Naeem's Blog

Last night, Riz Khan, who is Al-Jazeera's counter to CNN's Larry King, interviewed John Perkins, a former economic hit man.

Not sure what an Economic Hit Man (EHM) is? Neither was I until Perkins laid it out for a dummy like me to understand:

"There were two primary objectives of my work. First I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money to Main and other US companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans . . . so they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we [the US] needed favours, including military bases, UN votes or access to oil and other natural resources."
- Excerpt from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Here's the bigger picture of how EHM's work to permanently cripple a nation's economy:

1. Economic hit men, working for imperialistic engines of capitalism (otherwise known as the American empire, the G8 nations, and their multinational corporations) identify impoverished nations in need of major development of their infrastructure.

2. Using vehicles such as the IMF, USAID, and the World Bank, they generously make billion dollar loans to Country X to help develop and advance the nation. In addition, they are nice enough to generate complex plans of national development to help guide the locals.

3. However, since the country has no homegrown industries to actually carry out said programs of development, America and its cohorts will contract out the services to their own corporations. Thus the loans go directly from the Western governments back to Western corporations, with some skimming off the top by corrupt local officials in Country X.

4. Once the billions have been squandered, normally on special pet projects that only benefit the select few, Country X is hamstrung for the next century struggling to pay off the loans. This means that domestic funds which normally would have gone to provide basic services to the locals are now rerouted to the coffers of the West.

5. But the altruistic West is not done screwing, er I mean saving, Country X. They kindly propose to bail out Country X by waving some of the loans, but with a few minor strings attached. For example, Country X must cease to provide governmental subsidies to local industries and at the same time open the doors to free trade by doing away with tariffs and other trade barriers, essentially destroying any chance of sustainable livelihood by its citizens. Or another example would be Country Y has to sell natural resources A, B, and C or O, I, and L at below-market cost to the West.

And there you go, five easy steps to eternal financial debt and a grim future of poverty and despair for every developing and under-developed country.

And before you accuse me of propogating conspiracy theories and freemasonry crap, this stuff is pure and simple capitalistic greed.

The same inertia that powered the American auto industry to destroy the public transit system and is currently undermining the hybrid car is behind the EHM phenomenon. And its that same mentality that prevents the billion-dollar pharmaceuticals from allowing cheap generic drugs to enter the markets of the Third World.

These imperialistic engines of capitalism are very real and very ugly.