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One of the books on my 2005 Christmas list was John Perkins’
“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” I actually got to read it back in
November, as one of my children purchased it for me well before the holiday
season. Since its release earlier
in the year, there had been lots of talk about it on the Internet and
I’d read the reviews over at Amazon.com, so I doubted there would be
many surprises in it. How wrong I
was. A book review is not the
book itself. It’s a mistake
that I won’t make again.
Anyway, I’ve been telling all and sundry who would listen, that
this book fell into the ‘must read’ category. However, I’ve gone through a
couple of more books since then, and I’d sort of forgotten about
it. Yesterday I got a big wake-up
call and found myself up to my neck in the book again. It showed up in the form of an audio
interview by Amy Goodman, with author John Perkins as the guest.
Even if you’ve read the book, the interview is sensational in
the fact that the author himself is talking…you’re not just
reading words…although the text of the interview is right below the
audio link if you want to follow his words as Perkins talks. The other aspect is that the interview
is current…15 February 2006…certainly more than a year after he
finished writing the book, so there’s much that is new.
However, in order to whet your appetite further, I’ve done a
couple of ‘cut and pastes’ from the text of the speech. Here’s the first one…
AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we move further, your experience with it?
Explain the vantage point you come from. What does it mean to be an economic
hit man?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, what we've done -- we use many techniques, but
probably the most common is that we'll go to a country that has resources
that our corporations covet, like oil, and we'll arrange a huge loan to that
country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters, but
almost all of the money goes to the U.S. corporations, not to the country
itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General
Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure
projects in that country: power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks,
things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor. In fact, the
poor suffer, because the loans have to be repaid, and they're huge loans, and
the repayment of them means that the poor won't get education, health, and
other social services, and the country is left holding a huge debt, by
intention. We go back, we economic hit men, to this country and say,
“Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can't repay your debts, so give
us a pound of flesh. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap or vote with
us at the next U.N. vote or send troops in support of ours to some place in
the world such as Iraq.”
And in that way, we've managed to build a world empire with very few people
actually knowing that we've done this.
AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for?
JOHN PERKINS: I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the
one that's in the news so much today because of spying on people, and I was
tested by them, recruited by them --
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean you were
recruited by them?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, while I was a senior in business school at Boston University, they came to me and suggested
that I take their test. I had connections through my wife with people in the
agency, and they put me through a series of tests, personality tests, lie
detector, several days, and concluded that I would make a good economic hit
man, and they also discovered a number of weaknesses in my character, which
they could use then to hook me into the business, and then I ended up working
for a private corporation.
AMY GOODMAN: Why didn't you work for the N.S.A.?
JOHN PERKINS: Because these days it's not done that way. Nobody
wants to be able to connect the dots. So the N.S.A., the C.I.A., these types
of organizations often recruit economic hit men and the jackals, the
assassins, the 007 types, but they will recruit us, maybe train us, and then
turn us over to a private corporation, so that you really can't make the
connection, so that if I were caught at what I was doing in one of these
countries, it would not reflect on our government; it would only reflect on
the corporation that I worked for.
And here’s the second quote from the interview…
AMY GOODMAN: Not
to be ethnocentric about it, but America is a tremendous power,
especially military power. It has been diverted now to dealing with Iraq.
President Bush declaring war on Iraq, not exactly officially
declaring it, but engaging in it. Do you think that that has something to do
with what is happening in Latin America, not
to take power away from the people and what they are doing there?
JOHN PERKINS: Well,
certainly, I think that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela might not have survived
his presidency. His presidency might not have survived had we not been in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were so
diverted. We -- the economic hit men tried to overthrow him, you know, a few
years ago and were successful for about 48 hours. But then he had control
over the oil company, and he was very, very popular. So he got back into
office. At that point, had we not been involved in Iraq, I strongly suspect that we
would have done something much more aggressive, as we've done so many other
times. When the economic hit men fail, we take more drastic steps. Because we
were so involved in Iraq,
we didn't do that.
