John Perkins Quotes

This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.

The need to colonize a country in the old fashioned way is gone. Even in Iraq they will pull out. But Iraq will have McDonald's, Iraq will have American interests in there, America will be able to do its business there. They don't necessarily need to send in troops - they send in men in suits and they colonize the place financially. It's a cultural and financial imperialism

The World Trade Organization is a fearful instrument of re-colonialization and exploitation

Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West.

By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.

There are few colonial nations anymore. Instead, we are colonized by financial institutions beyond our political control. We are colonized with pens and papers and millions of little digital bursts transferring billions of dollars all over the globe in the blink of an eye.

When you have countries that have a lot of minerals and diamonds and oil and are in business with companies from all over the world - but these companies don't share, really, their profits - this is called post-post-colonial.

Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive.

If gold was found anywhere on the globe, that region would shortly be governed by English speakers.

Today's world war is entirely a competitive struggle amongst fully mature capitalisms for world domination, for the exploitation of the remaining zones of the world not yet capitalistic.

We are told that we must open up, that trade and commerce must be totally free. Free for whom? For rogue speculators. For anarchists wanting to destroy weak countries in their crusade for open societies, to force us to submit to the dictatorship of international manipulators.

The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might.

Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.

The Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have nothing to do with free trade. 'Free trade' is used as a disguise to hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use lawsuits to overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food safety, GMOs, and minimum wages.

There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations.

The United States is a monster that would like to devour all the weak nations, particularly the Muslim countries, in order to establish its hegemony

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

There is a dismal record of failure in Africa on the part of the developed world that shocks and shames our civilization.

We denounce the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interest of financial imperialists, oil monopolists, and international bankers, which has at times degraded our State Department from its high service as a strong and kindly intermediary of defenseless governments to a trading outpost of those interest and concession seekers engaged in the exploitation of weaker nations, as contrary to the will of the American people, destructive of domestic development and provocative of war.

In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.

In the Imperialist Era, the foreign loan played an outstanding part as a means for young capitalist countries to acquire independence.