This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
The Extended Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man
The book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins is easily one of the most engrossing pieces of non-fiction one can read to learn about the true drivers behind globalization, espionage, corporate cronyism, the emergence of such "artificial" organizations as the World Bank and the IMF, and most importantly, debt "enslavement", all as seen from an insider's view. It explains in simple words why over the past 40 years the developing world paradigm has been exploited as heavily as it has, why the BRIC concept was instrumental as a Red Herring to perpetuating the myth of endless growth, and why credit must always flow no matter what to keep the status quo in power. For those who have read the book, and for those who are on the fence about reading it, below we present the three part presentation by John Perkins at the 2006 Veterans for Peace National Convention in which he expounds on all the key ideas in his book, and does an extended Q&A covering topics not discussed previously. We urge everyone to spend at least a few minutes listening to Perkins who gives a unique and non-conflicted expert opinion on the primary force for why the the modern equivalent of enslavement is not by force, but by debt.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
And for the truly time-constrained we recommend the following blurb which encapsulates the key elements from the book, and Perkins' life.
»
- 56613 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
Fantastic video!!!
Actually, it is the hopey-changey Baroke Obummer voters who set a new land speed record for STOOPID, in 2008.
"HALO" that, MF'ers.
Judge him by the whiny Communist rable in his audience ! I'd rather listen to Madelein Allbright (sp?) and Hilary Clinton 69 ! Monedas 2011 I would rather listen to the "Battle Hymn" of the Silver Liberation Army ! http://trololololololololololo.com/
This active is still doing his old job, foolish people.
Can I get a cliff notes version of this, seems a little too emotional for me.
Globalization is getting the nations addicted and dependent and then managing them for the benefit of the looters. The value behind the currency as a medium of exchange was to be used for our interests, not the bankers; that’s why we need our own currency. A currency with protected value is what keeps us economically free and gives Americans the incentive to produce. It’s what gives all nations a chance to be free.
The money manipulators are using the political frames of the Fed, the IMF and World Bank to loot the resources of the world and turn the American republic into a global empire.
As John Perkins writes, they “are high paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortions, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as Empire but one that has taken on terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”
Perkins said such economic international skullduggery has dire consequences for the future of democracy and the world…and can be seen in this Fed scenario written by ZH’s Mikla: “Print dollars to purchase real assets and securities which establishes… [its] ’fundamental value’ as a holder of assets (MBS purchases, POMO, etc.).”
The Fed, the IMF, and the World Bank, are one.
Well stated.
+100
And from the WSJ with more MAD induced propaganda about the debt ceiling:
95 — Days required to wipe out this year’s economic growth, if the U.S. doesn’t raise the federal debt limit.
net growth or nominal?
lizzy36
Gee. Lizzy. That sure looks a lot like the CIA drawing of those mobile WMD trucks in Iraq.
Now you be careful. If we are not allowed to borrow many more trillions of dollars, then, well.... well...
we will have to live within our means.
And we certainly cannot have that.
Will he get a Pullitzer?
Big Business thrives on Big Government. Without Big Government to advance its agenda, Big Business is forced to compete in the marketplace. This is the fundamental truth that John Perkins misses.
There are two types of creature that inhabit Foggy Bottom and Langley. The first is an ideologue who believes the world would be a much better place IF ONLY his desired policies were implemented and the world actually worked the way he would like it to. The second is a colorless bureaucrat who diligently moves papers from his inbox to his outbox.
John Perkins is not a Washington insider. He is a sycophant Ichabod Crane, who, influenced by Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft believes the headless Hessian horseman to be a physical, existential threat in the world. He dislikes Big Business Brom Bones and fantasizes a romantic future with Big Government Katrina Van Tassel. His mental construct blocks the obvious infatuation and inevitable future between Katrina & Brom. If only Ichabod and Katrina could wed, all Ichabod's problems would cease and Big Brom would be SOL.
John Perkins is, however, absolutely correct in depersonalizing specific seats of power. Whether Neutron Jack or Jeff I-Banker occupies the corner office at GE is largely irrelevant to cooperation and coordination between GE and the Government; just as Paul Wolfowitz or Bob Zoellick occupying the big office at the World Bank is largely irrelevant to cooperation between the (new) World (order) Bank and GE; just as Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice occupying the top office in Foggy Bottom is largely irrelevant to cooperation between GE and the US foreign policy apparatus.
The World Bank is capable of both great good and great evil. It finances many otherwise non-financeable projects which measurably benefit the broad local populace. The devil is often is found in the details and tends to arise when a Big Business or Big Government project developer believes that he knows better than the locals how to define and implement domestic development. John Perkins ironically displays the imperialist ideologue trait in the videos by suggesting that native populations are simply worse off because of development efforts.
When an ill conceived nWo Bank project goes south, a natural alignment of interests occurs between Big Business (GE), Big Finance (GS), Big Government (DC), and the nWo Bank. The current seat holders of the Big Interests are always all each others’ acquaintances and call upon each other for assistance in crafting a Big Payout from the unfortunate borrower. Domestically, when a homeowner runs into problems with an ill-advised mortgage, it only takes an alignment of interests between Big Finance and Big Government for a Big Payout to form through a combination of robo-signing and robo-(in)justice. This does not, however, imply some sort of collusion between Blankfein and Geithner or Holder, it is merely an alignment of interests, at this point. A foreign policy equivalent might be United Fruit (now Chiquita), but Fernando Aguirre is no Bradley Palmer, Sam the Banana or Eli Black, although both John Perkins and Dan Brown have the literary talent to compellingly portray him as such.
All throughout the Cold War Big Business and Big Government made strange and frequent bedfellows. However, the coitus was and is more often a consequence of foreign policy than a cause of it. Moreover, the PPPs were the quota bitches of the boardroom of foreign policy formulation. In the two decades since the Berlin Wall came down, the former station chiefs of the FSB have shown themselves to be far more enterprising businessmen than their CIA counterparts.
When the US government pursues activist policies it often asks for favors from Big Business to advance those policies. Thus indebted to Big Business, a request is often made to return the favor. When Big Government crafts Big Legislation and Big Regulation it is able to clear the small obstacles to Big Business’s domination of the marketplace. The best mechanism to neuter a lethally rabid Big Business is a smaller and more restrained government.
So,”the World Bank is capable of both great good and great evil.” This fits that old argument: you need to trust me; I can’t tell you what I’m doing, you just need to trust me.
A vehicle created by the investment banks to steal the world’s resources and sell them on the market place probably does not have the capacity to do “great good.”
The IMF/World Bank is a stalking horse for world government and its pattern of swallowing up sovereign countries has been the same since its inception. Greece, Latvia, Hungary, Iceland, Bosnia, Cote d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Indonesia, Equador…
The IMF and its sister organization the World Bank—the most powerful bank in the world headed by the Goldmanite Robert Zoellick-- are agents for global empire, a global empire for a few greedy men run by a global corporatocracy-- a collective of corporations, banks and governments.
John Perkins’ job as an ‘economic hit man’ (EHM) for the corporatocracy was to manipulate economic forecasts in Less-Developed Countries (LDCs) to justify wild load growths between 17 and 20 percent. It was to justify massive commercial building projects for corporate interests and as a swindle to ensnare world leaders in a web of debt and dependent loyalty.
His job was “to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars…to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promoted U.S. commercial interests.”
The banks give loans to the LCDs for the projects. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to the member corporations (the creditors) to build their profitable infrastructure, the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is successful, says Perkins, the country defaults and the corporatocracy Mafia moves in for its additional pound of flesh—UN votes, installation of military bases, precious resources such as oil or canals, or whatever. “And, of course, the debtor still owes us the money.”
Wrote Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004):
“[Debts] were accumulated without the consent of the majority of people in those countries and served to make the corporatocracy and a few wealthy Third World families even richer—but debt-forgiveness is not what this is all about. The G8 (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia), the World Bank and the IMF are once again exploiting these nations and they are calling it “debt forgiveness.” They are insisting on ‘conditionalities’ that are cloaked in phrases like ‘good governance,’ ‘sound economics,’ and ‘trade liberalization.’ While the language is enticing, it is also terribly deceptive. These policies are ‘good’ and ‘sound’ only if you are looking at them through corporate windows.
“The countries that agree to such conditionalities are called upon to privatize their health, education, electric, water, and other public services—in other words, sell them to the corporatocracy. They are forced to drop subsidies and trade restrictions that support local businesses while at the same time accepting that the U.S. and other G8 countries can continue to subsidize certain G8 businesses and erect trade barriers on imports that threaten G8 industries.”
If your takeaway from what I wrote is that the bankers should be trusted- you should go back and reread the post more carefully. In less than 700 words there is more insight into how the system actually works than you could find in copying and pasting 700 pages of Perkins’ text.
