Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces pouring corporate globalization. In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins told the tale of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into making policy favorable to the US government and corporations, what he calls the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins says he helped the US cheat poor countries around the sphere out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. John Perkins has just come out with his following book on this issue. It’s called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption. John Perkins joins us now in the firehouse studio. Well, before we go further, “economic hit men”—for those who haven’t heard you clarify this, let alone clarify yourself as this, what do you mean? JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I reckon it’s honest to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to make the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the services, unlike other empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly. We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we orchestrate a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its …