John Perkins Quotes

The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender

U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call "the Fifth Freedom," understood crudely, but with a fair degree of accuracy, as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.

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.

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

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.

There's a belief that since Africa got a raw deal from the colonial West, then the Chinese must be Africa's best friend. But the evidence doesn't show that, and the main criticism is that they are building infrastructure in exchange for Africa's resources in deals that are structured to favor China.

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

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

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa

Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on earth to rule all of humanity.

The culture of death is imposed by economic and political interests, the arrogance of power, corruption. I blame the first world for having taken our riches for so many years. I am speaking of the superpowers that dominate the life of the world. More concretely, the World Bank, the IMF. Those that have caused and tolerated the death of our people, those responsible for the plundering of the third world. Silence is also part of repression.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.

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.

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.

Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.

Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world be overlooked or left unused.

In the 19th century, the chains [of slavery] were metal. Today, the chains are debt—the worker has to repay his transportation, his tools, his food.

Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.

Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.

A world divided into blocs, in which instead of solidarity, imperialism and exploitation hold sway, can only be a world structured in sin.

Muslims are gradually being excluded from the official positions altogether …. any answer for their degeneracy is one of the results of our political ignorance and neglect

We will not tolerate being cheap labor for industrialized nations, and the purchase of our national resources to be taken abroad.

Ireland has never recovered from Britain's nineteenth century "free trade" rule.