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"Economic Hit Man" John Perkins Tells How America Really Does Business: Loan Blackmail, Regime Change & Assassination -RI10
“Economic Hit Man”
John Perkins
Tells How America
Really Does
Business:
Loan Blackmail,
Regime Change &
Assassination - RI10
2nd Part of a Trilogy, originally published February 15, 2006
Read Tabacco’s prior Article about John Perkins:
Former “Economic Hit Man” John Perkins On Global Empire, NSA, WTO, World Bank Scams
http://tabacco.blog-city.com/former_economic_hit_man_john_perkins_on_global_empire_nsa_wt.htm
published January 4, 2006
Tabacco: The Right-Wing Media has spread Internet rumors, attempting to discredit Air America and other Liberal news sources. When you hear that type of propaganda, don’t automatically assume it’s accurate.
Neocons have never allowed fact or truth to prevent them from using character assassination on the people and organizations, which expose their nefarious actions. Look at what they’ve said about Bill Moyers. They’ve tried everything to undermine his credibility. They got Dan Rather removed from CBS, yet the story about Bush’s military “lack of service” has never been refuted or exposed as inaccurate. In fact, the White House has never disputed that story.
Propaganda was the favorite tool of the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, and it is the favorite tool of the Bush regime and Right-Wing media types. Don’t trust anybody, even Tabacco, who doesn’t offer you some proof, legitimate references or something besides “Trust me!”
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/15/1436221
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
Self-Described Economic Hit Man John Perkins: “We Have Created the World’s First Truly Global Empire”
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John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," joins us in our firehouse studio to talk about his former work going into various countries to try to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S government and corporations. Perkins describes himself as an economic hit man.
* John Perkins, author of “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, formerly worked for an international consulting firm and describes himself as an “economic hitman”.
John Perkins, Economic Hitman,
who tells the true story of America’s
capitalist success in the world.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn to someone on the inside who decided to speak out, and he is John Perkins, has written the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He came into our studios to talk about his former work, going into various countries to try to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations, what he called the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins says he was an economic hit man. I began by asking him to explain this term.
JOHN PERKINS: We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world's first truly global empire, and we've done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it's been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we've created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it's been done very quietly, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that
over 80% of the population of
South America recently voted in
an anti-U.S. president and
what's going on at the World
Trade Organization, and also, in
fact, with the transit strike
here in New York, is that people
are beginning to understand
the middle class and the lower
classes around the world are
being terribly, terribly exploited
by what I call the
corporatocracy, which really
runs this empire.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we move further, your experience with it? Explain the vantage point you come from. What does it mean to be an economic hit man?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, what we've done -- we use many techniques,
but probably the most common
is that we'll go to a country
that has resources that our
corporations covet, like oil, and
we'll arrange a huge loan to
that country from an
organization like the World
Bank or one of its sisters, but
almost all of the money goes to
the U.S. corporations, not to
the country itself, corporations
like Bechtel and
Halliburton,
General Motors,
General Electric, these types of
organizations, and they build
huge infrastructure projects in
that country: power plants,
highways, ports, industrial
parks, things that serve the
very rich and seldom even
reach the poor. In fact, the
poor suffer, because the loans
have to be repaid, and
they're huge loans, and the
repayment of them means that
the poor won't get education,
health, and other social
services, and the country is lef
holding a huge debt, by
intention. We go back, we
economic hit men, to
this country and say, “Look,
you owe us a lot of money.
You can't repay your debts, so
give us a pound of flesh. Sell
our oil companies your oil real
cheap or vote with us at the
next U.N. vote or send troops
in support of ours to some
place in the world such
as Iraq.” And in that way,
we've managed to build a
world empire with very few
people actually knowing that
we've done this.
AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for?
JOHN PERKINS: I was
recruited by the National
Security Agency, the one
that's in the news so
much today because of
spying on people,
and I was tested by them, recruited by them --
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean you were recruited by them?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, while I was a senior in business school at Boston University, they came to me and suggested that I take their test. I had connections through my wife with people in the agency, and they put me through a series of tests, personality tests, lie detector, several days, and concluded that I would make a good economic hit man,
and they also discovered a
number of weaknesses in my
character, which they could
use then to hook me into the
business, and then I ended up
working for a private
corporation.
