The transcript of Dialogos Radio’s interview with “economic hit man” John Perkins follows below. This interview was published in Truthout on September 11, 2014 and is reprinted here. This interview aired on November 14-15, 2013. Find the podcast of this interview here.
MN: 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?
JP: 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’s 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. And once bound by that debt, we would go back, usually in the form of the IMF, and in the case of Greece today, it’s the IMF and the EU, and make tremendous demands on the country: increase taxes, cut back on spending, sell public sector utilities to private companies, things like power companies and water systems, transportation systems, privatize those, and basically become a slave to us, to the corporations, to the IMF, in your case to the EU, and basically, organizations like the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, are tools of the big corporations, what I call the “corporatocracy.”