I Don’t Want To Benefit From The Indignity Of Others
This blog is a comment on the passage “A Slave World” by Charles Eisenstein.
I read this passage entitled “Slave World” from Charles Eisenstein’s
book “Sacred Economics” a few days ago. By the time I read the final
paragraph, I was in tears. When I read the last line, I was literally
crying my eyes out. Tears of shame and guilt flowed down my face as
though it were raining. Why must it be that so many people must
abandon, or even worse, never get a chance to discover their innate
dreams due to the need to work for life-sustaining resources?
I put the book down and reflected. I recalled the day my
“sustainability journey” began in 2007. I was working at Accenture
Consulting flying back and forth across the country each week. On my
way out the door one week, my brother handed me a book entitled
“Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins.
Having exhausted the movie options on my regular flight, I decided to
give the book a chance. It will turn out to be the first book I had
read since I graduated from college five years ago. I read it cover to
cover and exited the plane a different person than the one that boarded
six hours earlier. John Perkins lived a life “developing” the
“developing world”, a practice I felt at the time was noble work. After
all, economic growth was the engine that promoted prosperity,
happiness, and well-being.
My beliefs couldn’t have been farther from the truth. John Perkins
used to work for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank creating “development aid” packages at interest rates (up to 20%
annually) that they knew would be impossible to pay back. Many
countries would never see the money as it would flow directly to the
transnational corporations who would use ex-patriots for the
construction work. Inevitably, the interest could not be repaid forcing
these countries to renegotiate their debts in a way that lowered
protective trade barriers, flooded local markets with cheap imports that
destroyed local economies, and created a group of desperate people
willing to work for subsistence wages in factories to survive.
