John Perkins : How To Destabilize Countries Legally . Economic Hitman

Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and corporations, what he calls the "corporatocracy." John Perkins says he helped the US 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. John Perkins has just come out with his second book on this issue. It's called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption. John Perkins joins us now in the firehouse studio. Well, before we go further, "economic hit men"—for those who haven't heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do you mean?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it's fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world's first truly global empire, and we've done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We've done it through economics very subtly.

We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects—power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways—things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren't connected to the power grids. They don't have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it's such a big bet that the country can't possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, "Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can't pay your debt, so you've got to give us a pound of flesh."

AMY GOODMAN: And explain your history. What made you an economic hit man?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston University, I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization.

AMY GOODMAN: People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA, many times larger.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it is larger. It's much larger. At least it was in those days. And it's very, very secretive. We all—there's a lot of rumors. We know quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very, very little about the NSA. It claims to only work in a cryptography, you know, encoding and decoding messages, but in fact we all know that they're the people who have been listening in on our telephone conversations. That's come out recently. And they're a very, very secretive organization.

They put me through a series of tests, very extensive tests, lie detector tests, psychological tests, during my last year in college. And I think it's fair to say that they identified me as a good potential economic hit man. They also identified a number of weaknesses in my character that would make it relatively easy for them to hook me, to bring me in. And I think those weaknesses, I [inaudible] might call, the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. Who amongst us doesn't have one of them? I had all three at the time.

And then I joined the Peace Corps. I was encouraged to do that by the National Security Agency. I spent three years in Ecuador living with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who today and at that time were beginning to fight the oil companies. In fact, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world has just been brought by these people against Texaco, Chevron. And that was incredibly good training for what I was to do.

And then, while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T. Main, a consulting firm out of Boston of about 2,000 employees, very low-profile firm that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand was the work of economic hit men, as I described it earlier, and that's the role I began to fulfill and eventually kind of rose to the top of that organization as its chief economist.