Submitted by antarchi on July 26, 2007 - 03:41.
Here are a series of nuggets from John Perkins' truly extraordinary and shocking Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Even if the consequences of US actions around the globe are pretty clear, including the massive siphoning off of international 'aid' into the coffers of companies like Bechtel and Halliburton - it is something else to see how deliberate, comprehensive and cleverly planned the exercise has been.
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See them all together here
You can also see Perkins on Youtube. Or a slightly more showy version at the Veterans for Peace Conference. First part is on why we went into Iraq.
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And here's a nugget (or is it a humbug) from another interview he did on Democracy Now:
...we economic hit men, basically in the last four decades, have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire; and I talk in detail in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, about this and in various countries where we went in to create this first truly global empire. We’ve done it primarily without the military. The military comes in only as a last resort. We’ve done it through economics, and we’ve done it very, very subtly, so it’s been a secret empire, unlike all of history’s previous empires. Most Americans don't realize that we’ve created this empire. They don’t realize what we've done in Latin America.
And the way economic hit men work, we use many different techniques, but probably the most typical is that we'll identify a company [country] that has resources that corporations covet, like oil. We'll arrange a huge loan from an organization like the World Bank for that country; but the money won’t go to that country at all. It goes to big U.S. corporations -- Bechtel, Haliburton, ones we all hear about all the time -- to build infrastructure projects in that country.
These projects, like industrial parks and power plants, benefit the very rich of those countries and do nothing for the poor, except to leave the country in a huge debt, one it can’t possibly repay, which means it can’t give social services, education, health to its poor, and it’s put in a position where it doesn't repay its debts; so, at some point, we economic hit men go back in and we say: ‘Look, you can’t repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh. Sell oil to our oil companies real cheap or vote with us at the next U.N. vote, or send troops in support of ours some place in the world.’ And that's how we’ve created this empire; and we’ve done it without most Americans even realizing that it’s happening.
