Belíssimo livro de um ex adido econômico americano que viaja mundo afora com a missão de democraticamente impor empréstimos impagáveis a países do terceiro mundo, objetivando recrudescer a sua dependência dos EUA.
Ao longo da carreira o lado humanista do autor começa a aflorar, é quando ele começa a sacar as injustiças que ajuda a perpretar; a crise de consciência se torna inevitável e ele esboça deixar a carreira várias vezes, mas teme por sua família, sutilmente ameaçada - é a democracia yankee...
Crescida sua filha, decide então o ex guerreiro ideológico capitalista / imperialista mudar radicalmente de papel, a despeito dos milhoes de dólares que ainda poderia embolçar - escrevendo este livro e montando uma empresa de energia limpa e uma ong de conscientização ambiental; é o lado bom do empreendedorismo quase nato dos industriosos americanos.
Em muitas passagens remete-nos a livro àquela guerra fria nao encontrada nos livros do colégio, o Realpolitik, a política real, pragmática cujo único fim é o poder, buscado com imensa volúpia a acumulação do capital e a expansão de domínios geopolíticos no afã de derrubar o então - e já combalido - império Soviético.
Fica a esperança no Homem, no ser humano, capaz de reconhecer seus erros, apto ao auto-conhecimento, um ser humano que enfim é dotado de sensibilidade e, acima de tudo coragem para mudar radicalmente de rumo das suas atitudes, mesmo quando todo o mundo aplaudiria seu sucesso econômico ao continuar se submetendo ao stablishment; a esperança no ser humano consciente da interdependência que rege o universo e os relacionamentos (também econômicos) dos seres.
É leitura de impacto !
O comnetário está em inglês porque o fizemos para atender a um speech de um curso desse idioma. Enjoy it, hate it ! Comment !!
Hasta muchachos e muchachas !!
Besitos
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In this riveting personal story, John Perkins tells of his own inner journey from willing servant of empire to impassioned advocate for the rights of oppressed people. Covertly recruited by the United States National Security Agency and on the payroll of an international consulting firm, he traveled the world—to Indonesia, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other strategically important countries. His job was to implement policies that promoted the interests of the U.S. corporatocracy (a coalition of government, banks, and corporations) while professing to alleviate poverty—policies that alienated many nations and ultimately led to September 11 and growing anti-Americanism.
Perkins’ story illuminates just how far he and his colleagues—self-described as economic hit men—were willing to go. He explains, for instance, how he helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of Saudi Arabian petrodollars back into the U. S. economy, and that further cemented the intimate relationship between the Islamic fundamentalist House of Saud and a succession of American administrations. Perkins reveals the hidden mechanics of imperial control behind some of the most dramatic events in recent history, such as the fall of the Shah of Iran, the death of Panamanian president Omar Torrijos, and the U.S. invasions of Panama and Iraq.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which many people warned Perkins not to write, exposes the little known inner workings of a system that fosters globalization and leads to the impoverishment of millions of people across the planet. It is a compelling story that also offers hope and a vision for realizing the American dream of a just and compassionate world that will bring us greater security.
This book reveals a game that, according to John Perkins, is "as old as Empire" but has taken on new and terrifying dimensions in an era of globalization. And Perkins should know. For many years he worked for an international consulting firm where his main job was to convince LDCs (less developed countries) around the world to accept multibillion-dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at Halliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root, and other United States engineering and construction companies. This book, which many people warned Perkins not to write, is a blistering attack on a little-known phenomenon that has had dire consequences on both the victimized countries and the U.S.
Economic Hit Man are highly well paid professionals whose work is to damage thrird-world countries in strokes that amounts to US trillions. By Manipulating financial resources from World Bank, IMF and others, they use these resources to Huge American Corporations, as well as to Half Dozen fortunate and extremely wealthy families that control the planet’s natural resources.
Among its working tools, they have manipulated financial reports, frauded elections, , extortion, sex and murder. All of that in a world context in which nothing less than 24.000 people are dying daily from starvation and hungry related illnesses.
“ That is what we EHMs do best: we build a global empire. We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, Hems provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure —electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco”
“ Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire” - the country authonomy in then allienated.
