Former Economic Hit Man John Perkins Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded

I have and read his book, interesting book, but very repetitive in writing. Finished it in one afternoon.

Anyway, from many interviews around internet(youtube), he admitted he was paid by people to delay publishing it, and of course getting consents before publishing it. I wouldn't be surprised to know he is still working for some kind government agency either intentionally or not.
 
thanks for the link. i emailed it to a friend. can i ask debaser your occupation. on one of your posts you said your newspaper are you a journalist or do you own one.
 
AMY GOODMAN: And what personal experience do you have to prove this?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was there. You know, I was with Jaime Roldos in Ecuador. I was the guy—one of the guys who was supposed to corrupt him, bring him around, and Omar Torrijos of Panama and many others. When I failed with those two gentlemen, the Jackals went in and assassinated both of them. And I was there; I was in those front lines. My official title was chief economist of Charles T. Main. I had about three dozen employees working for me and did this for ten years, and finally saw the light.

But I think what’s—you know, what’s really important about all this is that in this period of time, since the 1970s, and really beginning very strongly in the 1980s, we’ve created what I consider a mutant, viral form of capitalism. Earlier on the program, you showed the statistics of 37 percent of the people in the survey not believing that capitalism is working. I don’t think the failure is capitalism. I think it’s the specific kind of capitalism that we’ve developed in the last thirty or forty years, particularly beginning with the time of Reagan and Milton Friedman’s economic theories, which stress that the only goal of business is to maximize profit, regardless of the social and environmental costs, and not to regulate businesses at all—regulation is bad, all forms—and to privatize everything, so that everything is run by private business. And this mutant form of capitalism, which I think is really a predatory form of capitalism, has created an extremely unstable, unsustainable, unjust and very, very dangerous world.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the robber barons, the modern day robber barons. Who do you mean?

JOHN PERKINS: So many of them. You know, we’ve seen them recently on Wall Street, the people from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and so many other organizations, people like Jack Welch, who is a former CEO of General Electric. And as I lecture at business schools and MBA programs, Jack Welch is often held up as this idol. Jack Welch laid off a quarter of GE’s employees. You know, he said he was making the company meaner and leaner—he certainly was making it meaner—gave himself huge raises and bonuses at the same time, turned General Electric essentially from a manufacturing company into a financial services company, which really was one of the leaders in taking us down this course today that we’re on of a failed economic system.

And we truly have a failed economic system at this point. It’s deep. You know, one of the reasons I wrote Hoodwinked is because I saw a lot of books coming out that deal with what I consider triage. What do you do with AIG? What do you do with General Electric? What do you do about the immediate problems with Wall Street? But the problem is much, much deeper. There’s a cancer beneath all that. And this is this very basics of our current economic system. And we must delve down and root out that cancer and move into something much better.

I have a two-year-old grandson. And as I look at this baby, you know, I think, what’s this world going to look like in six decades, when he’s my age? If we stay the course, it will be horrible. But we have this opportunity now, and I think this economic turmoil that we’re in today is teaching us that we must change. We have a failed system. We must create something better. And we must realize that my grandson can’t possibly hope to inherit a sustainable, just and peaceful world, unless every child growing up in Ethiopia and in Bolivia and in Indonesia and in Israel and Palestine has that same expectation. For the first time in history, we’re really living on a very, very tiny, highly integrated planet, and we’re all communicating with each other. Everybody is listening to Democracy Now! all around the world. We’re all talking on the cell phone and by internet. We really get it. We’re a very, very small community, and we need to recognize that.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, you have an interesting theory about what happened in Honduras, the coup that just took place there. What do you think?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I don’t think it’s a theory. You know, I think it’s—I was in Panama at the time that the coup took place. And, you know, the democratic—

AMY GOODMAN: In June.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah. The democratically elected president, Zelaya, had called for a new constitution to replace the old one that was really set up by the oligarchy in favor of the very, very, very wealthy and the international companies. He also called for a 60 percent increase in the bottom wage rate, which had a huge impact on Dole and Chiquita, two of the biggest employers in that company. They, along with a number of companies that have sweatshops in Honduras, strongly objected, very much the same way that they had objected to Aristide in Haiti, when he did something similar, and called in the military. The general in charge of the military was a graduate of our School of the Americas, this, you know, school that’s famous for creating dictators, and they overthrew Zelaya. It was a classic CIA-sponsored type of coup, very similar to what United Fruit had done in Guatemala in the early ’50s. And, of course, United Fruit became Chiquita.

So you had this—you know, this strong relationship and got rid of this democratically elected president, because he was drawing a line in the sand. We had seen ten countries in Latin America bring in new presidents who are instituting very significant reforms in favor of the people, in favor of using local resources to help the people pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and I think the corporatocracy decided to draw a line in the sand in Honduras.
More...

Yeah.
What capitalism has to worry about are the capitalists that become big enough to prey on other capatalists and everyone else.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top