Saturday, February 25, 2006
Economic Hit Man--Or Con Man?
Since I've cited the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins more than once in articles, this revelation courtesy of Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief is a bit disturbing, to say the least. In the interests of honesty--of always portraying the fact when things don't add up--I am posting the whole thing here for readers to check out for themselves. Joel Skousen's interpolated comments make sense, and suggest that Perkins might be just another shill--with Confessions a disinformational piece put out to divert our attention while the globalists continue doing the very things they have been doing elsewhere. Wouldn't somebody with real inside information and the motivation to help shut down this whole thing have named names, so that the heavy hitters could be targeted and, if possible, prosecuted? Would they have talked to Perkins if he really was a turncoat out to expose them? (Question of my own: wouldn't Perkins himself be in hiding?) Good questions, all!
JOHN PERKINS: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" OR CON MAN?
World Affairs Brief, February 24, 2006
John Perkins claims to be a disaffected "Economic Hit Man," an economic saboteur working for the NSA under cover of an investment banking firm on Wall Street. Let's examine his claims. Many are true in a general sense, but the whole story itself is a disinformation piece, in that it claims to be a tell-all version of globalist corruption from the perspective of an insider. Perkins makes enough specific errors to indicate he claims more than he really participated in. It is my opinion that Perkins is a plant who still works for the PTB, and that he only tells enough to inflame the left to continue its battle against the so-called right wing global domination agenda. Meanwhile, he carefully protects all the key players so that no one can be prosecuted. Someone who really wanted to kill this evil system of globalist economic control would name names and tell of detailed conversations. In short, the story Perkins weaves is meant merely to create limited hype amount the minorities opposed to US global imperialism, while protecting the actual players from legal prosecution.
In a recent interview with the leftist Democracy Now organization, Amy Goodman discusses with Perkins what it means to be an economic hit man. Excerpts of her interview follow, with [my comments in brackets].
JOHN PERKINS: Well, what we've done -- we 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 [This is part disinformation, making it look like simple "greedy capitalism." He fails to mention the real motive: globalist governmental control of nations. Oil and resources are merely part of the payoff to corporate participants in this globalist conspiracy], 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 [through Export/Import Bank loans] 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 [He's playing to the left again. The poor are only the last of a long line of sufferers. They don't pay for the loans directly, but businesses and the middle class do, through taxes and regulatory roadblocks to free enterprise. The poor suffer at the end of the process, being downstream of the lack of job creation as new businesses are strangled by high interest rates, high inflationary monetary policies and shortages of foreign exchange], and they're huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won't get education, health, and other social services [as if that were their "right". Actually, all socialist countries do provide these corrupting benefits, just never enough to satisfy socialists like Perkins], 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.' [It is never this overt. Much is done by forcing some free reforms, which aren't bad except when steered exclusively toward big corporations, connected to globalism.] And in that way, we've managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we've done this...
JOHN PERKINS: 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, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that over 80% of the population of South America recently voted in an anti-U.S. president and what's going on at the World Trade Organization, ... is that people are beginning to understand that the middle class and the lower classes around the world are being terribly, terribly exploited by what I call the corporatocracy, which really runs this empire. [But the corporate controllers are only working for the larger controllers, who are globalists -- a fact that Perkins surely understands.]
AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for?
JOHN PERKINS: I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the one that's in the news so much today because of spying on people, and I was tested by them, recruited by them -- I had connections through my wife with people in the agency, and they put me through a series of tests, personality tests, lie detector, several days, and concluded that I would make a good economic hit man [Baloney. He's leaving out all the specifics about training in the theory of establishing the NWO. You don't get to be an "economic hit man" until you've, first, worked up an unprincipled past, and second, been trained specifically on how the US control system works through "private corporations." This story is a fraud by what is missing -- not by what he does say, which is limited], and they also discovered a number of weaknesses in my character, which they could use then to hook me into the business, and then I ended up working for a private corporation. [So why aren't they using blackmail on him now, if he really is a whistleblower? Better yet, why haven't they made the least effort to pressure his establishment publisher? Simple: This who story is approved for distribution.]
AMY GOODMAN: Why didn't you work for the N.S.A.?
