Corporatocracy Conspiracies with Economic Hit Man John Perkins

(00:19): Welcome to the health Southern podcast. It is my great honor to have John Perkins on the call today, and if you're not familiar with John, I want to read this bit from probably his most famous books. Then confessions of an economic Hitman, economic Hitman are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of millions of dollars. They funnel money from the world bank, the US agency for international development and other foreign aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. The tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions. During this time of globalization, I should know I was an economic hitman. So John, thank you for joining me today.

(01:13): It's my pleasure or Logan. I'm very pleased to be on this show with you. Thank you.

(01:18): Yes. And I've also had the pleasure of visiting the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador with John as well as Guatemala. And that kind of whole bunch of life changes out of that. And you can read some of the stories from that in my book powered by nature. But what I really want to get to in today's show is to discuss these economic Hitman tools and the various other tools, but also how this imperialism is also going on in our health that much of the same thing is going on. So what I want to start with is this idea of conspiracy theories versus facts. And you mentioned this idea of a couple time throughout your books talking about you don't really believe in a grand conspiracy, but instead, there are hundreds of conspiracies. And I think the definition is a conspiracy is useful, that it's a secret plan by a group to do something illegal or harmful. So a theory on this is just people are doing these things. So do you still have that opinion that it's lots of small conspiracies going on?

(02:18): Yeah, I think I like to call myself kind of a conspiracy factual list. It's not a theory that I deal with kind of the facts. You know, we know that there, there was a conspiracy to cover up the whole idea around weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the word no weapons of mass destruction and yet the seems about a government conspiracy that convinced us that there was, we know there was a conspiracy at one point to overthrow Castro in Cuba under the Kennedy administration. We know there was a lot of different conspiracies and, and you know, perhaps the greatest conspiracy proponent is Trump himself, President Trump, who, who constantly seems to think that there's a conspiracy to overthrow him and not through the due process that just impeachment, but because of the political, so there are a lot of conspiracy things going on, but when people talk about a conspiracy theory or you're just a conspiracy theorist or whatever they, they say, I think they usually, they mean something like the idea of the James Bond, dr no, some overriding power, an individual or a group of individuals building Berks of wherever who sit at the top and control everything.

(03:28): And that's something I just don't buy into. Or a lot of small not always small, but there are a lot of individual conspiracies, but they're not all aimed at the same objective.

(03:37): Right. And you give countless examples in your book and stuff that is public knowledge now, but even though it's public knowledge, like not everyone recognizes it. For instance, back in 1953 the CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected Iranian prime minister most of the day like and installed the show so that we would have control of oil. Like this is publicly accepted knowledge and I think you said like people across the world, I'll know this, but Americans aren't taught this in the school because everything we do as good, of course

(04:07): We're not taught it, but the CIA has admitted to it. It's on the record, the same with a NDA and chili that our involvement there, Henry Kissinger Segra here, state admitted to our involvement there. So yeah, it's interesting that even though we do admit to a lot of these things, we don't teach them in schools. And it's always interesting to me how our journalists often criticized these events after the fact, but when something new comes up, they buy right into it. They kind of don't take into account the history of what we've done. So you know, just about everybody would admit that we made huge mistakes in Vietnam and there were conspiracies to cover up the truth there that we were losing the war. There's no question that General Westmoreland and others were deceiving the American public. But when we go into Afghanistan or Iraq, the press kind of forgets all the lies that were there were put up before.

(05:01): So when Colin Powell goes before the United Nations and says, there's no question that there are weapons of mass destruction, but the press kind of just buys into that. And that's what's kind of shocking to me. It's terrible how gullible we are and how we don't learn from our own history. And I want to, I want to say low in that I'm a very, very loyal American. My family goes back to the 16 hundreds and on the East coast and fought in the American revolution in every war since up through world war two. And I feel that to be loyal, we really need to look at the mistakes we've made in the past, learn from them and move on. And that's why I write the book because I do because I want to admit to the, you know, the way you solve a problem, first you got a problem and then you can figure out how to solve it. And so I think part of my job in writing books like confessions of an economic Hitman is to expose the problem in my new book that's coming out called touching the Jaguar is all about what to do to solve that problem. But before we can solve a problem, we have to admit that we have a problem and understand it and analyze it.

