Library:Confessions of an Economic Hitman (documentary)

Confessions of an Economic Hitman (documentary)
Author	John Perkins
First published	2009
Type	Transcript
Source	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWuAct1BxHU

Foreword by ProleWiki

This is a transcript of a video featuring interviews of John Perkins, former chief economist for Chas T. Main Inc. and author of the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. This transcript comes from a short documentary with the same title.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Introduction

[Intro text featuring a quotation: "There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt. - John Adams, 1735-1826."]

John Perkins: We economic hit men really have been the ones responsible for creating this first truly global empire. And we work many different ways, but perhaps the most common is that we will identify a country that has resources our corporations covet—like oil—and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations.

But the money never actually goes to the country; instead, it goes to our big corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, industrial parks, ports—things that benefit a few rich people in that country, in addition to our corporations, but really don't help the majority of the people at all. However, those people—the whole country—are left holding a huge debt. It's such a big debt they can't repay, and that's part of the plan, that they can't repay it.

And so at some point, we economic hit men go back to them and say, "Listen, you owe a lot of money; you can't pay your debt. So, sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, allow us to build a military base in your country," or "send troops in support of ours to someplace in the world" like Iraq, or "vote with us on the next U.N. vote" to have their electric utility company privatized and their water and sewage system privatized and sold to U.S. corporations or other multinational corporations.

So there is a whole mushrooming thing, and it's so typical of the way the IMF and the World Bank work: you put a country in debt—and in such a big debt it can't pay it—and then you offer to refinance that debt and pay even more interest. And you demand this quid pro quo, which you call "conditionality" or "good governance." Which means, basically, that they've got to sell off their resources, including many of their social services, their utility companies, their school systems, sometimes, their penal systems, their insurance systems, to foreign corporations. So it's a double, triple, quadruple whammy.

Iran, 1953

[Title card: Iran, 1953]

Perkins: The precedent for economic hit men really began back in the early '50s, when democratically elected Mossadegh was elected in Iran. He was considered to be the hope for democracy in the Middle East and around the world; he was Time magazine's Man of the Year.

But one of the things that he'd run on—and began to implement—was the idea that foreign oil companies needed to pay the Iranian people a lot more for the oil that they were taking out of Iran. The Iranian people should benefit from their own oil—strange policy!

We didn't like that, of course. But we were afraid to do what we normally were doing, which was to send in the military.

Instead, we sent in one CIA agent: Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's relative.

And Kermit went in with a few million dollars and was very, very effective and efficient, and in a short amount of time, he managed to get Mossadegh overthrown and brought in the Shah of Iran to replace him, who always was favorable to oil. And it was extremely effective.

[Old newsreel voiceover: "Mobs overflow Tehran. Army officers shout that Mossadegh has surrendered, and his regime as virtual dictator of Iran is ended. Pictures of the Shah are paraded through the streets as sentiment reverses; the Shah is welcomed home."]

Perkins: So back here in the United States, in Washington, people looked around and said, "Wow, that was easy and cheap." So this established a whole new way of manipulating countries, of creating empire. The only problem with Roosevelt was that he was a card-carrying CIA agent, and had he been caught, the ramifications could have been pretty serious. So very quickly at that point, the decision was made to use private consultants, to channel the money through the World Bank or the IMF or one of the other such agencies, to bring in people like me who worked for private companies so that if we got caught, there would be no governmental ramifications.

Guatemala, 1954

[Title card: Guatemala, 1954]

Perkins: When Arbenz became president of Guatemala, the country was very much under the thumb of United Fruit Company, the big international corporations. And Arbenz ran on this ticket that said, you know, "We want to give the land back to the people." And once he took power, he was implementing policies that would do exactly that—give land rights back to the people. United Fruit didn't like that very much, and so they hired a public relations firm, launched a huge campaign in the United States to convince the United States, the people, the citizens of the United States, the press of the United States, and the Congress of the United States that Arbenz was a Soviet puppet, and that if we allowed him to stay in power, the Soviets would have a foothold in this hemisphere. At that point in time, that was a huge fear on everybody's mind—the Red Terror, the Communist Terror. And so, to make a long story short, out of this public relations campaign came a commitment on the part of the CIA and the military to take this man out. And in fact, we did. We sent in planes, we sent in soldiers, we sent in jackals—we sent everything in to take him out, and did take him out.

And as soon as he was removed from office, the new guy that took over after him basically reinstated everything to the big international corporations, including United Fruit.

Ecuador, 1981

[Title card: Ecuador, 1981]

Perkins: Ecuador for many years had been ruled by pro-U.S. dictators, often relatively brutal. Then it was decided that they were going to have a truly democratic election. Jaime Roldós ran for office, and his main goal, he said, as president, would be to make sure that Ecuador's resources were used to help the people.

