John Perkins is one of the leading progressive voices in the U.S.A. He gained his greatest notoriety in 2005, after the publication of his smash best-selling book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
"Economic hit men," John Perkins writes, "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as Empire but one that has taken on terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization."
He has written several books since, describing how the "Corporatocracy" in collusion with the U.S. government and military, has built the shadowy, globalised empire and predatory capitalistic economic structure that keeps billions of people in poverty, and is leading to global environmental destruction. He runs a web-site, http://www.johnperkins.org/,
that he writes articles for, on current events, and a number of other interesting topics.
Before he decided to speak out about his life as an "economic hitman", he had spent many years working with tribes in the Amazonian rain-forest in Ecuador, whom he first met during his Peace Corps days in the late 1960s. He studied their cultures, and learned from their shamanic practioners, their ways of healing and advising their people. He led groups for many years to these tribal areas, many of whom were distinguished scientists and researchers, so that they could learn as well, what he had, of their cultures. One of our favourite books, here at A.P.R., that he wrote, The World Is As You Dream It, documents his work in Ecuador in the 1990s.
Through an interesting coincidence, your lead editor was able to get in contact with John, and he liked our work, and agreed to an interview with us. It is a great honour for us to have been able to talk with him, and we learned a great deal. What follows is a transcription of the audio interview, conducted by phone from here in Anchorage, with him in Seattle. This interview is about basic current events and was conducted three weeks ago. We will have a follow-up interview, at a later date, to ask him questions about his work in South America, and to share some concepts he has learned from the tribes there, which he feels would benefit us all. Below, is a link to the actual audio of the interview. Click on it, and then click on the file entitled, "01Track1.wma", if you wish to listen to it.
https://box742.bluehost.com:2083/frontend/bluehost/filemanager/index.html?dirselect=domainrootselect&domainselect=akprogressive.com&dir=%2Fhome4%2Fakprogre%2Fpublic_htmlAPR: Our first question is probably one you always get, but what exactly is an Economic Hitman, and what role did you play in that process, when you wrote your book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which was a huge best-seller. Some of the people listening probably haven’t read that, and so I guess we would need a quick summary about what that means.
JP: Well I think it’s fair to say Michael that we “Economic Hitmen” really have created the world’s first truly global empire without using the military, for the most part. The military sort of stands in the background. We do this in many different ways. However the most common is that we’ll identify a country that has resources our corporations covet, like oil. Then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one it’s sister organizations. And yet that money actually never goes to that country, instead it goes to our own corporations to build big infrastructure projects in that country, things like power plants and highways and industrial parks that benefit a few wealthy people, wealthy families, but don’t help the majority of the people at all, who really can’t afford much electricity, don’t drive cars, or can’t get jobs in industrial parks, because they don’t hire many people. Yet the citizens of that country are left holding a huge debt that they can’t repay ultimately. And so at some point, we Economic Hitmen go back and say “since you can’t repay your debt, vote with us on the next United Nations vote, or allow our corporations to go in and take your oil, or whatever other resources, without worrying about environmental damage, or social concerns. Or let us build a military base, or something along those lines.” And in the few cases where we fail, I mentioned in my book how I failed with the democratically elected president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldoz, and with Omar Torrijos, of Panama. In those cases, the “Jackals” [CIA, or other covert mercenary operatives, eds.] go in and either overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders. Both Roldoz of Ecuador and Torrijos of Panama were assassinated because I couldn’t bring them around, they would not be corrupted, they stood up to me, they would not be corrupted. And then in the few instances where the “Jackals” also failed, then we send in the military, and that’s what happened to Sadam Hussian in Iraq.
APR: That was going to be one of my questions, is that there are a number of theories out there as to what actually happened in Iraq that caused this country to invade it. One of them was that he [Saddam Hussein] was manipulating the oil market, creating instability in it, making Saudi Arabia unhappy, and other countries too, as well as the oil companies. And the other one was that the “neo-conservatives”, the other theory, was that they wanted to make Iraq a free-market paradise in the Middle East with no oversight or regulations, and to actually use it as a model, for what they wanted to do with other countries. Is that what you see as being responsible for what happened in Iraq?
