Politics & Power Quote by John Perkins

The line plays like a confession that’s also a dodge: Perkins opens with the NSA to trigger Cold War intrigue, then quietly pivots to “private corporations,” where the real story is. That move is the point. It frames state power not as a separate, shadowy world but as a pipeline that feeds into corporate agendas. “Largest and least understood” doesn’t just describe the NSA; it flatters the listener’s sense that they’re about to be let in on something forbidden, a rhetorical lure that makes his later claims about business and empire feel newly credible.

The context matters. “Business school… late sixties” evokes a moment when technocratic confidence and geopolitical paranoia overlapped: Vietnam, covert operations, the expansion of the national security state, and the rise of multinational corporate influence. By placing himself at that intersection, Perkins casts his career not as ordinary consulting but as a kind of soft-intelligence work: economic expertise repurposed as leverage.

The subtext is an indictment delivered in the passive voice. “I was recruited” suggests he was selected, almost swept along by forces bigger than him, while “ultimately I worked” restores agency right when responsibility could be assigned. It’s a memoirist’s balancing act: establish proximity to power, signal complicity, keep moral distance. The sentence also collapses a boundary many Americans prefer to keep intact - that spying is what government does, and profit is what companies do. Perkins implies the boundary is mostly theater, and that the machinery of influence runs on interchangeable personnel, shared incentives, and plausible deniability.