The only way I can describe this is to call it nonsense. Their resources are still there, but they have not developed and exploited as they could be because of barriers imposed primarily through government policy.
Who's sources?
Their resources.
In case you didn't look into the references I posted...consider this:
"For every $100 of crude (oil) taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forest; the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, 3/4 must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses - which leaves about $2.50 for health, education and programs aimed at helping the poor. Thus, out of every $100 worth of oil torn from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the damns, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water." -John Perkins
I have no specific idea as to the totality of political and economic conditions present in Ecuador, and I doubt that either you or, perhaps even John Perkins, a darling of the leftist, anti-capitalist political and internet world, does either. Looking at the some 850 customer reviews of his book on Amazon, it appears that Perkin's work brings out from under the baseboards both the extreme Left and Right in yet another marriage made in intellectual hell.
The critical reviews are of some interest.
This first is interesting because of the ethnic and national background of its author. Its long and I won't quote it all, but just some salient points:
See the US of America is taking out of contect by Perkins, he forgets all about the bitter cold war fought between 1950-1992, I know because I lived through it. Im a latinamerican and his stories touch close to home, especially the ones about the coup in Guatemala of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman(a socialist), who was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat. After his land reform, the CIA intervened because it feared that a socialist government would become a Soviet satellite nation in the Western Hemisphere, such as Cuba and Nicaragua during the Sandinistas rule; Panama`s President Omar Torrijos a leftist dictator died when his aircraft, crashed. It has been widely speculated that his death was a CIA assassination due to his resistance to renegotiate the Panama Canal Treaty, negotiated under the Carter administration, with President Ronald Reagan; Torrijos died shortly after the inauguration of US President Ronald Reagan, just two months after Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós died in strikingly similar circumstances. Those stories Perkins talks about touch close to home but I can never thank and bless the USA enough for stopping the spread of communism, if you knew anyone escaping from Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, the former Soviet republics you`ll know that the USA saved the day. Communism was the worst ideology that walked the face of the Earth, those people were murdered, alienated by their leaders from the rest of the world and Stalin and Mao Zedong who BTW murdered over 75 millions of their own citizens.
About Israel, Perkins is wrong in this book and on his second book "American Empire". The USA support for Israel come with a heavy price but still the USA does it because is the ritgh and moral thing to do after centuries of antisemitism by the Europeans and second grade cityzenship in the Arab Muslin world. Never Again should we allow another holocaust, bravo for America for standing for the Jews even though it is offending the powerful oil lobby.
Also there`s a lack of documentary or testimonial evidence to corroborate the claim made by Perkins that the NSA was involved in his hiring to Chas T. Main. Lols the NSA "is a cryptological codemaking and code-breaking agency, not an economic organization and that its missions do not involve anything remotely resembling alien abductions or placing economists at private companies in order to increase the debt of foreign countries, the third world have corrupt governments who do it for free, I know I`m from there, borned and raise. Economic historian Niall Ferguson writes in his book The Ascent of Money that Perkins's contention that the leaders of Ecuador President Jaime Roldós Aguilera and Panama General Omar Torrijos were assassinated by US agents for opposing the interests of the owners of their countries' foreign debt "seems a little odd" in light of the fact that in the 1970s the amount of money that the US had lent to Ecuador and Panama accounted for less than 0.4% of the total US grants and loans, while in 1990 the exports from the US to those countries accounted for approximately 0.4% of the total US exports approximately $8 billion. According to Ferguson, those "do not seem like figures worth killing for."
Also if the US is so good at having EHM`s abroad, why are we in this mess since 2007, which included a huge bubble in the US housing market, a subprime mortgage crisis, Wall street gone wild enjoying the deregulation era with Over-the-counter derivatives (OTC), also fueled by soaring oil prices, Lehman's bankruptcy that created a change reaction and moral hazard which followed with the troubles of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG which was up to its nose with toxic assets A.K.A credit default swaps (CDSs), and many, many more giants of the fiancial system that drunk the Cooley such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, JPMorganChase, that needed financial help ASAP. A $787 billion economic stimulus package was needed aimed at helping the economy recover from the deepening recession cause by ex-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his non-sense economics, where he BTW find a flaw!!!...Presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their firms...Well does deregulation rings a bell?... Mrs Brooksley born of the The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission(CFTC) advice everyone back in the 90`s about it,.."The market grew so enormously WITH NO or little oversight and regulation"... but no one listen!, we all drunk the cooley!!!, the CFTC regulation was strenuously opposed by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, and by Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, with Congress in their side, the result was the RECESSION OF 2007-2011 and going...Their response then was to dismissed Born's analysis that CFTC regulation of swaps and other OTC derivatives were unneed in a free market economy, WRONG!WRONG!, and yeah more WRONG!!!
