John Perkins – USA – World People's Blog

Linked with Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and with Dream Change DC. Also linked with John Perkins of 3rd November 2006 on this blog.

John Perkins (b. 28 January 1945 in Hanover, New Hampshire) is an activist and author. His best known book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, an insider’s account of the exploitation or neo-colonization of Third World countries by what Perkins portrays as a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government. His 2007 book, The Secret History of the American Empire, makes further claims about the negative impact of global corporations on the economies and ecologies of poor countries, as well as offering suggestions for making corporations behave more like good citizens … (full text).

He says: « When you look at the world we humans have created you may conclude that it was created by sleeping people, because awake, aware, conscious people would manifest a very different world. We have entered one of the most important periods in human history…We have the opportunity to lift ourselves to new levels of consciousness » … (full text).

Listen his video: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 53.34 min, June 21, 2007.

Look at his own website.

John Perkins – USA

He is the Founder of DREAM CHANGE.

Listen his video: John Perkins – America’s Secret Empire, 5.30 min, August 13, 2007.

He says: « 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 » … (full interview text).

John Perkins spent three decades as an Economic Hit Man, business executive, author, and lecturer. He lived and worked in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and North America. Then he made a decision: he would use these experiences to make the planet a better place for his daughter’s generation. Today he teaches about the importance of rising to higher levels of consciousness, to waking up – in both spiritual and physical realms – and is a champion for environmental and social causes. He has lectured at universities on four continents, including Harvard, Wharton, and Princeton. (full text).

Self-Described Economic Hit Man John Perkins: “We Have Created the World’s First Truly Global Empire”.

He 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 … « . (full text).

See the website: ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’, and its sub-page ‘What You Can Do‘.

John has been featured on ABC Television, the A&E and History networks, TIME, Italian Cosmopolitan and Elle, and many other publications in the Americas and Europe. A graduate of Boston University’s School of Business Administration. he served as U.S. Representative to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970’s and in the Peace Corps (Amazon and Andes) during the late 1960’s. His other books include: … (full text).

EXTENDED CALENDAR OF EVENTS WITH JOHN PERKINS (scroll down).

Some people have found John Perkins’ accounts in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to be so shocking and troubling that they have questioned whether his accounts are true. John himself has been absolutely unequivocal that everything written in the book is factual and is the true story of his life. John has clearly and unwaveringly affirmed the veracity of his accounts numerous times: in the book itself, in every media interview that he has done, and throughout the dozens of hours that he spent working through the manuscript page-by-page with me as part of our editorial process. Contrary to what some people have assumed, there is a great deal of evidence to support the veracity of John’s accounts in Confessions. This evidence includes numerous historical documents (see the attached copies of some of these documents) that confirm many aspects of John’s work; extensive research that many other people have done that support most of John’s principal allegations; confirmation from one of the persons who is in the best position to validate the veracity of John’s story; confirmations from others who knew and worked with John at Chas. T. Main; and the assessments of a number of people who have had long acquaintance with John and/or who have had in-depth discussions with him about the specifics of his accounts … (full text March 7, 2005:

Support and evidence for John Perkins’ account of his life from Steven Piersanti, President and Publisher, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (PDF format);
Mirror of this file here, the original link appears to be broken;
PDF recovered from The Wayback Machine).

Controversy.

Confessions – or Fantasies – of an Economic Hit Man? (by USinfo.State.gov).

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions – We spend the hour 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 taking over their economies. [includes rush transcript] … (full text).

John Perkins COLLECTION at the Global Dialogue Center!

I remember John Perkins. He was a real jerk. A gold-plated, super-slick lying little butthole shill for corporate gangsters; a snake-oil salesman with a movie-star grin, shiny loafers, a crooked calculator and a tooled leather briefcase full of high-blown bullshit. This was two decades ago. The early 1980s. I wore sandals, uncombed hair down to my cheap collar and carried a busted ring-binder filled with honest calculations and sincere analysis. It was Economic Hit Man Perkins vs. Economic Long-Hair Palast. I didn’t stand a chance. The EHM was about to put a political bullet hole through me wider than a silver dollar. Hit Men have « clients. » Perkins’ was a giant power company, Public Service of New Hampshire. PSNH was trying to sell New England lobstermen and potato farmers on the idea that they desperately needed a multi-billion dollar nuclear plant. The fact that this bloated atomic water kettle, called « Seabrook, » would produce enough electricity for everyone in the Granite State to smelt iron didn’t matter. That the beast could add a surcharge to electric bills equal to home mortgages was simply smiled over by Perkins and his team of economic con artists … (full text).

Signs of Progress.

He says also: « 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 … (full interview text).

How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions.

As Chief Economist and Director of Economics and Regional Planning at MAIN, his primary job was to convince Less Developed Countries (LDCs) around the world to accept multibillion dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at MAIN, Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown and Root, and other U.S. engineering/construction companies. The loans left the recipient countries wallowing in debt and highly vulnerable to outside political and commercial interests … // … John began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man several times during the past two decades. He was persuaded to stop by lucrative business offers that were contingent on his silence. « Now, » he says, « we have entered the new millennium. Nine-eleven happened. My daughter has grown up and left home. The time has come. (full text).

His publications: on his own website: books, and articles; on Google Book-search; on Google Blog-search; on Google Groups-search; on amazon; on wikipedia.

And he says: « 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 » … (full interview text).

John Perkins (disambiguation) on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. John Perkins can refer to: