Claudine told me that there were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other US companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone and Webster, and Brown and Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received these loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other US contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favours, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.

These executives fanned out across the planet. They sought the cheapest labour pools, the most accessible resources, and the largest markets. They were ruthless in their approach. ... Like us, they ensnared communities and countries. They promised affluence, a way for countries to use the private sector to dig themselves out of debt. ... In the end, however, if they found cheaper workers or more accessible resources elsewhere, they left. When they abandoned a community whose hopes they had raised, the consequences were often devastating...

Instead of sending in the Marines [to Iran], Washington dispatched CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore's grandson). He performed brilliantly, winning people over through payoffs and threats. He then enlisted them to organise a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh was both unpopular and inept. In the end, Mossadegh went down ... the pro-American Mohammad Reza Shah became the unchallenged dictator.

The example of organised crime seemed to offer a metaphor. Mafia bosses often start out as street thugs. But over time, the ones who make it to the top transform their appearance. They take to wearing impeccably tailored suits, owning legitimate businesses, and wrapping themselves in the cloak of upstanding society. They support local charities and are respected by their communities... However, beneath this patina is a trail of blood. When the debtors cannot pay, hitmen move in to demand their pound of flesh.

The condition was that Saudi Arabia would use its petrodollars to purchase US government securities; in turn, the interest earned by these securities would be spent by the US Department of the Treasury in ways that enabled Saudi Arabia to emerge from a medieval society into the modern, industrialised world. In other words, the interest compounding on billions of dollars of the kingdom's oil income would be used to pay US companies to fulfil the vision I had come up with... Our own US Department of the Treasury would hire us, at Saudi expense, to build infrastructure projects and even entire cities throughout the Arabian Peninsula.

Surely, [Omar Torrijos] knew that the foreign aid game was a sham - he had to know. It existed to make him rich and to shackle his country with debt. It was there so Panama would be forever obligated to the United States and the corporatocracy. It was there to keep Latin America ... forever subservient to Washington and Wall Street. I was certain that he knew that the system was based on the assumption that all men in power are corruptible, and that his decision not to use it for his personal benefit would be seen as a threat.

Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston. Cartagena, and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing...

In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison...
Another recent interview in Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.

The “security barrier”, as the ­Israeli’s term it, is designed to crush the human spirit as much as to enclose the Palestinians in ghettoes. Like a reptile, it transforms its shape and cuts across agricultural lands as a steel-and-wire barrier, with watchtowers, ditches, patrol roads and alarm systems. It will be 700km long and, at a height of 8m to 9m in places, dwarfs the Berlin Wall.

According to the United Nations, around 4,500 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by the Israeli army since September 2000. The Israeli committee Against House Demolitions calculates that Israel has demolished some 12,000 Palestinian homes since 1967, whether in punitive or military actions or simply because the Israeli authorities decide they do not have the correct permits. Over 70,000 people have seen their homes destroyed in these operations, while many more have seen their farms, fruit trees and olive trees razed to the ground.

13-year-old Iman al-Hams ... was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had 17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian doctor told the Guardian. Iman is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000. Several were killed as they sat at their desks in class. Three and a half thousand children have been wounded. Over 300 are in Israeli prisons.

A new UN map of the West Bank, produced by the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of the situation. Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has rendered 40 per cent of the territory off limits to Palestinians. The rest of the territory, including major population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into enclaves; movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints. The UN found that what remains is an area very similar to that set aside for the Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now underway to the infrastructure of the territories – including a network of highways that bypass and isolate Palestinian towns – would serve to formalise the de facto cantonisation of the West Bank.

In 2006, 661 Palestinians died as a result of Israeli military action, with 23 Israelis killed in the same period. Palestinian GDP is now 20 times less than Israeli GDP, Palestinians have suffered a 40 per cent fall in per capita GDP since 2000 — double that of the two worst years of the 1930s US Great Depression.
Whilst the US claims to talk peace, recent Associated Press reports on military aid made its real intentions explicit. The US is offering Israel a $30 billion military aid package over 10 years, a 25 per cent increase on last year.

As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty...
An increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meagre meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean, but fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed the movements of Gaza's fishermen.

A journey from one West Bank town to another that could take 20 minutes by car now takes seven hours for Palestinians, with manifold indignities at the hands of teenage soldiers.

