John Perkins

Well, it’s fairer to say I wrote it out of a feeling that it was a story that had to be told. Shortly after 9/11 I went to Ground Zero and while I was there, I realized that so many people in the United States have no idea of why there is so much fear and anger and hatred in the world directed at us. It’s not in any way to condone mass murder or Osama Bin Laden but it is to say that most Americans think that foreign aid is altruistic. But almost none of it is altruistic so I thought I had to write the book to explain to Americans what’s really going on. It’s very important that we understand and that we demand change. We must make a better world and the only to make a better world is to realize that we have that opportunity to understand some of the problems that we’ve created in the past.

Absolutely. All the executives that I’ve known, including CEOs at some big corporations, are worried about the world. Most of them have children, they know about Osama Bin Laden, they know about what’s going on in Latin America and they’re scared for the future of the world. But also they don’t know what to do and they don’t do the right thing because they’re afraid they’ll be fired, unless we put pressure on them. When organizations and consumers and unions put pressure on corporations they usually bend. We’ve seen this very much in the environmental area with organizations like Rainforest Action Network. We’ve seen rivers cleaned up, we’ve seen aerosol cans that destroy the ozone layer dropped, we’ve seen endangered species come back into healthy existence, we’ve seen civil rights and gender rights issues addressed. When we really pressure these corporations to do the right thing, I think they usually do and I think many of the executives want to do the right thing but they need to have pressure from the people.

I would agree with that. I think that this empire we’ve created, truly the world’s global empire, has to take responsibility for a great deal of the suffering that’s going on in the world today and the fear and the anger. After all more than half the world population lives on less than two dollars a day. In many countries, that is less than what slaves on plantations in the United States made because those slaves didn’t get paid money but they did get free room and board and whatever medical help was available in their community. Today many of the people work in sweat shops around the world so that you and I can buy a t-shirt for a dollar or two cheaper. Many of those people are being paid wages that do not allow them to provide room and board, housing and food for their families. Then when they get sick they get thrown out on the street, so in many respects we’ve created a type of slavery in the world that is worse than anything than happened here. That does not in any way negate the terrible suffering of the African Americans who were brought here as slaves but it is to say that today we are doing something that is very onerous in the world.

In a way, we all do. What I call the corporate hypocrisy, which is the modern equivalent of the old time emperor. Instead of one person today we have a group of people that really run our larger corporation, and through them our government. But we’re all complicit in that to a certain degree, everybody that wants to save a couple dollars by buying a pair of shoes or running shorts that has been made in an overseas sweatshop and therefore are cheaper. Every time we drive in our cars needlessly or anytime we drive in our cars period, we’re contributing to this situation. We the people don’t seem to objecting very strongly. For the most we live very well in the United States other than about a fifth of us who live below the poverty level but the rest of us live very good lives. We go about our daily business and we ignore the fact that 24,000 people starve to death every single day and we all have to take some responsibility for this.

Inevitably there are people like that but you never can generalize about individuals. A lot of them are caught up in what I would call the castle mentality. Back in feudal days whenever there was a threat from outside castle, the castle pulled up the drawbridges. Today we get a lot of people at the top of the heap who feel the castle is under attack and what they need to do to save themselves is make as much money as they possibly can, buy private airplanes and private armies and real estate and scatter it around the world. Then when things get really bad they can escape and protect themselves with their private armies. I don’t think that will work but that’s the mentality that some of these people have. But I also think that a huge number of people working in corporations at higher levels would really like to see change come.

Oh yes, it was the toughest book I’ve ever written. I’ve published five books before this but this one was very frightening for me. I knew as I wrote it that I was sticking my head in a noose and also it was very difficult to face this very dark side of myself. I knew that if and when it got out there, I’d become a moving target and that’s always a little scary. On the other hand, this is a time where we must all exhibit tremendous courage. Courage means that you have fear, so it’s not a question of going on about this without any fear, it’s a question of recognizing there is a danger and recognizing that we may have to make sacrifices.

I had to come to grips with the fact that I may be in danger. Once I made the decision to write the book I went to my daughter who is now 23 and told her I was sticking my head in a noose and her direct quote was “Dad don’t worry, if they come after you and get you, I’ll step in and fill your shoes.” That gave me great solace. I don’t know whether I’ve got another three days or another 30 years left of my life, but what I do know is that when I’m on my deathbed I want to look back and say I spent the last days and years of my life doing the right thing, rectifying some of the wrongs that I’d committed.

I really knew it from the beginning. I was first recruited and trained by this woman Claudine who was my mentor. I was getting into a dirty business and I knew it all along but it was easier to justify it. I did that for ten years and when I saw that I was going to become very wealthy and I was going to be made a partner in a firm, I realized I had to get out of it soon before I got stuck.

Certainly. In my day economic hit men were pretty generic, we arranged huge loans for organizations like the World Bank for third world countries and the money was used to hire any corporation to build construction projects in those countries. It would help the very rich in those countries and not help the poor and leave those countries holding a huge debt so at some time we would go back and ask for a favor like vote for our next United Nations vote or send troops in support of ours in some place like Iraq and it was pretty generic. Those guys are still around but there’s also another brigade that work directly for these individual companies like Nike, General Motors, General Electric and Boeing. They’re out there trying to use similar techniques to get work specifically for their company.

That’s what happened in Iraq exactly. The economic hit men failed in Iraq, the jackals were sent in to take Hussein out and they also failed. So we resorted to the last step which is sending in the military.

It usually works. We’ve really managed to build the world’s first truly global empire without the military. There are some instances where the economic hit men don’t work. I wrote about my experiences with Omar Torrijos of Panama and also Jaime Roldos Aguilera of Ecuador and how they were committed to making their country a better place for their poor people. With somebody like Saddam Hussein, it seems as though it was possibly a question of sanity and he had a very large ego and just was determined to defy the United States for whatever reason. Most of them do go along with the system. They opt for becoming wealthy in the process rather than being overthrown or assassinated.

Not a significant one. This empire is built under Democratic presidents and Republican presidents because at the top is the corporate hypocrisy and those people stay the same throughout. They die off and a few new people come into the system but basically they’re running this whole show and actually they move back and forth between corporations and governments all the time so one year somebody will be CEO of a very large corporation and the next year they’re secretary of defense or secretary of state or even vice-president or president. Then after that it goes back into the corporate world. It doesn’t really matter if you go Democrat or Republican. It does make a difference in terms of the composition of the Supreme Court and some other issues that are important, but not really dealing with this world empire building situation.

There’s a laundry list in the book of things that people can personally do but when it comes right down to it, the most important thing is for us all to be educated and to be skeptical. When we read the news, when we hear it on the radio and television, you have to ask “What’s really going on here? Why is the United States threatening Iran today? Is this really about nuclear energy, or is it really about the fact that Iran is threatening to sell oil for something other than dollars, the euro or the yen, which is very threatening to us?” Asking those kinds of questions and getting educated is important but then you have to have an impact on the corporations and get involved with organizations that do make the corporations take responsibility.

That’s to be announced. We know that Harrison Ford is involved in purchasing the option for the movie. He’s announced that he’s involved in it but not necessarily that he’ll play me. I don’t know who’s going to play me. We’ll see if the movie even gets made. I’m not holding my breath; I’m writing and speaking out.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck