This week we interviewed John Perkins, author, public speaker, and founder of two non-profit organizations, Dream Change and The Pachamama Alliance.

While working as Chief Economist for a consulting firm in the 1970s, Perkins advised the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), U.S. Treasury Department, Fortune 500 corporations, and governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. When he realized he had become an 'economic hit man' playing a dishonorable role in the economic colonization of the world on behalf of elite multinational corporations, banks and the United States government, Perkins decided he wanted to become part of the solution, not the problem.

Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - published in over 30 languages, and selling over 1.2 million copies worldwide - is a startling first-hand exposé of international corruption on a gargantuan scale, while his Secret History of the American Empire, another New York Times bestseller, details the clandestine operations that created the world's first truly global empire.

Our guest's latest book, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded - And How To Fix It, offers a blueprint for a new form of global economics, away from predatory capitalism and into an era more transformative than the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

Running Time: 02:12:00

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Here's a handy A to Z guide to U.S.-backed international crime

The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.

Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, "The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945." What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.

If the US/EU backed overthrow of the Ukrainian government last month had a face, that face would be Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain is the "Energizer Bunny" of US interventionism: wherever there is a government to subvert, a regime to change, chaos to foment, there you will find McCain in its midst.

He snuck into Syria to highlight the dominance of moderates that the US should support. But the world is now interconnected and soon it was known that McCain's moderates in Syria were in fact radicals and kidnappers. He snuck into Libya to receive an award from the military the same day Sharia law was approved.

But these are small potatoes. Russia has always been the prize for McCain. His International Republican Institute (IRI), a Cold War relic funded by US taxpayers, routinely funded subversive NGOs in Russia to undermine the political system.

Unidentified armed men seen on the streets of Donetsk in east Ukraine

Russian diplomat claims 300 mercenaries had arrived in Kiev this week

Mercenaries in the region could give Putin pretext for military action

Donetsk has been the scene of big pro-Russian demonstrations this week

Speculation was growing last night that American mercenaries had been deployed to Donetsk after videos emerged of unidentified armed men in the streets of the eastern Ukrainian city.

At least two videos published on YouTube earlier this week show burly, heavily armed soldiers with no insignia in the city, which has been gripped by pro-Moscow protests.

In one of the videos onlookers can be heard shouting 'Blackwater! Blackwater!' as the armed men, who wear no insignia, jog through the streets.

Donetsk was this week the scene of civil unrest as pro-Russian elements among its citizens seized control of the regional administration headquarters and another government building.

Yesterday thousands of people gathered in the city centre waving Russian flags and calling for a referendum to determine the status of the strategically important coal-mining region.

Both the videos which purport to show 'Blackwater' mercenaries in Donetsk were uploaded last Monday, with their descriptions written in Russian.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Battle For Justice In Palestine.

Israel, European and US leaders often insist, is a shining beacon for the world. François Hollande, the Socialist candidate elected France's president in 2012, observed that Israel faced so much criticism precisely because it is a "great democracy." In a similar vein, Matthew Gould, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, wrote that his country's close cooperation with Israel stemmed from the "principles of freedom, democracy and the rule of law that we work together to protect. These shared principles are the bedrock of our relationship." American leaders, however, are second to none in the intensity of their ardor. In 2008, Senator Barack Obama insisted that "the establishment of Israel was just and necessary" and that "the bond between Israel and the United States is rooted in more than our shared national interests - it's rooted in the shared values and shared stories of our people." It is a theme he has returned to often as president, enumerating, for instance, some of the "shared values" in a 2012 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): "A commitment to human dignity. A belief that freedom is a right that is given to all of God's children. An experience that shows us that democracy is the one and only form of government that can truly respond to the aspirations of citizens." Among the "shared stories" is the fact that both the United States and Israel were established by European settler colonists who usurped lands inhabited by indigenous peoples, though this is something Obama did not mention to his AIPAC audience. Another contemporary "shared value" that went unacknowledged is that Israel's practice of "targeted killings" - extrajudicial executions of "terrorist" suspects and bystanders, once condemned by the United States - has become the signature policy of Obama, the only president in history known to keep a "kill list" of US citizens and others. But despite these incongruities, it would appear at first blush that, at least when it comes to officially sanctioned racism and discrimination at home, the United States and Israel diverge sharply.

I pity the fool who didn't listen.

Ever since May 2013, I've been warning against investing in the wannabe currency, Bitcoin. I called it nothing more than an "insidious currency scam."

Lo and behold, one of the most prominent Bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox, disappeared this week.

Like a thief in the night, it moved offices, shuttered its Twitter account and closed down its website - without any explanation.

And just like that, every sucker who owned any Bitcoins on the exchange lost everything.


Like Erik Voorhees, the man behind Bitcoin-sharing website, Coinapult.com. He had over 550 Bitcoins on Mt. Gox, worth almost $ 300,000. As he conceded, "I will never get any of that back."

No. You won't.

Pop quiz: When really nasty criminals and dictators want to hide their illicit gains, which country do they go to?

I'll make this easy for you - multiple choice:

a) Switzerland
b) British Virgin Islands
c) Hong Kong

With all the drama, history, and stigma surrounding Switzerland, most people would choose (A).

Yet over the last few years, Switzerland has worked hard to shed this reputation, even going so far as to propose laws making it easier for them to freeze dictators' funds.

But in reality, the correct answer to the question is (D), none of the above. It's the United States of America.

Russian authorities warned the FBI in early 2011 that suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have been a follower of "radical Islam," a revelation that raised new questions in Congress on Saturday about whether the Boston Marathon attacks that killed three and wounded more than 170 could have been prevented.

A senior congressional aide privy to the Boston Marathon terror investigation confirmed Saturday that the FBI received the warning after Tsarnaev's apparently suspicious activities caught the attention of Russian authorities keeping close surveillance on militant Islamist groups in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union.

The FBI acknowledged Friday that it had investigated Tsarnaev in 2011, even interviewing him and his family, but "did not find any terrorism activity," either domestic or foreign.

"The FBI had this guy on the radar and somehow he fell off," said the congressional aide, who said oversight committees on Capitol Hill are seeking answers from counterterrorism officials. "We heard for several days leading up to this there was no intelligence. Now we know there could have been intelligence."

The mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater worked as a "virtual extension of the CIA," the company's former CEO revealed to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, who obtained court documents showing the company argued as much when its executives were facing prosecution.

It has long been known that Blackwater, now called Academi, worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, and there were even some pretty straightforward clues that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince was an agency asset. That relationship is strongly clarified by the company's own legal defense in a three-year prosecution that collapsed in February, going from having the potential to jail several of the company's executives to wrapping up with a guilty plea from two men punishable by probation, house arrest and a $5,000 fine.

"Blackwater's work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked," Prince told Lake. "In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house."

Every July, Polish activists and other people who remember WWII commemorate the tragedy which happened in Volhynia and is known as the Volhynian slaughter. Polish Rzech Pospolita described the events as a tremendous and extremely ferocious ethnic cleansing campaign during which perpetrators not only killed entire families but also destroyed the material evidence of Poles' presence such as buildings, churches, and even gardens. The newspaper emphasized that it was a planned genocide committed by an organization with a criminal ideology which could be defined approximately as the Ukrainian version of Nazism and fascism.

The decision to carry out the "depolonization" of Volhynia and Polesia must have been made by the OUN (The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) between late 1942 and March, 1943. No directive to launch the operation has ever been published, nor is any evidence of its existence available, but there is no doubt that the activity was carefully planned.

1. The OUN leaders hoped that both Soviet Russia and Poland would fall as a result of the German onslaught as in 1918. Struggling over the future borders, the OUN-UIA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) hoped to use the argument that there was no Polish population or military activity in the contested territories. The Bandera Movement used the same method of cleansing Poles from Galicia and Volhynia as the one widely employed by its political ally Germany: the physical extermination of the non-Ukrainian (or, speaking precisely, non-Galician) population.
2. The OUN had prepared in advance an ideological justification of the operation. It was a concept of racial and ethnic superiority of Aryan Ukrainians, which was modeled on the fascist theory of the superior race allegedly representing the highest point of the development of mankind.
3. The process of ethnic cleansing targeting the Polish population and the geography of the activity had been elaborately planned.
4. The Polish nationality was the criterion for selecting terror targets. Thousands of testimonies of survivors show that Poles and children from intermarriages were killed in mixed families while Galicians and Ukrainians in them typically were not (though it is hard to discern a general rule in the situation as cases of mass slaughter of Ukrainians who sheltered Polish refugees from Volhynia have been reported in the Zhytomyr Province).