Banking isn't a new business. Bad loans and poor due diligence are not a new phenomenon. In the US, there was “the recession that wasn't” at the beginning of the 1920’s, the Sub-prime Slime of the Roaring 20’s and the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Rinse, Repeat. There was “the recession that wasn't” at the beginning of the 2000’s, the Sub-prime Slime of the Roaring 00’s and now the Great Depression of the 2010’s.
The Builders, the Bankers and Banana Republic Makers all know exactly how international lending works. The choice generally amounts to making the deal with devil offering the best bargain. Everyone I know is sick to the stomach from the deals they are signing with Chinese, but the Chinese are offering better upfront terms then the other devils right now. No one goes into these deals blind, except perhaps Perkins, who sings the praises of a Soros front organization, while the wannabe devil himself is going into the only former French West African colony to resist CFA subjection to Banque de France, to try and get himself access to raw materials on the cheap.
There are serious problems with greed and poor oversight among both the bankers and politicians. In addition, the lack of leadership, knowledge, and perspective among decision makers leads endless repetition of different variations of the same errors, generation after generation. Slapping a new coat of paint on a 1971 Ford Pinto and calling it a CDS or Reprofiling is not innovation and should not be rewarded as such.
http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Main_Page
One of the highest ironies that the social media revolution has brought is not the extent and reach of the project (there is a very good reason Zuckerberg is allowed to continue as he does - he, and Google, provide market research data at no cost barring reciprocal advertising revenues, and let us not forget that some of his seed capital is assuredly via The Company, as MENA dictators loved finding out, both to track and to torture) but that the older and more entrenched in hierarchy a subject is, the less well data is protected. For the social sphere, this is Facebook etc. For business, this can be via linkedIn etc - using tools that are fairly available (i.e. you won't discover them if you're not looking, but once you do, you'll discover that they are free, open source and powerful) you can easily data mine a 'spider web' of social / business connections. Then you can start adding vast amounts of details such as fiscal reports, home price, credit rating and so on and so forth. Big corporates do this routinely, especially on interest groups (e.g. Microsoft has info folders on most major tech journalists, tracking their likes/dislikes and spends resources on 'knowing' how to hook them into a PR exercise. Apple, on the other hand, goes with the mystical and ignores them).
Add to this the lesson that the infamous HBGary emails showed; destination, location and headers (as well as quite stupidly unencrypted attachments) can provide the data miner with an accurate and dynamic web of inter-company and inter-jurisdictional links. i.e. The clear links between, let us say, the Department of Justice and the Bank of America can be seen in action. It also clearly showed the intellectual level of some of the players involved: not high. These aren't the academically bright kids who went to MIT (they tend to get funneled off into hot-houses or ivory towers or become useful idiots); these are the medium level kids always wanting / striving to impress those above them (hello, Governor Walker, did you really think a Koch brother would deign to call you? How.. naively self-deluded). Once you apply these techniques to lobby groups (hello Chamber of Commerce) and then do automatic trawls through government links, you have the following:
An accurate map of the surface / medium levels of interactions between power groups.
A clear idea of fiscal and power interests (i.e. Who is lobbying whom, and which Corporate is after what Government function)
A fuzzy appreciation of the relative competency levels involved
In all three cases, we have bad news for you. Barring the 0.1%, most of the system is kept going by greed, bullshit, stupidity and repetitious non-thinking, coupled with social peer pressure. Even the so-called "experts" in the field, regularly make huge business cock-ups (e.g. http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2010/10/cia-done-c... Where a coding dispute between two subcontractors resulted in bad targeting, and IBM having to take over the business, at god knows what cost to the USA taxpayer - also explains why so many innocents get wasted in Pakistan, but I digress).
Vast amounts of energy are spent in the following ways:
Making people want to buy products that have no intrinsic value or difference over their market contemporaries
Producing products that have designed obsolescence built it to guarantee re-purchase
Transport that is never figured into price [shipping costs largely] which results in products being outsourced globally and transported two, three, four times.
Being unable to rationalise long term benefits to short / medium term projects due to shareholder's expectations on return (i.e. If cities' entire workforce has its IQ raised by 10-25 points by good hospitals, clean air, clean water, good transport links, then in 20 years you should have more money generated. Sadly, this got slapped down by the 1960's, but there's a different tale).
