Burmese Under Guard
Burma is poverty under dictatorship. While the rich continue to strip mine and clear cut the country's remaining wealth, the military keeps the citizens under 24-hour Lockdown. You can't move a muscle in that place. Guns are everywhere, barbed wire is everywhere. Burma is a heavily-guarded fortress, with guns pointed inward.
The country is inherently wealthy, but the wealth is being sucked out as the citizens are driven further into poverty. I saw some promotional material put out by the Burmese military for attracting foreign investment. They make little effort to hide the truth, making direct mention of "extraction of resources". The military sells whatever they can to the first customer with cash. Forget about teak forests, they're gone - stripped out and robbed. I rode through a hot desert of ruts and stumps, once a vast forest but now nothing. Hot, open sun baking raw dirt, occaisional people by the roadside asking for worthless coins in the oppressive dry heat. And the new pipeline to Thailand is funded by cash from Unocal, paid to the military. Labor is provided when the military uproots villages and locks the citizens into virtual slavery. The country is slipping into deserts and chain gangs.
As deadly and universally feared as the Burmese military is, they are still the country's largest employer. I was shocked to run into pro- military types on the street, but they always turned out to work for the military. Nobody likes the military there except for the ones making money. Foreign investors turn Western cash into huge piles of one-time crops such as timber, gems, and petroleum, while cash-hungry locals keep the resource wealth flowing outward. Incoming cash flow is always sent through military hands, fortifying an economy where the bloody deeds will be carried out by a constant supply of willng dependants.