His book teaches us an old lesson anew: that the true wealth of nations is not discovered in the ground, but created by the ingenuity and sweat of citizens. Itâs the same lesson the Spanish learned centuries ago when they discovered gold, the oil of their time, in the New World. They piled up bullion but squandered it on imperial fantasies and failed to build enduring prosperity, while destroying the civilizations from which they seized it.
Destruction, or at least a lack of progress, has been the fate of most of the nations unlucky enough to sit on top of large pools of âblack goldâ today. They have grown corrupted by it, their leaders relieved of the need to show accountability as long as they can buy off well-connected foreigners and pay for the security and protection they need from their own angry, disenfranchised citizens. In starkly titled chapters â âFear,â âGreed,â âEmpire,â âAlienationâ and so on â Maass shows how each oil state has found its own way to failure. âJust as every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, every dysfunctional oil country is dysfunctional in its own way,â he writes.
Equatorial Guineaâs savage leader, Teodoro Obiang, plunders virtually every cent of his nationâs wealth, aided by Riggs Bank of Washington, which sometimes sent employees to the embassy to pick up bulging suitcases of cash. Locals donât even get the benefit of jobs because the manual labor is supplied by Indians and Filipinos brought in by Marathon Oil. Walking around the capital, Malabo, one night, Maass does manage to find a booming source of local employment: young Guinean girls called ânight fightersâ because they jostle for a chance to sell their bodies to the oilmen from Texas or Oklahoma. âThe men in Malabo might not find jobs in the oil industry, but it is clearly possible for their desperate sisters to earn a few dollars,â he writes. Traveling to Ecuador, Maass discovers graffiti on one of the pipelines that cut through what was once pristine Amazonian rain forest: âMás Petróleo = Más Pobreza.â More oil equals more poverty. For him, it sums up the confiscatory approach that Texaco took to that country, leaving it a stripped land oozing with toxic pollutants.