This gave great
support to all of the other movements in Latin America.
And these other candidates, people like Evo
Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who’s
had the staying power. He’s been able to stay there, despite the fact
that the administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry.
The other side
of the coin is that Brazil
is a world power. It's one of the largest economies in the world, and it
produces a tremendous number of military weapons that are used worldwide. And
Lula, of Brazil,
he’s backed off a bit. And there’s an interesting story that I
know behind that.
AMY GOODMAN: What?
JOHN PERKINS: Well,
I'll get into that. But he's backed off a bit. But he still –
he’s made alliances with Chavez, with Kirchner of Argentina, with Morales of Bolivia.
They’ve all agreed that if the United States does anything
drastic, they'll stand together and oppose us. So there is this coalition
that's happening. It's quite loose. But nonetheless, there's a tremendous
amount of support there.
AMY GOODMAN: Lula,
what do you know?
JOHN PERKINS: Well,
I was one of the speakers at the World Social Forum in Brazil in last February, and a
man asked to meet with me who was a very high advisor to Lula. And he said,
“You know, what you say in your book is all very true, but you just --
that's just the tip of the iceberg.” He said, “You know, from the
time I was a very young man, I was quite radical. And it was interesting to
me, as I was going through university, how much sex, drugs, booze were
available to me in the parties that I was invited to, and so on. And now that
I’m in this position of power, I discover that somebody was taking
pictures of all those things, that there's a record of this.”
And he says,
“You don't realize how all-pervasive your Secret Services are. It's
recruiting, in their own way, young people, even those that are extreme
socialists and communists. Your people befriend us from very early ages and
get a lot of information on us. So when we become high up in the government,
they basically –” And I said, “They blackmail you?”
And he said, “Well, you could use the word ‘blackmail,’ but
I think I would prefer that’s ‘modern U.S. diplomacy.’”
And I asked him, I said, “Well, is Lula a part of this?”
And he obviously didn't really want to answer this question. He hesitated,
and he said, “Let me just say that nobody gets to power in Brazil these
days without being very willing to make compromises to your corporations and
your government.” He said, “I think Lula’s a very, very
good man, but he also has to deal with reality. And certainly, he's been
watched all of his life, and I’m sure he's had the same temptations I
did.”
AMY GOODMAN: And
he’s also engulfed in a major corruption scandal,
which, for many of his long-time supporters, Brazilians and outside, are
raising a lot of questions.
JOHN PERKINS: And
I think the fact that the scandal has come out and
has been blown into such proportions is an indication that someone is sending
Lula a very strong message. Incidentally, the jackal – I’ll call
him – that was working with Gutierrez of Ecuador said to me, “You
know, this isn’t limited to other countries. This
happens in your country, too. Don't you think that the assassination of John
Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John Lennon and others
like that, and the many senators that have died in airplane crashes and other
things, has sent a strong message to your politicians? And don't you think
that –”
AMY GOODMAN: Who
said this to you?
JOHN PERKINS: The
same economic hit man/jackal who visited Gutierrez
and read him the Riot Act.
AMY GOODMAN: Would
you care to share his name?
JOHN PERKINS: No.
I'll let him do that at some point, if he feels it's appropriate. Right now,
he doesn’t feel it’s appropriate. He's still in the business. And
so, many of these people are still very -- even the ones that have retired
are getting pensions, and they’ve got loyalties, some of them. So,
they’ll talk to me on the side and say, “I want you to put this
in your book, but I’m not ready to talk.” A couple of them I am
working with to write a book, and my literary agent is working with them. So
hopefully some of them will come clean. But it's a slow process in making
that happen.
The audio interview is thirty minutes long and the
URL is below. I urge you to
follow the text as the interview progresses. If you haven’t read
Perkins’ book, and want to know the short version of how the American
Empire is propagated, do yourself a big favour and listen…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11964.htm
As I mentioned previously, this interview with John
Perkins was on February 15, 2006.