JOHN PERKINS: Because these days it's not done that way. 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 [very true]. I worked for a company called Charles T. Main, a big consulting firm out of Boston [and that's the closest we get to naming names].
AMY GOODMAN: And your job?
JOHN PERKINS: 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."
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain actually how that plays out, because it's not really in this pocket and that.
JOHN PERKINS: No, it's -- what I'm saying is that, you know, I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means [He can't do all this by working for Charles T. Main consulting. Only the black side of government can set up what he is claiming, so there is much he's not telling], and I can also -- if he doesn't accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying -- that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don't overthrow him, we'll assassinate him. And these people all know the history. They know that this has happened many, many, many times in the past. [The reasons for assassinating are much more complex than what he is explaining, and have more to do with controlling or whittling down the power of outright Communists, and replacing them with globalists. Also, his implied claim of moral conscience confessing all this doesn't wash. No moral people are allowed into this trade. There are no defectors, and if there were, they would be dead. Perkins is lying about his benevolent motives.]
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened to Torrijos, for example, in Panama, and what did you have to do with it?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, this was back in the '70s, and Torrijos was making a lot of world headlines, because he was demanding that the Panama Canal be turned back over to Panamanians. [That's because Torrijos was deeply involved in the Communist movement, which wanted control of the Canal -- not because he was a populist.] I was sent down to Panama to bring him around, to convince him that he needed to play the game our way. And he invited me to a little bungalow outside of Panama City, and he said, "Look, you know, I know the game, and if I play it your way, I'll become very rich, but that's not important to me. What is important is that I help my poor people." [This is bunk. In his interview Perkins portrays every communist as a soft-hearted liberal who loves the people. Pure propaganda.] Now, Torrijos wasn't an angel, but he was very committed to his poor people. So he said, "You can either play the game my way, or you can leave this country." And I talked to my bosses, and we all decided I should stay. Maybe I could bring him around. [More bunk.] I liked Torrijos, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring him around was not just because it was my job, but because I wanted to see him survive, and because he didn't come around, sure enough, he was assassinated... Fiery airplane crash, and afterwards, there was no question that -- he had been handed a tape recorder as he got on the plane that had a bomb in it [True, but this detailed knowledge implicates Perkins more deeply as an unprincipled insider -- not as the cringing moralist he paints himself to be. I never trust people who come out of active participation in the dark side.] ... [W]e 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 is [for] a bodyguard [to be] 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. [More baloney. He's only making a case only for greed and money. The real reason Saddam was targeted was short-term control of Iraqi oil, and long-term military bases in an area crucial to US plans of more Muslim intervention and antagonism -- like Iran and Syria.]
AMY GOODMAN: As a consultant, you did work in Saudi Arabia, John Perkins?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, in fact I put -- I was one of the ones responsible for putting together the main deal there in the early ''70s. [I think he's fibbing here, as his erroneous statements below will show.] As you may recall, Amy, 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 [gross exaggeration], 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 [always his excuse to avoid naming names] 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 [no, this was already standard procedure for all oil producing nations that had billion of petro dollars], the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants. [More baloney. This shows he is inventing facts. The interest was always automatically payable to the Saudis just as all other bond holders. The Saudis, not the Treasury Dept, used petro-dollars to finance their infrastructure moves.] 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. It's been holding for a long time. [Yes, there is a pact to "keep them in power", but it's a deal about playing along with US globalist objectives, and not tied directly to the price of oil.] ...