JP: Well, I think all of that’s the case. And I talk in Confessions of an Economic Hitman about this amazing deal we put together in Saudi Arabia. We had this oil embargo levied against the United States by OPEC and as a result I was sent over to Saudi Arabia to make sure that would never happen again. We knew we had to bring Saudi around because it was the largest producer of oil, and really controlled OPEC. We struck this deal with the house of Saud, the royal family, whereby they agreed not to increase the price of oil any higher than the price our oil companies wanted it, and they agreed to keep the oil flowing, and they also agreed to only sell oil for dollars, which put the dollar in a much stronger position. And a number of other things, and we [the U.S.] agreed in turn to protect the house of Saud and keep it in power. After that, we [the U.S.] decided we should do the same thing with Sadaam Hussein, Iraq was the next largest producer of oil. But he wouldn’t buy into it. And there were others, two more of course, but that was the big one, why we first sent the troops in, because we couldn’t take him out, the Jackals couldn’t take him out, he was too careful, security was high, he had a lot of look-alike doubles which made it difficult. And then after his military was destroyed by the first Bush administration, we figured he be sufficiently chastised that he’d now come around. He didn’t, so the second Bush administration really sent in the forces and took him out of course, as we all know. Those are all factors, another important one though is that the U.S. industrial complex likes wars, because it makes a lot of money off wars. Vietnam was long gone, we’d been looking for another war for awhile. It’s interesting that in the film South of the Border, in an interview with Kirchner, the former president of Argentina, he tells Oliver Stone, that Bush Jr. admitted to him that the U.S. economy is based on war.
APR: Yeah, that’s one thing that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out about in 1967, one year before to the day he was killed. And that’s one thing a lot of progressive people have wondered, do you think that the corporatocracy, the military industrial complex, those entities we all know run things, have they actually been responsible for people like MLK’s, RFK’s, assassinations, or even Paul Wellstone, the progressive senator from Minnesota who was killed in a plane crash in 2002?
JP: I have no doubt about it. I recently wrote about that in Tikkun magazine, and it’s been on my website, johnperkins.org, in fact I encourage your listeners to go to my website and subscribe to my newsletter, also Facebook and Twitter me at Economic_Hitman, because I send things out about current events all the time. Right now alot is focusing on Egypt and the Middle East.
You know it’s always been interesting that most of us know that President Eisenhower in his farewell address as president, warned about the military industrial complex. And you have to ask yourself, why didn’t he ever mention this when he was president and had the power to do something? Why didn’t he ever speak about it again? And the answer is pretty obvious, he knew he could get away with it once, but before that and after that, he couldn’t do it. So the next president comes along, Kennedy, the only president in my lifetime who wasn’t financed by big corporations, his campaign was financed primarily by his father. And he went after U.S. Steel in a big way, and U.S. Steel was the backbone of the U.S. economy in those days. And the president of U.S. Steel at the time absolutely hated Kennedy, and turned a lot of the business community against him. At the same time, the CIA and Pentagon became incensed at Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis when they wanted us to take out the missiles, rather than reach an accord with Khrushchev, and so Kennedy was taken out. And I have no doubt that the CIA was deeply involved in his assassination. There’s a new book out called JFK and the Unthinkable that goes into a tremendous amount of detail about that, very, very well covered. Then Robert Kennedy tried to follow in his footsteps, he was taken out, MLK, yes, I think that anyone who really speaks out, and has power, and has immediate impact on people in terms of rallying them and exposing the truth is in a very dangerous position, and I think since that time, every U.S. president has been very aware of that.
