It's a Whole Other World in the Corporate Media

It's paragraphs like this that make me nuts.  From Richard Stevenson and Elizabeth Becker
writing in the NYT about the Blair/BushCo debt relief agreement:

If the administration's position on the specifics of how to help the poorest nations is at odds with those its main allies, it is in agreement with them on the general goal. Mr. Bush has pledged to channel more aid to developing nations that show they are working to establish stable, democratic governments with good economic policies.

Good economic policies.  Jeez louise:

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you're not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.” And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they’ve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.

Comments

[Tom Chadwell]

What robber barons? Whose empire?

[eRobin]

The multi-national corpo-fascists who run the world. Certainly not the US empire. That's as disposable as the jobs we've lost over the last twenty years.

[DavidByron]

He needs to bring out the sequel to that book. He relates how it used to be done from the post war period but mentions that the modern hitmen do it differently.

I do think it is still a US empire though. That's an interesting question there. I've no doubt that the elites would be happy to let America sink into the sea if they got a profit from it but it seems to me that all this economic hitman stuff is ultimately only successful because of threat of direct military action and assassinations as Perkins makes clear at various times in the book. The Jackals always stand ready.

Can't make someone an offer they can't refuse if you don't have the means and the demonstrated temperment to enter into insane wars. Every war is the horses head in the bed for the next victim to be bullied by.

That's why America can't afford to lose in Iraq. It's the loss of face that any mob boss couldn't afford.