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was one of the speakers at the World Social Forum in Brazil in last February [shows he is playing to the far left. No one gets invited to this radical group unless you're on the left and projecting an anti-American image], and a man asked to meet with me who was a very high advisor to Lula. And he said, "You know, what you say in your book is all very true, but you just -- that's just the tip of the iceberg." He said, "You know, from the time I was a very young man, I was quite radical. And it was interesting to me, as I was going through university, how much sex, drugs, booze were available to me in the parties that I was invited to, and so on. And now that I'm in this position of power, I discover that somebody was taking pictures of all those things, that there's a record of this." And he says, "You don't realize how all-pervasive your Secret Services are. It's recruiting, in their own way, young people, even those that are extreme socialists and communists. Your people befriend us from very early ages and get a lot of information on us. So when we become high up in the government, they basically -- " And I said, "They blackmail you?" [As if Perkins didn't know this?!] And he said, "Well, you could use the word 'blackmail,' but I think I would prefer [is] 'modern U.S. diplomacy.'" [This sounds like Perkins talking -- not a Brazilian.] And I asked him, I said, "Well, is Lula a part of this?" [More Perkins playing dumb. If he is the insider he claimed, he would know everything that the US has on Lula.] And he obviously didn't really want to answer this question. He hesitated, and he said, "Let me just say that nobody gets to power in Brazil these days without being very willing to make compromises to your corporations and your government." [Again, Perkins is putting words in his mouth.] He said, "I think Lula's a very, very good man [more propaganda Perkins is anxious to promote. Lula is a radical Communist masquerading as a moderate], but he also has to deal with reality. And certainly, he's been watched all of his life, and I'm sure he's had the same temptations I did."
AMY GOODMAN: And he's also engulfed in a major corruption scandal, which, for many of his long-time supporters, Brazilians and outside, are raising a lot of questions.
JOHN PERKINS: And I think the fact that the scandal has come out and has been blown into such proportions [What does he mean, blown out of proportion? The scandals are much worse than what has been revealed, and Lulu is as corrupt as the rest] is an indication that someone is sending Lula a very strong message. Incidentally, the jackal -- I'll call him -- that was working with Gutierrez of Ecuador said to me, "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? And don't you think that --' [True enough, but now Perkins is feeding the right-wing side of his audience some conspiracy info they already know. It helps to endear both the left and far right to his alluring message.]
AMY GOODMAN: Would you care to share his name [the Jackal]?
JOHN PERKINS: No. I'll let him do that at some point, if he feels it's appropriate. Right now, he doesn't feel it's appropriate. He's still in the business. And so, many of these people are still very -- even the ones that have retired are getting pensions, and they've got loyalties, some of them. So, they'll talk to me on the side and say, "I want you to put this in your book, but I'm not ready to talk." [Baloney. No true insider would talk to Perkins if he were a real traitor to the system. They would know his every move would be surveilled.] A couple of them I am working with to write a book, and my literary agent is working with them. [Sure! As if there this could be done without discovery.] So hopefully some of them will come clean. [Again, Perkins keeps making this case like these guys have a conscience and want to tell the truth. That's a lot of garbage. These guys are really evil, and have million dollar retreats in Colorado as part of their retirement packages. They aren't going to risk losing it all and getting a bullet in the head over a fit of conscience.]" [End of Democracy Now excerpt.]
JOHN PERKINS: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" OR CON MAN?
World Affairs Brief, February 24, 2006
John Perkins claims to be a disaffected "Economic Hit Man," an economic saboteur working for the NSA under cover of an investment banking firm on Wall Street. Let's examine his claims. Many are true in a general sense, but the whole story itself is a disinformation piece, in that it claims to be a tell-all version of globalist corruption from the perspective of an insider. Perkins makes enough specific errors to indicate he claims more than he really participated in. It is my opinion that Perkins is a plant who still works for the PTB, and that he only tells enough to inflame the left to continue its battle against the so-called right wing global domination agenda. Meanwhile, he carefully protects all the key players so that no one can be prosecuted. Someone who really wanted to kill this evil system of globalist economic control would name names and tell of detailed conversations. In short, the story Perkins weaves is meant merely to create limited hype amount the minorities opposed to US global imperialism, while protecting the actual players from legal prosecution.
In a recent interview with the leftist Democracy Now organization, Amy Goodman discusses with Perkins what it means to be an economic hit man. Excerpts of her interview follow, with [my comments in brackets].
JOHN PERKINS: Well, what we've done -- we 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 [This is part disinformation, making it look like simple "greedy capitalism." He fails to mention the real motive: globalist governmental control of nations. Oil and resources are merely part of the payoff to corporate participants in this globalist conspiracy], 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 [through Export/Import Bank loans] 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 [He's playing to the left again. The poor are only the last of a long line of sufferers. They don't pay for the loans directly, but businesses and the middle class do, through taxes and regulatory roadblocks to free enterprise. The poor suffer at the end of the process, being downstream of the lack of job creation as new businesses are strangled by high interest rates, high inflationary monetary policies and shortages of foreign exchange], and they're huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won't get education, health, and other social services [as if that were their "right". Actually, all socialist countries do provide these corrupting benefits, just never enough to satisfy socialists like Perkins], 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.' [It is never this overt. Much is done by forcing some free reforms, which aren't bad except when steered exclusively toward big corporations, connected to globalism.] And in that way, we've managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we've done this...
