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Feb. 3, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
55:54
Economic Hit Man John Perkins interviewed by Mike Adams as USAID shuttered
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All right, welcome everybody to today's featured interview.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of BrightTail.com, and I've got a really special guest for you.
Just an extraordinary man and author.
A man I interviewed over 10 years ago, but so much has changed in the world since then.
And I refer to his book, one of his books, he's got many, with great frequency.
It's John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
Wow, does he have some things to share with us today about the U.S. empire and its role in the world.
Welcome, John.
It's an honor to have you back, sir.
It's great to be with you, Mike.
Thanks for having me on the show again.
I appreciate it.
Well, it has been so many years.
I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.
I'm going to ask you about your background just for our audience here in a second, but let me just lead off by saying you and I have some Similar concerns about the role that is being assumed by the leaders of the United States in the administration, the outgoing administration, and perhaps in the incoming administration.
And the way the U.S. interacts with the world has been very disturbing.
And your background speaks to this.
So can you give us just sort of...
How you came to author this book, and who you are, and the things that you did that showed you some of the horrors of this activity.
Sure.
Before I say that, I'd just like to say, you know, it's not about the past exactly, because I spent a lot of time...
I just came back from Latin America.
I hid there again in March.
About a month ago, I was in Doha, Qatar, in the Middle East.
I've been speaking at...
Places around the world.
So, you know, I think what's really important is what's currently happening, you know, and we're at an incredibly interesting time in human history.
True.
But my background, so I was chief economist at a major U.S. consulting firm, and really what I was was an economic hitman.
My job, and I apologize for my...
My throat.
I'm just recovering from COVID. I came back from Ecuador, from South America, and caught COVID here.
So I'm just recovering.
So I apologize if I'm a little rusty sounding.
No worries.
It's understandable.
We hope you get well quickly.
Yeah, well, I'm fine.
I tested negative yesterday morning, and it's my first time.
I guess everybody has to experience it at least once.
In any case.
I was chief economist at this consulting firm.
My real job was to identify countries that had resources our corporations want, like oil, or today maybe lithium, cobalt, the minerals that are necessary for high tech, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations.
But the money never actually went to the country.
It went to our own corporations.
Mainly engineering construction corporations like Bechdel, Halliburton, Brown and Roots, Sona Webster, to build big infrastructure projects in that country.
Things that served the wealthy people, because they were the ones who benefited from electricity, you know, from highways and ports and airports.
But then it indebted the local people of the target nation.
Right.
So it was what we call the debt trap.
And, you know, basically put the country deep into debt.
And so the majority of the people suffered because money was diverted from social services, from education, health care and other such things to pay the interest on the loans.
And of course, the corporations that built these projects, the U.S. corporations made huge profits and the wealthy people in the country benefited, but everybody else suffered.
That's not what I was taught in business school.
So for a long time, I believed I was doing the right thing because we're taught that if you want to help a poor country, you invest heavily in infrastructure and it increases the GDP, the gross domestic product, which it does.
And so business school, World Bank, all of these places, you know, foster this idea.
That this is the right approach.
But what they don't tell you, and what it took me about seven years to figure out, was that GDP really measures how well the wealthiest are doing.
Good point, yes.
And then there's the statistic of how it increases GDP per capita, which makes it sound per capita like everybody's.
Getting this.
But GDP per capita is just GDP, which measures the wealthy people divided by the population.
So it really tells you nothing about how well the average people are doing.
And as you said, this is also happening today.
So, I mean, you write in your book how you visited all these different countries and you were, in effect...
Working to sign them up for these kinds of programs, which indebted these nations, and in some cases led to a currency collapse or a regime collapse, ultimately, in some of those nations.
But even today, all the money that the U.S. said that it was sending to Ukraine, let's say, well, wasn't most of that just sent to U.S. weapons corporations?
Yes, and we don't know.
Actually, it's very hard to find out how much of that is debt.
That's put Ukraine into deep debt, certainly a lot of it.
And a great deal of that money, as you said, was used to purchase weapons from U.S. corporations.
So we get a double whammy out of this.
We've got Ukraine deeply indebted to us, and we've helped our own corporations.
And of course, the rebuilding of Ukraine, whenever that happens, will also make huge profits for corporations.
It's a terrible game that we're playing.
