{"id":21,"date":"2016-11-10T00:54:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T07:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/?p=21"},"modified":"2016-11-10T00:54:31","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T07:54:31","slug":"week-9-commerce-coercion-and-americas-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/2016\/11\/10\/week-9-commerce-coercion-and-americas-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 9: Commerce, Coercion, and America&#8217;s Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><del><\/del>At the beginning of the chapter, something that stuck out for me, was the astounding number of workers that died while working on the Panama Canal. Although yellow fever and other diseases are the main culprit, the more than twenty-seven thousand five hundred people that perished is still a tremendous number of people. To put that amount into perspective, the number of people that died could fill Rogers Arena once and a half. I also found it surprising how Dawson implied that \u201conly five-thousand and nine [people]&#8230;died in the ten-year period during which the United States government oversaw construction\u201d was somehow better than the death ratio when other countries oversaw construction. It is unreasonable to think that that was a better number because zero deaths is truly the best number. Some may point out that there are many reasons for why these workers died, however, to me, it seems to be just another dark chapter in the book of human exploitation.<\/p>\n<p>The labeling of the United States as a \u201cbully\u201d can be justified through many of its foreign relations in the past century. There are countless examples of the US interfering and intervening with the politics and governments of other countries. If there were any country opposing the US\u2019s ideology, they would counter it militarily and financially. In the example given by Dawson, the US and CIA overthrew the committed anti-communist Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. Even though he was anti-communist, he legalized the communist party and wanted to pull Guatemala out of its poverty and inequality by expropriating land and railroads owned by UFCO. In retaliation, the US implemented trade sanctions on Guatemala and when that didn\u2019t work, eventually worked with the CIA to bring him down; Which unsurprisingly occurred with the help of the US military might. As Dawson points out, \u201cclose business ties between UFCO and the administration, CIA fears of growing Soviet influence and the US government\u2019s inability to distinguish nationalism from communism\u201d all lead to Arbenz\u2019s downfall. In this case, it is farcical to think that the US did this for the better of Guatemala, it only benefited those in the US, which is the case for many of their military interventions in the past and present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the beginning of the chapter, something that stuck out for me, was the astounding number of workers that died while working on the Panama Canal. Although yellow fever and other diseases are the main culprit, the more than twenty-seven thousand five hundred people that perished is still a tremendous number of people. To put &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44057,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1304763,1772840],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-last100","tag-week9"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44057"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/austinchang\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}