Interview: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

* Part One:




* Part Two:




John Perkins has lived four lives: as an economic hit man (EHM); as the CEO of a successful alternative energy company, who was rewarded for not disclosing his EHM past; as an expert on indigenous cultures and shamanism, a teacher and writer who used this expertise to promote ecology and sustainability while continuing to honor his vow of silence about his life as an EHM; and as a writer who, in telling the real-life story about his extraordinary dealings as an EHM, has exposed the world of international intrigue and corruption that is turning the American republic into a global empire despised by increasing numbers of people around the planet.


As an EHM, Johns job was to convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the U.S. government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able to control these economies and to ensure that oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building a global empire.


In his EHM capacity, John traveled all over the world—to Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—and was either a direct participant in or witness to some of the most dramatic events in modern history, including the Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the assassination of Panama’s President Omar Torrijos, the subsequent invasion of Panama, and events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.



John Perkins Official Web Site://www.johnperkins.org

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium.


In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.


For more, visit: http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture.

Noam Chomsky: The Militarization of Science and Space

About the Lecture:


Chomsky launches a savage, two-pronged assault on national economic policies and efforts at “global domination….By now the stakes are so high that issues of survival arise,” says Chomsky.


The basic principle underlying our current economy is “to make rich people happy and make everybody else frightened.” Chomsky lays particular blame for this doctrine on Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan-- “Saint Alan”-- who claims the economy is working well because of private entrepreneurial initiative and expanding consumer choice. Chomsky disagrees.


He claims that in the last 30 years, it has been public spending on such technologies as computers, satellites, the Internet and lasers that has fed the economy. And the wealth derived from these technologies has gone primarily into the hands of corporate masters, who represent a fraction of the American people. The government has used a succession of bogeymen—the Soviets, Communist insurgents around the world, and now global terrorism—to scare taxpayers into supporting core defense programs whose technologies ultimately spin off into private hands.


The current administration advocates not merely controlling space, but owning it, with a new missile-based system and satellite-guided unmanned drones. This expensive strategy, combined with the doctrine of striking first at perceived enemies, may well bring global calamity.

Edward Said Lecture: The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilzations'

Edward Said Lecture The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilzations'
Runtime: 52:03


In 1993 Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" and later he expanded into a book with the same title, but without the question mark.


Edward Said, late Columbia professor put more question marks on Huntington's thesis.

What is Anti-Americanism:The Case of France

Date of event: Oct 19, 2007


Speaker: Sophie Meunier, research fellow in theWoodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University


Location: Middlebury College, Rohatyn Center for International Affairs

Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe on Lamb Castration, PETA, and American Labor

Mike Rowe
December12, 2008
The Entertainment Gathering 2008
Moertery, California


Drawing on his experiences picking up roadkill, feeding swine, and castrating a lamb with his teeth, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, discusses how modern American culture belittles necessary labor.

EG is the celebration of the American entertainment industry. Since 1984, Richard Saul Wurman has created extraordinary gatherings about learning and understanding. EG is a rich extension of these ideas - a conference that explores the attitude of understanding in music, film, television, radio, technology, advertising, gaming, interactivity and the web - The Entertainment Gathering

Mike Rowe has had more jobs than you. In fact, Mike has had more jobs than anyone.

As the creator and executive producer of Discovery Channels Emmy-nominated series Dirty Jobs With Mike Rowe, Mike has spent years traveling the country, working as an apprentice on more than 200 jobs that most people would go out of their way to avoid. From coal mining to roustabouting, maggot farming to sheep castrating, Mike has worked in just about every industry and filmed the show in almost every state, celebrating the hard-working Americans who make civilized life possible for the rest of us.

On Labor Day 2008, Mike launched a Web site called mikeroweWORKS.com, where skilled labor and hard work are celebrated in the hope of calling attention to the steady decline in the trades and bolstering enrollment in trade schools and technical colleges.

In addition to Dirty Jobs and his mikeroweWORKS endeavor, Mike is the voice of Deadliest Catch and the national spokesman for Ford Trucks. He has traveled extensively for Discovery Channel, hosting Shark Week in South Africa, where he field-tested a steel-mesh shark-suit, and Egypt Week Live, where he opened and explored newly discovered tombs in the Valley of the Golden Mummies.

Collecting Meteorites in Antarctica

Searching Meteorites in Antarctica
January 26th, 2006
Google Tech Talk
Length: 42:52



Every year since the late 70's the US National Science Foundation has supported a team of space scientists (ANSMET) to search for meteorites in Antarctica.


What is ANSMET?


Since 1976, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET), funded by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation, has recovered more than 10,000 specimens from meteorite stranding surfaces along the Transantarctic Mountains. The ANSMET specimens are currently the only reliable, continuous source of new, non-microscopic extraterrestrial material, and will continue to be until future planetary sample-return missions are successful.


The samples already recovered provide essential "ground-truth" concerning the materials that make up the asteroids, planets and other bodies of our solar system, and their continued retrieval is the cheapest and only guaranteed way to recover new things from worlds beyond the Earth.


The study of ANSMET meteorites has greatly extended our knowledge of the materials and conditions in the primeval nebula from which our solar system was born, revealed the complex and exotic geologic nature of asteroids, and proved, against the conventional wisdom, that some specimens represent planetary materials, delivered to us from the Moon and Mars, free of charge.


Why Antarctica?


Antarctica is the world's premier meteorite hunting-ground for two reasons. Although meteorites fall in a random fashion all over the globe, the likelihood of finding a meteorite is enhanced if the background material is plain and the accumulation rate of indigenous sediment is low.


Consequently the East Antarctic icesheet, a desert of ice, provides an ideal background for meteorite recovery- go to the right place, and any rock you find must have fallen from the sky. This allows the recovery of meteorites without bias toward types that look most different from earthrocks (a problem on the inhabited continents) and without bias toward larger sizes. But another factor may be equally important. As the East Antarctic icesheet flows toward the margins of the continent, it's progress is occassionally blocked by mountains or obstructions below the surface of the ice. In these areas, old deep ice is pushed to the surface and can become stagnant, with very little outflow and consistent, slow inflow. When such places are exposed to strong katabatic winds, massive deflation results, removing large volumes of ice and preventing accumulation of snow while leaving a lag deposit of meteorites on the surface. These areas exhibit a variable balance between infall, iceflow and deflation, all of which are intimately tied to environmental change during recent Antarctic history. Over significant stretches of time (tens of thousands of years) phenomenal concentrations of meteorites can develop, as high as 1 per m2 in some locations.


Terrestrial exposure ages of meteorites suggest that some stranding surfaces may have been active for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Antarctica is by far the best place on Earth to search for meteorites, and the ANSMET program has proven to be the most reliable and economic way to recover these specimens.