And he won. Overwhelmingly—by more votes than anybody that ever won anything in Ecuador—and he began to implement these policies to make sure that the profits from oil went to help the people.

Well, we didn't like that in the United States. I was sent down as one of several economic hit men to change Roldós, to corrupt him, to bring him around—to let him know, you know, "Okay, you can get very rich, you and your family, if you play our game. But if you continue to try to keep these policies you've promised, you're going to go." He wouldn't listen. He was assassinated.

As soon as the plane crashed, the whole area was cordoned off. The only people allowed in were U.S. military from a nearby base and some of the Ecuadorian military.

When an investigation was launched, two of the key witnesses died in car accidents before they had a chance to testify.

A lot of very, very strange things went on around the assassination of Jaime Roldós.

I, like most people who really looked at this case, have absolutely no doubt that it was an assassination. And of course, in my position as an economic hitman, I was always expecting something to happen to Jaime—whether it be a coup or assassination, I wasn't sure—but that he would be taken down, because he was not being corrupted; he would not allow himself to be corrupted the way we wanted to corrupt him.

Panama, 1981

[Title card: Panama, 1981]

Perkins: Omar Torrijos, president of Panama, was, you know, one of my favorite people. I really, really liked him. He was very charismatic; he was a guy who really wanted to help his country. And when I tried to bribe him or corrupt him, he said, "Look, John,"—he called me Juanito—he said, "Look, Juanito, I don't need the money. What I really need is for my country to be treated fairly. I need for the United States to repay the debts that you owe my people for all the destruction you've done here. I need to be in a position where I can help other Latin American countries win their independence and be free of this terrible presence from the north—you people are exploiting us so badly. I need to have the Panama Canal back in the hands of the Panamanian people. That's what I want." And, so, "Leave me alone; don't try to bribe me."

It was 1981, and in May, Jaime Roldós was assassinated.

And Omar was very aware of this. Torrijos got his family together and said, "I'm probably next, but it's okay, because I've done what I came here to do. I renegotiated the canal; the canal will now be in our hands."—He had just finished negotiating the treaty with Jimmy Carter.

In June of that same year, just a couple of months later, he also went down in an airplane crash, which there is no question was executed by CIA-sponsored jackals.

There is a tremendous amount of evidence that one of Torrijos's security guards handed him, at the last moment as he was getting on the plane, a tape recorder—a small tape recorder that contained a bomb.

Venezuela, 2002

[Title card: Venezuela, 2002]

Perkins: It is interesting to me how this system has continued pretty much the same way for years and years and years, except the economic hit men have got better and better and better.

Then we come up with, very recently, what happened in Venezuela.

In 1998, Hugo Chávez gets elected president, following a long line of presidents who had been very corrupt and basically destroyed the economy of the country.

And Chávez was elected amidst all that. Chávez stood up to the United States, and he's done it primarily by demanding that Venezuelan oil be used to help the Venezuelan people.

Well, we didn't like that in the United States. So, in 2002, the coup was staged—which, there is no question in my mind and most other people's minds, that the CIA was behind that coup.

The way that that coup was fomented was very reflective of what Kermit Roosevelt had done in Iran, of paying people to go out into the streets to riot, to protest, to say, "This Chávez is very unpopular."

You know, if you can get a few thousand people to do that, television can make it look like it's the whole country, and things start to mushroom. Except in the case of Chávez, he was smart enough, and the people were so strongly behind him, that they overcame it, which was a phenomenal moment in the history of Latin America.

Iraq, 2003

[Title card: Iraq, 2003]

Perkins: Iraq actually is a perfect example of the way the whole system works.

So, we economic hit men are the first line of defense. We go in, we try to corrupt governments and get them to accept these huge loans, which we then use as leverage to basically own them. If we fail—as I failed in Panama with Omar Torrijos and in Ecuador with Jaime Roldós, men who refused to be corrupted—then the second line of defense is we send in the jackals, and the jackals either overthrow governments or they assassinate. And once that happens and a new government comes in, boy, it's going to toe the line, because the new president knows what'll happen if he doesn't.

In the case of Iraq, both of those things failed. Economic hit men were not able to get through to Saddam Hussein. We tried very hard; we tried to get him to accept a deal very similar to what the House of Saud had accepted in Saudi Arabia, but he wouldn't accept it.

And so, the jackals went in to take him out; they couldn't do it. His security was very good. After all, he had one time worked for the CIA; he'd been hired to assassinate a former president of Iraq and failed, but he knew the system.

