Does the world's economic system create deprivation and devastation?

Yes, it's ruthlessly exploitative of developing countries

http://forums.civfanatics.com/member.php?u=173528 says:

in the last 30-40 years, the American government, through 3 critical branches:

1. The Federal Reserve*
2. The IMF - International Monetary Fund
3. The World Bank

through these branches, an economic crusade has swept the globe. The (so-called) Free Market. it is an Economic Crusade.and they mean to take over the world with it. by any means necessary.(really, what it means is, you change the laws of your nation to makeit FREE for the corporate west to come in and exploit you viciously,and WE'LL give you this huge package of Aid you desperately needbecause your country just had a horrible revolution, or got hit by atsunami, or suffered some other collapse)

I don't want to go into the details, you can see the results of 'Globalization' right here:
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

everything. everything in this world, today, is about economics. and wehave created a vastly, vastly, inequal system which also happens to betotally unsustainable in the long run.

we need to get BACK to Keynesian Economics. the Economic Philosophythat brought us out of the Great Depression and shaped America into themost powerful nation on the planet.


in short, it's all about KEYNES versus FRIEDMAN. two competing forms ofCapitalism... if you're with Friedman, then you're with FOX News...

you're also with companies like Bechtel, who decided to buy up all thewater rights in Bolivia after they'd had a revolution, and chargepeople for their own basic resources. when the Bolivians startedcollecting rainwater, Bechtel bought that, and made it illegal tocollect rainwater. shortly after this there was trouble in the streets.

and that's just one small example of where 'The Free Market' has taken us. 

* More on the Federal Reserve:
This story of the Federal Reserve, it goes right back to the foundingof the United States. from the beginning, Alexander Hamilton (who waswell connected with the nobility of England) wanted to create a FederalReserve bank.

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others were against it. Adams saw aFederal Bank on the English model as tantamount to slavery... thisstruggle from some quarters to create the Fed was something that wenton for the first 130 or so years of the American history.

finally, Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve... and there aresome who claim he later regretted it as the worst decision of his life.not sure about that.

however, Woodrow Wilson did write these two things:

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Oursystem of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation,therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men ...[W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completelycontrolled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longera government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction andthe vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and theduress of small groups of dominant men.

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided tome privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in thefield of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraidof something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized,so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, thatthey had better not speak above their breath when they speak incondemnation of it.

these are from a book Wilson wrote called The New Freedom

and this is a quote from a Wikipedia page: "Two kinds of people seem toexist: the ones that read a conspiracy theory and accept it withoutresearch and the ones that read it and say it's false without research.The first act out of spite for the authorities while the second act outof spite for conspiracy theories. I just ask you to be trully impartialon this matter."

• By Nicolas Holzapfel
• Dec. 20, 2009