My thanks to Edie Sutham for posting this video about Thailand that is in English. The video summarizes the frustration the Thai people have with the corrupt leaders they have recently had and the damage they have done to their country. They ask simply that America and other world powers stand down and allow the Thai to reform their government before the next election. I know Edie agrees with this point. My thanks also to Kathy McGrade who years ago lent me a copy of the book by the author featured at the end of the video. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004.According to his book, Perkins function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, those countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. I suggest that this approach has been widely accepted by many major powers. For example, China has a significant world aid program where they will build major infrastructure projects for countries, then do all of the work with Chinese companies and workers. This leaves the countries with no resulting expertise, an infrastructure project that may be impossible to sustain, and debts that are often resolved by assignment of natural resource rights to China. I know that China offered to build high speed rail in Thailand which would have resulted in just such an outcome.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 17:53:19 +0000
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