Confessions of an Economic Hitman! What a awesome story!

[Joanne98]

Read the transcript at Democracy NOW. This guy is a whistleblower worth his weight in gold.

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 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, 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 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.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251

[cthrumatrix]

1. I read it as well...should be required reading....the media is ignoring

[Joanne98]

5. I'm surprised he even got it published at all.

[RBHam]

2. Replace "economic" with "media" and "cultural"...

It's how the "Empire" has psy-opped the American populace for years...

bread and circuses, invented crises, increasing control of liberty...



"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."

[stray cat]

3. I'm thinking about getting it. I guess you would advise it?

[Joanne98]

4. Yeah! I haven't read it yet but I watched him on booknotes

And I read the interview. This guy is going to cause a real stir. Especiallt for the Bush/Saud House of corruption. He states why we really invaded Iraq. It's real interesting.

[cthrumatrix]

6. notice you don't see him on the MSM - it was a #1 at Amazon

[Joanne98]

7. I know! He's got guts too. I hope he stays alive.

[catzies]

8. Between this and the BBC's "Power of Nightmares," I know all I want to

know. I don't want to know any more.

I miss ignorance. I was so, well, blissful.

[Joanne98]

10. HA! I know how you feel. We've taken the red pill. No going back.

[rman]

11. come on, you don't want to get stuck in the rabit hole

there's only one way to go: all the way down the hole.

[Joanne98]

12. I'm stuck in the matrix. No holes here.

[rman]

18. hang around, we'll get you out

-

[Joanne98]

9. The gold bugs are talking about this book.........

snip>

And maybe it will! A book by John Perkins entitled "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" explains how it is done. "My real job was deal-making," he explains. "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 ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent 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 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."

And there is no reason to think that it is not working here either. I can almost hear The Voices On The Other End Of The Phone (TVOTOEOTP) explaining how it works to Wall Street money managers. "Borrow money from the banks and buy stocks and bonds with it, or we'll sic Eliot Spitzer on you, or the SEC, or any of thousands of government agents, to hound you until you die or you end up like The Mogambo, babbling to yourself and wiping spittle off of your chin. And nobody wants that." Ergo, debt gets bigger, the stock market goes up, and everybody is happy. Or are they?

http://www.321gold.com/editorials/daughty/daughty012605.html

[rman]

17. that's interesting

does this:

"The Federal Reserve, as is their wont, stepped back into the business of providing unholy amounts of liquidity last week, and increased Total Fed Credit (the ultimate in money-from-thin-air, because it gets multiplied by the banks themselves, via the fractional-reserve method) by another $2.6 billion, ..."

mean that large amounts of money are being poored into the US economy?

[justiceischeap]

13. I just had my local library order this

Should have it in a couple of weeks.

[Joanne98]

14. Good for you. Don't ya love libraries?

[Nadienne]

15. I ordered it last week.

I was hoping it would get here today. Maybe tomorrow. (Crossing my fingers.) I'm really looking forward to reading it!

[Joanne98]

16. I can't wait either.

[AirAmFan]

19. amazon.com has a short EXCERPT plus reviews at URL

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576753018/002-6884969-9012845

[paineinthearse]

20. Search CGCS

I started a similar thread there a while back that blossemed with very interesting comments.