The Corporatocracy and Its Hitmen

One of the great dilemmas facing those of us who seek to reveal new and hidden truths is that entrenched language often inhibits the discourse. So it's interesting to hear John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, talking about the “corporatocracy.”

We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world's first truly global empire, and we've done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it's been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we've created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it's been done very quietly...

[W]e 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...

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...

The other thing we do, Amy, and what's going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations, Mr. President. Now that you're president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. We have several hundred million dollars in this pocket if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I've got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out.”

Edwards graphically describes the 1970's assassinations of President Torrijos of Panama (he wanted Panamanians to have control of the Panama Canal) and Jaime Roldos of Ecuador (he wanted Ecuadoreans to control their own oil). Both men died in plane "accidents".

That's an easy thing to do, and incidentally, we also tried to do that to Saddam Hussein. When he didn't come around, the economic hit men tried to bring him around. We tried to assassinate him. But that was an interesting point, because he had pretty loyal security forces, and in addition he had a lot of look-alike doubles, and what you don't want to be is a bodyguard to a look-alike double and you think it's the president and you accept a lot of money to assassinate him and you assassinate the look-alike, because if you do that, afterwards your life and your family's isn't worth very much, so we were unable to get through to Saddam Hussein, and that’s why we sent the military in...

We wanted to get Saddam Hussein to really tie in to our system, and he refused to do that. He accepted our fighter jets and our tanks and our chemical plants that he used to produce chemical weapons that we knew were being used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He accepted all that, but he wouldn’t quite tie into our system in such a big way that he would bring in the huge development organizations to rebuild his country, as the Saudis did, in a Western image. And that's what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us. He would not go along with those things. If he had, he would still be president, Amy.
Edwards then gives a brief resumé of his big trade deal with the Saudies, as described in his book:

OPEC decided that they were going to clamp down on us, shut off our oil supplies. They didn't like our policies towards Israel, and so in the early ‘70s, the supply of oil was cut way back in this country. We had long lines of cars at the gas stations, and we were afraid we were going to go to another depression like the one that started in 1929, so the Treasury Department came to me and some other economic hit men and said, “Look, this is unacceptable.” And I give all the details of this in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but the short version is, they said, “Make sure that this doesn't happen again,” and we knew that the key to stopping this sort of thing was Saudi Arabia, because it controlled more oil than anyone else and the Royal House of Saud was corruptible.

So again, the short version is we put together a deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send almost all of the money it made from selling oil all over the world back to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities, the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants, in fact, entire cities from the desert, and in the process, to westernize Saudi Arabia, to make it more like us. And the other part of the deal was the House of Saud agreed to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us, and we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, and that deal still holds.

Mind you, the Saudis are now looking to China and India as new partners, as their deal with the USA becomes increasingly untenable.

Edwards says a lot of other "high people in governments and other economic hit men and jackals" now want to tell their stories too.
And I think once Americans understand what we're doing in the world and how much hatred this is generating, we will demand change. And I think history has proven that when we demand change in any area, eventually -- it takes a little time -- but we do get it.

Here's a provocative message from one of those "jackals":
“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?”