The radio interview with John Perkins under the title of "Confessions of an Economic Hitman," will prompt you to look into a number of the points he presents as facts, such as the murder of a President of Panama, and how Ecuador was entrapped.
LEESBURG, Nov. 18 (EIRNS)--THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE FOLLOWING "BOMBSHELL" INTERVIEW WITH JOHN PERKINS, ON HIS NEW BOOK, {CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HITMAN: How The U.S. Uses Globalization To Cheat Poor Countries Out Of Trillions}, provide leads for follow-up on such acts as the murder of a President of Panama (Omar Torrijo), and how Ecuador was entrapped into debt, Lyndon LaRouche commented today. {EIR} has ordered the book, which promises explosive revelations about how the Synarchist utopian financiers have used the World Bank, the IMF, and a network of "private" financier hitman to rape and ruin whole nations, going back to when the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, Kermit, orchestrated the overthrow of the nationalist Mossadegh government of Iran in 1953. The Nov. 9 interview with Perkins by Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now!" follows here:
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 tak[ing] 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 Man." 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.
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, EHM, 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 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 1950s,
Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the
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 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 CIA 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 CIA and the
NSA 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 50
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,
and this country would then have to give 90% 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 your 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 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 reasons, 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 -- Stone-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,
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
funnelled 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
-- EHMs?
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we
called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called
ourselves EHMs. 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. 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 CIA-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. 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
that's 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 problems, 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 CIA 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 IMF. 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 24,000 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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