Not In My Name
I've spent the last couple of years in my free time trying to piece together the real history of the U.S. The history that doesn't make the history books or the press. Because there are two Americas -- one for the 99% of us citizens and another, secret America that rules from behind the scenes -- an important piece of our story has not been told: the story of power, corruption, and empire.
If this all sounds a bit like the new world order illuminati myth don't worry. It's not. Our secret America leaves a paper trail.
It's been both a fascinating and horrifying endeavor studying these people. I've mostly focused on the last century or so -- the time since the big bankers and industrialists began to subvert the principles of our democracy and seize control of our government through illicit means. This subverting has continued, even accelerated, into the present, often times by the children and grandchildren of those same bankers and industrialists who rose to great wealth and power in the birth of the industrial age. (read Bush, Harriman, Brown etc)
But nothing I could write about what I've learned could be as illuminating as having "one of their own" blow the whistle on how they have been soiling the good name of the United States of America and its citizens in an attempt to control the resources of the planet. We all got a glimpse of the real agenda of this ruling class when they brazenly invaded a foreign country to secure their interests in oil (don't tell me it was for belief in a democratic middle east). But this latest display of empire building merely scratches the surface.
In a new book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins "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."
The testimony of this man, who undoubtedly has no motive other than his conscience, will make your stomach turn. Even for those who already have a pretty good knowledge of the workings of the CIA, World Bank, and the likes of Bechtel, Brown and Root or Halliburton.
Perkins gives us a personalized, up close view of the secret empire these people have been pursuing for the last century and how their actions, in our names, have lead to death and mayhem around the globe. Not to mention the seeds of terrorism against our people.
Below is excerpts from an interview with the author by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now
Check out the excerpt then click the link to read or listen to the whole interview online.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, already people are going to be wondering, What is he talking about, economic hit man? Explain.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, over the past 30 to 40 years, we economic hit men have created the largest global empire in the history of the world. And we do this, typically -- well, there are many ways to do it, but a typical one is that we identify a third-world country that has resources, which we covet. And often these days that's oil, or might be the canal in the case of Panama. In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90%, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we've all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks -- big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt. Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That's what we're doing today around the world, and we've been doing it -- it began shortly after the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world.
<SNIP>
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our conversation with John Perkins, his book is called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He joins us in our firehouse studio here at Downtown Community Television, just blocks from where the towers of the World Trade Center once stood, from ground zero, and we're going to talk about the effect of September 11 and how it -- the role it played in John Perkins writing this book. But before we do that, Robert MacNamara, you write about him. Talk about his roles from Ford to Secretary of Defense to World Bank.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Amy, I think that what we have here is a world empire that's controlled by a very few men I call the corporatocracy, and these are the heads of the big corporations, big banks and government, and they tend to be the same person. You know, they jump across these lines and MacNamara is a great example of that. He was president of Ford and then he became Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and then he became president of the World Bank. And in all three roles, his main job was to promote American business, to promote the corporatocracy, to bring the goodies home, to exploit the world. And he was in democratic regimes, Kennedy and Johnson. Today we've got Dick Cheney who's basically in the same picture. We had George Schultz under the former President Bush. So, the two Bushes both have these types of people, too. Condoleezza Rice. Government is filled with these people. But it is not just a republican issue. It's a bipartisan issue. It goes across all the lines, and MacNamara is a very good example of that. I think, at the same time, MacNamara was one of the most important people in terms of framing the new economics, what he called aggressive management, and it was aggressive about going out and basically taking the world and bringing it into us so that today we have, out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations. 47 are U.S. corporations, and they're not countries, they're corporations. Here we are 5% of the world's population reaching out like a great octopus and sucking in 25% or more of the world's resources. But it's not really 5% of the world's population, the American people. 1% of the American population owns more of the material wealth than 90% of our population. So, it's that 1% that are the corporatocracy that are sucking all this in and the rest of us are supporting it through our taxes, through our purchases, through our silence, through going along with this system. Like me, as an economic hit man, I went along with the system. I did more than go along with the system, I promoted the system. But I did so legally, for the most part, and I did so while being patted on the back by all the people that I was taught to look up to.
<SNIP>
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. He's author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. We're talking about oil, empire, what he calls the corporatocracy, and being an economic hit man. So you were involved in Iran. You also were tied up in Saudi Arabia. Explain.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Saudi Arabia was probably -- not probably, there's no question, it was our greatest success as economic hit men. I mean, that's how we judge ourselves. In the early 1970s, OPEC really flexed its muscle. It didn't like U.S. policies in Israel supporting Israel, and decided to do something about it. So it shut down oil production significantly. And as a result, the U.S. economy went into a tail spin. There were long lines of cars at gas stations, many of us still remember that. And we were afraid that it was going to be another crash like 1929 as a result of OPEC. And so the treasury department came to me and some other economic hit men and said this must never happen again. You have got to devise a plan. What are you going to do about this? How can you make sure this never happens? And we knew the key was Saudi Arabia. For one thing, it had more oil than anybody else. Even at that point in time, the Shah was getting a little bit shaky, and we'd seen that he wasn't probably going to take over the rest of the Middle East. We knew that the House of Saud, the royal Saudi family, was corruptible. They were corrupt, they are corrupt, and they were corruptible. So, to make a long story short, we put together this deal whereby they agreed, the House of Saud, to send most of their petro dollars, the money we paid for petroleum, back to the United States and invest it in U.S. securities. The interest from those securities would be dealt out by the treasury department to U.S. engineering construction firms to build Saudi Arabia in the Western image, to build huge cities out of the desert, which we've done, power plants, highways, McDonald's, the whole works, to make Saudi Arabia a very westernized country. And the House of Saud would guarantee to keep oil prices within acceptable limits, limits acceptable to us, and we would guarantee to keep the House of Saud in power. And we have done -- all those things have followed since the early 1970s. The policy still holds. Even to the point where, you know, we know that the House of Saud supports Osama bin Laden, supported him at our encouragement, of course, in Afghanistan, continues to support him and a lot of terrorist movements. We knew that the House of Saud provided sanctuary to Edie Amin, the Hitler of Africa. In fact, that's where he spend the last years of his life, living in a mansion, just died a little over a year ago there. And we've supported the House of Saud throughout all of this, despite the fact they've done a lot of things that ostensibly we disagree with. But they have provided us with these stabilized oil prices and a huge market for our engineering construction companies.
My biggest problem with the secret ruling class is that they lack accountability. Whether it's the WTO or the Senate Banking committee, deals and decisions that get made in the dark are dangerous and most often result in us, the people, getting the short end of the stick.
But the more I learn about what they've been up to, the more I realize that the America they've created, and projected to the world, has become a bad thing while we weren't paying attention. It's like growing up and discovering that your beloved uncle Sam is a rapist and murderer.
I can't believe that ordinary Americans, decent people by and large, would sanction the assassination of democratically elected foreign leaders if they knew about it. So it's our job to make sure everyone knows about it. It is only through the sunshine of accountability that we can purge the evil that is acting in our names around the world for nothing but the enrichment and empowerment of a very, very few bad apples.
We simply must expose the Corporatocracy and its stranglehold on our supposedly democratic government.