Global environmental destruction - brought to you by U.S. Corporatocracy

This is a bit lengthy, but I think worth the time.

The following excerpts are from John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins worked as an analyst for many years for a company called MAIN, paving the way for corporate profits at the expense of third world countries.

Like U.S. citizens in general, most MAIN employees believed we were doing countries favors when we built power plants, highways, and ports. Our schools and our press have taught us to perceive all of our actions as altruistic. Over the years, I've repeatedly heard comments like, "If they're going to burn the U.S. flag and demonstrate against our embassy, why don't we jut get out of their damn country and let them wallow in their own poverty?"

[...]

[T]hese people have no clue that the main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests [...] -- p.16

[...]

-----

[...]

On the evening of our first day, our project manaager Charlie Illingworth hosted a dinner for us in the elegant restaurant on the top floor.

[...]

"We will be well pampered here," he said, nodding his head appreciatively. "The Indonesians will take very good care of us. As will the U.S. Embassy people. But let's not forget that we have a mission to accomplish. [...] Yes, we're here to develop a master plan for the electrification of Java - the most populated land in the world. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[...]

"We are here to accomplish nothing short of saving this country from the clutches of communism. [...] An integrated electrical system is a key element. That, more than any other single factor (with the possible exception of oil), will assure that capitalism and democracy rule.

[...]

"We all know how dependent our own country is on oil. Indonesia can be a powerful ally to us in that regard. So, as you develop this master plan, please do everything you can to make sure that the oil industry and all the others that serve it - ports, pipelines, construction compnies - get whatever they are likely to need in the way of electricity for the entire duration of this twenty-five-year plan."

He raised his eyes from his note cards and looked directly at me. "Better to err on the high side than to underestimate. You don't want the blood of Indonesian children - or our own - on your hands. You don't want them to live under the hammer and sickle or the Red flag of China!" -- pp. 24-25

[...]

-----

[...]

In the years since I first went there, in 1968, [Ecuador] had evolved into the quintessential victim of the corporatocracy. My contemporaries and I, and our modern corporate equivalents, had managed to bring it to virtual bankruptcy. We loaned it billions of dollars so it could hire our engineering and construction firms to build projects that would help its richest families. As a result, in those three decades, the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion, and the share of national resources allocated to the poorest citizens declined from 20 percent to 6 percent. Today, Ecuador must devote nearly 50 percent of its national budget simply to paying off its debts [...]

[...]

During those three decades, thousands of men and women participated in bringing Ecuador to the tenuous position it found itself in at the beginning of the millennium. Some of them, like me, had been aware of what they were doing, but the vast majority had merely performed the tasks they had been taught in business, engineering, and law schools, or had followed the lead of bosses in my mold, who demonstrated the system by their own greedy example [...] Such participants saw the parts they played as benign, at worst; in the most optimistic view, they were helping an impoverished nation.

Although unconscious, decieved, and - in many cases - self-deluded, these players were not members of any clandestine conspiracy; rather, they were the product of a system that promotes the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever witnessed. -- pp. 203 - 204

Maybe the world will be rid of our influence once we've killed ourselves. Hopefully, we won't have killed off the rest of them first exporting our environmental destruction for corporate profit. To explain what I mean about killing ourselves, here are some excerpts from a recent article by environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr.

If you go to the Natural Resources Defense Council's web site you will see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration over the last three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack, one that's been hidden from the public.

We found, in 2003, a memo from Frank Luntz, the president's pollster, to the president saying that if you go through with the evisceration of America's environmental law, you are going to alienate not just Democrats but the Republican rank and file. Eighty-one percent in both parties want clean air, they want stronger environmental laws and they want them strictly enforced. [...] He recommended using Orwellian rhetoric to mask this radical agenda: They want to destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act, they want to destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Act. [...] The head of the Forest Service is [...] probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist in American history. The head of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the Air Division at the EPA is a utility lobbyist who has represented the worst polluters in America for twenty years. The head of Superfund is a woman whose former job was advising companies how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist - these are not exceptions, these are the rules across the agencies.

[...]

Our water in this country, according to EPA, is getting dirty for the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed.

[...]

I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand by what I said. It's the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called "malefactors of great wealth," who would destroy them from within. Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil War in 1863, said, I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind me and for my country, I fear the bankers more.

[...]

I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if you look up fascism, says, "the domination of government by large corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism" - that's getting to look pretty familiar.

[...]

[The current administration has] embraced [the] Christian heresy of dominion theology, which James Watt was the first to enunciate when he told the Senate, I don't think that there is any point in protecting the public lands because we don't how long the world is going to last before the Lord returns. The woman he mentored for twenty years, Gale Norton, is running the Department of the Interior.

[...]

We know that the principal source of ozone and particulates in our air is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. They were supposed to install controls over fifteen years ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those plants. But this industry gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000 campaign, and they've contributed $58 million since. One of the first things that President Bush did when he came to office was to order the Justice Department to drop all 75 of those suits. [...] According to EPA, these 75 plants, just the criminal exceedences from these plants, kill 5,500 Americans every year. After letting these criminals off the hook, the president then went and rewrote the Clean Air Act, illegally we believe. We're suing him, we'll win the suit, but it may take ten years, and in the meantime they'll discharge what they want.

[...]

Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that in 19 states it is unsafe to regularly eat any freshwater fish, and in 48 states at least some fish are unsafe to eat. The mercury is coming, largely, from those same 1,100 coal-burning power plants. [...] We know that one out of every six American women of childbearing years now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: cognitive impairment; mental retardation; autism; blindness; kidney, liver or heart disease.

[...]

Today, one-fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized from acid rain which is coming from those same coal-burning power plants, and this president has put the brakes on the statutory requirement that those companies remove the materials that are causing the acid rain.

[...]

[T]he Clinton administration reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act; that triggered the requirement that those companies remove 90 percent of that mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost, according to EPA, less than one percent of the revenues of those plants for them to do that. [...] Eight weeks ago, Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era rules and substituting, instead, rules that were written by the industry's lobbying firm Latham and Watkins. On their face, they say that they have to clean up, within fifteen years, 50 percent of the mercury. But they've woven so many loopholes into the new rule that they will literally never have to clean up. The chief lobbyist for the firm who wrote it is now the head of the Air Division at EPA.

[...]

We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, our children are brought into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe.

To track the Bush record on the environment, go to http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord at the website for the Natural Resources Defense Council, where you will also find alerts, updates on victories, and opportunities for action.