“We the People,” is the cry of America’s Constitutional Republic, a Republic that was intended to operate along Democratic lines. And it’s the only hope for developing nations whose resources have been raped by a tangle of international corporations that bribe the governments they claim to help.
Former World Bank economist, Peter Koenig thinks sovereign individuals offer hope for combating these ills at home and abroad. “If something is going to change, it has to happen from within,” says Koenig. He is also critical of the International Monetary Fund and the private, central Federal Reserve Bank.
Koenig witnessed the theft of developing nation’s natural resources first-hand throughout his approximately 30-year-long career with the World Bank. Koenig came to the bank in 1972 hoping to do some good. But after working in West Africa at the beginning of his career, he realized Africa would have been better off without its dependence on the central bank of France. He also realized that the Western world wouldn’t let go of Africa because of the natural resources there.
The 67-year-old Swiss native will share his experiences at South Carolina’s first
Patriot Expo, a one-day-long conference designed to inform South Carolinians on the problems we are facing as a nation and as a state. An 11 trillion dollar national debt-load, expanding federal government, the
state’s debt, and the problems with accepting federal stimulus funds are several concerns event organizers share. Individuals working for change in the nation’s financial system are composing the event.
But the United States, indebted though it may be, owns the primary stake--approximately 17 percent--in the World Bank. Despite the trillions of dollars in foreign aid lent by the World Bank and other organizations, the poorest countries remain poor. According to a report by the
World Economic Forum, the GDP in sub-Saharan Africa dropped $200 between 1974 and the 21st century.
This poverty and the conflict that Africa has become famous for is beneficial to the Western world, which can't seem to live without other nations' oil. As Koenig explains, conflicts such as the conflict in Darfur help the central banks and the corrupt governments those banks serve. Darfur sits atop a pool of natural gas, which it cannot defend because the region is fractured so by civil war.
But dismal as the World Bank-IMF-Fed connection makes the world, the world is not without hope. Koenig mentions the democratization process that South America has undergone over the past decade or so. Much of the continent has wriggled free from the demands of these central banks. “So, there is hope,” says Koenig, “a light at the end of the tunnel.”
And since there is hope, Koenig continues to work towards overcoming poverty. Today he works as a freelance consultant for such donors as the Swiss Development Cooperation, where he completes water resource management projects and other projects.
And since there is hope, Koenig enjoys sharing his experiences with students. It’s the world’s youth that will inherit their corrupt governments’ debt.
And in hopes of connecting the dots, the dots that run among crises and media and central banks and more, Koenig wrote
Implosion. The novel illustrates the connection between corporations and the corrupt governments they work for. Or do the nations serve the corporations?
Implosion is set in the countries of the Andes. Koenig chose this setting because of his familiarity with it and because the area is rich in natural gas and gold, prizes the Western world has been known to take if the nations won’t give up the resources willingly.
But with hope and with the truth, perhaps sovereign, developing nations can take back their countries. And perhaps Americans can take back their country too.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man,
and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Orwell
