More to Come...

It is amazing…..

But this guy was writing about Belize and its problems with out even knowing about it! It is all in his book:

CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN
By John Perkins

John Perkins’s book is an account of his activities as an employee of the Boston consulting and engineering firm Charles T. Main, doing which he avers he was sent to various poor countries around the world basically to con them into signing on to huge and expensive “development” projects that would entangle the country in indebtedness to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, all in the interest of special corporate geopolitical goals! He explains with passion and concert examples the sorry state of our world, the increasing dominance of corporate wealth, and the destruction of local environments, both physical and cultural. It comes very close to telling how it is in Belize!

Let us talk about big dams! (Were we conned into building one?) Early in his book, Perkins writes about a mammoth dam constructed in Ecuador. “That hideous, incongruous wall is a dam that blocks the rushing Pastaza River, diverts its water through huge tunnels into the mountain, and converts the energy to electricity. This is the 156-megawatt Agoyan hydroelectric project. It fuels the industries that make a handful of money of wealthy families, and it has been the source of untold suffering for the farmers and indigenous people who live along the river…. Because of these projects, Ecuador is awash in foreign debt and must devote an inordinate share of its national budget to paying this off, instead of using its capital to help the millions of its citizens officially classified as dangerously impoverished. The only way Ecuador can buy down its foreign obligations is by selling rain forests to the oil companies.” Now how close can you get to talk about Belize? What is going to happen to our recent oil finds???????????

Such projects are of course trumpeted as being for the benefit of the local people, but in reality the local people are considered expendable for the sake of whatever financial or political these responsible parties have. And the responsible parties -- or guilty parties -- typically include corrupt officials of the poor countries themselves, corporations and banks from Japan, Europe, or the U.S., and international financial agencies. For them the desires and needs of the local population are irrelevant.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man reads like an expose‘, and it is. Weaving his own life story into his narrative, Perkins flits from country to country in his destabilizing work, combining bribery of local officials with falsification of reports and statistics to show that countries needed the huge mega-projects that would put them hopelessly in debt.

Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man address the symptoms of our modern malaise, and the malaise in which Belize finds itself. Perkins book is surely worthwhile, simply to help people understand what is actually going on here in Belize.