By Kathleen Kern

When I got back from the Democratic Republic of Congo in fall 2005, I contacted Tikkun magazine and pitched an article to an editor I’ve worked with in the past about how armed groups there used rape as a weapon of war.

She was interested, but said she was leery of representing Africans as savages, because too many North American media outlets have perpetuated that racist stereotype.

I told her that the Congolese we met who were ministering to rape survivors connected their nation’s tragedy to Western corporations who were dumping enormous amounts of armaments into Congo and benefiting from the pillage of the country’s vast mineral resources. That connection was the angle she wanted for the piece, she said.

Before the article appeared, she passed on a draft to a colleague who was editing a follow-up book to John Perkins’ 2004 bestseller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (more than 500,000 sold). He asked me to adapt the Tikkun article into a chapter for the new book, which came to have the title, A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption.

This November, I met other chapter writers in San Francisco and was reminded of the Sesame Street song, “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.” My fellow writers were seasoned activists in economic justice organizations, investigative journalists and former employees of the World Bank, international tax havens and corporate think tanks. However, it warmed my heart to watch them network, because they have tried so hard for so many years to interest the public in the damage that the “Corporatocracy” (a term coined by Perkins) does to the world. And here they were among people who understood what they were talking about and were eager to form alliances.

That enthusiastic, collaborative vibe pervades the book’s final chapter, written by Antonia Juhasz. In it, she notes that the “Web of Global Corruption” is not the only force at work on the global economy. A “Web of Resistance” spun by people in both the Global North (affluent countries) and the Global South (the developing world) is also at work — a web that the World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and other minions of the Corporatocracy have not been able to destroy.

Citizens in Asian and Latin American countries have elected officials running on anti-IMF platforms. Workers in the North and South have begun to support each other as they see that the current global economic system harms them all. In the United States, various local governments have challenged the legal doctrine, established in late 19th century, that corporations should have the same protections under law as human beings.

Although Juhasz acknowledges that the innumerable tentacles of the Corporatocracy look daunting, she tells her readers they do not have to fight every battle. The Web of Resistance includes millions of people who are fighting thousands of big and small battles against corporate corruption and poverty. She encourages people to take on the issues that most affect them and maintain alliances with others in the web.

“We have never been, nor are we now, powerless to act against the forces of Empire. . . . We have a movement to learn from, act within and expand upon,” Juhasz writes. “Our story is just beginning to unfold.”