And as it turned out, that particular day was an excellent day for
telling the truth by another courageous person in a position to make a
difference. Congressman Ron Paul,
M.D. did the very same thing in front of the House of Representatives. I’ve read that particular speech
twice. It is entitled “The End of Dollar Hegemony.” As most of you know, Congressman
Paul is one of the only defenders of the U.S. Constitution left on Capitol
Hill. He is known for telling the
truth…and he makes a lot of people in Washington uncomfortable when he’s
doing it. In this piece he is
more than blunt…he is astonishing!
I was overwhelmed by his candor. Here’s a quote…
Now, a new attempt is being
made against the petrodollar system. Iran, another member of the
“axis of evil,” has announced her plans to initiate an oil bourse
in March of this year. Guess what, the oil sales will be priced Euros,
not dollars.
Most Americans forget how
our policies have systematically and needlessly antagonized the Iranians over
the years. In 1953 the CIA helped overthrow a democratically elected
president, Mohammed Mossadeqh, and install the authoritarian
Shah, who was friendly to the U.S.
The Iranians were still fuming over this when the hostages were seized in
1979. Our alliance with Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran in the
early 1980s did not help matters, and obviously did not do much for our
relationship with Saddam Hussein. The administration announcement in
2001 that Iran
was part of the axis of evil didn’t do much to improve the diplomatic
relationship between our two countries. Recent threats over nuclear
power, while ignoring the fact that they are surrounded by countries with
nuclear weapons, doesn’t seem to register with those who continue to
provoke Iran.
With what most Muslims perceive as our war against Islam, and this recent
history, there’s little wonder why Iran
might choose to harm America
by undermining the dollar. Iran, like Iraq, has zero capability to
attack us. But that didn’t stop us from turning Saddam Hussein
into a modern day Hitler ready to take over the world. Now Iran, especially since she’s made plans
for pricing oil in Euros, has been on the receiving end of a propaganda war
not unlike that waged against Iraq
before our invasion.
It’s not likely that
maintaining dollar supremacy was the only motivating factor for the war
against Iraq, nor for
agitating against Iran.
Though the real reasons for going to war are complex, we now know the reasons
given before the war started, like the presence of weapons of mass
destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connection to 9/11, were false.
The dollar’s importance is obvious, but this does not diminish the
influence of the distinct plans laid out years ago by the neo-conservatives
to remake the Middle East.
Israel’s influence, as well as that of the Christian Zionists, likewise
played a role in prosecuting this war. Protecting “our” oil
supplies has influenced our Middle East
policy for decades.
But the truth is that
paying the bills for this aggressive intervention is impossible the old
fashioned way, with more taxes, more savings, and more production by the
American people. Much of the expense of the Persian Gulf War in 1991
was shouldered by many of our willing allies. That’s not so
today. Now, more than ever, the dollar hegemony-- it’s dominance
as the world reserve currency-- is required to finance our huge war expenditures.
This $2 trillion never-ending war must be paid for, one way or another.
Dollar hegemony provides the vehicle to do just that.
For the most part the true
victims aren’t aware of how they pay the bills. The license to
create money out of thin air allows the bills to be paid through price
inflation. American citizens, as well as average citizens of Japan,
China, and other countries suffer from price inflation, which represents the
“tax” that pays the bills for our military adventures. That
is until the fraud is discovered, and the foreign producers decide not to
take dollars nor hold them very long in payment for their goods.
Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary system from
being exposed to the masses who suffer from it. If oil markets replace
dollars with Euros, it would in time curtail our ability to continue to
print, without restraint, the world’s reserve currency.
It is an unbelievable
benefit to us to import valuable goods and export depreciating dollars.
The exporting countries have become addicted to our purchases for their
economic growth. This dependency makes them allies in continuing the
fraud, and their participation keeps the dollar’s value artificially
high. If this system were workable long term, American citizens would
never have to work again. We too could enjoy “bread and
circuses” just as the Romans did, but their gold finally ran out and
the inability of Rome
to continue to plunder conquered nations brought an end to her empire.
