Originally published 11/10/06:
Wow! This guy, John Perkins, authored a book called, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” and explains very well in this interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now what sort of role he played in our great secret combination of the latter days. Other LDS related blogs lately have spoken about how we spread democracy and freedom to other lands. However, when our eyes are opened to this sort of thing, we can see that is just the sheep skin. This is the reason why the sword is hanging over our nation right now. Read the following excerpts from this interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan-let’s say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador-and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure-a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you’re not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.” And today we’re going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they’ve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It’s an empire. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It’s been extremely successful.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.’s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia-new cities, new infrastructure-which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn’t buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn’t work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren’t able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had — His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.
JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. Omar Torrijos had signed the Canal Treaty with Carter much — and, you know, it passed our congress by only one vote. It was a highly contended issue. And Torrijos then also went ahead and negotiated with the Japanese to build a sea-level canal. The Japanese wanted to finance and construct a sea-level canal in Panama. Torrijos talked to them about this which very much upset Bechtel Corporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was Casper Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and that’s an interesting story-how that actually happened), when he lost the election, and Reagan came in and Schultz came in as Secretary of State from Bechtel, and Weinberger came from Bechtel to be Secretary of Defense, they were extremely angry at Torrijos — tried to get him to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and not to talk to the Japanese. He adamantly refused. He was a very principled man. He had his problem, but he was a very principled man. He was an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which — I was there. I had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed. I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There’s no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most — many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.
(Thanks to CRC for bringing this book to light).
The Radical Mormon 
I read this book and disagree with the author’s premise that international aid is designed to enslave developing countries to serve the US’s will. How are these countries to develop if they don’t build infrastructure? And if we’re giving them our tax dollars, why shouldn’t we require that the money be used to purchase goods and services from American companies, which in turn creates jobs at home and also grows our economy? If another country, like Japan or the European Union, wants to offer the aid, let them. They frequently do so, much more than most Americans realize.
Look at the countries that have not accepted such aid. For example, Nicaragua, whose power grid is so outdated and dilapadated that there are now 13-hour blackouts every day. Blackouts affect not only TVs and air conditioners, but also the city water pumps as well as telephone and internet communications, not to mention the effect they have on potential investors, who would create jobs and generate tax revenue. The place is practically in the Dark Ages and is nearly uninhabitable.
The last time Ortega was in power, during the 1980s, the national currency (the Cordoba) ceased to exist. With 33,000% inflation it literally became worthless and fell out of circulation. The government instead issued coupons to the people for rations of rice, beans and even half-inch squirts of toothpaste at distribution centers. When the new president was elected, the government was flat broke and had zero international reserves.
But the US swooped in with $450 million of balance-of-payments aid and re-created the country’s currency out of thin air. How is that a bad thing? Where would the country be today without US aid?
Your example of Ortega and the economy during his reign left out a few little facts. Let’s not forget that the economy was ravaged by the US funded Contra terrorist war, and then the economic blockade which was imposed by the US in 1985 didn’t help either. The US tried to kill Nicaragua economically because they elected the wrong government. It is little wonder that the Cordoba ceased to exist.
It is no wonder that the US “swooped in with $450 million” in aid after their man was elected in 1990. Since then Nicaragua has seen a rash of privatization (just what the US wanted) and it is little surprise that the dollars flow when the leader bows down to the US and the dollars stop when the leader is defiant. Perkins’ theory seems to work here.
Near the end of the book Perkins tells of an indigenous prophecy of “The Eagle and the Condor,” which is about a time when civilization will have to make a choice between living in discord or harmony with the earth, respectively. That choice will determine how the rest of history plays out.
It reminds me of 3 Nephi 16:10, where the gentiles, lifted up in pride above all of the nations of the whole earth, have one last chance to repent before being destroyed like the other previously highly favored inhabitants of this blessed (and cursed) land have been destroyed.
Perkins is a lot more optimistic than I am about the gentiles (i.e. gringos) repenting and living in harmony with the indigenous peoples.
I’m afraid that the prophecy of an as yet unconverted remnant of Jacob going forth among the gentiles as a young lion, etc. (repeated three more times in later chapters) will be fulfilled here in North America.
The Gospel Doctrine manual neatly skirts around these scriptures. Too controversial, I suppose.