Geography Concepts: A Personal View

  Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by  John Perkins I’ve been reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man . It’s a story about how progress got weaponized. John Perkins describes the 1970s—when he flew from one “developing” country to another, briefcase in hand, selling prosperity at 10 percent interest. Power plants. Dams. Highways. Airports. All paid for with loans so large they could never be repaid. He calls himself an economic hit man , but the real weapon wasn’t a gun. It was compound interest . Every loan came wrapped in the promise of modernization. And hidden in the fine print: dependency . Countries took the money. American firms got the contracts. And decades later, the debts remain—still quietly shaping who gets schools, who gets medicine, and who gets told to privatize their water. Often the leaders who agreed to these loans are long dead or discredited, often dictators who only ruled for themselves and their cronies with no interest in the future of ...

Picture this. A teenager in Minnesota, 2025, scrolling TikTok, maybe sipping bubble tea. She’s Hmong-American, her parents born in the Twin Cities, her grandparents across the Pacific in the mountains of Laos. When she asks her grandmother why she came to America, she gets a quiet smile and an answer that sounds less like history than like a wound:  “Because we helped America.” Now, follow that thread backward. In the 1950s, the world looked like a chessboard. The United States and the Soviet Union were playing a global game of dominoes—each country that turned communist was imagined to knock down the next. Vietnam, a strip of jungle and rice paddies, became the table’s edge. If Vietnam “fell,” Washington feared, so would Laos, Cambodia, Thailand. And then? The whole of Southeast Asia, gone. So America fought—not directly against an invading army, but against an idea. And that’s always dangerous. The war spread like spilled fuel. Laos, officially neutral, became the target of a...

  Right, so picture this. The year is 1947. The war’s over, the highways are spreading like veins, and Americans are beginning to discover that they can all watch the same television show, eat the same brand of cereal, and—if they like—call their soft drink whatever everyone else calls it. But not yet. In that year, you could still draw a linguistic border across the country as clearly as a front line on a map. In the North, from Minnesota clear across to Washington, the drink in your hand was “pop.” It’s a word that snaps when you say it. Short, bright, cheerful—like the sound it names. It comes from the British “popwater,” the hiss and bang of a cork leaving a bottle, a bit of linguistic onomatopoeia that immigrants brought over and never quite let go. And in those northern towns—many of them Scandinavian, German, British in heritage—the word took root. It was what you drank at the church picnic, at the corner store, after mowing the lawn. “Pop” belonged to the language of smal...

 Capitalism has a dirty little habit. It makes too much, too fast. Goods pile up, money stagnates, and suddenly the whole machine threatens to seize. That’s the crisis. And the escape hatch? Geography. When Manchester’s mills glutted local markets in the 19th century, they didn’t slow down production—they exported their surplus to India and, while they were at it, dismantled India’s own textile industries. The contradiction at home was “fixed”… by making life worse somewhere else. The same logic drove European voyages across the Atlantic. Merchants drowning in debt conjured a solution out of stolen land, enslaved labor, and rivers of silver ripped from the Americas. One society’s “growth” was another’s catastrophe. Harvey calls this the spatial fix : capitalism avoids imploding by dumping its crises on someone else’s doorstep. Infrastructure serves the same function—railroads in colonies, highways across America, server farms in deserts—all built as sponges for surplus capital, ...