Four Horsemen Page #7

at the point of a gun or opposing regimes

which are democratic but

not in a way that America wants

So too this idea that america have been

promoting free market capitalism has also

been riddled with contradictions

Because the reality is that american

firms tend to make the most money when

countries are at the cusp of change,

certainly american financial firms.

And in a sense they want the markets

to change structurally

but not to free and too transparent

Because they make money when

the markets are a bit opaque

Is it any wonder developed nations are

fighting in underdeveloped countries

when so many are making so much

money out of it

Whithout ever really having to face up to,

or even wittness the consequences

of their actions

So what if five million kids died in africa

because of debt last year?

I got a bonus of a million punds,

if I have that conversation..

I've had it with some bankers who

have been in the business a long time

they listen politely,

they're very polite, very charming,

and at the end they say well Tarek,

it's lovely meeting you again,

and then they get back to the office

and do another

loan deal with Tanzania or something.

I've known a lot of "terrorists"

I've met them,

I've interviewed them for books,

I've known them since I was an

economic hitman,

I've never met one

who wanted to be a terrorist.

They all want to be with their families

back on their farm

They're driven to terrorism

because they've lost their farm,

it's been in under with water

from a hydro electric project or

with oil from oil deriks

Their farms have been destroyed,

they can't make a living for their kids,

or in the case of the somali pirates

their fishing waters have been destroyed,

that's why they turned to this.

It isn't because they want to be

pirates or terrorist,

now there may be a few crazy people,

people with their nuts loose,

there will always be serial killers,

maybe Usama Bin Laden is one of them,

but they do not get a following

unless there is a terrible injustice going on

and people are starving and

they're deprived

and then they will follow these crazy people

because they seem to offer an alternative

If we want to do away with terroriosm,

If we want to have Homeland Security,

We have got to recognise

that the hole planet is our homeland

What does the word terrorist actually mean?

Many terrorists would sooner

describe themselves

as freedom fighters

Could it be that the charge of terrorism

could just as easily be made

against western corporations,

speculators and policymakers?

When we talk about terrorism

it means what they do to us,

not what we do to them.

And what they do to us can be pretty ugly,

although it's a side of a fraction of

what we do to them.

Take say 9/11

that was a serious act of terrorism,

maybe the worst single act of

terrorism in history,

but it could have been worse

Suppose for example that

Al Qaida had bombed Washington,

bombed the white house and

killed the president

and installed a fresh military dictatorship,

and brought in a bunch of economists

who drove the economy into

the worst disaster in history.

Would that have been worse than 9/11?

I don't make it up, it happened.

What's called the first 9/11,

in south america namely in Chile.

On the 11'th of september in 1973

the democratically elected president of Chile

Salvador Elende was overthrown in a coup,

a dictarorship under

Augusto Pinochet was established

that ruled Chile until 1990

there was the systematic suppression of

political dissidents,

thousands we're imprisoned and murdered.

Who was involved in that first 9/11?

It's not hard to find them...

Right in Washington and London and so on.

But that's off the agenda, it doesn't count.

There is this principal of ideology,

that we must never look at our own crimes.

We should on the other hand

exalt in the crimes of others

and in their own nobility in opposing them.

The root causes of so called terrorism

will not be solved by increasing

economic inequality

If governments really are serious

about combating terrorism,

then they must start with

real structural reform back home

As long as banking empires

chase infrastructure and debt deals

in pursuit of profit,

the west will continue to

export injustice through finance

Millions more will be displaced,

terrorism will thrive,

and neo colonialism will continue to

end more and more lives around the world

What's happened is that we've

moved from a relatively empty world

to a relatively full world.

That is, empty of us and all of our stuff,

is now full of us and our stuff

In my lifetime the world population has trippled,

and the populations of other things,

of cars, houses, boats,

all these other things

that have put a load on the environment

to just like human bodies

those have vastly more than trippled,

so the world is very very full of what we call,

man made capital.

And it's becoming more and more empty of

what used to be there,

what we might call natural capital

We are the first generation,

we in the rich developed world are

the first generation that

have gone to the end of the real benefit's of

the economic growth

For hundreds of years

the best way of raising the quality of human life

has been to raise material living standards,

and that's what's driven the huge

rises in life expectancy

and increases in happiness and

other measures of well being

but all those have now become

detached from economic growth,

although life expectancy continues

to rise in the rich world

It's no longer related to the amount of

economic growth a country has at all,

and the same is true of measures

of happiness

and the measures of well being

The paradox is the more we grow

the more poverty we create

Our self interrested economic system

seems to be continually missing the trick

So as we keep plundering the earths natural capital

is it time rethink our western

definition of progress?

When I look at the world

I look at it much the way royal dutch

Shell looks at it,

they have one of the best strategic

entities in the world,

private or public.

And all that shell is posited two scenarios,

one is called blueprint and is obviously a

plan corporate structure

where the world leaders get together

and they think about things like

energy transformation,

planetary warming and

dwindling fossile fuels and so forth

The other is called "Scramble".

and Scramble is pretty much

what it sounds like too,it's a mess.

Interrestingly enough in 2075

the ending year for these scenarios as I recall,

we get to about the same place.

It's just that blueprint leaves

a lot less blood on the floor

Scramble leaves a lot of blood on the floor

as people fight for these resources and so forth.

The reason oil companies are

drilling miles under the sea,

is that the world's easilly accessible oil

has already been found and largely consumed

Not only are our oil supplies dwindling

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