And so on, and so forth. Bottom line: the system is corrupt. The system is so corrupt and inefficient and dangerously blinkered that vast amounts of time, energy and money are wasted trying to make the boat float. People bang their heads against entry to market issues, bureaucracy and all the old barriers to entry (the 'old' being education, welfare within upbringing, social structures and so on). Ironclads with massive guns also cost a lot. The problem is that the real power brokers are stuck with the same old issues, and have been for about 100 years now. "Boom and Bust" cycles are a dangerous thing when everyone has nukes; "Uplift" doesn't happen when the difference between 'socialism' (i.e. communitarian-ism) and 'Communism' (i.e. totalitarian communitarian-ism) results in enforced regime change. Corporations don't function sanely when their only rationale is 'profit > all' which necessarily results in a moral double bind in the non-Sociopathic employees, with loss of function (which is why the highest realms of CEOs are statistically much more likely to be sociopaths than in a normal population), but more damagingly, means they can only function in partnership with despotic regimes with ease (i.e. Regulation to protect anything but the profit margin is against their constitution, and so counter their aims, however much their employees may still want to not pollute etc). This last point results in one of the largest wastes within Corporate spending; ethics, HR and behaviour modification programs - where internally strict morality, normative behaviour and so on is valued whilst externally they can be giving back-handers to paramilitaries to torture / break unions (hello Coke-a-Cola in South America! hello numerous others in China!). This is similar to the tensions found in the old public/private splits found in politicians spouting on about 'family values' whilst banging hookers paid for by lobbyists.. but I digress.
The current 'solution' to the issue is Disaster Capitalism, via the IMF; I think originally to get some kind of global meta-social recognition (i.e. The "McDonald's hypothesis" - that countries with McDonald's in them never go to war, which was sadly proven wrong in the Balkans, btw) to give a framework of human experience that would preclude violence.
Now, I've seen it argued that there's no "conspiracy", there's nothing behind the scenes, there's not a separate class who are more 'in the know' than the majority. This is patently false. Governments and Corporations regularly, and with no compunction to ever not to, lie to the world. They lie to the public, their shareholders, their bosses, you name it. Here's a great example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising . Denied for years, recently the UK government was forced to admit that yes, 100,000 or so people were indeed raped, beaten, tortured, castrated, abused, imprisoned without trial and so on. In 1952-1960. Added to this, we could easily show the numerous times the CIA was 'up to no good' in the world (I'd suggest 'School of the Americas' for a good start). Need Corporate examples? Here's a 1990's list (http://www.corporatepredators.org/top100.html) which makes quaint reading (hint: the sums are still in millions, not billions).
The usual problem cited is that the more you attempt to educate people in reality, the less they want to know, because they either lack the cognition to process the huge amounts of data or are too lazy. People are placing a lot of faith on white knights such as Google & Facebook, and new drugs, to essentially provide those who do not naturally have high levels of social organisation / 'will power / focus' with tools to do it for them, without admitting the issues to everyone. As someone in the know once put it: "Dancing on Ice beats Orwell" in reference to why Fukushima was kept off the 7 list for as long as possible.
This is incorrect: the real issue is stagnation, lack of challenge and lack of new ideas being acted on. The 1960's are labeled as a hugely disruptive and massive social change, especially within America: however, at least they were acted upon. This resulted in a massive reactionary pull back. Add to this that the average ability to process that future is diminishing year on, year out. New social media is not really new, it is merely faster, because you can't eat an Ipad. Texting your friends / updating your web of friends is exactly the same model as gossiping (hello Tweet) which means they succeed (because they are merely the old sped up into the new, time frame by time frame) but are not game changers in their own rights.
Anyhow.. ramble over. The OP videos are simplistic, but some of the counter trolling going on is equally vapid.
Link of the weekend: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page <Guys aiming to provide 80 buildable blueprints for farms using low tech items. Smart cookies, and where people need to start thinking.
Ramble indeed. I have cognition bursting from my ears and ass, yet your point escapes me. The only thing I am sure of is that you have a very high opinion of yourself; which must be nice for you...congrats.
FYI, the 1960's was a temper tantrum by spoiled rich kids egged on by economic opportunists like Abbey Hoffman.
(rolls eyes), yeah, the sixties was all about `spoiled rich kids`; the patriot act, now that was the time to be alive! (/sardonic off)
So the corporatocracy's top execs are people too, not evil.
They're just waiting for someone to tell them the truth, firmly.
After which they'll reform and consider the whole of human kind.