(06:09): Yeah, and another point that I think is important and something I've been trying to grapple with this, like how much is it conspiracy versus how much is just kind of the systemic effects of such the one, the quotes, I forget which book this was from. I kind of poured through your books in preparation of this, but this EHSM system is fueled by something far more dangerous than a global conspiracy. It is driven by concepts that have become accepted as gospel. What do you mean by that?

(06:36): Well, yeah, and that's a very, very interesting point. Yeah. If we knew there was some grand conspiracy and there was a group of let's say half a dozen or a dozen people sitting at the top conspiring to control the world. If that were the case, it would be relatively, well it shouldn't say it wouldn't be easy to resolve that or to get rid of that group of people, but at least we would have something that we could focus on. The fact of the matter is if there's a systemic problem and to a large degree that can be defined as, as the goal of corporations and therefore those who protect and promote corporations like an economist and economic Hitman and politicians and government officials, that the goal of corporations is to maximize short term profits regardless of the social-environmental costs. And those short term profits primarily go to a few very wealthy individuals.

(07:24): I mean we all can participate in the stock market, but it really benefits, you know, the majority of it benefits a few very rich individuals. And so that's a very systemic idea that if we believe, and if we teach in our business schools, which we do, that the goal of the corporation and the goal of all the systems that support the corporations such as our government, is to maximize short term profits. Then that gives CEOs and government managers the right, you might even say the mandate to do whatever they feel is the best way to create and promote short term profits, including bribing politicians. And they can do that legally by the financing campaigns and by offering politicians lucrative consulting jobs or lobbying jobs when they leave politics, bribing politicians destroying the very resources upon which the long term future their industries depend as we see if they were doing with the oil and coal and a number of other resources and many, many other activities that should be illegal. It shouldn't be part of our economic system, but because this goal is to maximize short term profits they become very powerful tools that corporations and those who support the corporations use

(08:46): Yeah. I think an important part of this, the recognition that things that used to be illegal. If you can consolidate the power and the money in order to buy lobbyists, fund politicians and all that, you can change the laws, which is what they've done. And all sorts of industries across time in order to make things that previously were illegal are now legal. Now you can do more of the same. You can continue that process.

(09:12): Yeah. And you know, the whole campaign financing a deal, you know, the laws that have been passed around allowing corporations to play such a huge role and wealthy individuals to play such a huge role in deciding on who's going to be the next candidate and to finance that and really have a huge impact on our electoral process. And that's been legalized. It didn't use to be, they used to be restrictions on the amount of money that any individual or corporation could contribute. But that's pretty much changed recently.

(09:41): Yeah. So I want to discuss the tools used by economic Hitman and the jackals. You talk about it, it seems to come down to this idea of silver or lead. One of your quotes was that they offer the care of corruption. And then if that does not work, they threaten the stick of KU or assassination. So that's some of the tools. And you were mentioning bribes of which they can be legal or illegal ones. There are threats, false science or you talk about putting together economic models that really they're just pipe dreams. There's rigging elections, sex blackmail, all these different tools that are out there. And one of the things that come across in your book is you talk about how these are smart people, they're learning as they go. So they're flexible with these tools and they're innovating and adapting new tools and getting kind of better at this process all the time. Do you have anything to add to that?

(10:30): Well, it's true. And one of the followup books to confessions with the new confessions of an economic Hitman, I won't really go into in the 12 years between running the original and a follow up, how it really got, it's gotten a lot worse. And you know, today we have many different kinds of economic Hitman, if you will, including corporate agents who will go to different countries and say, well, you know, our corporation wants to build a huge manufacturing plant someplace in the world and we're going to employ a lot of people and Hey, in the Philippines, if you give us these tax breaks and, and let us pay our, our workers a very low fee we'll come here. But on the other hand is Indonesia office is a better deal. We'll go there. And you know, that goes on a very large scale.

(11:21): Now even goes on in cities in the United States. You know, we saw, we've seen companies like Boeing and Mike and Amazon compete. Let's get their cities to compete with each other, to give them more tax breaks, to give them better deals that essentially subsidize these big corporations that really don't need subsidies. No, it's pretty well known that our corporate system and even our politicians and our, and our military are heavily subsidized. Those are basically socialistic institutions, but we're socializing the spenders, the big money makers, and we're not socializing. The rest of us were the, and especially not the people who need it the most.

