Greenpeace: A Hired Economic Hitman on Palm Oil?

Greenpeace: A Hired Economic Hitman on Palm Oil?

In the fabulously successful and, in some quarters revered, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, the author John Perkins, recounts how a cabal of wicked men like him have enabled American corporations to seize control of the planet. Now, in a follow up called “The Secret History of the American Empire,” Perkins comes completely clean about his epochal role in tripping up poor countries on behalf of powerful US multi-national corporations so that the USA could end up being the sole super-power in the world today.
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nIn a recent interview with Al Jazeera TV, Perkins explains how a truly global American Empire has been created: “We economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history.” “We’ve done it largely though economics, very subtly”, he continues.
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nIt was Perkins’ work, after all for a Boston consulting firm that allowed nefarious multinational corporations to plunder Indonesia. It was Perkins’ acquisition of for-your-eyes-only data from the mysterious Dr Asim that enabled the Secret American Empire to take over Egypt. It was also Perkins’ covert missions in Saudi Arabia that ultimately sealed Saddam Hussein’s fate, and Perkins’ invention of an ingenious payment system that led directly to the destruction of the economy of Bolivia. (i)
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nIn this sequel, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and draws on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters and activists and examines the current geopolitical crisis. From the US military adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq to infrastructure development in Indonesia to jackals in Venezuela, Perkins exposes a conspiracy of corruption that has fueled instability and anti-Americanism around the globe.
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nMost sinister of all Perkins’ revelations is the secret and covert role of the National Security Agency or NSA, an American covert agency that some people allege are many times bigger than the CIA. Says Perkins: “It’s very much larger than the CIA. And they’re very secretive”. “They claim to work only in cryptography, encoding and decoding messages,” Perkins explains. However, contrary to appearances, Perkins recounts how he was secretly vetted by the NSA before he was sent initially to serve with the Peace Corps in Ecuador and eventually placed with Chas T. Main, the American consulting firm with which Perkins was to do most of his dirty work to exploit third world economies: “They put me through a series of tests, very extensive tests, lie detector tests, psychological tests during my last year in college!”
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nWith all the concerted action undertaken by myriad “environmental NGOs” such as Greenpeace and the FOE, we have to wonder what role the NSA has to play with this planned attempt to derail the palm oil juggernaut.
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nAfter all, this was a commodity that was, by its nature, a highly productive commodity posing a more than formidable challenge to the oil seed industries of the USA and Europe – a commodity that was intrinsically good for health as an edible oil and incredibly efficient as a feed stock in the production of bio-fuel/bio-diesel.
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nIt has to be pointed out that the oil seed producers in these countries, specifically soy and rapeseed are reeling from their lack of price-competitiveness and productivity vis a vis palm oil, a situation which jeopardizes the subsidies for the US and European oil seed producers, especially if palm oil were to enjoy the same subsidies as a sustainable feedstock for bio-fuels.
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nWe have to wonder too how all this would have played out if palm oil was planted in the USA or Europe and not in the emerging economies of Indonesia and Malaysia.
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nThe sheer volume of these baseless attacks against palm oil by supercilious and opaque “Environmental NGOs” such as Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth, appears to be moving the political process in the countries in which palm oil is proving to be a serious threat or making inroads against oil seed producers in those countries towards some type of policy restricting palm oil imports – but insidiously and cleverly disguised as policies to prevent deforestation and climate change.
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nThe singular notoriety of Greenpeace and the FOE stem from their support of the astonishing lobby calling for the banning of palm oil, both as a source of healthy edible oil and as an ideal feedstock for biofuel! So convoluted have their position been that palm oil is blamed for an astounding assortment of environmental ills, each one more absurd than the last!
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nFrom an environmental group, Greenpeace has deviously morphed into a shameless lobby with a twisted extremism and so obviously serving competing edible oil seed lobbies. It is to Greenpeace’s eternal shame and folly that this once respected environmental group has degenerated into an twisted, nefarious and unethical lobby – one beholden to commercial interests, with a reflexive hostility to all things palm oil that now permeates their increasingly vitriolic and poisonous “Reports”. Recently, they’ve taken to using their boats to block a tanker carrying more than 30,000 tons of palm oil from leaving an Indonesian port.
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nToday, Greenpeace falls far short of the standards required of a responsible environmental group of consequence. Unfortunately, for Greenpeace, their servitude to commercial interests is now so transparent that the average man in the street can sniff them out!
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nFinally, if Greepeace were to continue in this vein, it is then only a matter of time before Greenpeace will have their credibility sink to such depths that they’d be joining the pantheons of the trivial and inconsequential NGOs that populate the darkest and nethermost parts of the NGO world!
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nReferences:
n(i) The Secret History of the American Empire, Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption, John Perkins, Dutton 2007

Posted Date: 2010-01-09 07:08:18