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In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions
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.
*****
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our firehouse studio. Welcome to
Democracy Now!
JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. Its great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Its 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 weve been very successful.
Weve built the largest 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, Mossadeghs
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 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 government.
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 loanlet's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuadorand
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 infrastructurea 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 couldnt possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes
over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it
really cant 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 your 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 theyve
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. Its 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 the subject, 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, its 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, Im 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 Id 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 crashdepression; 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 Arabianew cities, new infrastructurewhich weve done. And the House
of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits
to us, which theyve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep
the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which weve done,
which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place.
And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that 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 couldnt 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 weve obviously done in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how Torrijos died?
JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. Omar Torrijos 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
Corporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was
Casper Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and thats an interesting
storyhow 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 thats 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 weve 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.
*****
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."
But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us now in our
Firehouse studios.
* John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he 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 new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
source:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8171.htm
===
-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
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