Here’s the URL from Ron Paul’s official government web
site…
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2006/cr021506.htm
But as interesting as this
URL is, there’s another one similar to the Perkins interview. This is the video taken of Congressman
Paul as he was making the speech in the House of Representatives on February
15th. And as it turns
out, the speech is also accompanied by the text so you can follow along as
Paul talks. It’s always
more impressive to hear (and this time, watch) the speech as its being read
by the author in the original setting it was presented in. This one is no different. Here’s
the URL…
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul303.html
I’ve sent the Paul speech far and wide,
including a friend of mine somewhere in China. His comment on the speech was as
follows… “It’s
obvious that Dick Cheney will have to take Ron Paul on a hunting trip.”
What struck me about both these February 15th
items was how far and how fast this information was propagated. Anyone with an interest in the
internal goings-on of the U.S.
government would be able to watch the Empire in action virtually in real
time. Between Perkins and Paul, America (the
Empire) is on display for the whole world to see.
The same could be said about GATA’s
work. Those of you intelligent
enough to have purchased a copy of the Gold Rush 21 video will have seen most of the speeches by now.
It was John Brimelow’s speech that impressed
me the most. Over the years,
I’ve corresponded with John via e-mail and telephone, and I devour his
every word in his daily commentary at Bill Murphy’s LeMetropleCafe, but it’s
the first time I’ve laid two eyes on the guy, or heard him give a
speech.
One thing he said that really fits in with John
Perkins and Ron Paul…was his luncheon conversation with one of
gold’s arch enemies…Andy Smith. During the lunch, Andy said to
John…and I’m paraphrasing a little here…“You know,
it’s amazing what some of those GATA people such as Reg Howe have been able to dig up. Things like the gold derivatives at
the BIS, for instance. I bet that
most of the bullion banks had no idea that they were there.”
Sitting here in Edmonton, I’m still amazed at how
such a disparate group of people from all over this little world of ours,
have been able to find out so much and expose it to the world, and really
make a difference.
I’m reminded of a famous quote by a famous
American that pretty well sums up how this is possible…“Cautious,
careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social
standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest
must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and
publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised
and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.”
– Susan B. Anthony
We may not see big changes on the surface as fast as
we would like, but I know they are going on behind the scenes all over the
world right now. How do I know? First of all, on all fronts, American
primacy is being challenged openly.
Secondly, the Russians (and other countries no doubt) have been
following GATA’s work on the sly for
years...then they went public with it in a big way. These same people would also be
reading everything that Ron Paul, John Perkins, Murphy/Powell, Reg Howe and John Embry et al, have been writing. And
lest I forget, one of the latest bricks in the wall for the powers that be
was the Cheuvreux Gold Report out of Europe.
The times they are a-changing…and changing
fast! It’s not only what
these people are saying (and in some cases, doing) that is making the
difference. Highly ethical people
such as these have lived through all of recorded history. The difference is that today we have
this magnificent communication tool called the Internet that enables
like-minded people to meet, converse and exchange knowledge on an almost
instantaneous basis, regardless of where in the world they are. That has NEVER been possible before in
all of human history. It is
unprecedented! This is the
ultimate in freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
Through it, the powers that be have been found
out. And as Chris Powell
says…“We have discovered
the secret knowledge of the universe.” Yes we have…and at some point in
time (probably sooner rather than later) most of the western world’s
financial, economic (and probably political) systems as we know them today
are going to go up in flames…or down the drain.
I have to agree with Bob Landis…Reg Howe’s business partner over at Golden Sextant.com…one of
these days we are going to have a non-linear financial event caused by a
non-linear economic or political event, and that will be the end of it. So fasten your golden seat
belts…it’s probably going to a rough ride…and maybe a
faster one than you might think
Ed Steer
Director
Gold Anti-Trust
Action Committee
www.GATA.org
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S.
Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe
at www.GATA.org. GATA is
grateful for financial contributions, which are federally tax-deductible in
the United States.
 
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