To:
"V.K.Durham"
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 10:11:31 PM
Subject: More people getting it
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 10:11:31 PM
Subject: More people getting it
Former ‘economic hitman’: U.S. ‘death economy’ brought world to
brink of destruction
By Travis Gettys
Monday, March 17, 2014 13:10 EDT
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Author John
Perkins explained last week on the David Pakman Show how American corporations
extorted natural resources from developing nations in a process that sounds
very similar to domestic privatization schemes.
Perkins, who
wrote the 2004 book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” about his experience
working as a chief economist for the engineering company Chas. T. Main, said
corporations would identify countries that had resources sought by the U.S. and
arrange for them to obtain large loans from the World Bank and similar
organizations.
“But the money
never actually went to the country,” Perkins said. “Instead, it went to our own
corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country. They made a
great deal of profit from that.”
The countries
would use those borrowed funds to build electrical systems, highways,
industrial parks, and other infrastructure projects.
“Yet the country
would be left holding a huge debt they couldn’t repay, and so at some point
we’d go back and say, ‘Hey, you know, since you can’t pay your debts, sell your
resource – oil, whatever – very cheap to our companies without any
environmental restrictions or social regulations or privatize your public
sector businesses, sell them real cheap – your utility companies, your water
and sewage system, your schools, your jails, off to our corporations,” Perkins
said. “And in that way we created the world’s first truly global empire,
primarily without the use of the military.”
He said most
economists agreed that developing countries needed better infrastructure to
improve their economies, but he said statistics supporting this model were
misleading.
“I came to
understand that the poor people were not benefitting, that the statistics
reflect the very wealthy, which is true in this country, too, you know, that 85
people control more resources than half the world’s population,” Perkins said.
“Our statistics are very, very skewed to those rich people.”
He claims in his
book the U.S. backed the assassinations of Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos and
Ecuadoran President Jaime Roldós Aguilera in a pair of 1981 plane crashes
because they refused to bow to corporate interests.
“We’ve created a
death economy, one that’s based on killing people, militarization, and ravaging
the earth,” Perkins said. “We need to move into a life economy that’s based on
cleaning up pollution, feeding starving people, developing new technologies,
transportation, communications, (and) energy.”
He declared the
global economy to be “an abject failure,” arguing that Americans make up just 5
percent of the world’s population but consume 30 percent of its natural
resources.
“That’s not a
model,” Perkins said. “It can’t be repeated by China, even though they’re
trying. It just puts the world in a worse condition when other countries try to
repeat our model. We must come up with a new model.”
He said some
corporate leaders and many consumers have arrived at similar conclusions and
are beginning to take steps to correct the problems he’s identified.
“We’re truly in a
consciousness revolution, a huge revolution, where people are waking up to the fact
that we’re living on a very fragile space station that has no shuttles,”
Perkins said. “We’re going to have to take care of this place, and big business
is going to have to play a major role in waking up and taking care of this,
serving a public interest – not the 1 percent, but the 99 percent – serving the
earth, in essence, and we all need to get out there and make sure that
happens.”
Watch the
entire interview posted online by David Pakman Show:
From The Web
Monday, March 17, 2014 13:10 EDT
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