Warren Buffett famously referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" in early 2003.
Needless to say the both Bush and Clinton administrations were ill advice by Mr Greenspan, with unbridled deregulations that came to define the Clinton and Bush eras (1993-2009)and pave the way for disaster. Also did not helped the taking away the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 provisions that prohibited banks to glamble with the commercial banks regular savings acc., small loans and mortgages, making the new mortgage-backed securities (MBS) into a commodity, enabling them to be traded on futures exchanges with little oversight by any federal or state regulatory body, adding to that, the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 waived its leverage rules, under the new regulations, 5 companies - Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley - were granted an exemption, which they promptly used to lever higher...GREEDY too big to fail..
Instead of a good objective book, John Perkins gives a pitifully science fiction novel loaded with anti_USA conspiracies, and speculations tangle together with half truths. Meanwhile Russian(expansionist during the Cold war), Chinese(murdering over 75 millions of their own people, and the illegal occupation of Tibet), Arabs(current Syrian, Iran human right violations as in 2012, etc), African(as in 2012 rape use as a weapon in their wars, ethnic cleansing ), Latin-american(as in 2012 Mexico thorn apart by the Drug cartels, Guatemala ethnic war, Salvadorean gang problem, etc) aggressiveness towards others or their own people goes largely ignore?
GOD bless America
This author thinks Paul Krugman is a good economist, and that deregulation was the cause of the housing market collapse, but the rest of this criticism bears looking at, especially with respect to the perceptions of other critics:
But I can see why this book would hit a nerve here. Its conspiratorial in nature, fundamentally a tell-all anecdotal work, and features deep Israeli control of the American "empire." Its a red, meaty bone for this forum. But let's continue with some other choice comments:
Further, he fails to consider what would happen if the US didn't influence other developing countries to follow a free market method of evolving economically. He doesn't consider examples like Hawaii and the Philippians which have benefitted tremendously from their support and protection by the US. This, considering that both might have fallen under the control of Japan, or later, Red China. It appears those populations have done quite well under American protection. How about the fact that America, at the end of WWII was the only country with the bomb, and could easily have taken over any country it wanted to, but chose not to continue war actions? That unaddressed foreign policy really erodes the whole, "America is an Imperial Force" argument that Perkins defines in the book.
Why would Perkins fail to note that?
Indeed, the above critic zeros in on what I've seen, just taking a cursory look at Perkins popularity in venues such as Democracy Now, Democratic Underground, Indymedia sites, and at the Huffpo, to be his fundamental ideological orientation:
Also, why did Perkins give such minimal note to the repression that went on in Iran when Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah to be deposed and the Ayatolas to take over? Are Iranians better off in a repressive Islamic "Republic"? Would they be better under Russian, Iraqi, or Red Chinese rule? We can say for certain NO in the first case, and almost certainly not in each of the others.
Here's another question: How did Perkins fail to note the American banks that wrote off foreign debt to South and Central American countries in the 1970's and 1980's? Given his hypothesis that America uses debt overload to ensnare small countries and rape them for their raw materials- up to an including invading them when necessary, why didn't we just invade those bad debtors?
You'll hear none of America's success stories or mercies in Perkins' book. Could Central and South America have fallen under Soviet control without successful US foreign policy? You bet, and I have force recon marine friends who were there in Central America watching soviet tanks on the ground in the 1970's. How well did those foreign empires treat the indigenous peoples they interacted with? You won't hear a word about THAT from Perkins.