The UN Security Council has called Israel's settlements a 'flagrant violation' of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids population transfer into territory occupied in war. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, such population transfer is also a war crime. Over the past 40 years the UN has repeatedly called on Israel to comply with international law and dismantle the settlements, but Israel has instead expanded them at an increasing rate.

Gaza constitutes a time bomb. Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run, and no space to hide. Virtually without external access since June, Gaza is experiencing a rise in poverty, unemployment, penury, and despair...
Since the Israeli operation "Summer Rain" began end-June in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli Defense Forces soldier, one Israeli soldier has been killed. During the same period, 235 Palestinians have been killed, including 46 children...
Access by air, sea, and land has been virtually cut off for Gaza. The movements of goods and peoples have practically ceased. Supplies of electricity and water, interrupted by Israeli Defense Forces attacks on electric power stations, is irregular and insignificant. Civilian infrastructures have been affected. Gaza today remains dependent on outside sources for its food and commercial supplies. Hygienic conditions are deteriorating, while access to potable water is inadequate. With a Palestinian economy in continuous freefall, we must expect a more severe deterioration in sanitary conditions.

In the week of January 17 - 23 (2008) alone, Israeli attacks on Gaza:
- killed 19 Palestinians along with three others from previous IDF-inflicted wounds;
- extra-judicially executed seven of the victims, including two women;
- wounded 71 Palestinians, including 24 children and three women;
- made 33 IDF incursions in the West Bank and five in Gaza;
- arrested 58 Palestinian civilians, including seven children, in the West Bank, and 32 in Gaza, including 3 children;
- destroyed five homes and razed agricultural land in Jabalya in northern Gaza;
- allowed further settler attacks against civilians and property in Hebron.

The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing even food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Due to the electricity shortage, at least 40 percent of Gazans have not had access to running water (which is channeled through electric pumps) for several days and the sewage system has broken down. The raw sewage that has not spilled onto the streets is now being poured into the sea at a daily rate of 30 million liters. Hospitals have been forced to rely on emergency generators leading them to cut back, yet again, on the already limited services offered to the Palestinian population. The World Food Programme has reported critical shortages of food and declared that it is unable to provide 10,000 of the poorest Gazans with three out of the five foodstuffs they normally receive.

According to the Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory, Israel actually has the obligation to ensure the well-being of the people on whom it has chosen to impose a military occupation for more than four decades.
Instead, it has shrugged off the law. It has ignored the repeated demands of the U.N. Security Council. It has dismissed the International Court of Justice in the Hague. What John Dugard, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, refers to as the "carefully managed" strangulation of Gaza -- in full view of an uncaring world -- is explicitly part of its strategy. "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli government advisor, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger."

UN Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler complained to Caterpillar’s chief executive Jim Owens in May 2004 that Israeli forces were “using armoured bulldozers supplied by your company to destroy agricultural farms, greenhouses, ancient olive groves and agricultural fields planted with crops, as well as numerous Palestinian homes and sometimes human lives”.

The Wall will cause many Palestinian villages to lose their only source of water ... Thirty wells are listed as lost in the Qalqilya and Tulkarm districts alone. The route of the wall bites deep into Palestinian land to ensure that Israel steals control of the aquifers in the West Bank. Movement restrictions have already led to an 80% increase in the cost of trucked water, an absolute necessity in summer. Israel already controls the entire water supply, rationing it to Palestinians and charging them for their own resources. Meanwhile illegal settler colonies use 80% of the West Bank’s renewable water supplies.

1,133 Israelis and an estimated 5,144 Palestinians (including 952 children) have been killed since September 2000. From UN data, the post-1967 avoidable mortality (excess mortality) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories totals 300,000 and the post-1967 under-5 infant mortality 183,000 (of which 90% has been avoidable) - as compared to 2,178 post-1967 Israeli terrorism deaths (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs figures).

The prime ethnic cleansing tool is, forever, land grab of Palestinian property in conjunction with expansion of settlements. Various stages of annexation process are in evidence in the originally rural part of the West Bank, constituting 60 per cent of its area. By now, nine per cent of the West Bank land has been transferred to the direct control of the settlements. A recent Peace Now investigation (July 2007) revealed that only twelve per cent of this land is being used at all. "The state earmarks huge tracts for the settlements, out of all proportion to their size, in order to prevent Palestinian construction in those areas. Yet once an area is closed to Palestinians, the settlers begin seizing adjacent Palestinian lands, often privately owned, that lie outside their jurisdiction".

