Re: SC35

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=COX20070125&articleId=4595

Gangsters for Capitalism

................In "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," John Perkins describes how he was often sent by the U.S. government into some Third World country that had something the U.S. wanted: from oil or other natural resources to strategic location. He then tried to persuade the country's leader to agree to a project like building oil pipelines or a power plant or a dam. Anything that would cost a lot of money.

The cost of the project, which would be grossly inflated, would be paid for by loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. All work would be done by American firms, which received huge profits. Inevitably the Third World country would be unable to repay the loan and would then become, in effect, an American puppet doing whatever the U.S. wanted – from giving control of its resources to multinational corporations to voting whatever way the U.S. wanted in the United Nations to allowing the U.S. to build military bases in the country.

If the hit man's plan didn't work, Perkins said, then the U.S. government sent in "jackals" from the CIA to try and foment civil disorder. If the leader of the Third World country still resisted, "accidents" happened to them. In the 1980's, Panama's Omar Torrijos, who insisted on retaining control of Panama's resources and helping the poor in his country, and Ecuador's Jaime Roldas, whose goals were the same for his country, were both killed in mysterious plane crashes.

Torrijos had taken land from the rich and given it to peasants, and initiated other economic and social programs that antagonized powerful Panamanian families and their American supporters.

“If the leader of the Third World country still resisted, ‘accidents’ happened to them.”

"Their deaths were not accidental," Perkins said of Torrijos and Roldas in an interview on the radio and television show Democracy Now. "They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldos and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in... It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort (as of 2006, the U.S. maintained 725 military bases in 132 countries, including a huge new base in the nation of Djibouti to help control Africa, its resources and its politics. The CIA Fact Book, in describing Djibouti’s importance to the West, said it has a "strategic location near the world's busiest shipping lanes and close to Arabian oilfields..." Djibouti, in fact, can control access to the Red Sea, which is why both France and the U.S. maintain a strong military presence in that small African nation).

If Torrijos and Roldas had gone along with U.S. wishes, their nations would have been plunged into widespread poverty, and large American corporations would have taken over their infrastructure, resources and political decision-making.

And so while the military is still used to control other nations and their resources, as we can easily see in Iraq, the economic controls in the so-called Free Trade Agreements the U.S. has forced on much of Latin America, are now increasingly used to steal the riches of other regions. Even the forgiveness of the debt of poor nations that Bush has bragged about, said Perkins, is a "complete sham" that forces the poor nations to allow large American corporations to take over their water, gas, power, telephone and education systems.

The U.S. destruction of democracy can be compared to the actions of locusts. I used to spend every summer on my grandparents' farm in Ohio, and I helped my grandfather plant, repair fences, bring in the hay, whatever needed doing. He was a man who could go hours without saying more than a few dozen words. But he said one thing I've never forgotten, because it applies to so many situations in life, including U.S. history: "When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind."

This nation has acted like a plague of locusts in other lands throughout its history (and as slave-owning, land-stealing locusts within this country, starting with the enslavement of Africans and the slaughtering of Native Americans because Whites wanted their land and labor). While the method of this country's greed-driven destruction has sometimes changed, the goal remains the same as it has always been: to steal in order to make rich Americans richer, even if that means creating generation after generation of locusts swarming around the world, seizing everything they value...........

When the oil and gas is gone in the Middle East, the Locust will move on.............