AMY GOODMAN: Why didn't you work for the N.S.A.?
JOHN PERKINS: Because
these days it's not done that
way. Nobody wants to be able
to connect the dots. So the
N.S.A., the C.I.A., these types
of organizations often recruit
economic hit men and the
jackals, the assassins, the 007
types, but they will recruit us,
maybe train us, and then turn
us over to a
private corporation, so that
you really can't make the
connection, so that if I were
caught at what I was doing in
one of these countries, it
would not reflect on our
government; it would only
reflect on the corporation that
I worked for.
AMY GOODMAN: And whom did you work for?
JOHN PERKINS: I worked for a company called Charles T. Main, a big consulting firm out of Boston.
AMY GOODMAN: And your job?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I started off as economist, became chief economist, and my job really – I had a staff of several dozen people. My job was to get them, and for me to convince these countries to accept these very large loans, to get the banks to make the loans, to set up the deal so that the money went to big U.S. corporations. The country was left holding a huge debt, and then I would go in or one of my people would go in and say, “Look, you know, you owe us all this money. You can't pay your debts. Give us that pound of flesh.”
The other thing we do, Amy, and what's going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says,
“Hey, congratulations, Mr.
President. Now that you're
president, I just want to tell you
that I can make you very, very
rich, you and your family. We
have several hundred million
dollars in this pocket if you play
the game our way. If you decide
not to, over in this pocket, I've
got a gun with a bullet with
your name on it, in case you
decide to keep your campaign
promises and throw us out.”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain actually how that plays out, because it's not really in this pocket and that.
JOHN PERKINS: No, it’s – what I'm saying is that, you know, I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means, and I can also – if he doesn't accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying – that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don't overthrow him, we'll assassinate him. And these people all know the history. They know that this has happened many, many, many times in the past.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened to Torrijos, for example, in Panama, and what did you have to do with it?
JOHN PERKINS: This was
back in the ‘70s, & Torrijos was
making a lot of world headlines,
because he was demanding that
the Panama Canal be turned
back over to Panamanians. I
was sent down to Panama to
bring him around, to convince
him that he needed to play the
game our way. And he invited
me to a little bungalow outside
of Panama City, and he said,
“Look, you know, I know the
game, and if I play it your way,
I'll become very rich, but that's
not important to me.
What is important is that I help
my poor people.” Now, Torrijos
wasn't an angel, but he was
very committed to his poor
people. So he said, “You can
either play the game my way,
or you can leave this country.”
And I talked to my bosses, and we all decided I should stay. Maybe I could bring him around. In the meantime, we could make some money, and so I stayed. But I knew the whole world was watching Torrijos because of this Panama Canal issue and that if he didn't come around, the jackals would be likely to come in. [inaudible] A man like Torrijos [inaudible] not only would we lose Panama, but he would set an example that others might follow. So I was very concerned.
I liked Torrijos, and one of the
reasons I wanted to bring him
around was not just because it
was my job, but because I
wanted to see him survive, and
because he didn't come around,
sure enough, he was
assassinated.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
JOHN PERKINS: Fiery airplane
crash, and afterwards, there
was no question that – he had
been handed a tape recorder as
he got on the plane that had a
bomb in it.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I know the people that did the investigation afterwards, and this is pretty well-documented in many places also, but I, personally, was aware of what went on, and, of course, you know, our official line here was that, of course, that wasn't what happened. The plane simply blew up and hit a mountain. But there was no question, and in fact we were expecting this to happen.
Three months before this, another president, Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, who I also was involved in trying to bring around, he very strongly opposed our oil companies. Not “oppose,” isn't the right word. What he said is, “Oil from Ecuador has to serve the interest of the Ecuadorian people. Therefore, the oil companies are going to have to pay a lot greater share to the Ecuadorian people or we're going to nationalize them.” And he’d run on a very, very strong anti-American campaign, and we knew that if he didn't change his ways, that something would happen to him. We were in his office making the same promises. You know, here we’ve got a couple of million dollars for you. Here we’ve got a bullet for you, basically. It’s done a lot more subtly than that, but that's the short version.
