[Shadow_Group] New Book: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"

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>From http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251>
Democracy Now - Tuesday, November 9th, 2004

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. [includes rush
transcript] 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 Rolds, 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 Rolds 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.

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.
       



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