And now China's entered into it.
My most recent book is about the economic hitmen of China.
It's the third in the Confessions trilogy.
And China's doing a much more efficient job than we did.
Their economic hitmen are very, very good at what they do.
Now, China's building ports, for example, in many countries, right?
Infrastructure for international shipping and commerce.
Yes.
And China, you know, it's got a great story.
It can tell the leaders of countries in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, look what happened in China.
We averaged 10% economic growth for 30 years.
No one else has ever done that.
And we brought 900 million people out of poverty.
That's more than twice the population of the United States.
And incidentally, you know, we're not going to do a most favored nation like the United States does between your country and our country.
That gives good trade between these two.
But we're going to build ports that will help you become part of the new Silk Road, which means you'll be a trading partner with everybody in the world.
And so it's, you know, it's a great story.
I wish I'd thought of that.
I wish I had that story.
But it's, you know, and a lot of it's based on fact.
They have had a miraculous economic growth.
Of course, it's come at a terrible price socially and environmentally.
Yes.
It's a really good story, and their economic hitmen are extremely good at spinning it and convincing other countries to take on this debt and hire Chinese companies to go and build the infrastructure.
Yeah, good point.
And they are very efficient at construction.
Let me ask you about the weaponization of the U.S. dollar, because this is something that we've all observed over these last few years, back to Ukraine and Russia, where Russia was cut off from the SWIFT system.
But doesn't the U.S. have a long history through the State Department of weaponizing dollar trade through economic sanctions?
And these sanctions, don't they typically...
Actually end up hurting not the leaders of these nations, but the people instead.
Well, they hurt the nations, the people of the nations, and often they hurt the people of the United States too, indirectly.
But yeah, this weaponization, as you put it, of the U.S. dollar, and of course China recognizes this, and they recognize that the only reason we can impose these sanctions the way we do is because The world, the main world trading currency is the dollar.
And so there have been many attempts to replace the dollar.
Qaddafi did it in Libya.
He promised to replace the dollar.
Saddam Hussein did it.
Yeah, look what happened to all of them, right?
Exactly.
You know, we don't want that to happen.
We get a sort of a different issue now because we've got China that is using the UN to buy oil from several countries.
It's using its own currency.
So it's in the process of undercutting the dollar.
And at the same time, we've also got Bitcoin, which puts a whole new slide on everything.
True.
Well, what do you think about the BRICS currency proposals or, let's say, non-dollar international settlement between trading partners?
Well, BRICS is fascinating.
and that stands for Brazil.
Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
But there's many, many other countries that have bought into this.
It's sort of their equivalent to our World Bank.
But it, again, is much more efficient around the world than the World Bank.
It's doing a bang-up job, if you look at it from the standpoint of wanting to create their own empire.
as the United States empire decreases, which it definitely is, the Chinese empire increases, which it definitely is.
And one really good statistic is in the year 2000, the US was the number one trading partner with about 80% of the world's countries.
Today, China is.
They've replaced the United States.
That's a fact.
And most Americans are really blind to that. - Well, absolutely.
I'm so glad you pointed this out.
Sometimes I take heat for pointing this out as well, but as you say, it's just a fact.
For example, Russia and China, I think 90% of their trade between each other is carried out in non-dollar-denominated currencies.
A similar thing between Russia and India, or India and China, sometimes Turkey and Russia, etc.
There are many examples of this.
And the number of countries using non-dollar-denominated currencies for trade or settlement continues to increase.
Functioning as an economic hitman, as you say, the U.S. was really a lot more dominant in that time.
It could set the rules and make good on threats and roll an aircraft carrier or sail an aircraft carrier into a region and credibly threaten somebody.
It seems to me like that capability is eroding rapidly.
Look at Yemen and the Red Sea, for example.
What are your thoughts?
You know, I think when I became an economic hitman, one of the reasons that the United States was moving away from the military invasion idea, the military control idea, into the debt trap was because Vietnam had basically proven that the military reaction doesn't work.
So for many, many years after that, after the mid-70s, the emphasis was totally on economic control.
But of course, what we call the military-industrial complex here in the United States didn't like that.
And we're always putting pressure on presidents and congressmen to change that.
And 9-11 offered the perfect opportunity.
So after 9-11, we developed a military presence.
We went hard into Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and many other countries, as you said.
So today we have both things going.
We've got the military.
And we've got the economic hitman.
And I will say that this military involvement of ours in Iraq and Afghanistan has really helped China.
Because we've devoted so much energy and so many resources to those parts of the world.
China hasn't.
And China instead has devoted its energies to bringing around Africa and Latin America and controlling the trade in these countries.
So, you know, the unintended consequences of America's involvement in these wars is extremely significant and yet very little is talked about in the United States.
I'm glad you pointed that out because, you know, China is the world's strongest industry.
You know, more industrial output than, I believe, any other nation in the world.
And, of course, Russia.
Arguably has the most energy resources.
The United States used to dominate in both of those areas, but no longer.
You know, the industrial base isn't what it used to be.
And it seems to me that the U.S. cannot compete on its merits any longer with producing goods and services and exports that just on a level playing field would be sufficient to be the dominant trading partner.
It's like the U.S. has to run around and threaten everybody, obey us or else.
Do you see it that way too or do you disagree with that assessment?
What's your take?
Yeah, it depends on what we want to accomplish, of course.
Yes.
I think to realistically understand that China is winning the economic game, we need to focus more on how we approach that game, if you want to call it that.
And also to recognize that China has another certain advantage, and that is it does not have a history of invading other countries other than those that it considers to be part of its sphere, you know, like Taiwan and Tibet and places like that.
And I taught it, of course, in Shanghai to Chinese MBA students.
Fairly recently.
And one of the things they said is, you know, you took half of Mexico.
You've got Puerto Rico.
You've done kind of the same thing.
And this talk on the part of President Trump of taking Iceland and Panama and maybe Canada really feeds into the hands of the Chinese, quite frankly, whether he's serious.
It doesn't really matter.
The rhetoric itself, they're using.
They're going around the world saying, hey, the United States is back at it.
The Monroe Doctrine is being reinstituted in the United States.
This is a little concerning, or more than a little concerning to myself as well.
When Trump said that we want to buy Greenland, I thought it was a joke at first.
Excuse me.
It should be.
I mean, because my first thought was, well, what about the people that are already there?
I mean, you know, it's not like it's an empty place.
And then I heard Trump say, well, we're going to take Panama back because China controls it.
And of course, I know people in Panama and they say, no, what Trump says about Panama is just factually not the case.
Panama charges all the countries the same based on the cargo.
Panama runs the place, not China.
I mean, I don't know what to say.
I mean, there are some things that Trump has done that I'm really happy about, but I don't want to be part of a country that runs around the world just conquering lands again.
I mean, come on.
Well, yes, and as I mentioned, every person in Latin America, as far as I know, and I suspect...
Almost all of them take great exception to that.
That sends a shiver of fear from Mexico to Argentina and Chile, all the way across through the hemisphere.
Like, what?
The Panama Canal has been run extremely efficiently by the Panamanians.
And yes, the Chinese have a couple of...
Container ports on each end of the canal, but so do we.
And we have the 4th Fleet, which is standing right off there.
So militarily, we have all the power there.
Even if we don't own the canal, we could completely stop all shipping in the canal if we wanted to.
So what's the point of owning it?
What's the point of pissing off the rest of the world by even talking about owning it?
There's no reason for us to own it.
Well, honestly, I think This is just my guess, John, but I think that Trump wants to cut off China from being able to use it.
That's my guess.
Yeah, but owning it won't do that, and he can already do that.
But right now, wouldn't...
I mean, the Panamanian controllers of the canal, I don't think they would go along.
Are you suggesting that if Trump wanted to...
Blocked China that he could just do so militarily with the military vessels there?
Yeah.
Is that what you're saying?
Just like Kennedy did with the Cuban blockade.
Just like a blockade.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, even if we owned it, he'd still have to do that probably because what else do you do there?
You just don't operate the locks for ships under Chinese flags, but a lot of the Chinese...
Goods don't even come in on Chinese flags.
They're from, you know, Liberia, from many other flags.
So, you know, this is not an easy thing to do, whether you own the canal or not.
But I think it's just as easy if you don't own the canal.
And let me offer this opinion and get your reaction, but I want to trade with China.
I want trade.
I mean, I don't want countries...
To exchange bombs and missiles when we can exchange goods and services, right?
That's my take on it.
I don't mind buying stuff from China, but we should also sell things to China.
But if you just start cutting off trading partners, everybody suffers.
I agree.
I agree.
It makes very little economic sense.
And I think if it actually happens, we're going to suffer pretty severely economically in the United States.
What would that look like, do you think?
Well, I think we'd have a higher inflation.
Everything would cost, well, not everything, but almost everything would cost more.
And our own industries, many of them would have a very difficult time getting the products that they need to build the things that they need to build, because they use Chinese components.
Totally cut off trade with China.
Even if we cut off a fairly small percentage of trade with China or impose such heavy tariffs or sanctions that China decided to just pull things out, I think we'd be in perhaps more trouble than China, certainly as much trouble as China.
That's a really good point because China has many, many trading partners beyond the United States.
The U.S. is, of course, a large market for China, but it's not the only market, not by any stretch.
And also U.S. consumer spending or discretionary spending has really plummeted recently because of the dire economic situation of people in the country.
I mean, Americans are just buying less right now compared to a few years ago.
And let's not forget that China also controls a lot of the world's lithium, cobalt, and other rare minerals that are required in the high-tech industry.
They control most of Africa.
I would encourage your listeners, if they're interested, to Google maps of China's growing trade takeover of the world, however you want to state it.
There's a number of fascinating maps that show how, right now, China controls most all of Africa and a lot of Latin America and a lot of Europe and a lot of Asia.
And we need those things.
So if we can't develop this trade with China, if we cut off that trade, what's the next step?
War with China?
Yeah.
It's, you know, these war hawks, some of whom...
Some have just joined in the Trump administration.
Some were in the Biden administration.
These war hawks, that seems like that's what they want, John, is they keep trying to amp up, like, China's our greatest threat.
We need to fight China.
I've heard them say things like, well, we need to defeat China before they get stronger.
Things like this.
I just shake my head.
You can't defeat China now.
War is not a solution to this, right?
And what's the end goal?
And the other aspect of this is we just pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, the WHO, and very likely some other organizations, which weakens the dollar, actually, and encourages those countries to...
Side more and more with China.
Whatever you think of how much money, and it is unfair, the United States spends an inordinate amount of money supporting these organizations.
But that doesn't require you to pull out.
And by pulling out, we've sent a message to so many other countries that we don't want to be in partnership with them.
So they'll turn increasingly to China.
That's my theory.
In the old days, it might have made sense.
Before, China was so, so powerful economically.
But today, it just puts us in a very weakened position, quite frankly.
I just want to remind our audience, we're talking with John Perkins here, and your website is johnperkins.org.
And John is the author of several books, but the most notable, in my view, is Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which is now in its third edition.
It's available at booksellers everywhere.
And John, your book, when I first read it, and I forgot how many years ago it was, when did the first book come out?
Late 2004. Okay.
Wow.
Well, when I first read it, I was absolutely shocked.
Honestly, I was in a state of disbelief.
Right.
I thought this couldn't possibly be true, what you're saying.
I was really skeptical.
Over the time since then, I've learned that what you state is absolutely true, and I've watched...
I mean, I love my country.
I love America.
I love the Constitution, etc.
But I also don't want us to be the bullies around the world.
I want us to get along and trade with people and not coerce everybody into doing what we say.
You know, I would state it even...
A little bit differently.
Incidentally, my ancestors fought in the American Revolution.
I consider myself to be an extremely loyal American.
To be loyal to a democracy means you've got to criticize.
We've got to be open to looking at our mistakes so we can correct them.
That's my goal.
It's not so much to me about bullying.
Yeah, that's a terrible...
That's a terrible shingle to have hung out on your office.
I'm the world's bully.
But it's also just about our own economic situation here at home.
And by bullying these other countries at a time when China is so potent and on the rise and we drive countries to China, it ultimately hurts us and it weakens us and it helps China.
So, you know, yeah, ethically, morally, we don't want to be bullies.
But being much even more practical, we don't want to be bullies at this time in history.
Well, yeah, and I think...
We here in America, the policies of our government are shooting ourselves in the foot.
For example, cutting off Russia from SWIFT, but then seizing reportedly about $300 billion in Russian assets that I think were mostly held in the euro in European banks, and just saying, well, we're going to freeze those assets now, so Russia, you no longer own them.
We, the West, control $300 billion.
That sent a message to the world, which is...
Never deposit money in Western banks because they can just take it.
And that seems like a really bad decision if you want to sway the world to do banking with you, doesn't it?
Well, that's one of the reasons that the BRICS bank that you mentioned and several other Chinese-dominated banks, international banks, are taking over the Asian infrastructure.
Investment bank is another one, you know, because, yeah, people are afraid of us, and there's an alternative.
You know, it's one thing to be a bully.
We keep using that word, and I don't really like it.
You can pick a better word.
That was my word.
I don't know.
It's one thing to sort of try to dominate a situation, a global situation, when you're the big boy on the block.
And during my time, It was the Cold War, and we were up against the Soviet Union.
But the Soviet Union had nowhere near the power that China has.
It was a small economy by comparison.
There were very few countries in the world that were turning to Soviet banking or anything like it.
True, right.
It wasn't creating a new Silk Road.
Or international banks that people were looking at it.
It was a very different adversary.
We were afraid of its nuclear power.
And it was a reasonable thing to be afraid of, that there could be a nuclear war and they were behaving very aggressively.
But today what we've got to understand is that China is very, very different from the old Soviet Union.
And actually Russia is different too.
But China particularly, they've already got the power.
We essentially...
Closed our eyes and rolled over and played dead while we were fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places.
And China moved right in.
And so they're there now.
And you can't be a bully if there's a...
Bigger bully on the block.
That kind of neutralizes you.
Or, you know, you can't push people around if there's someone else who's bigger and stronger than you pushes you around.
And I don't mean to imply that the United States doesn't have still a lot of power.
It does.
And our military is very, very powerful.
But to think of the idea of fighting a war with China, that's just unthinkable.
It really is.
What does the military really do?
So today...
Unless we're looking at a total apocalypse through war, the real battle is fought by technology, by AI, if you will, and by economics.
Well, let's talk about that because the U.S. In a bully-like fashion, attempts to sabotage China's ability to manufacture microchips that are used to build data centers for AI. So you're probably familiar with the U.S. sanctions on exports of microchip fabrication or lithography equipment out of European countries to China.
And I remember last year when China rolled out...
A new mobile phone using its own microchip that it had developed in-country.
It shocked the world because the Western world thought that they had blockaded China's microchip design and fabrication capabilities, and China proved that, no, it didn't work, that they could still create microchips.
And a follow-up on the question, sorry to take so long, John, but just two days ago.
A Chinese company called DeepSeek released a bombshell reasoning AI model as an open-source free model that does actual human, better than human, better than PhD reasoning.
And it's equivalent to the open AI model, but it's 1 60th the price, or you can just download it for free and use it yourself.
So China is beating the U.S. on AI. Stunning.
Well, should it really surprise us?
You know, China's got some incredibly good universities.
It's got a much larger population to draw from than we do.
Very, very bright people.
And yeah, we can just expect this to increase that way.
So what do you do in a case like that?
You try to work with them.
You understand maybe that there's competition in the world.
But the last thing you want to do is drive a wedge that does not allow our companies to benefit from the technology that's developed in China.
And vice versa.
A relationship gets worked out.
Yes.
Well, it's interesting.
You know, Russia and China had recently announced an AI technology sharing agreement.
So they, you know, Russia recognizes what you just described.
That they benefit from that cooperation.
Whereas the U.S., I mean, this actually, this was leaked a couple of weeks ago that there was a conversation.
I forgot who, no, it was, who's the founder of Netscape?
Andreessen.
Yeah.
Andreessen came out and said that he was told in a government briefing in the U.S. that the U.S. government was going to outlaw areas of math in order to control AI. I'm like, really?
You're going to outlaw math?
Okay.
That sounds a bit extreme, doesn't it?
Yeah, because it's linear algebra.
What are you going to do, ban algebra in the schools?
I can't imagine that happening.
I would add one more thing, and that is that the first two books in the Economic Hitman trilogy were published in China by a very prestigious One of the largest publishing houses in China and sold a lot of copies.
And I was asked to teach at this MBA program there.
This third book in the trilogy is quite critical of China.
It has the same publisher in the United States.
