Did I mention you should read this book?
I want to pick up in chapter 8 because when I saw the title, “Jesus, Seen Differently,” I knew it would be interesting. Perkins quotes a few hard questions about American citizen innocence from his journal written during his time in Indonesia, ubt I like his dream about Jesus best:
I had seen Christ in front of me. He seemed like the same Jesus I had talked with every night…as a young boy…[e]xcept…this one had curly black hair and a dark complexion. He bent down and heaved something up to his shoulder. I expected a cross. I saw the axle of a car with the attached wheel rim protruding above his head, forming a metallic halo. Grease dripped like blood down his forehead. He straightened, peered into my eyes, and said, “If I were to come now, you would see me differently.” I asked him why. “Because,” he answered, “the world has changed.”
We support modern day slavery, as long as we don’t see it or get our hands dirty. At what point do we see that while we may not be holding a gun to some poor Indian’s head to work 14 hour days in Dubai or a Filipino slaving away in the Saudi oil fields, we still benefit from someone holding the gun. Oh, it may not be a gun, but peek behind the curtain of the oil industry and see how disturbing the industry’s underbelly is.
Take a look at the dark side of Dubai, courtesy of The Independent.
And see what the Independent was saying in 2006 about Migrants and the Middle East:
But what about the citizens of Dubai? How do they see this influx of foreigners - many of whom, especially from the West, bring with them an alien culture which jars with Muslim customs. Jamal, who sells real estate, said he has done well out of the commercial boom. But, in the back of his mind, he said, there is a feeling of uneasiness.
“Our leaders want to turn us into a modern, first-world country, and that is good. But the place has become all about money. Do you know, there wasn’t any real protest here about the Danish cartoons of the prophet - Dubai was the only place in the Muslim world where there was no outcry. What does that say about us?”
John Perkins makes an excellent point about all of this on pages 63 and 64. He talks about his co-workers and other EHMs believing they were doing the right thing and fulfilling “a duty to their country, to their offspring, and to God to convert the world to capitalism.” His comparison of these people to “plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South” is cutting yet does a good job of debunking the idea of a conspiracy.
Page 65 is full of important lines about slave labor. Allow me to quote Perkins’ summary of one of his professors:
…all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves.
Perkins goes on to say (emphasis mine):
Of course we are not the first to do this. The list of practitioners stretches back to the ancient empires of North Africa, the Middle East… Asia… Persia, Greece, Rome, the Christian Crusades, and all the European empire builders of the post-Colombian era. This imperialist drive has been and continues to be the cause of most wars, pollution, starvation, species extinctions, and genocides.
At some point the oppressed always becomes the oppressors, even if not in outright empire. I think this idea is the entire premise of Rob Bell’s book, Jesus Wants To Save Christians.
Some final quotes and thoughts:
In the final analysis, [globalization] was not solely about the United States. The global empire had become just that; it reached across all borders. …U.S. corporations were now truly international… they could pick and choose from an assortment of rules and regulations under which to conduct to conduct their activities… (pg. 218)
What is so important about this quote is that as companies move into beholden nations, they can control the government to create rules that benefit them exclusively. I recommend Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston to see how this happens right here in America.
In November 2001, Perkins went to see NYC and the aftermath of 9/11 while walking around he:
…came face-to-face with the world headquarters of Chase… …a bank seeded with oil money and harvested by men like me. This bank, an institution that served EHMs and that was a master at promoting global empire, was in many ways the very symbol of the corporatocracy. (pg. 228)
And Chase is one of how many that is recieving billions of dollars to continue its ruinous practices. Ruinous for Americans and countless others around the world, but not the few who will profit wildly from the free influx of capital they will use to greedily suck up other banks and companies. Take a look at this article on The Consumerist.
Perkins talks about the CIA’s attempt to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela saying:
In Venezuela, the Bush administration was bringing Kermit Roosevelt’s Iranian model into play… This was exactly how the CIA brought down Mossadegh and replaced him with the shah. The analogy could not have been stronger. It seemed history was uncannily repeating itself, fifty years later.(pgs. 234, 235)
Problem is, it didn’t work and now Chavez is a hero to many. More importantly, if the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran was a new way of bringing nations to heel instead of invasion, it didn’t work in Venezuela. Does that mean a new way of creating empire is necessary, or is America’s empire on decline as Kevin Phillips’ argues in his book American Theocracy?
I’ll end on this final quote from the book,
Our own government, in alliance with the big corporations and banks, has created an empire that brings servitude, misery, and death to millions of people. As a result, we who reside within the walls of the empire find ourselves living in constant fear of those who claim the right to defend themselves against what they view as tyranny…”
- mike
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