Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillionshttp://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/31/confessions_of_an_economic_hit_manSicer že nekaj let stara zgodba, ne vem pa, če je bil John Perkins že predstavljen tukaj. Kot dobro plačan strokovnjak na področju bančništva je ZDA pomagal pri izkoriščanju dežel tretjega sveta in napisal knjigo o tem (?).
Nekaj izsekov iz intervjuja z njim:
JOHN PERKINS:
Well, really, over the past 30 to 40 years, we economic hit men have created the largest global empire in the history of the world. And we do this, typically—well, there are many ways to do it, but a typical one is that we identify a third-world country that has resources, which we covet. And often these days that’s oil, or might be the canal in the case of Panama. In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let’s say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we’ve all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks—big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don’t benefit from these loans, they don’t benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt. Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can’t possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador’s foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50 of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can’t repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs.
And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That’s what we’re doing today around the world, and we’ve been doing it—it began shortly after the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it’s really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world.AMY GOODMAN: On the jacket of your book, it says that your job as an economic hit man was to convince countries that are strategically important to the U.S., from Indonesia to Panama, to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to U.S. corporations. Saddled with huge debts, these countries came under the control of the U.S. government, World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies that acted like loansharks, dictating repayment terms and bullying foreign governments into submission. You work with a lot of people in other countries and right here in the international financial institutions, for example, like the World Bank. What do they say? What understanding do they have? Do a lot of people feel the same way you do?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, that’s a good question. It’s hard to answer for a lot of other people. Within those organizations, most of the people don’t realize what’s going on. The engineers at Bechtel and Halliburton and the financial specialists at the World Bank and so on and so forth don’t really realize what’s going on. They should. They ought to look into it and find out. But there is every excuse not to on their part. They do their job. My father-in-law was chief architect at Bechtel Corporation. He has since retired, and you know, and he built big cities in Saudi Arabia. He was in charge of that. For him, it was a plum. He was an architect. To be given, basically, you know, all the money that he wanted to build huge cities out of the desert was a dream for an architect. He never thought what was going on beneath the surface, and unfortunately, too many of us don’t. I’m struck by the fact that as I travel around the world—I just got back recently from Nepal and Tibet, I travel a lot to South America—about how many people in these countries, even people we consider illiterate, question their government. They assume their government is corrupt, they assume ours is corrupt, but we don’t. It is amazing to me how many of us don’t, at least not openly. And as I speak, I’ve been on this tour with this book for the last month, people keep saying, gee, I knew that was going on. Some place in my heart, I knew that was going on, but I really didn’t understand it. And the fact is that Americans, for the most part, we don’t really want to know, I’m afraid, what’s going on. But we need to. We really need to question that. So within these organizations, you’ve got tremendous numbers of people that are just going along with the system, getting paid really well to do it, and getting jobs that they were trained to do. And fascinating. But then you always have a number of people like me at the top of the organizations that know what’s going on. They are part of this and they use every means they can to keep the system moving.
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