Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Adam Franco July 14th, 2007
From Dave on Fire’s new blog of videos, Throw Away Your Telescreen, I came across this great address John Perkins gave to the Veterans for Peace convention. Perkins is a self-described “Economic Hitman”, an ‘independent’ consultant recruited by the NSA who’s job for three decades was to provide the ‘carrot’ and threat of a ’stick’ pressure to third world governments to force them to provide multinational corporations with favorable access to their resources. Perkins describes how he offered the leader of Panama, Omar Torrijos, vast wealth for he and his family if he would back down on his promise to return the Panama Canal to the people of Panama. Torrijos did not take the bait and died in a plane explosion two weeks later.
While this address is fascinating on its own, one thing I find interesting is that Noam Chomsky has for years be describing the US-led overthrow of third-world democracies that clash with American corporate interests. Critics have often derided Chomsky saying “he’s a linguist, not an economist” or otherwise attaching Chomsky for not having the ability “to really know what is going on”. Now we have John Perkins, a man who was at the bargaining tables and behind the scenes telling basically the same story.
Anyway, here is Perkins’ address (broken into three clips for some reason):
Part one:
Part two:
Part three - Questions:
