JD and phil both recommended that i pick up “confessions of an economic hit man” by john perkins. i got it at cody’s today, started reading it on telegraph, and haven’t put it down since. from the intro:
Claudine pulled no punches when describing
what I would be called upon to do. My job, she said, was “to encourage world
leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial
interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that
ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire—to satisfy our
political, economic, or military needs. In turn, they bolster their political
positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their
people. The owners of U.S. engineering and construction companies become
fabulously wealthy.”
Today we see the results of
this system run amok. Executives at our most respected companies hire people at
near-slave wages to toil under inhuman conditions in Asian sweatshops. Oil
companies wantonly pump toxins down rain forest rivers, consciously killing
people, animals, and plants and committing genocide among ancient cultures. The
pharmaceutical industry denies life-saving medicines to millions of HIV-infected
Africans. Twelve million families in our own United States worry about their
next meal. The energy industry creates an Enron. The accounting industry creates
an Andersen. The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world’s population in the
wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30:1 in 1960 to
74:1 in 1995. The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq
while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could
provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to
every person on the planet.
And we wonder why
terrorists attack us?
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