And three months before
Torrijos, his airplane also
exploded.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did the investigation reveal in that case?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, if you're talking about F.B.I. investigations, it revealed that there was an airplane that exploded in both cases. If you’re talking about local investigations and investigations that were done by many international journalists,
there were explosives on those
planes, both of them.
And, you know, it's relatively easy to get to assassinate one of these presidents who has a security force that's well armed, that surrounds him all the time, and in the case of both Roldos andTorrijos,
those security forces had been
trained primarily at the School
of the Americas, a U.S. training
camp for South American
armies.
It’s well known that when --
AMY GOODMAN: Which used to be in Panama, actually?
JOHN PERKINS: Used to be in Panama, right, and it's well known that people that are trained this way stay pretty loyal to their trainers. And they didn't make a lot of money, and so if one of their trainers went back and said, “Hey, would you mind handing this tape recorder to Jaime Roldos?” And the security guy may very well know that there's a bomb in it, and I'm going to pay you several hundred thousand dollars or maybe in this case it's only $100,000, because these guys were not very well paid, or, “simply look the other way while we plant something on the plane.”
That's an easy thing to do, and incidentally,
we also tried to do that to
Saddam Hussein. When he
didn't come around, the
economic hit men tried to bring
him around. We tried to
assassinate him. But that was
an interesting point,
because he had pretty loyal
security forces, and in addition
he had a lot of look-alike
doubles, and what you don't
want to be is a bodyguard to a
look-alike double and you think
it's the president and you
accept a lot of money to
assassinate him and
you assassinate the look-alike,
because if you do that,
afterwards your life and your
family's isn't worth very much,
so we were unable to get
through to Saddam Hussein,
and that’s why we sent the
military in.
AMY GOODMAN: Although Saddam Hussein was in the pocket of the U.S. for many, many years.
JOHN PERKINS: He was and – but we wanted that final deal, similar to the one we’d struck with Saudi Arabia.
We wanted to get Saddam
Hussein to really tie in to our
system, and he refused to do
that. He accepted our fighter
jets & our tanks and our
chemical plants that he used
to produce chemical weapons
that we knew were being used
against the Kurds and the
Iranians. He accepted all that,
but he wouldn’t quite tie into
our system in such a
big way that he would bring in
the huge development
organizations to rebuild his
country, as the Saudis did, in a
Western image.
And that's what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us.
He would not go along with
those things. If he had, he
would still be president, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: As a consultant, you did work in Saudi Arabia, John Perkins?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, in fact I put -- I was one of the ones responsible for putting together the main deal there in the early ‘70s. As you may recall, Amy, OPEC decided that they were going to clamp down on us, shut off our oil supplies. They didn't like our policies towards Israel, and so in the early ‘70s, the supply of oil was cut way back in this country. We had long lines of cars at the gas stations, and we were afraid we were going to go to another depression like the one that started in 1929, so the Treasury Department came to me and some other economic hit men and said, “Look, this is unacceptable.” And I give all the details of this in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but the short version is, they said, “Make sure that this doesn't happen again,” and we knew that the key to stopping this sort of thing was Saudi Arabia, because it controlled more oil than anyone else and the Royal House of Saud was corruptible.
So again, the short version is
we put together a deal whereby
the House of Saud agreed to
send almost all of the money it
made from selling oil all over
the world back to the U.S.,
invest it in U.S. government
securities, the interest from
those securities was used by
the Treasury Department to
hire U.S. companies to rebuild
Saudi Arabia, power plants,
desalinization plants, in fact,
entire cities from the desert,
and in the process, to
westernize Saudi Arabia, to
make it more like us. And the
other part of the deal was the
House of Saud agreed to
keep the price of oil within
limits acceptable to us, and we
agreed to keep the House of
Saud in power, and that deal
still holds. It's been holding
for a long time.
Tabacco: Now you know why Osama bin Laden initiated September 11th. The Bush administration will never tell you this part of the story.
There's a lot of blowback right now that's occurring around it,
but from our standpoint as
economic hit men, it was an
extremely successful deal, and
it’s the one we tried to replicate
with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. We’ll continue with our conversation in a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. I asked him if he was the first person to coin the term “economic hit man.”
