Economic Hit Man John Perkins talks to BuzzFlash about global corporate control and how we can stop the coming economic meltdown

BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

We're headed for disaster. You'd have to be totally blind not to recognize that. So if we don't change -- if this crisis doesn't force us to change -- there will be more and more and more and more. And who knows what the ultimate outcome will be? If we continue to resist, we'll disappear. I mean, you have to be sustainable at some point don't you, by definition?

-- John Perkins

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Initially, John Perkins seems to be a character you'd love to hate. His tales of spreading exploitation and pushing World Bank loans across the planet as an "economic hit man" make him easy fodder. Perkins has been a member of a group that finds itself more and more unpopular every day since the implosion of Wall Street last year.

In his latest book, he introduces himself as one of the "'hired guns' who promote the interests of big corporations and certain sectors of the U.S. government." He adds that though he had a "fancy title" his "real job was to plunder the Third World."

This was Perkins' basic narrative in his wildly popular book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. But in his latest book, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded -- and What We Need to Do to Remake Them, he connects the plundering of the last three decades to the roots of today's economic crisis.

"We were so successful in the Third World that our bosses directed us to implement similar strategies in the United States and across the rest of the planet," he writes. This is where the global economic crisis came from, and we can only fix it if we understand that.

And that's why BuzzFlash had to talk to the economic hit man himself. Turns out, the H-word that came to mind was not hate, but hope.

In this interview, Perkins explains why "economic recovery," in the mainstream sense of the word, is not desirable for our country, and that such a "return to normal" will only precipitate the next looming crisis. He also told us what he thinks about the supposed "change" as represented by the Obama Administration a year after inauguration and what it's going to take to transition from toxic, predatory capitalism to a sustainable, fair-market society.  

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BuzzFlash:  First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time, and let you know I really enjoyed Hoodwinked. But I do want to start by going back a bit to your first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and your persona in that role. I want to know how well you knew, when you were actually in this role, that you might be doing something wrong as an economist in the Third World.

John Perkins:  Well, Meg, I think it was always in the back of my mind. From the moment I first met with Claudine -- you know, this amazing woman who was my mentor and trainer -- and she let me know what I would be in for. I think I had suspicions. But I felt that I could probably be different. I think we often feel that way.

Also, all my training in business school said that if you build big infrastructure projects in developing countries, that was the right way to increase economic growth. And of course, the business schools were teaching that while I was an economic hit man. I was asked to speak at places like Harvard and talk about these things. And the World Bank was very much behind it. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, patted me on the back and told me what a good job I was doing.

So there were a lot of ways to kind of convince myself that what I was doing was right. And I was living a very interesting life, traveling first class around the world, visiting countries that I'd always wanted to visit. So there's a side of me that always wanted to convince myself. But as time went on and I questioned more and more, and heard more and more, I saw more and more. Finally after about ten years I reached a point where I could no longer fool myself. I could no longer be in denial.

[ ... ]

BuzzFlash:  Do you see another looming crisis on the horizon?

John Perkins:  This is not ending. If we don't do something to change it, it's going to get worse. There's no question about that. I mean, we should have seen this crisis coming -- and anybody who was really looking did see it coming.

When your country is as deep in debt as ours is, when you're doing essentially what the Spanish empire did back in the sixteen- or seventeen-hundreds, which was plundering the rest of the planet, and not building up your own manufacturing base, but instead going to other countries, borrowing huge amounts of money. This is exactly what the Spanish did. They plundered Latin America for gold and silver, and they took out huge loans based on that plunder from the Dutch and the British and many others, and just lived this lifestyle. They didn't really build up their own economy, and it imploded.

We're doing the same thing, and it doesn't work. And in addition to that, it's worse today because we've created this world for less than five percent of us who live in the United States and consume more than 25 percent of the world's resources. And you can't -- the world's so big -- it's such a big population that there's no way anybody else can replicate that. The planet's just not big enough. We'd have to have another five planets to do that.

And so, we're headed for disaster. You'd have to be totally blind not to recognize that. So if we don't change -- if this crisis doesn't force us to change, there will be more and more and more and more. And who knows what the ultimate outcome will be? If we continue to resist, we'll disappear. I mean, you have to be sustainable at some point, don't you, by definition? The species has to be sustainable. A lot of species have disappeared from the planet because they haven't been sustainable. A lot of human cultures have disappeared from the planet because they weren't sustainable, like the Mayan culture for example. We have to either become sustainable or perish.

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