As the other two, in conversations with that publisher and their hierarchy, as we're bringing out this third book, one of the things we had to deal with is because of the way I criticized China, it probably won't be published in China.
Maybe it'll be published in Taiwan and people can get it in the Chinese language.
Well, surprise, surprise, surprise.
About a month ago, I received this.
And we knew it was coming because we'd signed a contract.
But the same publishing house in China.
This is the third edition.
This is the third in the trilogy.
Wow.
It's very critical to China.
Wow.
You know, it paints the patriotism of China's economic growth and the good things that China has accomplished.
But it also really, really comes down hard on Chinese engineering and some of the construction projects they've built and places that I've visited, like dams they've built in Ecuador that are failing and so on and so forth.
And it's all in there.
I have a friend who's, I have a couple of friends who are from China, and they're now visiting professors at universities in the United States.
They've read the Chinese version, and they say nothing's been omitted.
Wow.
Yeah, well, that's a very different impression than what we tend to get in the United States, isn't it?
Well, it's fascinating you say that, because I've been assessing the AI language models from the U.S. versus China.
And I'm always told by U.S. engineers that the Chinese models are heavily censored.
I found exactly the opposite to be the case.
I found the U.S. models are heavily censored on topics like vaccines or climate change or culture, etc.
The Chinese models are not censored except on just a very narrow sliver of topics like Tiananmen Square, for example, or certain things on Taiwan.
I can use Chinese models, such as DeepSeq, to do reasoning about pharmaceutical regulation policy in the United States, whereas U.S. models, such as Anthropic, refuse to process the questions.
That's very interesting.
Fascinating.
Isn't it, though?
Yeah.
Because I was wanting to send some policy ideas over to RFK Jr. for HHS, and I had to use a Chinese model to get the best ideas for America's health care.
Wow.
Imagine.
Yeah.
The world has changed.
Well, we're in a fascinating time, Mike.
The next couple of years, and particularly the next couple of years, are going to be very, very interesting, I think, to see where we go next.
Well, what would you like to see America do?
In terms of its relationships with other nations in the years ahead, I mean, regardless of what Trump has said or is doing, if Trump wasn't even there and you could dictate policy, or I don't mean dictate, but suggest policy, how would you shape U.S. policy?
Well, you know, it would depend on the region we're talking about, but let's use as one example the immigration problem.
I spent a lot of time in Central America.
And the free trade agreements we have in Latin America, in Central America particularly, are a major cause for our immigration problem.
So let me give you an example.
According to these agreements, the United States is allowed to subsidize agriculture in this country, but nobody's allowed to put tariffs on agriculture.
And so if you take a farmer in Guatemala, and I'm going to just make up some numbers here, but let's say it costs him $5 a bushel to produce corn.
In the agribusiness in the United States, it costs $10 a bushel to produce corn.
But the agribusiness gets a $6 subsidy from the U.S. government.
So it can produce the corn basically for $4.
And it can sell at a profit at $5.
Whereas the Guatemalan...
A campesino needs to sell something more than $5 in order to make any kind of a profit at all.
And Guatemala doesn't have the money to subsidize its farmers, and it can impose tariffs on things imported by big agribusiness.
And so big agribusiness has basically taken over Central America.
The farmers, who used to make a decent living off the land there, No one can do that.
And so they have a couple of choices.
They can go to work for sweatshops that are primarily owned by American-affiliated businesses and pay terrible wages, but they pay something.
Or they can go begging in the streets, or a family member can try to migrate to the United States and send money home.
It's all interrelated.
Yeah.
If we really wanted to solve the immigration problem, we would be investing something like the Marshall Plan that we did in Europe after World War II into Latin America, helping these countries.
I develop their economies and at the same time helping ourselves.
And we can ask for things in exchange, certainly.
But, you know, that that would be a rational approach.
So if I'm dictating policy or suggesting policy, I would suggest a very different approach to dealing with the immigration problem rather than trying to stop poor starving people at the border or wherever, you know.
Help them to stay in their country.
I speak Spanish fluently.
Where I live, there's a lot of Guatemalans and Mexicans working here.
They're mowing lawns and they're cooking our food in the restaurants and so on.
I talk to them a lot.
They don't want to be here.
They don't have good lives here.
They work hard and then they send as much money as they possibly can back to their families.