JOHN PERKINS: I think I may have been the first to use it in print, but we used it back in the ‘70s. We called ourselves -- and it was sort of a tongue-in-cheek term. Officially, I was chief economist, but we used that sort of tongue-in-cheek, because it described was we did. Since the book came out on hardback – yes, and there’s a new epilogue in the paperback, which covers a lot of the new material -- a lot of people have stepped out of the shadows and approached me and talked to me, high people in governments and other economic hit men and jackals and wanted to share their story. A lot of them want to do it anonymously, which is a little tricky for a writer these days, as you know, but it's been fascinating to me how many have stepped out.
I also have seen, Amy, I think, a tremendous change in attitude around the world. We're seeing people really rebelling and saying, you know, we understand what's going on. And to be honest with you, I attribute a great deal of that to your show and other shows like it. You're reaching people.
The Internet, for example, is
working wonders. And there’s a
lot of books, there’s a lot of
movies like Syriana and Hotel
Rwanda and Good Night, and
Good Luck and so on and so
forth. So, the information is
getting out.
And I think once Americans
understand what we're doing in
the world and how much hatred
this is generating, we will
demand change.
And I think history has proven that when we demand change in any area, eventually -- it takes a little time -- but we do get it. So I’m very hopeful.
AMY GOODMAN: And these people who have come forward, are they active today?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, very much so. One of them – you know,
there was a president elected,
the President of Ecuador,
Gutierrez, a few years ago and
he ran on a very, very strong
anti-U.S. ticket.
And he said that if he was
elected, he would make sure
that the people of Ecuador get
the fair proceeds from
Ecuadorian oil. As soon as he
was elected, he was visited by
an economic hit man,
whom I know personally, and
read the Riot Act, told the
things we mentioned earlier,
you know, “I’ve got money for
you or a bullet.”
Within a month, he came to
Washington. There was a
famous picture shown all over
Ecuador of him sitting, holding
hands with George Bush. And
very soon after that, he went
against everything in his
campaign promises. He cut
sweet deals with the oil
companies. He went back on
the indigenous peoples, whose
lands in the Amazon area he
had promised to protect. And
the Ecuadorian people went
wild. They took to the streets.
They protested and
demonstrated and eventually threw him out of power.
So this particular one backfired. But what -- the economic hit man did his job right. Gutierrez came around, and then the Ecuadorian people understood what was going on. I have good friends in Ecuador, who called me shortly after that and said,
“You know, when we elect
someone democratically to do
something and he doesn't do it,
democracy requires that we
throw him out. Why don't you
the same thing in your
country?”
AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, what about Evo Morales? You talk about Gutierrez.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Bolivia. In fact, at one time, I was offered the job as president of Bolivian Power Company, which is the second most important job in Bolivia, actually, behind the President. And Bolivia has this – and it was an American-owned company, incidentally. Bolivia has this long record of giving into the I.M.F. and the World Bank, privatizing their resources, like their power company and their water company. And the people of Bolivia were fed up with this. They had been exploited and exploited and exploited. And so Evo Morales ran on this ticket that said, “I’m not going to put up with this anymore.” And, of course, he's getting a bad name in the U.S., because we want to portray him as a cocaine-raising farmer, who's all in favor of Castro and socialism and communism and cocaine. The fact is he did raise coca. He was a coca farmer. Coca's a very legitimate product in Bolivia that is not just used for cocaine. It's used for many other things.
AMY GOODMAN: Like?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, for example, high altitude sickness. Coca tea is perfectly legal in this country, too, and it's very effective against high altitude sickness, and derivatives of coca are used for many medicines. They're very effective. But the reason he was elected had nothing to do with any of that. It simply has to do with the extreme frustration and anger of the Bolivian people, of how they've been exploited and how the I.M.F. and the World Bank have insisted that they turn their resources over to foreign corporations. And also, you know, part of the World Trade Organization policies is that we insist that countries like Bolivia not subsidize their local industries and products, but that they accept our subsidies of them, and that they not erect any barriers against our goods coming in there, but they accept the barriers that we erect against their goods. And people around the world, Amy, are getting fed up with this. 300 million Latin Americans -- South Americans out of 360 million, over 80% have voted for these types of candidates.