(12:02): I forget who was saying this, but just the kind of hit me that with the whole big bailout back in 2008 that is really kind of ironic that way back in history, they used to have debt Jubilees you know, they erase all debt, but here they weren't Bailey, not the people, but bailing out the exact institutions, the banks that had created the problem in the first place.

(12:25): Yeah, exactly. And the rest of us paid for our tech to our taxes. Yes, exactly. And you know, I mean here we've got a situation where our statistics also are totally skewed. You know, we know now that there are three individuals in the United States who have as much wealth as half the population, a little bit more than half the population. And so if those three individuals, this next year make a 10% return on their wealth and half the population loses, 3% will still show a gain in the economic growth of about three and a half percent overall, which is ridiculous when you think about it. That shows that our statistics of it, you know, so when president Trump or for that matter, previous presidents, all right say, well we get great economic growth, we're growing at three and a half percent. That really means that the wealthy are getting a lot of money and the middle class and below maybe staying, staying still or even getting a lot worse off. And so our statistics are part of this process of lying, part of this economic Hitman process of selling us a perception that doesn't really reflect the reality of the majority of people.

(13:41): Yeah, GDP is not a very good metric to be tracking as far as the results that it's bringing and we can see a similar sort of thing in health. Like even longevity is probably not a good one. Although the health span would be something much harder to track. We look at just for all of our wealth and everything in the U S compared to other parts in the world, the level of mental conditions and all kinds of unhappiness that's here is much higher than other places in the world.

(14:09): Yes, absolutely.

(14:11): So you mentioned in confessions that when you were writing the book, you wanted to call it conscious of an economic Hitman first. I'm curious why the title change? Was that just a book publisher type thing with other better sell?

(14:24): Well, the idea originally the regional idea, after I stopped being an economic hit man, I started writing the book. I wanted to include the stories of other people who had jobs similar to mine and the jackals or the ones who go in. When the economic hit men fail, that people we call the jackals go in either overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders. Some of the things we talked about a little bit earlier. So I started contacting these people, both the former economic gift man and the jackals, and very quickly I get anonymous phone calls threatening my life and my young daughters, she was about the same age as your daughter is right now, probably around two or thereabouts. And I took these threats very seriously because two of my clients, the president of Ecuador, high mural dos and I've head of state of Panama, Theresa has both been assassinated.

(15:16): All the evidence shows that they were assassinated because they didn't buy into the deal. So I knew what these people could do. And at the same time I was taken out to dinner by the president of stoner Western engineering company and one of the largest and most powerful engineering firms in the world at that time. And I just quit being chief economist at one of his rivals, Charles DMA in it as president takes me out to dinner and he says, you know, we'd like to use your resume. You've got a very good resume. You're a chief economist, you have 50 people working for you. We'd like to use your resume and our proposals. You won't have to do any work for us. Not much. Anyway, just let us use your resume and I'm prepared to write you a check tomorrow morning for half a million dollars. This was in the eighties half a million dollars is worth a bit more than it is today and it's nothing.

(16:02): Don't have that today. And then he says, but just don't write that book. And so suddenly I'm being hit with the same carrot and stick approach that I was, I had been using it on presidents during my 10 years. It's an economic Hitman, you know, and being off of the carrot of this huge bride, basically totally legal, it's a consultant's retainer. It's a totally legal thing for them to do it. That was a very unusually large one, but nonetheless not illegal. And I'm also being offered the sick of the amount of the phone calls. So I took the money and in my own defense I would say that I used that money to go back to the Amazon where I had been a peace Corps volunteer and I formed a nonprofit called dream change. And eventually the Pachamama Alliance. Both organizations you're personally familiar with and working with the indigenous people.

(16:52): And I put, so I put the money that I made not into getting a fancy car and then a house or something like that. It put it into developing this relationship in Ecuador, in the Amazon and Andes and in writing five books on indigenous culture shape shifting the world is as your dream. Five books that I wrote before, confessions of an economic Hitman stone and Webster was fine with me writing those books. In fact, they said it probably wouldn't HAMP their business if it did anything. But then after my contract was Tony Webster expired, I was in the Amazon with a group of people taking them into spend time with some of the indigenous cultures they're learning from the indigenous cultures. Oh nine 11 the famous idle Ivan. And after that I flew to New York and look down into this shit. And at this point I knew I had to write a book about my life.

(17:42): I had to talk about the things I've done that make people very angry around the world. And this time I, that my best protection would be to not tell anybody. I was writing this book, not to interview other people, to just write my own story, which, which I thought of originally as the conscience other than economic Hitman, my own conscience coming into play, but somehow that in that evolve or into the idea of a confession, because as I wrote it, I saw what I was really doing was confessing, so I decided I would write this book, I'd write it totally in secret. I wouldn't contact any of the people. That would be a personal story. It wouldn't include any other stories and once I have it in the hands of an agent, good agent in New York and Houston distributing it to publishers, I figured it would be my insurance policy that anybody who might think that they didn't want my message to get out, the last thing they would want to do and make me a martyr, kill me and that would sell out the copies of the book.

(18:40): Right. Amplify the message. Yes. One of your quotes in there that I think is kind of helpful to understand is I often felt jealous of my employees for their naivety. I had intentionally deceived them and in so doing I had protected them from their own conscious. They did not have to struggle with the moral issues that haunted me. So you were brought into this world and told you're going to be an economic Hitman like we are using the world bank, the IMF in order to put these countries into debt in order to control them. But the people that worked under you, you had a bunch of employees at the time. It was, they thought they were doing good.

(19:20): Yes, exactly. And you know, originally, in the beginning, I also thought I was doing good because we're taught in business school that the way to help developing countries or poor countries is to invest heavily in big infrastructure projects. Get the country to take out huge loans to invest in, in big infrastructure projects that was taught in business school. And the economic models show that that's right. And when you do that, the economy grows. But at the beginning of my career, I thought that was doing the right thing. I'd come out of the Peace Corps and working with the company and I'm making the economies of these countries. But it took me a few years to understand that. Again, those statistics are very stupid like I described before, these three individuals in the United States. But if you, that's true throughout the world. And in fact recently Oxfam concluded that 1% of the world's population has more wealth than 7 billion people, most of the rest of the world.

(20:16): So that 1% is doing really well. It looks as though the whole world economy is doing well. And so I came to understand how skewed these two statistics were in favor of a few wealthy families in those developing countries who benefited from that or electricity production that are ports that are highways because they own the businesses that benefited from those. While the majority of the people were suffering because money was being diverted from education, health care, and other social services to pay off the interest on the debt. So it took a while to get that. And meanwhile in building up the staff. And the mandate I basically had was to produce reports that would create the perception. In fact, I believe the perception to begin with, that when countries put themselves into this deep debt, they would be helping their overall economic growth. But as time went by and I realized that wasn't the case, and in fact, I'd been trained by this woman, Claudine, who I mentioned the book of the beginning, who basically told me that I would be doing these nefarious things, but I still didn't.

(21:22): It still seemed to be within the realm of all the economic models that I've been taught the world bank toted and still does. Instead, that business schools still teach us. But I began to understand this. And once I began to understand that, I realized that in order to keep going at this job, I had to continue to deceive the people who worked for me, that I really didn't want to put them in the position of understanding this. And at that point, I was making a lot of money. I was traveling first class around the world. I'm staying in the best hotels, eating in the finest restaurants, wining and dining with presidents. And I came from a relatively poor teacher's family in New Hampshire, rural New Hampshire, and suddenly I'm living what seems to be the American dream. So even though once they understood the evil nature of what I was doing, I didn't want to understand it.

(22:13): I kept wanting to be in denial. And I think that's a very, very important aspect of all of this, that this, a lot of people out there that may in their hearts know that what they're doing is the wrong thing, but they're in denial about it because it's just too easy. You know, we probably all are anybody who drives a car, we know that we're doing a bad King Bay driving this huge piece of metal around. We weigh, let's say anywhere from a hundred to 250 pounds and we're driving around this piece of equipment. It ways to move us places and we're using a whole lot of petroleum, yet we keep doing it. [inaudible]. You know, that's a very simple case, but in the business world is an awful lot of people that are convinced that they're doing the right thing and they want to convince themselves they're doing the right thing because they're making a lot of money and they think they're living the good life.