JOHN PERKINS: 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, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that over 80% of the population of South America recently voted in an anti-U.S. president and what's going on at the World Trade Organization, ... is that people are beginning to understand that the middle class and the lower classes around the world are being terribly, terribly exploited by what I call the corporatocracy, which really runs this empire. [But the corporate controllers are only working for the larger controllers, who are globalists -- a fact that Perkins surely understands.]
AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for?
JOHN PERKINS: I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the one that's in the news so much today because of spying on people, and I was tested by them, recruited by them -- I had connections through my wife with people in the agency, and they put me through a series of tests, personality tests, lie detector, several days, and concluded that I would make a good economic hit man [Baloney. He's leaving out all the specifics about training in the theory of establishing the NWO. You don't get to be an "economic hit man" until you've, first, worked up an unprincipled past, and second, been trained specifically on how the US control system works through "private corporations." This story is a fraud by what is missing -- not by what he does say, which is limited], and they also discovered a number of weaknesses in my character, which they could use then to hook me into the business, and then I ended up working for a private corporation. [So why aren't they using blackmail on him now, if he really is a whistleblower? Better yet, why haven't they made the least effort to pressure his establishment publisher? Simple: This who story is approved for distribution.]
AMY GOODMAN: Why didn't you work for the N.S.A.?
JOHN PERKINS: Because these days it's not done that way. 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 [very true]. I worked for a company called Charles T. Main, a big consulting firm out of Boston [and that's the closest we get to naming names].
AMY GOODMAN: And your job?
JOHN PERKINS: 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."
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain actually how that plays out, because it's not really in this pocket and that.
JOHN PERKINS: No, it's -- what I'm saying is that, you know, I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means [He can't do all this by working for Charles T. Main consulting. Only the black side of government can set up what he is claiming, so there is much he's not telling], and I can also -- if he doesn't accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying -- that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don't overthrow him, we'll assassinate him. And these people all know the history. They know that this has happened many, many, many times in the past. [The reasons for assassinating are much more complex than what he is explaining, and have more to do with controlling or whittling down the power of outright Communists, and replacing them with globalists. Also, his implied claim of moral conscience confessing all this doesn't wash. No moral people are allowed into this trade. There are no defectors, and if there were, they would be dead. Perkins is lying about his benevolent motives.]
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened to Torrijos, for example, in Panama, and what did you have to do with it?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, this was back in the '70s, and Torrijos was making a lot of world headlines, because he was demanding that the Panama Canal be turned back over to Panamanians. [That's because Torrijos was deeply involved in the Communist movement, which wanted control of the Canal -- not because he was a populist.] I was sent down to Panama to bring him around, to convince him that he needed to play the game our way. And he invited me to a little bungalow outside of Panama City, and he said, "Look, you know, I know the game, and if I play it your way, I'll become very rich, but that's not important to me. What is important is that I help my poor people." [This is bunk. In his interview Perkins portrays every communist as a soft-hearted liberal who loves the people. Pure propaganda.] Now, Torrijos wasn't an angel, but he was very committed to his poor people. So he said, "You can either play the game my way, or you can leave this country." And I talked to my bosses, and we all decided I should stay. Maybe I could bring him around. [More bunk.] I liked Torrijos, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring him around was not just because it was my job, but because I wanted to see him survive, and because he didn't come around, sure enough, he was assassinated... Fiery airplane crash, and afterwards, there was no question that -- he had been handed a tape recorder as he got on the plane that had a bomb in it [True, but this detailed knowledge implicates Perkins more deeply as an unprincipled insider -- not as the cringing moralist he paints himself to be. I never trust people who come out of active participation in the dark side.] ... [W]e 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 is [for] a bodyguard [to be] 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. [More baloney. He's only making a case only for greed and money. The real reason Saddam was targeted was short-term control of Iraqi oil, and long-term military bases in an area crucial to US plans of more Muslim intervention and antagonism -- like Iran and Syria.]
