Many African nations are ruled by leaders backed by the US, Britain or France, or constrained by IMF/World Bank/WTO policies

The mainstream media rarely challenge the patent system, or discuss the scale of fraud by the industry, or explain that medicines could be researched and produced far more cheaply by other means

Controlling Knowledge to Extract Wealth

Conditions on aid are used to change economic policies in poor countries to enable rich countries to exploit them

Rich countries, particularly the US, dominate the IMF and World Bank, and use them to manipulate developing countries so that their corporations can dominate trade

Sweatshops are widespread. We could insist upon much higher standards all over the world for goods sold in rich countries

Poor countries are told to focus on labor-intensive tasks and growing crops for export. This is intended to keep them poor

Politicians from rich countries have tried to forcefully ‘persuade’ other countries to use an extreme economic system with few public services and very little regulation of big companies

There is huge poverty around the world, because people with power are actively keeping it that way

“The total amount of third world debt has already been repaid six times over in interest”