Culled from DemocracyNow: just amazing how we're being robbed either blind or 
eye, wide opened.

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 take over their economies. [includes rush 
transcript] 

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 Men." 
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. 
John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting 
firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described "economic hit man." He is the 
author of the new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.



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. 
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 fifty 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 ninety percent 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 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, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you're 
not able to repay your debts, therefore give our 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 reason 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 -- Stoner-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 funneled 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 --e.h.m.’s? 
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. 
Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. 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 C.I.A.-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 story–how 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 problem, 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 C.I.A. 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 I.M.F. 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 twenty-four thousand 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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