According to a 17 February 2005 BBC article: "... China has overtaken the United States in the consumption of basic agricultural and industrial goods ... It is now the world's biggest consumer of grain, meat, coal and steel. ... China is well ahead of the US in the consumption of goods such as television sets, refrigerators and mobile phones. However, per capita consumption in China, the world's most populous country, remains far below that of the US. ...
According to a 16/17 February 2005 alternet interview of John Perkins by Amy Goodman: "... John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, worked for years as chief economist at an international consulting firm in Boston called Chas. T. Main. ...
JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, over the past 30 to 40 years, we economic hit men have created the largest global empire in the history of the world. ... typically ... we identify a third-world country that has resources that we covet. And often these days that's oil ... we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90 percent, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks &endash; big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt.
... this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit men, is equal to roughly 50 percent of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. ... That's what we're doing today around the world, and we've been doing it since the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world. ... Other empires have been created militarily and everybody in the country knows the armies are going out there and creating empire. But this one has been done so subtly that most Americans have no idea that it is going on. ...
... what we have here is a world empire that's controlled by a very few men I call the "corporatocracy," and these are the heads of the big corporations, big banks and government, and they tend to be the same person. They jump across these lines and MacNamara is a great example of that. He was president of Ford and then he became secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson and then he became president of the World Bank. And in all three roles, his main job was to promote American business, to promote the corporatocracy, to bring the goodies home, to exploit the world. And he was in democratic regimes, Kennedy and Johnson. Today we've got Dick Cheney who's basically in the same picture. We had George Schultz under the former President Bush. ... It's a bipartisan issue. It goes across all the lines, and MacNamara is a very good example of that. I think, at the same time, MacNamara was one of the most important people in terms of framing the new economics, what he called aggressive management. It was aggressive about going out and basically taking the world and bringing it into us so that today, out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations; 47 of them are U.S. corporations - they're not countries, they're corporations. ...
... Iran is where economic hit men really get started because in the early 1950s, Iran democratically elected a man named Mossadeq as premier. But as soon as he got into power, he went up against the oil companies. And he really stood up for his people. And he said, particularly British Petroleum, if you are going to be here, you are going to give your fair share to our people. The oil companies were very upset, so the United States made the decision to go in and do something about this. Now, at the time, we were terrified of thermonuclear war. Russia was the enemy after World War II, and Iran is on the Russian border. So we didn't dare send in troops to get rid of Mossadeq, but we've decided we have got to get rid of him because he is opposing the oil companies. Instead of sending in the troops, we sent in Kermit Roosevelt, a CIA agent who happened to be Teddy's grandson, and we sent him in with a few million dollars, and he managed to create riots, protest, havoc, and to make a long story short, he overthrew Mossadeq, the premier, and brought the Shah back into power. ...
... The plan was that the Shah would help take over the rest of the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq ... We did everything we could to shore him up. ... Oil is ... a benefit for a few of the very wealthy people at the top ... But for everybody else, it's a curse. ... we were making tremendous numbers of people angry [ and the Shah fell ]. ...
... Saudi Arabia was our greatest success as economic hit men. ... In the early 1970s, OPEC really flexed its muscle. It didn't like U.S. policies in Israel supporting Israel, and decided to do something about it. So it shut down oil production significantly. And as a result, the U.S. economy went into a tailspin. There were long lines of cars at gas stations, many of us still remember that. And we were afraid that it was going to be another crash like 1929 as a result of OPEC. And so the treasury department came to me and some other economic hit men, and said 'this must never happen again. You have got to devise a plan. What are you going to do about this? How can you make sure this never happens?' And we knew the key was Saudi Arabia. For one thing, it had more oil than anybody else. ... We knew that the House of Saud, the royal Saudi family, was corruptible. ... So ... we put together this deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro dollars, the money we paid for petroleum, back to the United States and invest it in U.S. securities. The interest from those securities would be dealt out by the treasury department to U.S. engineering construction firms to build Saudi Arabia in the Western image, to build huge cities out of the desert, which we've done - power plants, highways, McDonald's, the whole works ... And the House of Saud would guarantee to keep oil prices within limits acceptable to us, and we would guarantee to keep the House of Saud in power. And we have. All those things have followed since the early 1970s. The policy still holds. ...
... Iraq followed Saudi Arabia. ... Iraqi oil fields ... may be larger than those in Saudi Arabia ... After our tremendous success in Saudi Arabia, we decided we should do the same thing in Iraq. And we figured that Saddam Hussein was corruptible. ... so the economic hit men went in and tried to bring Saddam Hussein around, tried to get him to agree to a deal like the royal House of Saud had agreed to. And he didn't. So, we sent in the jackals to try to overthrow him or to assassinate him. They couldn't. His Republican Guard was too loyal and he had all these doubles. So, when the economic hit men and the jackals both failed, then the last line of defense that the United States, the empire, uses these days, is the military. ... we did that in Iraq in 1990. We thought Saddam Hussein at that point was sufficiently chastised that now he would come around, so the economic hit men went back in the 1990s, failed once again. The jackals went back in, failed once again, and so once again the military went in - the story we all know - because we couldn't bring him around any other way. ...
... The engineers at Bechtel and Halliburton and the financial specialists at the World Bank and so on and so forth don't really realize what's going on. They should. They ought to look into it and find out. But there is every excuse not to on their part. They [just] do their jobs. I'm struck by the fact that as I travel around the world how many people in these countries, even people we consider illiterate, question their government. They assume their government is corrupt, they assume ours is corrupt, but we don't. It is amazing to me how many of us don't, at least not openly ...".