So, in '91, we send in the troops and we take out the Iraqi military. So we assume at that point that Saddam Hussein is going to come around. We could have taken him out, of course, at that time, but we didn't want to. He's the kind of strong man we like; he controls his people. We thought he could control the Kurds, keep the Iranians in their border, and keep pumping oil for us. And that once we took out his military, now he's going to come around. So the economic hit men go back in in the '90s, without success. If they'd had success, he'd still be running a country; we'd be selling him all the fighter jets he wants and everything else he wants. But they couldn't—they didn't have success. The jackals couldn't take him out again. So we sent the military in once again, and this time we did the complete job and took him out. And in the process, we created for ourselves some very, very lucrative construction deals; we had to reconstruct a country that we essentially destroyed, which is a pretty good deal if you own construction companies—big ones.

So, you know, Iraq shows the three stages: the economic hit men failed there, the jackals failed there, and as a final measure—the military goes in.

In that way, we've really created an empire, but we've done it very, very subtly; it's clandestine. All the empires of the past were built on the military, and everybody knew they were building them. So the British knew they were building them, the French, the Germans, the Romans, the Greeks, and they were proud of it. And they always had some excuse, like spreading civilization, spreading some religion, something like that. But they knew they were doing it. We don't. The majority of the people in the United States have no idea that we're living off the benefits of this clandestine empire, that today there's more slavery in the world than ever before.

And then you have to ask yourself: Well, if it's an empire, then who's the emperor? Obviously, our presidents of the United States are not emperors. An emperor is someone who's not elected, doesn't serve a limited term, and doesn't report to anyone, essentially. So you can't classify a president that way. But we do have what I consider to be the equivalent of the emperor, and it's what I call the corporatocracy.

Corporatocracy

[Title card: Corporatocracy]

Perkins: The corporatocracy is this group of individuals who run our biggest corporations, and they really act as the emperor of this empire. They control our media, either through direct ownership or advertising. They control most of our politicians because they finance their campaigns, either through their corporations or through personal contributions that come out of the corporations. They're not elected and they don't serve a limited term; they don't report to anybody.

And at the very top of the corporatocracy, you really can't tell whether a person's working for a private corporation or the government, because they're always moving back and forth. So, you know, you've got a guy who one moment is the president of a big construction company like Halliburton, and the next moment he's Vice President of the United States, or the president, who was in the oil business.

And this is true whether you get Democrats or Republicans in office—you have them moving back and forth through the revolving door.

And, in a way, our government is invisible a lot of the time, and its policies are carried out by our corporations on one level or another. And then again, the policies of the government are basically forged by the corporatocracy and then presented to the government and they become government policy.

So, it's an incredibly cozy relationship. This isn't a conspiracy theory type of thing; these people don't have to get together and plot to do things. They all basically work under one primary assumption, and that is that they must maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs.

Globalization

Voiceover: This process of manipulation by the corporatocracy through the use of debt, bribery, and political overthrow is called globalization.

Just as the Federal Reserve keeps the American public in a position of indentured servitude through perpetual debt, inflation, and interest, the World Bank and IMF serve this role on a global scale.

The basic scam is simple: put a country in debt—either by its own indiscretion or through corrupting the leader of that country—then impose "conditionalities" or "structural adjustment policies," often consisting of the following:

Currency devaluation: When the value of a currency drops, so does everything valued in it. This makes indigenous resources available to predator countries at a fraction of their worth.

Large funding cuts for social programs: These usually include education and healthcare, compromising the well-being and integrity of the society, leaving the public vulnerable to exploitation.

Privatization of state-owned enterprises: This means that socially important systems can be purchased and regulated by foreign corporations for profit. For example, in 1999, the World Bank insisted that the Bolivian government sell the public water system of its third-largest city to a subsidiary of the U.S. corporation Bechtel. As soon as this occurred, water bills for the already impoverished local residents skyrocketed. It wasn't until after a full-blown revolt by the people that the Bechtel contract was nullified.

Then, there's trade liberalization, or the opening up of the economy through removing any restrictions on foreign trade. This allows for a number of abusive economic manifestations, such as transnational corporations bringing in their own mass-produced products, undercutting indigenous production, and ruining local economies. An example is Jamaica, which, after accepting loans and conditionalities from the World Bank, lost its largest cash crop markets due to competition with Western imports. Today, countless farmers are out of work, for they are unable to compete with the large corporations.

Another variation is the creation of numerous, seemingly unnoticed, unregulated, inhumane sweatshop factories, which take advantage of the imposed economic hardship.

