John Perkins |
The Corporate Empire
Francesca Rheannon:
Given the Euro crisis going on now, which is leading to draconian austerity
measures in Ireland, England, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal, let’s start
out with the impact of the structural adjustment programs in Europe. These
mirror the “structural adjustment programs” imposed by the IMF and the World
Bank on developing countries.
John Perkins: These
programs have essentially been ripoffs. In exchange for restructuring debt --
it's almost never forgiving debt -- these countries are told they will have to
take very austere measures. Their citizens are told they will have to forego
many social services, such as health care and education, and very often things
that were previously part of the public sector, like utility companies --
electricity, sewer and water companies, even schools sometimes -- are sold to
private corporations, the multinationals.
They've done this for quite some time with what we call Third World
countries and now we're seeing it happen in Europe and we're also seeing it
happen to some degree in the United States.
It's fair to say that this process is part of building a new
form of empire, a corporate empire where big corporations have more and more
control over these countries. We've moved in the last several hundred years from
geopolitics that was controlled primarily by religious organizations to
city-states and then to nations.
But we've now moved beyond nations; while today you can
still look at the globe as a place with roughly 200 countries, you might better
envision geopolitics as being composed of huge clouds drifting around the
planet. These are the big corporations. They know no national boundaries and
they follow no specific sets of laws. They don’t care who is at war with whom;
they'll go into any country that has the resources or markets they covet: they
strike deals and form partnerships with the Chinese and the Taiwanese, the
Pakistanis and the Indians, the Israelis and the Palestinians. So we are really
at a whole new phase of history where the big corporations have become a huge
force. And they are all driven by one single goal: to maximize profits
regardless of the social and environmental costs.
Compassionate Capitalism
In Hoodwinked,
John Perkins says a new “compassionate capitalism” must be created, one where
the primary goal of is to serve a public interest. He takes inspiration from the indigenous
tribes of the Amazon, with whom he has been working since the 1960’s. In the
book, he tells the following story illustrating the values that underpin his
vision. He went on a hike with two members of the Shuar tribe in the Amazon…
Perkins: A few years
ago, I took a hike with a couple of men up to a sacred waterfall. It’s a long,
hard hike and took about a day to get there. We spent three days up there doing
rituals at the waterfall and when we came back down three days later, these men
stopped by the trail and examined a small plant. And when they stood up, they
said, “this plant is sick.”
It hadn’t been sick three days ago when we went up there.
When I looked at the plant, it didn't look sick to me -- a few brown leaves.
They called a meeting of the elders that night when we got back to the
community and in the end the elders decided there were other trails where there
were some sick plants. They weren't sure, but they thought that maybe these
trails were being overused. They thought maybe the rain forests were being
threatened by overusing the trails.
They all agreed they couldn't prove this, but they thought
that if there was any possibility that their current actions were jeopardizing
their children's futures, they would stop. And so they closed down these
trails. And that's a big step for them -- they don't have chain saws! Closing
down trails and trying to create new trails is a huge sacrifice.
A few days later, I was back in the United States. I was
driving from the airport to home and I was listening to the debate that was
then going on in Congress about whether global warming exists and, if there is
global warming, do human beings cause it. And the conclusion was: We can't
really prove that there's global warming and we certainly can't prove our
industries are causing it, so let's not do anything to disturb our industries.
It really struck me that here I'd been with these supposedly
primitive people and they had acted so rationally that if there was a
possibility they could be hurting their children's futures, they wouldn't do
these activities anymore. And now I was back in this country that is supposedly
the most well-educated and wealthiest in the history of the world and we were
taking this extremely short term, selfish and greedy perspective that was not
at all about looking after our children.
Another place in Latin America John Perkins is familiar
with is the Mamoni Forest Preserve. It’s in the Darien Gap, a
rainforest between Panama and Columbia that at one time was vast and
impenetrable. Perkins went there more recently with one of the founders of
Oxfam America, Nathan Gray. He told CSRwire what has happened to that forest
and what Gray is doing about it.
John Perkins: I
spent a lot of time Panama in the 1970's. I was an economic
hit man -- I was supposed to be trying to bring Omar Torrijos, the head of
state then, around to our way of thinking. I was unsuccessful at that and as a
result Torrijos was assassinated. But at that time Darien was considered one of
the most impenetrable jungles in the world. And it's recently been reduced to a
swath of about 12 miles wide.
The only reason the swath is kept at all is because the UN
has mandated this for protection against hoof and mouth disease and other
animal diseases that might come up through Latin America into Central America
and the United States. The rest of
the area has been logged off and turned into cattle ranches, which has been
devastating to the area, to the climate, plants and animals and to human beings
-- there were a lot of indigenous people living in that area.
Nathan Gray had formed an organization that was trying hard
to restore some of that jungle and I was down there working with him and Jane
Goodall and others to try to bring the area back, to plant trees and to help
the farmers.
Around the world, people are encouraged to go into cattle
ranching, to convert forests, especially tropical forests, into cattle ranches,
and yet cattle ranchers usually don't do very well financially. They are always
in debt. They just squeak by. So part of this process is to help the cattle
ranchers develop alternatives forms, growing trees and then cutting them.
We experimented with a lot of different varieties of trees.
There was no way the original forest would be brought back, so the idea was to
bring back a dozen to two dozen varieties of trees that would improve the
environment and restore rain patterns, and that the people could also cut
periodically and re-grow in a rational way to make a living or raise pigs in
the forest. There are a lot of animals and ornamental plants and herbs that can
be raised under the forest canopy; it would be a lot more successful than
cattle ranching.
Another project John Perkins is involved with is the
Pachamama Alliance, which he co-founded with Bill and Lynn Twist. The Alliance
has been instrumental in incorporating environmental rights into the new
constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia.
Perkins: One of the
things we did in Ecuador is help the President, Rafael Correa, bring in experts
to formulate a new constitution, which was ratified by an overwhelming majority
of the people. It’s the first constitution in the history of mankind, as far as
we know, that gives inalienable rights to nature, including animals and plants,
rivers and all the natural environment. This was a monumental step for a small
country in South America to take. Bolivia has done something very similar. And
now a lot of other countries are studying this and the Pachamama Alliance is
still active in that process.
I think the whole world should do that. I think it should be
one of the driving forces behind this movement to force corporations to be good
public citizens and recognize they have a responsibility. Yes, make profits;
make a decent return for your investors, but only within the context of being
socially and environmentally responsible, only within the context of a
sustainable world where all sentient beings can thrive.
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