Reply #92: Cute headline. Your post doesn't back it up.

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You should read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins says that Venezuela is another example of steps one and two of the three step process that leads to Iraq-style invasion. He says that the "soft empire" institutions are at play in Venezuela. IMF-encouraged indebtedness, designed-in default, forcing leaders to have to make social program sacrifices, undermining governments which try to help their citizens rather than foreign capital.

Incidentally Clark has endorsed the SOA. He has literally endorsed it. He testified in Congress that it should continue in '98 or '99 around the time he had first-hand experience down there as head of the southern command in Panama, NONETHELESS and despite Clark's testimony, Congress did in fact stop funding the school, so they weren't convinced by his argument. Also, Clark is on the B.O.D. of N.E.D. So it's absurd to say that he doesn't "participate." Talk about "total distortions of the truth"!

What are these writers doing? THEY'RE WRITING THEIR ARGUMENTS DOWN! It's amusing that you ask this question while also refusing to read any of these books. Perkins has an entire chapter devoted to this question. He said that when he was trying to decide what to do with his knowledge, he thought about people like Tom Paine, and the abolitionists and the anti-fascists. He said that long before their ideas turned into action, when very few people agreed that imperialism and slavery and fascism were bad, people who thought about these issues wrote them down. Gradually, ideas that had narrow appeal, because of their power and because of their truth, grew until a majority of Americans realized they were right.

Also, I believe there's a passage in the bible where god tells Habbikuk when Habbikuk asks what he should do in the face of so much misery in the world that Habbikuk should write it down. It looks like the men who wrote the bible at a time when it seemed like injustice was prevailing came to the same conclusion Perkins and all these other authors came to and that was that when you see something that is unjust and the world seems against you, the best thing you can do is read, research, contemplate and then write it down for others to consider.

Incidentally, this thing you say here is interesting:

Would it be better for the US if we helped other countries develop their resources and then we turn around and pay through the nose for them?

The domestic equivalent of your attitude, in my opinion, is the reason we had a Great Depression. FDR was great because he challenged the assumption that exploitation at the bottom created wealth for the people at the top, which then trickled down to everyone else (or that was the lie the rich told so that people wouldn't complain about the concentration of power).

The essence of Keynes and of the New Deal and of progressive domestic and foreign policy is that wealth is a seed you plant at the bottom -- by rewarding people for their labor, by compensating the nations that own natural resources on behalf of their citizens -- and that wealth grows up from this and creates a better economy for more people.

YES, we should as a nation not exploit the people at the bottom. We should not be afraid to pay fair prices for labor and natural resources anywhere in the world. Fair prices for labor and national resources are seeds -- as we learned from FDR and the New Deal -- which promote happiness, health, democracy and aggregate demand which then percolate up and make everyone else better off, including people paying fair prices.

Do you personally benefit when you buy oil that some private company that practically steals it from Nigerians and Indonesians? That profit margin they made helps them buy the government that is currently in power. Did you benefit from that? You would have been much better off if African and Asian citizens were benefitting from their oil resources through fair prices paid to democratic governments, exactly as Venezuelans are now benefitting. (This, incidentally, was the direction Kennedy was heading before he got shot -- read Richard Parker's Galbraith biography, that is, if you have time and are interested in having an informed opinion).

Clark may have proposed a department of international development, but he reveals what he thinks that department should be doing in the rest of Chapter 6, which he also reaffirmed in his response to welshTerrier2's post at TPM Cafe for One which was that we nead cheap oil and we have to do what we're doiing in Iraq so that we don't have to fight wars for oil (huh???).