Politics & Power Quote by John Perkins

Perkins speaks in the plain, almost shrugging register of a man describing a job description, and thats where the punch lands. "Basically" and "trained to" deflate the romance of geopolitics: this isnt heroic statecraft, its professionalized extraction with a curriculum. The phrase "American empire" is the rhetorical dare. Its a taboo word in mainstream U.S. self-narration, and Perkins uses it to recast familiar tools - development loans, consulting reports, infrastructure megaprojects - as instruments of dominance rather than benevolence.

The subtext is about laundering power through technocracy. By framing the process as resource "flows" to "corporations" and "our government", he collapses the usual distinction between public interest and private gain, implying a coordinated ecosystem where policy, finance, and business reinforce each other while maintaining plausible deniability. "Create situations" is especially telling: the emphasis isnt on responding to needs but manufacturing conditions - debt dependence, contractual lock-in, political leverage - that make alternatives costly or impossible for the targeted countries.

And then the most revealing line: "we've been very successful". Its not triumphal; its clinical. The moral argument is smuggled in through managerial language, inviting the reader to feel the chill of efficiency applied to inequality. In the broader context of Perkinss post-Cold War critique, the intent is to shift the scandal from rogue actors to a system: not a conspiracy in smoke-filled rooms, but an economy of incentives where empire can operate in spreadsheets and consultancy slides, leaving the violence off-camera.