THE only criterion used to approve such huge loans was Economic Growth itself simply, no matter how it would benefit the majority of population and, above of all, not a single worry for the poor, no social benefit policy. The whole project was to, like in the middle ages merchants, explore poor countries till theirs exhaustion and complete dependence on USA economy.
For instance, if one decision of investing USD 1 billion to one country with the aim of persuading it not to ally with Soviet Union, the Economic Hit main mission was to compare which kind of investment would led to the greatest economic growth, investments such as railway, telecommunication systems, electricity projects, etc. It would depend on me to forecast if that investment would cause an economic growth intense enough to justify that loan.
EHM’s were, and still are, educated in the traditional materialist and pragmatic American philosophy – great focus on practical results and no care for culture, history, arts and geography. This book’s author, after graduating in business administration in Boston, thought Ecuador was located somewhere in Africa…Nevertheless he was being paid very sophisticated macroeconomic and econometrics courses.
The huge loans were based purely on deliberately manipulated econometric statistics. The real needs of the country for, lets say, electricity, telecommunications infrastructure, etc, were extremely over evaluated, something like 3 to 6 times the real need, sometimes the need were over evaluated in more than 10 times, like the sanitarian system installed in Saudi Arabia.
In this way, the biggest the loan, the best for the EHM’s, as well as for the plastic-culture consumption American Imperialism.
The very evident fact that the debit (and its huge out of market interest rates) weight was to be put on the increasingly poor population shoulders …
Such a situation would for sure, and the irrefutable Historic facts has given us cabal proofs, deprive poor citizen (the majority as usual) from healthy services, education, sanitary services, potable water services, and, in extreme cases – like ours, Brazilians, from very basic needed diets for our more than 20 million indigents for decades. That unimportant details was never taken into consideration by the extremely sophisticated (and manipulated) econometric systems developed by the EHM’s with the help of some of the best mathematicians in the world, recruited form India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Nowadays we can clearly notice that the simply economic growth based on IGP is of a very deceiving nature, when we consider the benefit for the majority of population, mainly its mostly needy parts. For instance, the (IGP) growth can occur even when half dozen of very privileged and politically influent families are in fact benefited from it.
The payment for the loans, principal plus interest, is almost totally supported by the majority of poor population, that besides the lack of basic services above commented, are, in its greatest part, submitted to near-slave working conditions, with very low income, as well as sub employment and an increasing unemployment rate that has nothing to do with population growth, but with an very smart strategic of creating and ever last reserve of manpower available for any kind of salary or even for food…
One of the most evident results is what we can see nowadays in Brazil: An immense income concentration in the hand of very feel, 20 millions of indigents and 50 living under poverty conditions. We see our companies and Brazilian business people saying Amen to everything that comes from abroad, mainly from USA, an elite devoted to foreign investors (or speculators?) whose only care is to explore both our natural resources and manpower until its exhaustion to, (very) soon afterwards, go away and find another place full of such resources to explore again. Talking about social responsibility in such a state sounds like a joke!
The Philosophy…
The market and its merchandises are then considered like God, ends on it selves…
Paraphrasing Karl Marx, when we come to such a state of things, human beings become merchandise, and in its turn merchandise become alive beings that control our minds, hearts and souls. Even the richest are controlled by the greed of accumulating more and more, only the awakened are realizing this and they are day by day being persuaded by this huge industry to give up on thinking a new world, in which human being retake its natural place of center of creation. The media system (magazines, journals, TV, radio, etc), had already, unfortunately, being swallowed by the corporotocracy and had become a formidable propaganda machine for the system. No hope for it until it is controlled by the people democratically.
Money and power Fundamentalism
“All the well succeed capitalists systems involves hierarchs with rigid command chains, including very feel people, that from the top controls a system of decreasing power distribution. An immense mass of workers in the base, with a great number making the reserve army, all economically slaves. As a last analysis, then, I have convinced myself that we encourage this system because the corporotocracy had once convinced us that God has given us (USA) the right to put only those few people in the top of the pyramid and to export this model to the whole world.
Nearly every country we EHMs have brought under the global empire’s umbrella has suffered economic ruin. Third world debt has grown to more than $2.5 trillion, and the cost of servicing it—over $375 billion per year as of 2004—is more than all third world spending on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid. Over half the people in the world survive on less than two dollars per day, which is roughly the same amount they received in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of third world households accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all private financial wealth and real estate ownership in their country; the actual percentage depends on the specific country.