And then of course, there was the character assassination of Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Linda Tripp. Linda Tripp was a real economic hitwoman, she’d come out of the Pentagon, she’d come out of the Bush Administration, the first Bush Administration. And we learned from all that, today, you don’t have to take a president out with a bullet, you can do it by assassinating his character. And we’ve seen shots fired across the bow of Obama with these questions, is he really American, was he born in Indonesia, you know, is he a Muslim, these questions are warnings to him. That if he steps out of line, he can be taken down too, and it doesn’t have to be with a bullet anymore.
APR: Right. That’s a very good point. Maybe we should move on to the economic crisis, I think that has a direct impact on what’s happening in the Middle East right now and one will kind of lead into the other. So, most people I think, assume that the economic crisis that started in 2007 was a result of the “housing bubble” where real estate became overvalued, and subprime loans, risky loans, were let out and then repackaged and sold as really confusing derivatives and securities, which nobody really understands. And that it basically was caused by unregulated banking and financial industry practices. But I know you speak a lot about this and have a better picture about what actually happened.
JP: Well certainly deregulation played a big role in it. When I was in business school in the late 1960s, I was taught that we’d never have another depression like we had in the 1930s because the regulations were in place to protect us. And I think that was true but they went down. The Glass-Steagall that was taken out under Clinton, for example, but there’s a whole series. And that had an impact. But the greater impact, is that we’ve been in a phase that I call “Predatory Capitalism”. I wrote extensively about this in Hoodwinked. It really got underway in the 1970s when I was an economic hitman, but it caught on in a big way in the U.S. when Reagan came in the 1980s, and Thatcher in England. And they all embraced the theories of Milton Friedman, from the Chicago School of Economics. And his guiding principles, there’s three really for business. They say the only responsibility of business is to maximise profits. Regardless of everything else. Regardless of social and environmental costs, disregard all that. The second principle is that business shouldn’t be regulated, or at least, minimise all regulations on business. And the third one is that everything should be run by private business, privatise the schools, the jails, and the military as we’re seeing happening in Afghanistan today. And beginning in the 1970s, these principles were adopted by every U.S. president since, Democrat and Republican alike, and they’ve created a failed global economic system, an economic system, where less than five percent of us who live in the U.S. consume almost 30 percent of the World’s resources. That’s not a viable model, not something you can pass on to India, or Africa, or Latin America. You can’t do it, it would take five to six planets to make that happen. So there is a huge underlying fallacy to the system. We need to come up with a different approach to our economics, we need to move out of this period of what I call “predatory capitalism”, into a form that is much more compassionate and into a form that says business can make profits and give a decent rate of return to their investors, but let’s do so within the context of creating a sustainable, just, and peaceful World. Let’s understand that businesses are here to serve us the people, not just a few wealthy investors.
JP: Unless things change, there will be big problems. There are already some big problems, half the World is starving to death, or on the verge of starvation. Doomsday has come to three billion people on this planet. And we need to recognize and understand that, it’s a huge problem for us. We need to understand that our children and grandchildren can not inherit a World we would want to see them inherit, unless every child on this planet inherits that World. And this is new, it used to be that we only needed to worry about Alaska, or people in Alaska, Washington State, if you live there, as I do. Or the United States. But today we have to understand that we are an incredibly interdependent World, and we’re truly living on a fragile space station. But unlike a space station our astronauts build, this one doesn’t have any shuttles. We’re stuck on it, we can’t get off, we’ve got to do something and realise that we are very well integrated. And that the only way we’re going to have Homeland Security, anywhere, is when we recognise the the whole World is our Homeland. It isn’t Alaska, it isn’t Washington State, it isn’t the United States, it’s the whole World. And we better catch on to that, and I think we are. I’ve seen tremendous changes in the six years since Confessions published, and I’ve been out on the road, almost constantly, in the United States, China, Latin America, Iceland, and many other places. I’ve seen a real change in consciousness in these six years, and six years is a pretty short time really. It may seem long to you or me, but it’s really a short time in historical terms.