Guatemala is one of the most beautiful countries in the world.
They want to be there.
And, you know, so that's one example of policy.
And it depends on what part of the world we're dealing with.
But there's so many things we could do to be good citizens of the world.
Well, this harkens back to the centralized corporate control over agriculture and to help support what you just said.
I've seen many cases of U.S. corporate imperialism when it comes to things like pushing GMOs to other nations.
And what we see is the destruction of the seed diversity of the agricultural sectors, right?
And I completely agree with you.
When I lived in Ecuador, everybody knew how to grow food around where I was in rural Ecuador, and they enjoyed...
The diversity of the seed supply, the diversity of the foods, but the U.S. corporations want to come in and say, no, you only grow Monsanto GM corn or whatever, because then you have to pay us a licensing fee.
I've seen that too, John.
I've seen the economic destruction of Central and South America from U.S. corporations.
I'm really glad you pointed that out.
And the people that you were with in the Vilcabamba area of Ecuador, it's a very special region, as you well know.
Yeah.
Much, perhaps, a large percentage of the agriculture in Ecuador does use GMOs, and they rely completely on imported insecticides and fertilizers.
It was every time I went to the open-air markets there, I was always talking to people, you know, say, la comida sin pesticido, you know, no pesticides.
And, you know, some would grow without pesticides, but most would say, no, we grow with pesticides.
It was very common.
It was hard for me to find organic food, even in the markets there.
Yeah, and once they've bought into that whole, what's called the Monsanto approach, they can't get out.
That's true.
It's almost impossible to convert back.
I also saw, though, John, this is really interesting that we're having this discussion because I saw what I call processed food imperialism.
So you would see all the processed food and the Procter& Gamble companies and pushing personal care, cosmetics, laundry detergents into the grocery stores in Central and South America.
And then that would lead to the same...
First world diseases that we have in America.
And then you start to have, like, we would have people constantly coming to us begging for money because their family member has a cancer tumor.
All the time, right?
And was this happening here two generations, three generations ago?
They said, no, we didn't have this.
This is all new.
It's because they're eating the U.S. processed food.
That's why.
When I first lived in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968 to 71, Time, I believe it was Time Magazine, which we got about three months late, but we did get it, had an article on the blue regions of the world where people live longer.
I think there were four or five at the time.
And one of them was the Vilcabamba area where you were.
And one of the reasons was because they ate such great organic food.
There were a number of other factors involved, but that was one of them.
And so, yeah, in that period of time, the Green Revolution happened, which meant that you had these miracle seeds that require heavy amounts of chemicals and are very, very much controlled by a few agribusiness corporations.
True.
And this is really consistent with the theme that we've talked about here today, John, and we're about to wrap this up, but think about it.
The dollar, like the imperialistic currency, and then pesticides or GMOs as imperialistic agriculture, the military-industrial complex as imperialism force projection, it all comes back to the same themes.
The money goes into the hands of a few powerful people while the world suffers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the same, you know, that's why we do these interviews, John, because we want people to understand the control system so we can decentralize, get out of this trap as much as possible.
You know, Mike, I just had an interesting experience, a newsletter that came out, my newsletter yesterday, and people can get it by going to johnperkins.org and just going to blog up in the corner there.
And the title of it is A.I. Musk and the Oligarchy, A Conversation with Thomas Paine.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
I grew up on Thomas Paine.
I grew up in New Hampshire.
As I mentioned, my family was very cognizant of their heritage to the American Revolution and all the world wars that we fought in.
I grew up on Paine and other writings by people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson and so on.
So I felt I could really have a conversation with Thomas Paine, assuming that he's been able to look down from where he is and see what's going on today.
And once I get started, the way I write, it's kind of like this flow, you know, it's what I call inspiration, being in spirit, just letting the voice come in.
And I really felt I was having this conversation with this very brilliant, you know, A guy who wrote these articles that were instrumental in convincing Americans to fight the British back in the Revolution.
Yeah, wasn't Common Sense one of them?
Yeah, Common Sense and The Crisis.
These were the best-selling books of the time, and they were read throughout the colonies and taverns and churches and so on, and were extremely influential.
And, you know, it's interesting to look at what would Thomas Paine think about where we are today?
What would he say about it?