In the occupied territories, Israel maintains a strict racial and colonial segregation between Israeli Jewish settlers and the native Palestinians... The former group enjoys economic benefits, special roads, heavily subsidised and more heavily protected housing, and full political rights. Even under apartheid there were never whites-only roads. There was never a comparable prolonged siege, or curfews,

In 1895, Theodor Herzl, Zionism's chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to "try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people's souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.
I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people's land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country.

“The construction of the wall being built by Israel... in the occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem... [is] contrary to international law. Israel is under obligation... to dismantle forthwith the structure... [and] make reparation for all damage caused...”

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32% of the population, the UN partition plan assigned them 55% of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78% of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 700,000 to 900,000 had been made refugees.

With around 80 per cent of Gazans now surviving on less than £1 a day, families are living on food parcels from the UN. They cannot even fish to supplement their diets because Israeli gunboats fire on any vessels more than a mile offshore. Eighty five per cent of manufacturing businesses are now closed, according to the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.
This blockade has forced the UN to suspend over £45 million worth of construction projects for homes, schools and sewage treatment in Gaza because cement and other building supplies have run out and Israel blocks further supplies. The 121,000 people previously employed on these UN projects have been forced to join the 70 per cent of Gazans already unemployed.
Borders are closed even to imports of paper for textbooks for UN schools in Gaza, and residents are effectively imprisoned.

Israel continues to deny Palestinian refugees, who were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 war, their right to return to their lands and properties. Israel bases its position, which is contrary to fundamental human rights provisions and international law, on its right to preserve its Jewish ethnic-religious supremacy. No other country in the world today dares to claim any similar right.

"The word 'apartheid' is exactly accurate. This is an area that's occupied by two powers. They are now completely separated. Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of 'apartheid' is, one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people."

There are approximately 8 million Palestinians in the world today. Over half the entire Palestinian population were expelled from their homes in the 1947-49 Nakba (catastrophe) that followed partition and the creation of the State of Israel. A second wave of Palestinian refugees was created after the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the remainder of Palestine. One million Palestinians whose families were not driven out in 1948 live as second class citizens in the state of Israel.
Until now, not a single Palestinian refugee from 1948 nor their families have received a penny of compensation for their forcible dispossession nor have they been allowed to return to their homes.

Qalqilya, once a prosperous market town, with half the water resources in the West Bank, was an important agricultural resource which exported fruit and vegetables to Israel and the Gulf States. Now it is a ghetto almost totally surrounded by the wall. The only entrance and exit for the 42,000 residents is a bottle-neck. Gates, overlooked by a watchtower, control the flow in and out of the town — one person or vehicle at a time. The town can be transformed into a prison at the whim of any occupation soldier.

TOTAL DEATHS SINCE SEPT 2000:

Israeli children: 123
Palestinian children: 1050

TOTALS FOR 2000:

Israeli children: 0
Palestinian children: 91

on September 19, [Israeli] sanctions on Gaza were tightened, and it was decided to "reduce the amount of megawattage provide(d) to the Strip..." There was more as well - cutbacks in fuel, food, other essentials and even tighter border crossing restrictions.
Even before the latest crisis, Gaza was devastated. Its industrial production was down 90%, and its agricultural output was half its pre-2007 level. In addition, nearly all construction stopped, unemployment and poverty topped 80%, and by now it may be 90%. After September 19, it got worse when shops began running out of everything. Israel allows in only nine basic materials, their availability is spotty, and some essentials are banned, like certain medicines, and others restricted like fruit, milk and other dairy products. Before June 2007, 9000 commodities could be imported. Today, it's down to 20, people don't get enough food...

beit hanun, gaza: 'a town that lost nearly 80 of its sons and daughters within a week. The shadows of human beings roam the ruins. Last week, I met people there who are terrified, depressed, injured, humiliated, bereaved and bewildered... They only know the IDF will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions, without them being guilty of a thing'.

Here is a small microcosm of how this madness works: A Palestinian town has a wall built surrounding it from all sides, making it impossible for previously prosperous farmers to access their land, patients to reach their doctors and children to reach their schools. Naturally, the town is devastated. That's when Europeans send in their conscience-assuaging, smugness-propping aid "experts" to "save" the town, in the process relieving Israel from having to deal with the consequences of its crimes. They provide the farmers with food to replace the food they could have produced themselves, and proceed with projects to teach Palestinians "alternative industries," "new business models," "good local governance," "participatory development," "creative educational techniques" and countless other meaningless prattle that the Palestinians would gladly give up for having the wall removed, an independent state and some sense of normalcy bestowed on their lives.