The capitalism tendency was and continues being the main cause for the majority of wars, pollution, hunger, species extinction and genocide. This was also part of the Soviet Union Empire. It has always charged a very high price from the conscience and welfare of its citizens, leading to social malefaction and resulting in a situation in which the most reach cultures of the History is devastated with the highest levels of suicide, drugs use and violence.
The subtlety of this modern empire building puts the Roman centurions, the Spanish conquistadors, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial powers to shame. We EHMs are crafty; we learned from history. Today we do not carry swords. We do not wear armor or clothes that set us apart. In countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we dress like local schoolteachers and shop owners. In Washington and Paris, we look like government bureaucrats and bankers. We appear humble, normal. We visit project sites and stroll through impoverished villages. We profess altruism, talk with local papers about the wonderful humanitarian things we are doing. We cover the conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics. We are on the record, in the open. Or so we portray ourselves and so are we accepted. It is how the system works. We seldom resort to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate.
However—and this is a very large caveat—if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we EHMs refer to as the jackals, men who trace their heritage directly to those earlier empires. The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent “accidents.”10 And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the old models resurface. When the jackals fail, young Americans are sent in to kill and to die.
The Ecuador’s case:
Because of EHM projects, Ecuador is awash in foreign debt and must devote an inordinate share of its national budget to paying this off, instead of using its capital to help the millions of its citizens officially classified as dangerously impoverished. The only way Ecuador can buy down its foreign obligations is by selling its rain forests to the oil companies. Indeed, one of the reasons the EHMs set their sights on Ecuador in the first place was because the sea of oil beneath its Amazon region is believed to rival the oil fields of the Middle East.8 The global empire demands its pound of flesh in the form of oil concessions.
Ecuador is typical of countries around the world that EHMs have brought into the economic-political fold. For every $100 of crude taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses—which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor.9 Thus, out of every $100 worth of oil torn from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water.
The second world’s biggest Terrorist (after USA)
All of those people—millions in Ecuador, billions around the planet—are potential terrorists. Not because they believe in communism or anarchism or are intrinsically evil, but simply because they are desperate. Looking at this dam, I wondered—as I have so often in so many places around the world—when these people would take action, like the Americans against England in the 1770s or Latin Americans against Spain in the early 1800s.
Countries in Latin America with Presidents assassinated by CIA:
Brazil: Juscelino Kubicheck; Humberto Alencar Castelo Branco
Reason: Progressive presidents, USA was afraid Brazil to become a new Japan and then another threat to its empire;
Chile: Salvador Allende
After Allende’s election, with the project of nationalizing Chilean copper mines, the American investors, with almost 80% Chilean copper in their hands sold all this commodity, putting the price in extremely low basis, this caused the military stroke.
Allende was also an Soviet Union ally and wanted to bring socialism to Latin America, an extremely important military territory to USA.
Panama: General Omar Torrijos, another progressive president, with humanist Jimmy Carter USA President, retook Panama Canal to Panama possession. This caused a very great revenge desire in republic part and, as soon as Ronald Reagan was elected, a great pressure over Torrijos renegotiate the possession was made by the EHMs. Torrijos had already stared plan to make the canal improvement engineering projects with Japanese companies, the best in the world in this are. This would cause great losses to American Engineering companies and CIA did not want the access to the canal. The action taken was to kill the president in a sabotaged airplane (bombs installed in the motor). The man put by CIA to be the president – Manuel Noriega
Noriega started an extremely repressive movement and took control of the situation. Although he never gave up the idea of an independent canal and an independent Panama. Noriega restarted the negotiation with Japanese companies and gave a period to US troops live the country and take off military training. As a result, in 1989 USA attacked Panama, the worlds greatest bombing after 2º World War, mainly over civilians.
- Ecuador: President Jaime Roldós, progressive man, humanist, just wanted Ecuador Oil back to Ecuador and its income for more than urgent social program, as well as internal economic increase, nothing about communism.
- Costa Rica
Dictatorships sponsored by USA:
All countries in Latin America, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Indochina, South Vietnam, South Korea.
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