No, you will only hear him bash American oil companies, the US Government (but only conservative administrations like Reagan's and Bush's), American Christian missionaries, his consulting company MAIN, and finally, himself. Perkins also fails to discuss the attempt by Saddam Hussein on George Bush senior's life as a reason that George H. Bush went into Iraq the second time. If Perkins really was an insider, he would have known about that and included it at the time he published the book...
I was left to conclude that this book is somewhat more eco-leftist propaganda than a complete and balanced telling of factual history.
The next from "John Smith" is interesting:
Confessions of an EHM certainly is one for the conspiracy theorists. It was an interesting read by a man obviously plagued by his conscience. It got too wishy washy for me about three quarters of the way through. He was trying to be both a philosopher and an economist and it would have been better had he just stuck to the facts of economics and politics (as he saw or knew them) rather than waffle on about eagle and condor "prophesies".
Yes,
very enlightening:
http://eomega.org/omega/faculty/viewPro ... 64c740789/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I think we can say with some degree of conviction that Mr. Perkins is a fairly good "fit" for many in this forum. As to his competence to criticize and analyze the economic policies of the United States, let alone foreign nations, I'm not at all certain.
Another reviewer, "ThurgoodMarshall," takes Perkins to the woodshed:
What a truly disappointing book. If John Perkins really is who he says he is then it is a terrible shame that his book was so completely unimaginative and one dimensional. In this book the US is the "boogey" man and communists and muslims extremists are the poor victims. What an incredible misrepresentation. As someone who has spent some time in the third world, I am shocked that Perkins would rather deliver the poverty stricken masses into the grave than see a US corporation profit from building infrastructure in the third world.
I'd advise going through as many of the pro/con reviews here as you can. Its quite revealing.
However, just as a general statement, Whatever the real situation in Ecuador is, the answer to poverty is free markets and the rule of law; that is, productive work and the ability to keep most of the money one earns. Wealth creation is the answer to poverty, and it hardly matters whether or not the company one works for is indigenous or foreign. I have little doubt that the Ecuadorians who work for foreign oil companies are
far better off than they otherwise would have been without such gainful employment.
Secondly, Thinker appears to assume, with Perkins, that industrial development (dams, drilling, and the creation of technological infrastructure) are
bad things: he appears to believe that economic development creates poverty. This is, indeed, the classic Western Leftist paradigm (notice how oil is "torn" from the Amazon, not just "extracted").
Consider...
Why was our country attacked on September 11, 2001?
Because they are fanatiacal belivers in the ideology of Wahhabi Islam, which forsees a global caliphate imposed at all costs through Jihad on all of the world's peoples, and who see America as "the Great Satan" because of its open, free society, democratic insittutions, and religious heterodoxy. We are all "dar al-haab;" the "House of war" relative to Islam. We are its implacable enimies simply by the fact of declining conversion and being non-Islamic.
These "terrorists" were pissed at us... WHY?
1. We are not like them. We represent everything they oppose and hate.
2. We, the Great Satan, support Israel, the Little Satan (and the only democratic, open soceity in the entire Middle East).
3. We are infidels, and are already considered to be at war with them because of this.
Why did so many others cheer after they heard the news of the U.S. being attacked?
Its called "barbarism," "Thinker," and its still a salient aspect of the world in which we live.
It is wondered if US backed oil company officials made deals with Saudi Arabia and thought they could do the same with Iraq and didn't care that Saddam Hussein was a pathological mass murderer - what they wanted was oil.
Yes, none dare call it conspiracy...
But Hussein wouldn't go along, so CIA jumped in, which again didn't work, so then American troops were sent in.
Actually, Saddam went right along with the U.N., French, German, and Russian supported Oil for Food program, in which all of these entities and key people and organizations within them did very nicely as Iraqi children starved.
Why is "The first contracts for rebuilding post-war Iraq have been awarded, and Vice President Dick Cheney's old employer, Halliburton Co., is one of the early winners"??
Because there were (and I think, still are) only two corporations in the world with the technology, know-how, and experience necessary to rebuild and reconfigure an entire oil industry teeming with obsolete, poorly maintained, and damaged equipment and infrastructure, one being a French company, and the other being Halliburton, and there was no possibility the pusillanimous French were going to be rewarded for their (traditional) pusillanimity.
I see no reason to pursue your Code Pink/International ANSWER talking points any longer.