Confessions of an Economic Hitman - On the Web

God I hope this post is brief, because I'm a little sleepy. I would have put this up yesterday but the stinking blogger was not working. So here we go. Confessions of an Economic Hitman, our book of the month, has a website all its own and it can be found here. The site helpfully posts those that have praised the book. Finding other stuff on the web was more difficult . I Googled to my heart's content but the MSM (mainstream media) has chosen to ignore this book so I had to go to alternative sources. One thing that kept popping up was this interview with the ironically named Democracy Now! Since it is just a book promo interview there isn't much there that isn't in the book. The one nugget is a throwaway comment:

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. [emph. added]

What's so interesting about being the most ineffectual president since Herbert Hoover? I suppose the EHM had something to do with the takeover of the embassy in Tehran? How about the invasion of Afghanistan did the EHM plot that too? Jude Wanniski the self-styled guru of supply-side economics and the only person I know of that can call both Jack Kemp and Louis Farrakhan friends thinks that he'll like Confessions when he gets around to reading it.

What we have in this book from Mr. Perkins is an account of a foot soldier in these operations of the Evil Empire. I’ll get his book and check it out, but from what I can gather about it on the internet he is well within the ballpark of what has been going on. Are bankers evil by nature? Of course not. But as bankers they follow the money, not giving a second thought to the conditions in which they leave their debtors. The first priority of any institution is self-preservation, and for the big banks, that means getting paid back on their loans. Is this any way to run the world? No. It is a dreadful way to operate, and it would end if our government returned to a dollar/gold system and abided by it. If not, I’m afraid nothing Mr. Perkins writes or that I write will change a thing. The folks who control the money control our government and that’s that. It is interesting that Perkins does identify the Bechtel Corporation and Halliburton as agents in this quiet conspiracy to make sure the good old USA flourishes, even though it means the relentless impoverishment of the poorest countries of the world.

Another big Confessions fan is Lyndon Larouche the perennial Democratic presidential candidate. The December 3, 2004 of Larouche's Executive Intelligence Review breathlessly proclaimed:

The publication and initial widespread circulation of a book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, has prompted Lyndon LaRouche to launch a major new international flanking attack against George Shultz's fascist "Vulcan" apparatus, an attack which could catapult the Perkins book to the top of the international best-seller lists, and drive the would-be controllers of the Bush-Cheney "Halliburton Regime" into new, greater-than-ever fits of wild-eyed rage.

Despite praising the Larouchies did not some faults:

The international financier circles described by Perkins as an "American global empire" are, in fact, part of an apparatus centered, not in the U.S.A., but in Western Europe, particularly in the City of London. This apparatus, an extension of the Venetian rentier-financier oligarchy, later morphed into what is today called the "Anglo-Dutch liberal system" of private central banking, characterized by a Physiocratic obsession with vise-grip private cartel control over strategic raw materials, and a deep commitment to a Malthusian nightmare of radical world population reduction.

That Anglo-Dutch system was fully consolidated by the 1763 close of the Seven Years' War, and was, for the next century, dominated by the British East India Company of Lord Shelburne, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Mill. It was this same apparatus, later under Lord Palmerston, that orchestrated the Southern secession and the U.S.A. Civil War. In the 20th century, through its Bank for International Settlements (BIS), it installed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in power in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco in Spain, and other subservient fascist regimes in other parts of Eurasia.

Today this apparatus is behind the Bush-Cheney Administration, as most clearly shown by Shultz's role in installing Condi Rice at the President's side, to "Vulcanize" George W. Bush's brain.

The December 10, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review was practically dedicated to the book. The first article says that the book should reopen the murder cases of Enrico Mattei, Aldo Moro, Jürgen Ponto, and Alfred Herrhausen and Detlev Karsten Rohwedder. I have no idea who these guys are, but if you care you can read the piece here. You have to get about half-way through to find some praise for Confessions:

Thus Perkins' book is so explosive, because it is written by a high-ranking insider, who finally blames himself through this self-exposure. But it simply corresponds to the most specific experience of our movement over the past 30 years. A veteran team of experts of the LaRouche movement in the United States and Europe is now occupied in comparing the facts enumerated by Perkins, with conditions and affairs already known to us, and in researching further background material. And this much can already be said: There are, above all in the developing nations, a very large number ofcontemporary witnesses who can confirm what he confesses.

The next article is a not-so-nice profile of former Secretary of State George Schultz. Finally we get to a glowing review of Confessions of an Economic Hitman:

Perkins' autobiographical account of how he was spotted, profiled, recruited, and trained to be an "economic hit man"—and how he found the personal courage to escape from a very lucrative, seductive, but murderous life—is a gripping tale. It is told with a flair for the details, great and small, which make it a very convincing story. The archives of EIR, and the saga of Lyndon LaRouche's lifetime quest for global economic justice, confirm that every basic feature of Perkins' account is true to life. Perkins speaks, in personal terms, about his own dealings with Panama's leader Omar Torrijos and Ecuador's President Jaime Roldos. Both men resisted the bribes and threats of the "economic hit men," and instead fought for programs that would benefit all of their people. They were both killed in 1981, and Perkins' accounts leave no doubt that they were assassinated by the jackals because they dared to resist.

