Today cocaine earns Bolivia as much as its entire formal economy and provides a livelihood for one family in six. Neil MacDonald looks at the havoc this is creating in a coup-prone land...Government response to the crisis has hit the poor in a way that has become all too familiar in the Third World. The 'New Economic Policy', an austerity package approved by the IME and World Bank, has frozen wages, raised taxes and freed prices.
There are now thousands of street children in La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz living rough without families and surviving by theft, child prostitution and drug dealing.
This was not the first time that Bechtel had been involved in dodgy activity:
WASHINGTON - U.S. construction giant Bechtel, a firm with a major contract to help rebuild Iraq, planned to hire �non-U.S. suppliers of technology� so it could evade economic sanctions imposed by Washington after Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iraq's Kurdish minority, according to a newly declassified document.
In April 2003 Bechtel was awarded one of the largest contracts to date by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for infrastructure repair work in U.S.-occupied Iraq. The deal is worth an initial payment of 34.6 million dollars and up to 680 million dollars in total.
Bechtel maintains that it has always respected and complied with U.S. government prohibitions in Iraq, but the uncovered document shows how its officials were prepared to challenge even its Washington allies to retain its business.
According to a 1988 confidential State Department cable, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the non-profit National Security Archive (NSA), U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie wrote that Bechtel officials threatened to bypass the sanctions, passed by the Senate in 1988.
�Bechtel representatives said that if economic sanctions contained in the Senate act are signed into law, Bechtel will turn to non-U.S. suppliers of technology and continue to do business in Iraq,� the cable said.
The document also shows further behind-the-scenes particulars of how the U.S. corporation, now part of President George W. Bush's project to bring democracy to post-Saddam Iraq, courted the dictatorial regime with full knowledge of Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and the Kurds -- with the approval of U.S. diplomats.
�They (Bechtel) were certainly well aware of what was going on in Iraq and had no qualms about making a buck there,� said Jim Vallette, research director at the Washington-based Sustainable Energy and Economy Network.
�So they had no concerns over what Saddam was doing to his own people.�
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the main reasons why Hussein must now be "taken out", at the time Washington’s response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
Just four months later, Washington stood by as the US giant Bechtel corporation won the contract to build a huge petrochemical plant that would give the Hussein regime the capacity to generate chemical weapons.
On September 8, 1988, the US Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime. Immediately, the Reagan administration announced its opposition to the bill, calling it "premature". The White House used its influence to stall the bill in the House of Representatives. When Congress did eventually pass the bill, the White House did not implement it.
Bechtel are merely ahead of the curve in identifying a new phenomenon - the water wars:
Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030 and strategists from Israel to Central Asia prepare for strife.
After droughts ravaged his parents' farmland, Sixteen-year-old Hassain and his two-year-old sister Sareye became some of the newest refugees forced from home by water scarcity.
"There was nothing to harvest," Hassain said through an interpreter during an interview at a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya which is housing some 160,000 Somalis displaced by a lack of water. "There had been no rain in my village for two years. We used to have crops."
As global warming alters weather patterns, and the number of people lacking access to water rises, millions, if not billions, of others are expected to face a similar fate as water shortages become more frequent.
Presently, Hassain is one of about 1.2 billion people living in areas of physical water scarcity, although the majority of cases are nowhere near as dire. By 2030, 47 per cent of the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Environmental Outlook to 2030 report .
Some analysts worry that wars of the future will be fought over blue gold, as thirsty people, opportunistic politicians and powerful corporations battle for dwindling resources.
The banking sector always likes to lend a helping hand, though:
Citi's Top Economist Says The Water Market Will Soon Eclipse Oil
I expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, futures markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments — puts, calls, swaps — both exchange-traded and OTC will follow. There will be different grades and types of fresh water, just the way we have light sweet and heavy sour crude oil today. Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.
There have been many, many predictions of water rationing and shortages occurring in the future, particularly focused on the year 2030. Here are a few of them:
Paper: Global Water Shortage in 2030 = Excellent Business Opportunities
Conclusion: Either the price of water will rise dramatically, all over the world, to ‘ration’ the short supply, or major technological advances arising out of massive R&D projects will reduce demand and increase supply. Of course, both will occur. Higher water prices will make large R&D investments in water technology profitable.
Companies are already looking ahead and hard at work turning water into money; IBM is a great example and Big Blue is not the only one.
They're always at least one step ahead of the general public. I hope this has been informative.
The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. The true measure of a man is this: how quickly he can respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give - Philip K. Dick.
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