Additionally, due to production deregulation, environmental destruction is perpetual, as a country's resources are often exploited by the indifferent corporations while outputting large amounts of deliberate pollution.

Perkins: The largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world today is being brought on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorian Amazonian people against Texaco—which is now owned by Chevron, so today it's against Chevron—for activities conducted by Texaco.

They are estimated to be more than 18 times what the Exxon Valdez dumped into the coast of Alaska. In the case of Ecuador, it wasn't an accident; the companies did it intentionally. They knew they were doing it to save money out there, rather than arranging for proper disposal.

Voiceover: Furthermore, a cursory glance at the performance record of the World Bank reveals that the institution, which publicly claims to help poor countries develop and alleviate poverty, has done nothing but increase poverty and the wealth gap while corporate profits soar.

In 1960, the income gap between the fifth of the world's people in the richest countries versus the fifth in the poorest countries was 30 to 1. By 1998, it was 74 to 1.

While global GNP rose 40% between 1970 and 1985, those in poverty actually increased by 17%, while from 1985 to 2000, those living on less than $1 a day increased by 18%.

Even the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress admitted that there is a mere 40% success rate of all World Bank projects.

In the late 1960s, the World Bank intervened in Ecuador with large loans. During the next 30 years, poverty grew from 50% to 70%. Under- or unemployment grew from 15% to 70%. Public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion, while the share of resources allocated to the poor went from 20% to 6%. In fact, by the year 2000, 50% of Ecuador's national budget had to be allocated for paying its debts.

It is important to understand that the World Bank is, in fact, a U.S. bank supporting U.S. interests, for the United States holds veto power over decisions as it is the largest provider of capital. And where did it get this money? You guessed it—it made it out of thin air through the fractional reserve banking system.

Of the world's top 100 economies, as based on annual GDP, 51 are corporations, and 47 of that 51 are U.S.-based. Walmart, General Motors, and Exxon are more economically powerful than Saudi Arabia, Poland, Norway, South Africa, Finland, Indonesia, and many others.

And, as detective trade barriers are broken down, currencies tossed together and manipulated in floating markets, and state economies overturned in favor of open competition and global capitalism, the empire expands.

[Clip from the film Network: "You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale."]

[Text on screen: "Taken cumulatively, the integration of the world as a whole, particularly in terms of economic globalization and the mythic qualities of 'free market' capitalism, represents a veritable 'empire' in its own right... Few have been able to escape the 'structural adjustments' and 'conditionalities' of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the arbitrations of the World Trade Organization, those international financial institutions that, however inadequate, still determine what economic globalization means... Such is the power of globalization that within our lifetime we are likely to see the integration, even if unevenly, of all national economies in the world into a single global, free market system. - Jim Garrison, President, State of the World Forum"]

Voiceover: The world is being taken over by a handful of business powers who dominate the natural resources we need to live, while controlling the money we need to obtain these resources. The end result will be world monopoly, based not on human life but on financial and corporate power.

These so-called counterterrorism measures, of course, have nothing to do with social protection and everything to do with preserving the establishment amongst the growing anti-American sentiment both domestically and internationally—which is legitimately founded on the greed-based corporate empire expansion that is exploiting the world.

The true terrorists of our world do not meet at the docks at midnight or scream "Allahu Akbar" before some violent action. The true terrorists of our world wear $5,000 suits and work in the highest positions of finance, government, and business.

So, what do we do? How do we stop a system of greed and corruption that has so much power and momentum? How do we stop this aberrant group behavior which feels no compassion for, say, the millions slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan so the corporatocracy can control energy resources and opium production for Wall Street profit?

[Text on screen: "Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's opium. After the US/CIA backed Mujahideen won the Soviet/Afghan war, by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world's heroin supply. By 1999, they were producing 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened... The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed most of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction. On Sept. 9th 2001, the full Afghanistan invasion plans were on President Bush's desk. Two days later they had their excuse. Today, opium production in US controlled Afghanistan, which now provides more than 90 percent of the world's heroin, breaks new production records nearly every year."]

Voiceover: How do we stop a system of greed and corruption that condemns poor populations to sweatshop slavery for the benefit of Madison Avenue, or that engineers false-flag terror attacks for the sake of manipulation, or that generates built-in modes of social operation which are inherently exploitative, or that systematically reduces civil liberties and violates human rights in order to protect itself from its own shortcomings?

How do we deal with the numerous covert institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group—and other undemocratically elected groups which, behind closed doors, collude to control the political, financial, social, and environmental elements of our lives?

In order to find the answer, we must first find the true underlying cause, for the fact is, the selfish, corrupt, power- and profit-based groups are not the true source of the problem; they are symptoms.