AMY GOODMAN: As a consultant, you did work in Saudi Arabia, John Perkins?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, in fact I put -- I was one of the ones responsible for putting together the main deal there in the early ''70s. [I think he's fibbing here, as his erroneous statements below will show.] As you may recall, Amy, 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 [gross exaggeration], 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 [always his excuse to avoid naming names] 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 [no, this was already standard procedure for all oil producing nations that had billion of petro dollars], the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants. [More baloney. This shows he is inventing facts. The interest was always automatically payable to the Saudis just as all other bond holders. The Saudis, not the Treasury Dept, used petro-dollars to finance their infrastructure moves.] 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. It's been holding for a long time. [Yes, there is a pact to "keep them in power", but it's a deal about playing along with US globalist objectives, and not tied directly to the price of oil.] ...
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was one of the speakers at the World Social Forum in Brazil in last February [shows he is playing to the far left. No one gets invited to this radical group unless you're on the left and projecting an anti-American image], and a man asked to meet with me who was a very high advisor to Lula. And he said, "You know, what you say in your book is all very true, but you just -- that's just the tip of the iceberg." He said, "You know, from the time I was a very young man, I was quite radical. And it was interesting to me, as I was going through university, how much sex, drugs, booze were available to me in the parties that I was invited to, and so on. And now that I'm in this position of power, I discover that somebody was taking pictures of all those things, that there's a record of this." And he says, "You don't realize how all-pervasive your Secret Services are. It's recruiting, in their own way, young people, even those that are extreme socialists and communists. Your people befriend us from very early ages and get a lot of information on us. So when we become high up in the government, they basically -- " And I said, "They blackmail you?" [As if Perkins didn't know this?!] And he said, "Well, you could use the word 'blackmail,' but I think I would prefer [is] 'modern U.S. diplomacy.'" [This sounds like Perkins talking -- not a Brazilian.] And I asked him, I said, "Well, is Lula a part of this?" [More Perkins playing dumb. If he is the insider he claimed, he would know everything that the US has on Lula.] And he obviously didn't really want to answer this question. He hesitated, and he said, "Let me just say that nobody gets to power in Brazil these days without being very willing to make compromises to your corporations and your government." [Again, Perkins is putting words in his mouth.] He said, "I think Lula's a very, very good man [more propaganda Perkins is anxious to promote. Lula is a radical Communist masquerading as a moderate], but he also has to deal with reality. And certainly, he's been watched all of his life, and I'm sure he's had the same temptations I did."
AMY GOODMAN: And he's also engulfed in a major corruption scandal, which, for many of his long-time supporters, Brazilians and outside, are raising a lot of questions.
JOHN PERKINS: And I think the fact that the scandal has come out and has been blown into such proportions [What does he mean, blown out of proportion? The scandals are much worse than what has been revealed, and Lulu is as corrupt as the rest] is an indication that someone is sending Lula a very strong message. Incidentally, the jackal -- I'll call him -- that was working with Gutierrez of Ecuador said to me, "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? And don't you think that --' [True enough, but now Perkins is feeding the right-wing side of his audience some conspiracy info they already know. It helps to endear both the left and far right to his alluring message.]
AMY GOODMAN: Would you care to share his name [the Jackal]?
JOHN PERKINS: No. I'll let him do that at some point, if he feels it's appropriate. Right now, he doesn't feel it's appropriate. He's still in the business. And so, many of these people are still very -- even the ones that have retired are getting pensions, and they've got loyalties, some of them. So, they'll talk to me on the side and say, "I want you to put this in your book, but I'm not ready to talk." [Baloney. No true insider would talk to Perkins if he were a real traitor to the system. They would know his every move would be surveilled.] A couple of them I am working with to write a book, and my literary agent is working with them. [Sure! As if there this could be done without discovery.] So hopefully some of them will come clean. [Again, Perkins keeps making this case like these guys have a conscience and want to tell the truth. That's a lot of garbage. These guys are really evil, and have million dollar retreats in Colorado as part of their retirement packages. They aren't going to risk losing it all and getting a bullet in the head over a fit of conscience.]" [End of Democracy Now excerpt.]
