The World’s Most Famous Economic Hitman Confesses – They’re Coming for Your Democracy

[Zenaan Harkness]

Very disheartening, the battle rages on...
Chickens will come home to roost one day, I think soonish.
Z


http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_World%E2%80%99s_Most_Famous_Economic_Hitman_Confesses_%E2%80%93_They%E2%80%99re_Coming_for_Your_Democracy/50047/0/38/38/Y/M.html


The World’s Most Famous Economic Hitman Confesses – They’re Coming for
Your Democracy
Published: March 26, 2016


Source: Michael Krieger

Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and
Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,
and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that
functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot
offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy
games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy
or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and
overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning
democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American
power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period
when the national security state was constructed in this country, and
where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like
Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between
these power groups within the American system for control of the
country and the world…

Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have
exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would
have been delighted by how technology and other developments have
allowed the American security state to go much further than he went.
He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go
around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were
in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call
them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my
book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from
that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

Most readers will be familiar with John Perkins and his best-selling
novel Confessions of an Economic Hitman. What you may not know, is
he’s currently making the rounds warning us that all the corporatist
mercenary tactics employed against third-world nations to financially
benefit U.S. conglomerates are now being turned inward on American
communities.

    Twelve years ago, John Perkins published his book, Confessions of
an Economic Hit Man, and it rapidly rose up The New York Times’
best-seller list. In it, Perkins describes his career convincing heads
of state to adopt economic policies that impoverished their countries
and undermined democratic institutions. These policies helped to
enrich tiny, local elite groups while padding the pockets of
U.S.-based transnational corporations.

    If economic pressure and threats didn’t work, Perkins says, the
jackals were called to either overthrow or assassinate the
noncompliant heads of state. That is, indeed, what happened to
Allende, with the backing of the CIA.

    Perkins has just reissued his book with major updates. The basic
premise of the book remains the same, but the update shows how the
economic hit man approach has evolved in the last 12 years. Among
other things, U.S. cities are now on the target list. The combination
of debt, enforced austerity, underinvestment, privatization, and the
undermining of democratically elected governments is now happening
here.

    Sarah van Gelder: What’s changed in our world since you wrote the
first Confessions of an Economic Hit Man?

    John Perkins: Things have just gotten so much worse in the last 12
years since the first Confessions was written. Economic hit men and
jackals have expanded tremendously, including the United States and
Europe.

    Back in my day we were pretty much limited to what we called the
third world, or economically developing countries, but now it’s
everywhere.

    van Gelder: So how has this switched from us being the
beneficiaries of this hit-man economy, perhaps in the past, to us now
being more of the victims of it?

    Perkins: It’s been interesting because, in the past, the economic
hit man economy was being propagated in order to make America
wealthier and presumably to make people here better off, but as this
whole process has expanded in the U.S. and Europe, what we’ve seen is
a tremendous growth in the very wealthy at the expense of everybody
else.

    On a global basis we now know that 62 individuals have as many
assets as half the world’s population.

    van Gelder: Is this the same kind of dynamic about debt that leads
to emergency managers who then turn over the reins of the economy to
private enterprises? The same thing that you are seeing in third-world
countries?

    Perkins: Yes, when I was an economic hit man, one of the things
that we did, we raised these huge loans for these countries, but the
money never actually went to the countries, it went to our own
corporations to build infrastructure in those countries. And when the
countries could not pay off their debt, we insisted that they
privatize their water systems, their sewage systems, their electric
systems.

    van Gelder: I want to ask you about the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
and other trade deals. Is there any way that we can beat these things
back so they don’t continue supercharging the corporate sphere at the
expense of local democracies?

    Perkins: They’re devastating; they give sovereignty to
corporations over governments. It’s ridiculous.

    I was just in Central America and what we talk about in the U.S.
as being an immigration problem is really a trade agreement problem.

    They’re not allowed to impose tariffs under the trade
agreements—NAFTA and CAFTA—but the U.S. is allowed to subsidize its
farmers. Those governments can’t afford to subsidize their farmers. So
our farmers can undercut theirs, and that’s destroyed the economies,
and a number of other things, and that’s why we’ve got immigration
problems.

    van Gelder: Can you talk about the violence that people are
fleeing in Central America, and how that links back to the role the
U.S. has had there?

    Perkins: Three or four years ago the CIA orchestrated a coup
against the democratically elected president of Honduras, President
Zelaya, because he stood up to Dole and Chiquita and some other big,
global, basically U.S.-based corporations.

    He wanted to raise the minimum wage to a reasonable level, and he
wanted some land reform that would make sure that his own people were
able to make money off their own land, rather than having big
international corporations do it.

    The big corporations couldn’t stand for this. He wasn’t
assassinated but he was overthrown in a coup and sent to another
country, and replaced by a terribly brutal dictator, and today
Honduras is one of the most violent, homicidal countries in the
hemisphere.

    It’s frightening what we’ve done. And when that happens to a
president, it sends a message to every other president throughout the
hemisphere, and in fact throughout the world: Don’t mess with us.
Don’t mess with the big corporations. Either cooperate and get rich in
the process, and have all your friends and family get rich in the
process, or go get overthrown or assassinated. It’s a very strong
message.

That is how a once proud nation gets transformed into a rancid,
oligarch-controlled Banana Republic.