$$$$ Confessions of an economic hit-man $ $ $ $

A recent BOOK tells how OLIGARCHS who run "WORLD BANK and some top US and Brit corporations ASSASSINATED two THIRD WORLD PRESIDENTS WHO wouldn't play BALL with the BIG MONEY/ CORPORATIONS. This may seem hard to swallow, but we, as Americans, must not be willfully ignorant! THIS GUY worked for them, he knows where the bones are buried, he was one of the people who slipped NOOSES around third world necks, and PRESSURED the top guys abroad. HE SAW who refused to play ball and how even though they were the presidents, they were assassinated immediately!ALL foreign rulers know what USA will do if the local president doesn't play ball with the demands of Western oligarchs, corporations, banks.

Amy Goodman interviews John Perkins

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization* to
Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

(*GLOBALIZATION is when transnational corporations can move to any place on globe, unrestricted by tariffs, laws, and do what they will with foreign legislators, presidents. THERE IS a hierarchy of POWER involved, similar to NAZIs or any military group where all power descended from one man. THE DESPOT. And there is no democracy, no input from other minds. THE RICHEST man is on top of the pile and decides all policy. WHen you realize that the PEOPLE WHO PUT CLINTON in power killed 200 PEOPLE  who threatened his name, fame and "honor", you will see that these guys on HIGH play very dirty polo.)

John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981, worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described "economic hit man." He is the author of the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Available at abebooks.com for a buck.

We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies. John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title,"Conscience of an Economic Hit Men."

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos,president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion,my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."

================

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our Firehouse studio.Welcome to
Democracy Now!

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It's great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Okay, explain this
term,"economic hit man," e.h.m., as you call it.

JOHN PERKINS: Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do
is to build up the American empire. To bring -- to create situations where
as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations,
and our government, and in fact we've been very successful. We've built thel
argest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50
years since World War II with very little military might, actually.
It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last
resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been
built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through
fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic
hit men. I was very much a part of that.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you become one? Who did you work for?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was initially recruited while I was in business school
back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's
largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for
private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early
1950's, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew of government
of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh's government who was
Time's magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this
without any bloodshed -- well, there was a little bloodshed, but no
military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and the USA replaced
Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea
of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn't have to worry about
the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that
was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he
been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very
embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations
like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me
and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering
firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no
connection with the overnment.

AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Explain the company you worked for.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas.
T.Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became
its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But
my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge
loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay.

One of the conditions of the loan ­let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia
or Ecuador & this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a
U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure ­a Halliburton
or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build
an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve
just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor
people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt
that they couldn't possibly repay.

A country today like Ecuador owes over 50% of its national budget just to pay down
its debt. And it  really can't do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we
want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, Look, you're not able to repay your
debts, therefore give our oil companies our Amazon rain forest, which are
filled with oil." And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain
forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they've accumulated all
this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United
States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they
basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about
it. It's a huge empire. It's been  extremely successful.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins, author of Confessions of an
Economic Hit Man. You say because of bribes and other reason you didn't
write this book for a long time. What do you mean? Who tried to bribe
you, or who -- what are the bribes you accepted?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I accepted a half a million dollar bribe in the nineties
not to write the book.

AMY GOODMAN: From?

JOHN PERKINS: From a major construction engineering company.

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

JOHN PERKINS: Legally speaking, it wasn't -- Stoner-Webster. Legally
speaking it wasn't a bribe, it was -- I was being paid as a consultant. This
is all very legal. But I essentially did nothing. It was a very
understood,as I explained in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that it was
-- I was -- it was understood when I accepted this money as a consultant to
them I wouldn't have to do much work, but I mustn't write any books about
thes ubject, which they were aware that I was in the process of writing this
book, which at the time I called "Conscience of an Economic Hit Man."
And I have to tell you, Amy, that, you know, it's an extraordinary story
from the standpoint of -- It's almost James Bondish, truly, and I mean--

AMY GOODMAN: Well that's certainly how the book reads.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, and it was, you know? And when the National Security
Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests.
They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the
strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over. I come
from a very old New England family, Calvinist, steeped in amazingly
strong moral values. I think I, you know, I'm a good person overall, and I
think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of
sex, money and power can seduce people, because I certainly was seduced.
And if I
hadn't lived this life as an economic hit man, I think I'd have a hard time
believing that anybody does these things. And that's why I wrote the book,
because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation
understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is
about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will
demand change.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. In your book, you talk about
how you helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of
dollars of Saudi Arabian petrol dollars back into the U.S. economy, and that
further cemented the intimate relationship between the House of Saud and
successive U.S. administrations. Explain.

JOHN PERKINS: Yes, it was a fascinating time. I remember well, you're
probably too young to remember, but I remember well in the early seventies
how OPEC exercised this power it had, and cut back on oil supplies. We
had cars lined up at gas stations. The country was afraid that it was
facing another 1929-type of crash­ depression; and this was unacceptable.
So, they -- the Treasury Department hired me and a few other economic hit
men. We went to Saudi Arabia. We --

AMY GOODMAN: You're actually called economic hit men --e.h.m.'s?

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves.
Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. It was
tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you
know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew
Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the
situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud
agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and
invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would
use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build
Saudi Arabia new cities, new infrastructure which we've done. And the House of
Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to
us, which they've done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the
House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we've done, which is
one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place.

In Iraq we tried to implement the same policy which was so successful in Saudi
Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in
this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are
C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or
revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations, or try to.
In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein.
He had -- His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn't get
through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and
the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who
are sent in to die and kill, which is what we've obviously done in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how Torrijos died?

JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama  had
signed the Canal Treaty with Carter much -- and, you know, it passed our
congress by only one vote. It was a highly contended issue. And Torrijos
then also went ahead and negotiated with the Japanese to build a sea-level
canal. The Japanese wanted to finance and construct a sea-level canal in
Panama. Torrijos talked to them about this which very much upset Bechtel
orporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was Casper
Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and that's an interesting story how
that actually happened), when he lost the election, and Reagan came in and
Schultz came in as Secretary of State from Bechtel, and Weinberger came from
Bechtel to be Secretary of Defense, they were extremely angry at Torrijos -- tried to get him to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and not to talk to the Japanese. He adamantly refused. He was a very
principled man. He had his problem, but he was a very principled man. He was
an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was
connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which -- I was there. I
had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed.
I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane
exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There's no question in my
mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most -- many Latin American
investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard
about that in our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where -- when did your change your heart happen?

JOHN PERKINS: I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced.
The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for
me. And, of course, I was doing things I was being patted on the back for.
I was chief economist. I was doing things that Robert McNamara liked and so
on.

AMY GOODMAN: How closely did you work with the World Bank?

JOHN PERKINS: Very, very closely with the World Bank. The World Bank
provides most of the money that's used by economic hit men, it and the
I.M.F. But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had
to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the
economic hit men are doing. And the only way that we're going to feel
secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about
ourselves is if we use these systems we've put into place to create
positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that. I believe
the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were
originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of
the world. Help -- genuinely help poor people. There are twenty-four
thousand people starving to death every day. We can change that.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, I want to thank you very much for being with
us. John Perkins' book is called, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251 THAT IS the radio show!

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