A Game As Old As Empire

Following on the success of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, this anthology brings to the public eye even more crimes with more concrete details than John Perkins was able to impart. The whole shady loans to developing countries is explained plus a chapter just on the Phillipines to demonstrate what happens. And if the World Bank thinks a project is too much of a credit risk or is environmentally unsound even for their standards, there's the export credit agencies for the odd nuclear power plants and massive arms sales to areas of conflict.

Then there's the whole nefarious world of offshore banking which is reported here to be a substantial part of the global financial traffic thus allowing all the crooks of the world to channel profits out of their home countries, launder money, evade taxes and take kickbacks without anybody being the wiser. That's also how the arms trade and drug trafficking can carry on.

Repressive regimes in Africa mine resources from the land with what amounts to slave labor created from local wars. Coltan for instance is an ingredient of the Sony playstation 2. Here also, how oil production sharing agreements will rob the Iraqis of most of their revenue stream.

Debt relief just creates more burden for the same country, but here is offered some suggestions which would require the redistribution of social assets like land, education, technology and political power. Also resurrecting basic legal principles which would deem certain dubious debt contracted by dishonest governments to be non-enforceable. And addressing the offshore banking problem of capital flight.