AMY GOODMAN: Not to be ethnocentric about it, but America is a tremendous power, especially military power. It has been diverted now to dealing with Iraq. President Bush declaring war on Iraq, not exactly officially declaring it, but engaging in it. Do you think that that has something to do with what is happening in Latin America, not to take power away from the people and what they are doing there?
JOHN PERKINS: Well,
certainly, I think that Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela might
not have survived his presidency. His presidency
might not have survived had
we not been in Iraq and
Afghanistan, that we were so
diverted. We -- the economic
hit men tried to overthrow
him, you know, a few years
ago and were successful for
about 48 hours. But then he
had control over the oil
company, and he was very,
very popular. So he got bac
into office. At that point, had
we not been involved in Iraq,
I strongly suspect that we
would have done something
much more aggressive, as
we've done so many other
times. When the economic hit
men fail, we take more drastic
steps. Because we were so
involved in Iraq, we didn't do
that.
This gave great support to all of the other movements in Latin America. And these other candidates, people like Evo Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who’s had the staying power. He’s been able to stay there, despite the fact that the administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry.
The other side of the coin is that Brazil is a world power. It's one of the largest economies in the world, and it produces a tremendous number of military weapons that are used worldwide. And
Lula, of Brazil,
he’s backed off a bit. And there’s an interesting story that I know behind that.
AMY GOODMAN: What?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I'll get into that.
But he's backed off a bit. But he
still – he’s made alliances with
Chavez, with Kirchner of
Argentina, with Morales of
Bolivia. They’ve all agreed that
if the United States does
anything drastic, they'll stand
together and oppose us. So
there is this coalition that's
happening. It's quite loose.
But nonetheless, there's a
tremendous amount of
support there.
Tabacco has previously predicted a world coalition against the United States and NATO, which will form to stop the U. S. and its friends from ruling the planet. Think about it; what else could happen? When you hear the names of Russia, China, North Korea, Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Iran, now add to that the Latin American countries sick of American imperialism, nuclear war cannot be far behind. And it will be our own fault – the United States and its capitalistic exploitation of countries around the globe. Mark my words – our days of terrorizing other peoples are numbered.
AMY GOODMAN: Lula, what do you know?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was one of the speakers at the World Social Forum in Brazil in last February, and a man asked to meet with me who was a very high advisor to Lula. And he said, “You know, what you say in your book is all very true, but you just -- that's just the tip of the iceberg.” He said, “You know, from the time I was a very young man, I was quite radical. And it was interesting to me, as I was going through university, how much sex, drugs, booze were available to me in the parties that I was invited to, and so on. And now that I’m in this position of power, I discover that somebody was taking pictures of all those things, that there's a record of this.”
And he says, “You don't realize how all-pervasive your Secret Services are. It's recruiting, in their own way, young people, even those that are extreme socialists and communists. Your people befriend us from very early ages and get a lot of information on us. So when we become high up in the government, they basically –” And I said, “They blackmail you?” And he said, “Well, you could use the word ‘blackmail,’ but I think I would prefer that’s ‘modern U.S. diplomacy.’”
And I asked him, I said, “Well, is Lula a part of this?” And he obviously didn't really want to answer this question. He hesitated, and he said, “Let me just say that nobody gets to power in Brazil these days without being very willing to make compromises to your corporations and your government.” He said, “I think Lula’s a very, very good man, but he also has to deal with reality. And certainly, he's been watched all of his life, and I’m sure he's had the same temptations I did.”
AMY GOODMAN: And he’s also engulfed in a major corruption scandal, which, for many of his long-time supporters, Brazilians and outsiders, is raising a lot of questions.
JOHN PERKINS: And I think the fact that the scandal has come out and has been blown into such proportions is an indication that someone is sending Lula a very strong message. Incidentally, the jackal – I’ll call him – that was working with Gutierrez of Ecuador said to me, “You know, this isn’t limited to other countries.
