Books I've read, Books I'm reading
I finished Douglas Coupland's All Families are Psychotic. It was ok. The first half was a little slow and contrived and very...Coupland-y. The second have was more of an adventure story, and the paced picked up accordingly. In the end I was glad I stuck it out, but not sure I'd recommend it to everyone.
But what I really want to say is you MUST read John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I'm only a chapter or two into it, and already my brain is blown. I'm experiencing simultaneous shock and awe at every sentence. I'll throw up an excerpt about what an Economic Hitman does:
Claudine told me that there were two primary objectives of my work. [All regarding going into an undeveloped nation to do this] 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 constsruction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those 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 favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resouces.
These companies, Perkins goes on to write, are 100 percent intertwined with the US government. Essentially, the US gets all these undeveloped countries completely dependent on us by fucking with their GNP, so that when we need them to say..I don't know..fight a senseless war in Iraq, they'll be forced to sign on. Its no mistake the "coalition of 200"-odd countries that are "with us" for the War on Terrorism and War on Iraq is comprised mostly of countires we did this to.
Perkins spent his career doing this to Ecuador. The statistics he provides are staggering. For every 100 dollars made in oil there, a mere 3 dollars goes back to the middle (which is now nonexistant) and working class natives of Ecuador. About 70 goes to the US and US companies, the other 27 to rich people on the US' side in Ecuador. The tales of environmental destruction, humanitarian crises, and ridiculous gaps in the distribution of wealth is incredible, and I'm only at page 30.
And people say none of this happens, none of it is true, its all a conspiracy. I'm not sure I should be allowed to read nonfiction political books anymore, they only make me hate the world even more.
posted by I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T (Dye knows what that means) @ 10:09 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Have you read about how Bolivia under pressure from the World Bank agreed with Bechtel to privatize the water system of Cochabamba--a city of 600,000 people, several years ago? The terms of the agreement gave Bechtel rights to the water system including rainwater. In other words, if you put a bucket outside during a storm, the water that collected wasn’t your. Farmers had to buy permits to gather rainwater on their own property! Bechtel only backed down after protests where a 17-year old boy was shot to death.
You should read Jules Archer’s book The Plot to Seize the White House. In 1933 Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (a two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor) was approached by representatives of corporate America to be their front-man for a proposed fascist coup against FDR. In 1934 the House of Representatives’ McCormack-Dickstein Committee reported that “in the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist government in this country...there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”
In 1935 General Butler said “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”
Thanks for the book recommendation, I only know a tiny bit about Bolivia.
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