The patriarchy and Economic Slavery

There is a great post over on Women’s Space/The Margins (which is fast becoming one of my favorite blogs about women’s issues) about Seung-hui Cho’s family. I just posted a somewhat tangential comment over there about US global construction/reconstruction efforts and the patriarchy* and I wanted to repost here:

Thank you for doing this journalism… this post was an eye opening, provocative read for me.

I just wanted to comment that I don’t think “reconstruction” is a good thing. The US government and contractors like McNeil are a loosely connected but carefully aligned operation. They have two strategies:

1) Saddle countries with loans (from the World Bank) for building infrastructure that countries don’t need. Make sure the loans are too big for them to repay. and make sure the contracts specify that they have to use US contractors like McNeil. After all that money gets pumped back into the US economy, and the recipient country inevitably defaults on the loans, force the countries to make political concessions. This is how US companies got drilling rights in Ecuador against the will of the people.

2) Bomb the shit out of them. Send in US contractors and “protect” their “reconstruction” rights with US troops. Build all kinds of infrastructure that they don’t need. Saddle the new government you create with the debt, or just add the tab to the trillions of debt the federal government already holds.

I read most of this in John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The prologue is online, and is a great read. I heartily recommend the whole book, it really changed my perspective.

And I never thought about it this way until now, but maybe it’s really about how the patriarchy works on an international level, where entire countries are being subjugated, instead of gender/sex/ethnic/cultural groups.

* I’m still a little uneasy about the term patriarchy, but for now I defer to the wisdom of the feminist community. They’ve been thinking about/using the term longer than I have.