As if enough had not been said George Schultz the reviewer has to throw in his own two cents:

As EIR has reported over the past 30 years, and as we detail elsewhere in this Feature, George Shultz is truly one of the most nefarious figures in political life in our time. It was Shultz who took personal responsibility for the final destruction of Franklin Roosevelt's Bretton Woods System of fixed echange rates, first in his infamous diktat to Nixon's Treasury Secretary John Connally, whom he soon replaced; next, at the Azores international monetary conference; and finally at the 1975 Rambouillet conference, where European nations attempted, unsuccessfully, to reconstitute a stable monetary system to also include the integration of the Soviet bloc. Shultz later orchestrated the Plaza Accords of 1985, between the United States and Japan, which, in effect, ended Japan's efforts, over the prior decade, to play the role of sponsor and creditor of a series of great economic development projects. He later would, in effect, "create" the present George W. Bush Administration, through his sponsorship of the "Vulcan" team of top policy aides, who became key Cabinet officials.

But Shultz in other respects merely personifies the system of economic hit men exposed by the Perkins book. Shultz is not a "Lord of the Rings." He is, ultimately, an underling, who has taken the Faustian deal, and cares nothing about the fact that his policies have directly led to the deaths of millions, and will kill countless more millions in the future if not stopped.

The Perkins special issue closes with an in depth interview with the hitman himself. Of course we get more George Schultz!

Perkins: Yes—you've covered a lot of territory there, from George Shultz to the jackals! do want to say—George Shultz, I do talk about, who was, of course, president of Bechtel Corp., and then Secretary of State under Reagan, and very much, deeply involved in attacking Panama in 1989. And that's described in detail in the book, how that all ties in with the whole Bechtel philosophy.

But, I want to emphasize, that this is not a partisan issue. These things happened under both the Democratic and Republican regimes. And George Shultz is a great example under the Republican, as are Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, and the Bush family themselves. But, let's not forget that the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations had Robert McNamara, who'd been president of Ford and then was Secretary of Defense under Johnson and Kennedy, and then became president of the World Bank. And there were people like Brzezinski in the Carter Administration. And these things occurred also under Clinton. This is not a partisan issue.

Here's more:

Perkins: Right—and let me start by saying, I'm all for foreign aid, real foreign aid. Billions of people are destitute in this world: 24,000 people die every day of starvation; 30,000 children die every single day of curable diseases. On Sept. 11, we lost 3,000 people in a very tragic event, terrible event. But, on that same day, over 50,000 people died of starvation and curable diseases, needlessly. We need to correct that, and we can.

And the book, ultimately, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is a very hopeful one, that presents alternatives; that shows how we can be the first empire in the history of the world, not to collapse, not to fall, as all empires eventually do, but to turn around and offer the world a truly different system, something that's never been done before. And so, this is where we stand today, I think, poised at the verge of doing that. . . .

Finally -

Perkins: Yes. Our roots, definitely, defeat this enemy. We have become what we fought against in the American Revolution. We have become that, to much of the world. And a lot of people living in England in the 1770s probably would talk very much like we are, or a majority of our people are today—they weren't aware of what the British Empire was doing overseas. They were simply aware that they were living relatively comfortably, compared to most other people in the world at that time. And so, they carried out their jobs.

We're doing the thing. We're blind. It took people who were willing to stick their necks in the noose: the George Washingtons, the Thomas Paines and Thomas Jeffersons, John Hancocks, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, to show the world what the British Empire really was like, and what imperialism and colonialism truly was about. Now, these people who we now look at—George Washington, you know we see pictures of him all over the place, and he looks quite stately, and he looks like he's living a comfortable life and all (which he was, after the Revolution). But we have to remember that those men who signed the Declaration of Independence were terrorists! They were traitors! They were performing treason. They would have been hanged, had they lost the Revolution, because they were defying their government. And now, we've basically turned our own country into something not unlike the British Empire, but a lot subtler—and, perhaps, in that respect, maybe even more dangerous, because it isn't our armies that have created this empire, for the most part. It's this very subtle form—it's our taxes, it's our economic hit men.

And we need to reverse that process. My book is ultimately an extremely positive book. It tells the shadow side of foreign policy, but it leads up to the current time, when I truly feel that this prophesy that I mentioned before, of the indigenous people: We are in this time now, of tremendous opportunity for change. And, all empires collapse. This one will collapse, too, if we continue on this path.

OK, I'm done. Since I am going to miss tonight's discussion I will be posting my thoughts later...when I wake up.