Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model, no one pays for it. The carbon the British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty- three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. Your helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon you are describing as inevitable because o your financial shell games, then two thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand answer possible."

The World Bank guys flinched at this. "Well," one of them said, "we don't se it that way."

Charlie said, "That's the trouble. You see the way the banking industry ses it, and they make money by manipulating money irrespective of effects in the real wold. You've spent a trillion dollars of the American taxpayers' money over the lifetime of the bank, and there's nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistance agriculture to ch crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and then you insist on austerity measures even though your actions shattered the economy. You order them to cut their social services to pay off their debts to you and your financial community investors, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That's your idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan and instead you've been the United Fruit Company.

p. 144

I have seldom seen the state of the world economy stated so succinctly or so eloquently.