How can countries allow corporations to start wars in their countries?
If by countries you mean the governments, if they are not composed of, intimidated by or joined at the hip with the corporations, it's not them. I suggest these agreements and conflicts are made between the native oligarchical class and corporations, not the government that repesents the many.
Corporations are merely the modern, more mobile form of oligarchical organizations. Most countries, including ours, was built by slaves employed by the most vicious form of corporation, the plantation system. Most of the Americas and much of the world, even non-Eurocentric or European colonies are set up in a variety of these forms.
It has to do with who has possession of the land and its resources, and who has been dispossessed by them. This system being so unjust, but implacable, and impossible to eliminate, caused Thomas Paine to propose a fixed income for all the dispossessed paid for by government from taxes taken from the oligarchical class. It is the philosophical basis of the Social Security system, and it is in their archives.
Every nation in which we see conflicts like the one described, as well as our own, has a major portion of the population who is either working for or benefiting from this same ancient social structure. FDR knew this and argued for a wide social safety net, since the old ways of making a living, on one's own land, and the demands of society in competition with other nations and within itself to industrialize, caused dislocation of families and traditional ways of supporting persons through the trials of life, accidents, illnesses and the like.
Someone who has lived and done business in Cambodia posted an original piece here at DU, that, IIRC, said some of the conflict in Cambodia is due to a social clash that is of one set of people, in the northeast, and the rest. The culture of the northeast is liberal, has a social safety net, socialist, etc.
The rest of the country is more on the old model. The leader of Cambodia falls in with the former group, the corporate, land owning group is seeking to overthrow the government and many citizens are going along with them because they see the more liberal or socialist part of the country which has a lot of modernity, education, etc., as oppressing them and thus financing their easier lives.
It's like our rural GOP vs. urban liberals. They think they are the real workers, and we are parasites on their labor, making meat, grain, extracting minerals and all of that, which the urbanites consume as they move forward in education and wealth. They see the laws we think of as wonderful as robbing them.
All revolutions are not liberal, often they are reactionary in nature. That is the root of the hostility, IMHO.
Governments should require corporations to pay enough for people to live or what good are they?
Getting back to the workers. A government in a nation has to have some unity with the majority of people to enforce such equality. We've seen in our own nation, that the reactionary, oligarchical forces, the owners of land and resources and those who work for them, see the world as a zero sum game and do NOT believe in uniting with others. Thus our own millions who are anti-union today.
The contrast was shown clearly during the auto bailout. The workers that would get the most benefit, and the communities that would be saved, were not part of the same region, and those in the southern states did not see any reason to support the workers up north. In fact, they disdained them and called them lazy and greedy. All the while, they were competing for their wealth by working for foreign firms who negotiated with the powerful owners in their red states who saw more profit coming their way by destroying the domestically OWNED auto business. They didn't care about that as part of being American.
They just wanted to keep their non-union jobs at less pay with less benefits as a sure thing. Remember, they were part of the Confederacy. They have a benchmark for work, and that benchmark is room and board, slavery. What they get better than that, is just fine. Their contention was that the auto workers up north were just as the other group sees the liberal northeastern part of Cambodia.
I may be drifting off your point, but am trying to provide context. There are a few implacable foes to what we as liberals and believers in worker rights believe. Those I am talking about are just a few rungs above the slaves before the Civil War. They have an entire culture based around a sort of aristocratic notion of how the world really, really operates, as a natural law ordained by God. Anyone who speaks against that is to them, godless and communist. There is a reason they vote and act the way they do. I suspect something like it in Cambodia.
I see labor relations as one of the main reasons for so much turmoil world wide. From sugar cane workers in South America to oil rig workers in Africa that have to become pirates in order to get paid. It's corporations doing this.
I see that, but I think there is something that was there before the corporations, that led to it in all the countries involved. A corporation, with few exceptions, does not literally invade a country. They make alliances with the most powerful there who are usually oligarches, and are not always involved with the government.
These groups were there long before, and will exist, like the churches, long after government rise and fall. To them, the governments that people set up to act as arbiters between common people seeing as all equal, are temporary interlopers in an ancient plan. It is always just below the surface, festering and ready to seize any weakness to take control.
Our system of public education that once gave information on how to figure out such things and give people the legal tools to use their power in government, is falling apart because of the people brainwashed by these oligarchs and churches. The real power exists in the other conspirator, the corporations. But I see no difference in the DNA of a corporation and an oligarchy.
That's why we cannot afford to let them be elected to do this. But in calling government at fault, we are denying our own responsibility to use it for us. None of the private entites are transparent nor are they accountable to the majority of people who MIGHT resist them. That is how these things happen.
Oh, well, just a few thoughts. Perhaps not at all helpful.
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