This happens in your country,
too. Don't you think that the
assassination of John Kennedy
and Robert Kennedy and Martin
Luther King & John Lennon &
others like that, and the many
senators that have died in
airplane crashes & other things,
has sent a strong message to
your politicians?
And don't you think that –”
Liberal Democratic Senator, Paul
Wellstone was killed in an airplane
crash in 2002 just before he was
up for reelection. Does that sound
familiar. Yes, folks, I’m working on
a Wellstone Article.
AMY GOODMAN: Who said this to you?
JOHN PERKINS: The same economic hit man/jackal who visited Gutierrez and read him the Riot Act.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you care to share his name?
JOHN PERKINS: No. I'll let him do that at some point, if he feels it's appropriate. Right now, he doesn’t feel it’s appropriate. He's still in the business. And so, many of these people are still very -- even the ones that have retired are getting pensions, and they’ve got loyalties, some of them. So, they’ll talk to me on the side and say, “I want you to put this in your book, but I’m not ready to talk.” A couple of them I am working with to write a book, and my literary agent is working with them. So hopefully some of them will come clean. But it's a slow process in making that happen.
AMY GOODMAN: And these people you know, who you call economic hit men, who are the first to move in to these men who gain power, where does -- what do you know about Evo Morales now? He's just been elected President?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I have no doubt that he has been visited by at least one of these men, who's known him beforehand. These are not strangers that walk in. They’ve been hanging around Bolivia for a while, as I did. And so, once the President is elected, they walk into his office and shake his hands and say, “Congratulations, Mr. President. You won. We launched a strong campaign against you, but now you've won. And now, I want to tell you the facts of life and make you --”
AMY GOODMAN: And you know someone who has talked to him in this way?
JOHN PERKINS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was -- according to you, what was President Morales's response?
JOHN PERKINS: Morales was
very diplomatic about the whole
thing, but absolutely stood firm
and said, “You know, my people
have elected me for a reason, &
I intend to honor that.” This is
what his initial response was.
But what I will say is we can't
imagine the pressure now that’s
being exerted on a man like
Morales, as is true with all these
other presidents. They know
what's happened before their
time. And they – you know, the
pressure will be put on them
tighter and tighter and tighter.
And imagine being in that position. Imagine being an integritous person and really wanting to help your country, being elected with a majority – Morales got 54% of the vote, which is unheard of in Bolivia; he was up against many opponents -- and then, wanting to implement the policy, and somebody walks into your office and reminds you of what happened to all these other presidents.
And perhaps the most scary one was Noriega, who did not get assassinated. He wasn't a martyr. Instead, he had to stand by and watch several thousand innocent Panamanian civilians bombed, slaughtered, burned to death. And then he was dragged off to a U.S. prison, where he has been pretty much in solitary confinement ever since. Imagine thinking that might happen to you.
And so, Evo Morales, the story has just begun for him. I sympathize with him very deeply. And I think from our standpoint, Amy, as American citizens -- and I look at myself as an extremely loyal American citizen. I believe in the principles of this country, which I think that in the past few decades, increasingly, we've put them way in the back burner. But as good Americans, we need to insist that our government and our corporations honor democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
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Tabacco: America, this is real American history – the kind you will never read in high school history books or hear on network TV. I repeat for the umpteenth time, drop Cable and subscribe to Satellite so you can get the truth, not fairy tale news fluff and disinformation. America is NOT what it’s cracked up to be.
America doesn’t promote democracy; we kill heads of state, who won’t cooperate with big biz for personal profits. Presidents, who commit genocide and oppress their people, are O.K. with America if they permit U.S. capitalists to make a profit in their countries. If not, they must go!
Visit these websites to see what U.S. capitalists=hypocrites=murderers want to keep you from knowing (Have you viewed this stuff on network TV or read it in your local newspapers?):
In Memory of Salvador Allende and all the Other Victims of the Fascist, U.S. Sponsored Coup, September 11, 1973
http://www.neravt.com/left/allende.htm
ECUADOR: 250,000 march against corruption
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/615/615p16.htm
President Martin Torrijos of Panama speaks to the media.
Battle Over the Darién Gap
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/photogalleries/dariengap/photo2.html
Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.
In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)