Paul Craig Roberts – If you have not read John Perkins’ book, Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, you should. The book is easy to read and explains clearly from the inside how US corporations deceive foreign governments into debts that they cannot service or repay and then use the IMF and World Bank as looting mechanisms and reduce the indebted countries to penury.
Capitalism has become a socially dysfunctional system focused on pillage and not on the growth of consumer income that sustains and grows markets for goods and services. Once the last prospect is looted, there is nothing left to sustain capitalism.
In this interview John Perkins describes the looting process in Greece. Tomorrow the Greek people face the same decision that the people in Iceland and Ireland faced. In Iceland the people rejected the debts and refused to pay them. Now Iceland is recovering. Somehow the feisty Irish were brainwashed into accepting austerity programs so that the looting of Ireland could continue, and Ireland continues to suffer. Sunday will tell us if Greeks have learned from the examples.
Michael Nevradakis – John Perkins is no stranger to making confessions. His well-known book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, revealed how international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, while publicly professing to “save” suffering countries and economies, instead pull a bait-and-switch on their governments: promising startling growth, gleaming new infrastructure projects and a future of economic prosperity – all of which would occur if those countries borrow huge loans from those organizations. Far from achieving runaway economic growth and success, however, these countries instead fall victim to a crippling and unsustainable debt burden.
That’s where the “economic hit men” come in: seemingly ordinary men, with ordinary backgrounds, who travel to these countries and impose the harsh austerity policies prescribed by the IMF and World Bank as “solutions” to the economic hardship they are now experiencing. Men like Perkins were trained to squeeze every last drop of wealth and resources from these sputtering economies, and continue to do so to this day. In this interview, which aired on Dialogos Radio, Perkins talks about how Greece and the eurozone have become the new victims of such “economic hit men.”
Michael Nevradakis: In your book, you write about how you were, for many years, a so-called “economic hit man.” Who are these economic hit men, and what do they do?
John Perkins: Essentially, my job was to identify countries that had resources that our corporations want, and that could be things like oil – or it could be markets – it could be transportation systems. There’re so many different things. Once we identified these countries, we arranged huge loans to them, but the money would never actually go to the countries; instead it would go to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects in those countries, things like power plants and highways that benefitted a few wealthy people as well as our own corporations, but not the majority of people who couldn’t afford to buy into these things, and yet they were left holding a huge debt, very much like what Greece has today, a phenomenal debt.