Wouw, touching. So rich, so powerful and so ignorant, yet mallable.
Well good luck with that, John, and everyone else who favors
brotherly patience with the likes of Goldman Sachs, whom
John mentions reformed themselves back in 2006... - I guess
all the crroked mafioso shit GS stirred in the interim doesn't count.
I say: shoot the fuckers and be done with it. The day is coming.
This low level stooge doesn't know or understand anything but pump and dump his stupid whiny book to the "Blame America first and for everything that is wrong in the world crowd" ! Rush Limbaugh has more talent in his little toe ! Don't parade these idiots by me ! Monedas 2011 Don't worry ! Be happy ! http://trololololololololololo.com/
URINE IDIOT
http://trololololololololololo.com
U2, but at least you have good taste in music ! Monedas 2011 Idiot Savant Extraordinaire http://trololololololololololo.com/
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a sexier title then Confessions of a Subprime SLiME Schlepper. The only difference between the two storylines is the number of zeros to left of the decimal point (comma in Europe).
Mozilo, Dodd, Frank, and Raines are not the axis of a secret Queer-Orange-Man-Catholic-Quota-Monkey Cabal actively conspiring to re-enslave blacks through debt for the benefit of Goldman Sachs. Greed, mismanagement, and poor regulation did, however, facilitate Countrywide, Fannie Mae, and Goldman springing a debt trap and economic crisis upon the American populace.
Perkins was Chief Economist at Chas. T. Main, which in the Engineering & Design business would be more analogous to Crazy Eddie than Best Buy or Wal-Mart. After his departure, Chas. T. Main went bankrupt, and was absorbed by Parsons, just as Countrywide went bankrupt and was absorbed by the Bank of America. This would imply that John Perkins was perhaps not the best choice to serve as Chief Economist or Loan-Salesman-of-the-Month.
Third World Countries are the subprime borrowers of the Sovereign market. They don’t have American-Dollar-Gold-Cards, which require domestic banking sectors which are directly plugged into the BIS paper-leverage-ponzi.
When a Third World Subprime borrower wants a new port, airport, industrial park, highway, water plant, power plant, or hospital- their options are limited. They could go to the private sector and ask JP Morgan to syndicate a loan. The loan cost from the private sector though is usually usurious, because the subprime borrower isn’t plugged into the BIS paper-leverage-machine. A practical consequence of the private sector method is that if the syndicate members withdraw one billion dollars of capital for the project, significantly more than one billion dollars of credit is erased from the syndicate’s potential loans to paper-of the-month-club borrowers.
The other primary avenue available to the Third World Subprime borrower is the multilateral Banks. Just as Fannie Mae enables borrowing at a lower cost in the US by transferring risk from the private sector to the public sector, the multilateral Banks enable borrowing at a lower cost in the Third World.
If you are someone who is a member of the US armed services or any large employer who is relocated on a regular basis, then an interest-only mortgage coupled with a mortgage interest tax deduction may be a wise economic choice. However, the economic hit men of Countrywide placed their own profit above the economic interests of their customers when recommending solutions to their borrowing needs.
When a burger flipper seeks a loan for a Toll Brothers McMansion, the burger flipper might be excused for not having the financial acumen to properly analyze the terms. The banana republic seeking a guarantee from a multilateral institution cannot perpetually claim the same level of ignorance. In fact, whereas the economic hit men of Countrywide and Toll Brothers probably failed to question the economic assumptions and declarations, the economists of the E&D firms work closely with local Finance Ministries to develop the numbers in the financial presentations to the Fannie Mae equivalent economists at the multilateral banks who assume the loan risk.
If a multilateral loan goes into foreclosure, unless grossly mismanaged, Countrywide and Toll are even- as the outstanding liability has been packaged and resold; Fannie Mae and its sponsors are holding the bag. The repo men of the multilaterals, with the threat of ICJ or ICSID litigation, but more importantly- the threat of future access to borrowing, are looking for any asset or access which can be used to make the liability holders whole. Perkins is right to feel guilt for what he did, if he had endeavored to honestly analyze potential projects- Chas. T. Main might still exist and the countries he conned into subprime SLiME might not be trading titles on their old cars to keep the repo men from taking the upgrades which had outstanding notes.
Goldman’s and Greece’s collusion cooking numbers on Greece’s ironically paper-machine-eligible debt, and then throwing them to IMF demonstrates the arrogant newcomer needlessly repeating predecessors’ mistakes.