And in going through that process, it was, for me, very, very interesting to see how, in recent years, we've really stepped back from what people like Thomas Paine and the other revolutionaries, the founding fathers, foresaw.
Trying to create.
And they were not perfect by any means.
But the fact of the matter is our whole attitude seems to be changing.
And I think at this point, we're extremely vulnerable to a few of the oligarchs who control communications, transportation, and much of technology.
I completely agree with you, and that's why I'm a strong advocate of decentralization of food, medicine, technology, and knowledge.
Knowledge has been controlled by far too few people.
The big tech platforms, I've been censored for over 10 years for saying things that certain parties did not want to hear.
But that's actually changing now with AI and open source models.
But I think you and I may not agree on everything policy-wise or political, but...
We agree on the idea that we want human beings to live with joy, with prosperity, with a sense of self-determination.
And all the things that you have described today and what you cover in your book are actually forces of power and coercion that are detrimental to the advancement of those human outcomes I just mentioned, which include joy.
Yeah.
I'm glad you said that, Mike, because we are the country that...
It talks about happiness for its people, prosperity and happiness and freedom.
The world for a couple of centuries now has looked to us as the leader in creating democracy and creating a good world.
And that's been severely threatened in my lifetime, particularly in the last quarter part of my lifetime.
I'm turning 80 next week, so I've been around a long time.
I'm still in great health.
I just was tromping through the Amazon rainforest two weeks ago, and then I got COVID, but I recovered very quickly.
So, you know, we've seen this whittling away, and I think one of the great appeals of Trump is to talk about making America great again.
I'm concerned that a lot of his policies are going to do the opposite, but I totally agree with the philosophy that we need to make America great again.
And that doesn't mean bullying the world, as you put it, and having military support.
It means setting an example, and it means helping the world achieve for every country and every person in the world a better life.
I completely agree with you, and I think that...
To make America great again, we have to look inward.
We have to ask the questions, how do we become better people?
How do we enhance our education?
How do we adopt a philosophy that is more universally beneficial to the world?
We can't just run around the world with our ships and our bombs and our dollars and just threaten everybody and make America great.
It just doesn't work that way.
And I don't know what people will call this.
Like, are my beliefs progressive, liberal, conservative, libertarian?
I don't care.
Any label you want.
They're reasonable.
They're rational.
That's right.
We need to take a rational approach to what it means to being a world leader.
I completely agree.
And I would just say it's pro-humanity.
It's humanitarian.
If we can't recognize the value of each other, what are we doing?
You know?
I agree.
John, it's an honor to be able to speak with you today.
Thank you for taking the time.
Any final thoughts you want to share with us?
Well, I think we need to look at that we live in very blessed times.
Listen to this.
I would encourage you to realize that we're living in an amazing time in human history.
You may like what just happened yesterday at the inauguration, or you may not.
But either way, we're living in a time that's historical.
And the evolution of human beings is occurring right now, right under our noses.
And, you know, to recognize that we do have control over it.
We can, you know, set the course.
And particularly, America is in a position still where we can set the course for the world.
But we really must understand the awesomeness of that power and also understand what it is we really want to do for the world.
What world do we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren?
But we're there.
We're at this blessed time in history, the evolution of human beings.
Very well said.
And the only way that I want to make America great again is if we uplift the condition of all the other people in the world.
I don't want to be a wealthy nation in a world surrounded by impoverished.
Just like you said earlier, that's part of the immigration problem.
The infliction of poverty upon these developing nations.
And we can change that.
So I thank you for taking the time here.
We'll publish this transcript and video.
Let me remind people of your book again, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and your website, johnperkins.org.
And one last question, John.
Are there speaking engagements coming up that people may be able to attend of yours?
Yeah, and if they subscribe to my newsletter by putting their email in the little box on my website, it only comes out once a month, and I think it's absolutely brilliant.
Yay!
It's short, and at the end, it tells events that are evolving for me, and some of them come up very, very quickly.
You know, I get invitations to speak at things or on podcasts or whatever, and it happens fairly quickly sometimes.
Stay tuned.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much, John.
Have a blessed day.
Thank you for sharing your time with us.
And for all of you listening, thank you for listening and sharing this interview everywhere.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
And God willing, we shall all help uplift our fellow human beings from this day forward.
Thank you for listening.
Take care.
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