In May 2003, whilst international attention was focused on the war in Iraq, the Israeli government approved plans to extend the Wall to the eastern and southern areas – taking the wall 15km inside the West Bank from the Jordanian border, stealing the Jordan valley and the most fertile Palestinian land, and completely corralling almost all of the Palestinian people in half of the West Bank.

Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory...
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’

Eventually, it did come out that the United States Embassy had been notified that a massacre was going on at Sabra and Shatila, and despite that, did nothing for 48 hours so that the massacre could be concluded before the U.S. embassy said anything at all about it to the Israelis. And this despite the fact that Philip Habib (then U.S. Envoy to the Middle East himself, on behalf of the United States government) had personally promised Arafat that if the PLO fighters abandoned the camps where they were protecting the innocent civilians, from the Christian Phalange, from outright massacres that the Phalange had said they were going to perpetrate, as well as [from] the Israeli Army, that the U.S. would guarantee their protection. And yet we knew, the U.S. government knew for a fact, that the massacre was going on. Apparently they had an intelligence source there at the scene – we're not sure who it was – and they let it happen anyway.

Palestinians are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Food imports cover only 41% of demand. 80% of Gazans receive food aid and 80% live below the poverty line.
People who are seriously ill are being prevented from accessing essential medical treatment outside Gaza. Over 40 Gazans have died as a result of being denied medical treatment by the Israeli authorities and 20% of essential drugs and 31% of essential medical supplies are no longer available inside Gaza.
Israel is cutting fuel and electricity supplies, affecting essential health and water facilities. 210,000 people are able to access drinking water for only 1-2 hours a day.

The Security Council;
Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle East,
Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security...
1. Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles:
(i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;
(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency...

The “separation wall” is being built at a frantic pace. It does not separate Israel and the Palestinians. It separates the Palestinian villages and their lands. It cuts whole Palestinian villages off from the West Bank. It penetrates deep into the Palestinian territories, in order to attach dozens of settlements to Israel. It surrounds the West Bank on all sides, cuts it into pieces and cuts it off from the world.

In 2002, a Glasgow University study found that barely 9 per cent of young British viewers of television news knew that the Israelis were the occupying force and that the illegal settlers were Jewish: many believed them to be Palestinian. The term 'Occupied Territories' was rarely explained, and people were not told that the Palestinians were the victims of an illegal military occupation. Language was used selectively, terms such as 'murder' and 'atrocity' applied exclusively to the deaths of Israelis. Only they were worthy victims. The deaths of Palestinians were ... non-existent news.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967, at the same time as it occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.Today the Golan Heights remain illegally occupied territory, with 33 Israeli settlements housing over 20,000 settlers. Golan wine accounts for over a third of all Israel’s wine exports, with Tesco, Waitrose and Selfridges openly selling Yarden wine from the Golan Heights Winery, marketed as ‘Wine of Israel’.

A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries.

$10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.

As the USSR collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev made a concession that was astonishing in the light of recent history and strategic realities: he agreed to allow a united Germany to join a hostile military alliance. This “stunning concession” was hailed by Western media, NATO, and President Bush I, who called it a demonstration of “statesmanship ... in the best interests of all countries of Europe, including the Soviet Union.”

Gorbachev agreed to the stunning concession on the basis of “assurances that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the east, `not one inch’ in [Secretary of State] Jim Baker's exact words.” Strobe Talbott, the highest official in charge of Eastern Europe... reports that “Secretary of State Baker did say to then Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in the context of the Soviet Union's reluctant willingness to let a unified Germany remain part of NATO, that NATO would not move to the east.”

Clinton quickly reneged on that commitment, also dismissing Gorbachev’s effort to end the Cold War with cooperation among partners. NATO also rejected a Russian proposal for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone from the Arctic to the Black Sea.

Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer ... described the ousting of Sukarno in Indonesia as a "model operation" for the US-run coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." He says the Indonesian massacres were also the model for Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, where US-directed death squads assassinated up to 50,000 people.