(23:03): Right? Another example would be if you pay taxes, which I'm not suggesting anyone stopped doing, but you're funding this kind of corruption that is going on. It's under this kind of corruption and you're fighting it, what I call it, death economy, which is an economic system that's consuming its resources into extinction. But in addition, you know, 51 cents of every tax dollar you pay in the United States goes to in the discretionary budget, goes to the military, goes to supporting killing people. And you know, it's what we call defending ourselves from being killed. But a lot of it has nothing to do with that. We've got military bases and places that are absolutely no threat to us whatsoever, but we're funding that and that's part of why, what funds are our economic growth. It's huge as Eisenhower defined a military industrial complex. So yeah, 51 cents of every dollar that you pay in taxes goes toward the military. And that's a little scary. That's the largest in any country.

(24:05): Yeah. And I think one of the, I guess more insidious aspects that I don't feel like you cover it super well in confessions, but in, I believe hoodwinked had the most on this maybe the secrets of American empire, but this idea of the colonizer posing as altruist, which is definitely happening with the world bank and the economics, but that NGOs, that charity organizations, foundations can actually be part of this whole economic Hitman plan. Can we trust the United Nations when we know that that is used in order to buy votes from other countries? And oftentimes we only follow UN ideas when they sued them because we have veto power often there. Can we trust the world health organization, which is, we can see similar sort of revolving door going on. Can we trust the red cross when we see that with the catastrophe in Haiti that they raised half a billion dollars and built six homes?

(25:02): No, we can't try. I mean it's, and it's a shame because we need these global organizations. We desperately need referees around the whole global economy. And let's face it, we're in a global economy, whether we want to be dependent on China or have this independence in it. And this has come up a lot now with these diseases, influenza crisis in China that, you know, can companies stop being so dependent on China? Well, it's very difficult. These are the two largest world's largest economies in the United States. We're very, very interrelated, interdependent. And that's true with so many countries and places. So we've got this globalized situation. There's no question about it. The question is how do we deal with that? So in a world that is globalized and there's no question that we are, and we may all want to get more local and I want to get more love from, and I promote that that's important.

(25:55): By local trade with local banks, buy organic local foods as much as you can, but to realize that as long as we're going to use these computers and their cell phones and airplanes and so much of the rest of the technology, we're going to be globalized. And that kind of a world, you need referees. You need people to make sure that everybody's playing on a level playing field, that you follow the rules. You know, I got 11 and 12-year-olds Krantz who place shocker. And imagine if you put 22 players, two teams of 11 each on a soccer team PO and you just threw the ball in the middle of the field and there was no referee. Well, what happened? Good Lord. You don't even want to think about what might happen. You know? And that's kind of the way the world is. I mean, that's why we need organizations like the world health organization to monitor these things, to control them.

(26:41): And the United nations, unfortunately they don't work well. Primarily because a few countries and the United States being the prime example, have so much control. So when the United Nations strongly, strongly opposed the United States going into Iraq in the second world war in Iraq under the second Bush administration, Bush ignored it and went ahead anyway. And when the foreign minister of Iran wanted to come to the opening meetings, very important meetings of the United nations this past fall, he wasn't allowed to go to the United nations. That's happened many times. It happened with Olivia. It's happened with other countries. It's terribly absurd to think that the United Nations, and if you walk into that building, there's a plaque that says, we're not part of the United States. We're on independent soil. This soil is owned by all the nations of the world that were built on this building. It's owned by all the nations of the world.

(27:33): That's beautiful. But the fact of the matter is to get to that building, you've got to land in the US airport and you've got to go through US territory to get there. And we don't grant pieces to people. We don't want to. We went to the prime minister, the foreign minister of Iran, just this last fall. So we've really used served the United States has usurped the power of the United Nations and other countries too often do things that are contrary to the spirit of the United Nations and the same is true of the world house organization and I think that's a terrible pity because I believe very strongly that we truly, truly need these organizations, but they need to be independent and everybody including the United States needs to agree that they will follow the rules that are still funny as organization,

(28:19): So we need fair referees, but it's a problem when governments and corporations have the power to basically set who the referees are corrupt. Then we'll be back in the next episode with John Perkins to discuss what can be done about all of this. If you'd like more information, definitely check out all of John's books. There'll be links to those in the show notes. In addition, my book powered by nature, this was inspired by that journey I took with John and others down to the Amazon rainforest. If a special deal when that helps support them as unreinforced as well. You can check that out poweredbynaturebook.Com