Countries Are Cheated out of Trillions of Dollars: Confessions of an Economic Hitman

John Perkins started and stopped writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man four times over 20 years. He says he was threatened and bribed in an effort to kill the project, but after 9/11 he finally decided to go through with this expose of his former professional life. Perkins, a former chief economist at Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, says he was an "economic hit man" for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business. "Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars," Perkins writes. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an extraordinary and gripping tale of intrigue and dark machinations. Think John Le Carré, except it's a true story.

Perkins writes that his economic projections cooked the books Enron-style to convince foreign governments to accept billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and other institutions to build dams, airports, electric grids, and other infrastructure he knew they couldn't afford. The loans were given on condition that construction and engineering contracts went to U.S. companies. Often, the money would simply be transferred from one bank account in Washington, D.C., to another one in New York or San Francisco. The deals were smoothed over with bribes for foreign officials, but it was the taxpayers in the foreign countries who had to pay back the loans. When their governments couldn't do so, as was often the case, the U.S. or its henchmen at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund would step in and essentially place the country in trusteeship, dictating everything from its spending budget to security agreements and even its United Nations votes. It was, Perkins writes, a clever way for the U.S. to expand its "empire" at the expense of Third World citizens...Also see Democracy Now! interview 11/9/2004 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Whether or not this has anything to do with the current financial crises I don't know but worth looking into this and also:

BAILOUT CONCERNS

Also see Obama-Biden/Kucinich/Dodd/Feingold and other vantage points...we may be better off taking a good hard look at a number of these...

And consider...Sending a letter to elected officials through

http://www. VoteNoBailout.org.

The Bush administration and the richest bankers in the country, with support of some of the top leaders in Congress, have put a gun to our head: give us your money, or we will sink your economy. Yesterday, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, threatened the Senate if they failed to pass the $700 billion plan, they would be responsible for causing recession, more joblessness, and pushing more homes into foreclosure.

The bailout package takes our money and gives it to the same bankers and executives who drove the economy into the ground. The pay for chief executives of large U.S. companies is now at 275 times that of the average worker's salary in 2007. It was 25 times greater in 1965. The same bankers who will be given our hard-earned tax dollars refuse to support even the bailout of their own institutions if their obscene salaries are even slightly compromised. "We support the bill, but we are opposed to provisions on executive pay... It is not appropriate for government to be setting the salaries of executives," said Scott Talbot, executive for Financial Services Roundtable, a group representing the bankers.

keep watching BOB HERBERT-- Op Ed at the New York Times...last was "A Second Opinion?"

One more...Securing Capitalist Accumulation for America’s Ruling Corporate Caste

by Eddie J Girdner, 23 September 2008

maintreamweekly dot net

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