The use of PMSCs also enables governments to cover their tracks and evade accountability... When campaign group Corporate Watch asked a US government official why the United States had awarded a contract to DynCorp to support the rebel Sudanese People s Liberation Movement in their negotiations, he replied: The answer is simple. We are not allowed to fund a political party or agenda under United States law, so by using private contractors, we can get around those provisions. Think of this as somewhere between a covert program run by the CIA and an overt program run by the United States Agency for International Development. It is a way to avoid oversight by Congress.

you'll see a pretty good coincidence of the enemies that Amnesty International goes after and the interests of both the United States and British governments. Let's take an older example – apartheid in South Africa under the former criminal regime in South Africa. Amnesty International refused adamantly to condemn apartheid in South Africa. Despite my best efforts while I was on the board, and other board members, they would not do it. They are the only human rights organization in the entire world to have refused to condemn apartheid in South Africa. Now they can give you some cock-and-bull theory about why they wouldn't do this. But the bottom line was that the biggest supporter, economic and political supporter of the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa was the British government, followed by the United States government. And so no matter how hard we tried, no matter what we did, they would not condemn apartheid in South Africa. Now I just mention that as one among many examples.

The 'best interests of the corporation' principle, now a fixture in the corporate laws of most countries... compels corporate decision makers always to act in the best interests of the corporation, and hence its owners. The law forbids any other motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people's money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves, only as means to serve the corporation's own interests, which generally means to maximise the wealth of its shareholders.
Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal - at least when it is genuine.

Pilger: What right have you - and I mean, you, the CIA, the United States Government - or any foreign power - what right do you have to do what you do in other countries?
Clarridge: National Security interests
Pilger: but... the people that you do it to have no say in this
Clarridge: Well... that's just tough. We are going to protect ourselves, and we're going to go on protecting ourselves, cos we end up protecting all of you. And let's not forget that. We'll intervene whenever we decide it's in our national security interests to intervene. And if you don't like it - lump it. Get used to it world: we're not going to put up with nonsense.

It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States Government] and American hand be well hidden...,

Every day, 28,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday. Nearly all these deaths occur in developing countries where mothers, children and newborns lack access to basic health-care services. It is especially tragic since most of these deaths could be prevented at a modest cost.

On September 11, 2001, while the world lamented the deaths of innocent people in the United States, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation reported that the daily mortality rate continued: 36,615 children had died from the effects of extreme poverty. This was normal in the age of 'economic growth'.

* Only 57% of African children are enrolled in primary education, and only one of three children complete school
* One in six children die before the age of 5. This number is 25 times higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in the OECD countries
* Children account for half of all civilian casualties in wars in Africa

- 315 million people – one in two of people in Sub Saharan Africa survive on less than one dollar per day
- 184 million people – 33% of the African population – suffer from malnutrition
- During the 1990s the average income per capita decreased in 20 African countries
- Less than 50% of Africa’s population has access to hospitals or doctors
- In 2000, 300 million Africans did not have access to safe water
- The average life expectancy in Africa is 41 years

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

The bottom 5 percent of the world grew poorer, as their real incomes decreased between 1988 and 1993 by 1/4, while the richest quintile grew richer. It gained 12 % in real terms, that is it grew more than twice as much as mean world income.

In the former Soviet republics, the decline in life expectancy has been spectacular, especially among men. In the Russian Federation, average life expectancy of men has gone from 70 years in the mid-1980s to 59 years and is today lower than in India. This situation is due notably to economic collapse, decline in the social welfare system and the prevalence of alcoholism and illness. Non-transmissable illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and injuries account for the greater part of the increase in deaths, although infectious diseases are also recurrent. If this death rate remains stable, 40 percent of boys age 15 today will die before the age of 60 in Russia.

Each year, some 18 million people die prematurely from poverty-related causes. This is one third of all human deaths - 50,000 every day, including 34,000 under age five.

The biggest killers of children worldwide are newborn complications, pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria.
Using existing tools and knowledge, we could save more than 6 million of the 10 million children who die every year from easily preventable or treatable causes.

In 1998 and 1999, the Malawi government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn...

The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About 1,500 people perished.

the Nazis’ actively and intentionally killing people is morally very much worse than not doing enough to reduce poverty today, because there is no intention among rich-country politicians or citizens to kill a large number of people in poor countries. There is simply indifference. However... if we think that it was morally urgent then to do something to reduce the problem of the Nazi killings, we should for very similar reasons conclude that it’s very urgent now to do something about the world poverty problem.