The whole story of Africa and the Congo is such a devastating and sad one. We in the United States don\'t even talk about Africa. We don\'t think about Africa. You know, Congo has something called coltan, which probably most of your listeners may not have even heard of, but every cell phone and laptop computer has coltan in it. And several million people in the last few years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because you and I and all of us in the G8 countries demand low—or at least we want to see our computers inexpensive and our cell phones inexpensive. And, of course, the companies that make these sell them on that basis, that \"Oh, here, mine\'s $200 less than the other company.\" But in order to do that, these people in the Congo are being enslaved. The miners,the people mining coltan, they\'re being killed. There\'s these vast wars going on to provide us with cheap coltan.\n\nRoughly 50,000 people die every single day from hunger or hunger-related diseases and curable diseases that they don\'t get the medicines for, simply because they\'re part of a system that demands that they put in long hours, and they get very, very low pay, so we can have things cheaper in this country. And the Congo is an incredibly potent example of that.\nYeah, wwe, you and I, look at them as defeats, perhaps, and certainly anybody who lost a child or a sibling or a spouse in these countries look at them as disasters, as defeats, but the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, of course, they\'re doing it in a very, very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they\'re making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they\'re successes from a very strong economic standpoint.\n the Israeli people, for the most part, are led to believe that they\'ve been given this land as a payoff, basically, for the Holocaust, because they deserve to be recompensed. And, of course, the Holocaust was terrible, and they do deserve to be taken care of and recompensed and have stability.\n\nI think the Israeli people have been terribly exploited in this process.\n\n But the fact of the matter is, our having this military base in Israel has been a huge defense for us. It\'s been a place where we could really launch attacks, rely on. It\'s been our equivalent of the Crusaders\' castles in the Middle East. And it\'s very, very sad. I think it\'s extremely sad for the Israeli people that they\'re caught up in all of this. I think it\'s extremely sad for the American people. It\'s extremely sad for the world that this is going on.\n\nAMY GOODMAN: As we crisscross the globe, John Perkins, which is exaclty what you did in your years as an international consultant, having been groomed by the National Security Agency, but then becoming a top economist in an international consulting firm, you have also written books about Shamanism. You also write about Tibet. Where does Tibet fit into this picture?\n\nJOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, I was just in Tibet a couple of years ago, and it was aninteresting thing, because I took a group of about thirty people into Tibet with me as part of a non-profit organization. I was leading the trip. And some of these people had been in the Amazon with me, been to other places. And, of course, Tibet right now is—it\'s very depressing, because the Chinese presence is extremely strong, and you see how the Tibetan culture has been put down. And you\'re always aware that there\'s Chinese soldiers and spies all around you. And many of the people on the trip came to the realization, yeah, this terrible here. \"Free Tibet,\" we all know about that, but the ones who had been with me on a trip to the Amazon, where the oil companies and our own military are doing the same things, said, \"But doesn\'t this remind us of what we\'re doing in so much of the world?\" And it\'s something we tend to forget.We can all wave banners about \"Free Tibet,\" which we should, but how about freeing the countries that are under our thumb, too? And certainly Tibet is not nearly—well, I hate to say it this way, because some people might disagree with me, but I think Iraq is in worse shape than Tibet is these days, although both of them are in pretty bad shape. But so, what we saw in Tibet is that same kind of model that we\'re implementing around the world. And yet, most Americans are not aware that we\'re doing it. They\'re aware that the Chinese are doing it, but not aware that we\'re doing it on actually amuch bigger level than the Chinese are. advisors, assassination, Banks, CIA, Conspiracy, consultants, corporation, crime, NSA, Perkins, WTO