APR: That’s great, because we all need to hear good news, because it seems like most of the what we hear is bad. I think we should talk about Egypt, and the significance of that, and to the global economic picture and the mutant form of Capitalism, the predatory Capitalism you’ve been talking about. Are these popular uprisings in Tunisia, and Egypt, and then possible ones to come, are they a direct response to this sort of predatory Capitalistic structure?
And we’re really hearing the voice of the people. At the same time, now we’re certainly seeing a tremendous amount of jockeying going on, the Economic Hitmen are in Egypt big-time, and they’re trying to get Vice President Suleiman to take over, and we have to remember, he was head of the Secret Service, in Egypt. He had and still has very close ties with the CIA, very close ties with the Israelis and Mossad, and he’s not what the people want, but I’m sure he’s what the Corporatocracy wants. And certainly what the Israeli government wants, and so there’s a struggle going on, and once you overthrow a dictator, you’ve got an amazing vacuum, and no matter where you are, you never know what’s going to happen. And of course, the United States and Israel do not want to see the Moslem Brotherhood take over. And I think the people don’t want to see Vice President Suleiman take over. So it’s very interesting, what’s going on there right now.
JP: It’s very very difficult to say what could happen. I wish I had a crystal ball that would tell me that, but I don’t. We really don’t know. The one model we have to base this on is Iran, where you went from a very brutal CIA-supported dictator, the Shah, to this regime that has basically been run by the Mullahs, and it has not been a particularly good experience for most Iranians, or anyone else. On the other hand, I think probably Iranians under the Mullahs are a lot better off than the Iraqis under the U.S. military occupation. And that plays a major factor, countries in the Middle East have seen how Iraq has gone from what they had under Sadaam Hussein, nobody can deny he was not a good leader. But to much, much worse, under U.S. occupation. On the other hand, Iran with it’s Mullahs, has done better than Iraq. And that certainly is sending a message in the Middle East. It’s very unfortunate, I think, that we’ve put ourselves in this position. Rather to defend good presidents, democratically elected presidents, like Mossadegh in Iran, who we basically overthrew in the early 1950s. And who was then replaced by the Shah, and who was then replaced by the Mullahs. Rather than supporting those really good movements, we’ve stepped in and replaced them with people who would keep the oil companies really happy, and our big corporations happy. And in the process, we’ve put ourselves in the position of being looked at by much of the World as a very materialistic power. It’s really unfortunate, and we have to do everything we can to turn that around, and truly lead the World into a democratic process. And I think it’s up to us, the American people, to insist on that happening.
APR: Do you think that can actually happen in this country? It just seems to us, that the corporate media being so powerful, and voices like yours and Noam Chomsky’s totally excluded from any participation in the mass media, it just seems so difficult.
JP: That depends on how you define the mass media Michael. You know, if you talk about the mass media as being NBC and CBS and Fox, and CNN, then, you’re right. But I think a great deal of the World now sees that as irrelevant. I know most young people that I talk to, I have great hope from the young people, when I travel around to colleges. They don’t even pay much attention to that media, they get most of their information off the internet. And you know, the power of the internet, the power of media like yours, like what you’re doing right here, is very very strong today. Confessions has sold over a million copies. And I have a number of other books out there. So Noam Chomsky is heard, around the World, and he may not be heard on Good Morning America, but he is heard around the World, and all of these voices, are a great hope, and the blogging that’s going on, and the alternative media, and the streaming. I can talk to a small radio station someplace in Arizona, and can get questions texted in to me from South Africa, and the Phillipines, and Indonesia. And that happens, it’s quite remarkable today, how we have created this alternative media.
APR: You’re absolutely right about that, I’m sure your interview today is going to be heard by people all over the country, and probably all over the World, at some point. I really thank you John, it has been a great honour talking with you, we look upon you as one of the most prominent progressive voices in the country, and we wish you all the best in your endeavours. We really encourage all our readers to visit your website, johnperkins.org. Because there are some great things on there, and hopefully we’ll have the pleasure of talking with you again at some point.
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