Wealth & Money Quote by John Perkins

The casual bluntness of "These were big ones" is doing strategic work: it shrinks an entire geopolitical playbook into a shrug, as if the scale of the schemes is so routine it barely merits elaboration. John Perkins is speaking in the register of the insider-turned-whistleblower, and the sentence structure mirrors that posture. "Those companies would then go in" reads like inevitability, not choice; agency dissolves into process. The grammar is bureaucratic, the implication moral.

The surface narrative is infrastructure: electrical systems, ports, highways. The subtext is extraction. These projects sound like development until Perkins slides in the qualifying clause that punctures the PR balloon: they "basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families". "Basically" is a tell - a hedge that also dares you to deny the pattern. He isn't litigating edge cases; he's naming a default setting in which public-looking goods are engineered for private gain.

Context matters because "development" has long been a diplomatic brand as much as an economic one. Mega-projects carry a comforting imagery of modernization while quietly hardwiring political alliances: contracts for multinational firms, debt obligations for states, and logistical advantages for whoever controls trade routes and energy grids. Perkins frames inequality not as a side effect but as a design feature - infrastructure as a lever that concentrates power, not a ladder that broadens it. The line lands because it flips the hero story of progress into something colder: a map of who gets plugged in, and who stays in the dark.