the metanational’s economic policies. In general they enforce what are called austerity measures, but all government employees are paid much more than they were before, including the army and police and intelligence operations. So at that point, the country is bought. And every metanational has the resources to buy several countries. Amexx has that kind of relationship with the Philippines, the North African countries, Portugal, Venezuela, and five or six smaller countries.”
“Has Praxis done this as well?” Marina asked.
Fort shook his head. “In a way yes, but we’ve tried to give the relationships a different nature. We’ve dealt with countries large enough to make the partnership more balanced. We’ve had dealings with India, China, and Indonesia. These were all countries that were shortchanged on Mars by the treaty of 2057, and so they encouraged us to come here and make inquiries like this one.