Introduction: New Confessions
and Revelations from the World of
Economic Hit Men
John Perkins
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who
cheat countries
around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel
money
from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International
Development
(USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the
coffers of huge
corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families
who control the
planet’s natural resources. Their tools include
fraudulent fi nancial reports,
rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder.
They play
a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new
and terrifying
dimensions during this time of globalization.
I should know; I was an EHM.
I wrote that opening paragraph to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as a
description of my own profession. Since the book’s fi rst
publication in early
November 2004, I have heard TV, radio, and event hosts
read those words
many times as they introduced me to their audiences. The
reality of EHMs
shocked people in the United States and other countries.
Many have told me
that it convinced them to commit themselves to taking
actions that will make
this a better world.
John Perkins links his experiences
to new revelations that expose the drive for
empire that lies behind the rhetoric
of globalization.
2 A GAME AS OLD AS EMPIRE
The public interest aroused by Confessions was not a foregone conclusion. I
spent a great deal of time working up the courage to try
to publish it. Once I
made the decision to do so, my attempts got off to a
rocky start.
By late 2003, the manuscript had been circulated to many
publishers—and
I had almost given up on ever seeing the book in print.
Despite praising it
as “riveting,” “eloquently written,” “an important
exposé,” and “a story that
must be told,” publisher after publisher—twenty-fi ve, in
fact—rejected it.
My literary agent and I concluded that it was just too
anti-corporatocracy.
(A word introduced to most readers in those pages, corporatocracy refers to
the powerful group of people who run the world’s biggest
corporations, the
most powerful governments, and history’s fi rst truly
global empire.) The major
publishing houses, we concluded, were too intimidated by,
or perhaps too
beholden to, the corporate elite.
Eventually a courageous independent publisher,
Berrett-Koehler, took the
book on. Confessions’ success among the
public astounded me. During its fi rst
week in bookstores it went to number 4 on Amazon.com.
Then it spent many
weeks on every major bestseller list. In less than
fourteen months, it had been
translated into and published in twenty languages. A
major Hollywood company
purchased the option to fi lm it. Penguin/Plume bought
the paperback
rights.
Despite all these successes, an important element was
still missing. The
major U.S. media refused to discuss Confessions or the fact that, because of it,
terms such as EHM, corporatocracy, and jackal were now appearing on college
syllabuses. The New York Times and other newspapers
had to include it on their
bestseller lists—after all, numbers don’t lie (unless an
EHM produces them, as
you will see in the following pages)—but during its fi
rst fi fteen months in print
most of them obstinately declined to review it. Why?
My agent, my publicist, the best minds at Berrett-Koehler
and Penguin/
Plume, my family, my friends, and I may never know the
real answer to that
question. What we do know is that several nationally
recognized journalists
appeared poised on the verge of writing or speaking about
the book. They
conducted “pre-interviews” with me by phone and
dispatched producers to
wine and dine my wife and me. But, in the end, they
declined. A major TV
network convinced me to interrupt a West Coast speaking
tour, fl y across the
country to New York, and dress up in a television-blue
sports coat. Then—as
I waited at the door for the network’s limo—an employee
called to cancel.
Whenever media apologists offered explanations for such
actions, they took
the
form of questions: “Can you prove the existence of other EHMs?” “Has
INTRODUCTION: NEW CONFESSIONS AND
REVELATIONS 3
anyone else written about these things?” “Have others in
high places made
similar disclosures?”
The answer to these questions is, of course, yes. Every
major incident
described in the book has been discussed in detail by
other authors—usually
lots of other authors. The CIA’s coup against Iran’s
Mossadegh; the atrocities
committed by his replacement, Big Oil’s puppet, the Shah;
the Saudi Arabian
money-laundering affair; the jackal-orchestrated
assassinations of Ecuador’s
President Jaime Roldós and Panama’s President Omar
Torrijos; allegations of
collusion between oil companies and missionary groups in
the Amazon; the
international activities of Bechtel, Halliburton, and
other pillars of American
capitalism; the unilateral and unprovoked U.S. invasion
of Panama and capture
of Manuel Noriega; the coup against Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez—
these and the other events in the book are a matter of
public record.
Several pundits criticized what some referred to as my “radical
accusation”—
that economic forecasts are manipulated and distorted in
order to
achieve political objectives (as opposed to economic
objectivity) and that foreign
“aid” is a tool for big business rather than an
altruistic means to alleviate
poverty. However, both of these transgressions against
the true purposes of
sound economics and altruism have been well documented by
a multitude of
people, including a former World Bank chief economist and
winner of the
Nobel Prize in economics, Joseph Stiglitz. In his book Globalization and Its
Discontents, Stiglitz writes:
To make its [the IMF’s] programs seem to
work, to make the numbers “add
up,” economic forecasts have to be adjusted. Many users
of these numbers
do not realize that they are not like ordinary forecasts;
in these instances
GDP forecasts are not based on a sophisticated
statistical model, or even on
the best estimates of those who know the economy well,
but are merely
the numbers that have been negotiated as part of an IMF program. . . .1
Globalization, as it has been advocated, often seems to
replace the old
dictatorships of national elites with new dictatorships
of international fi -
nance. . . . For millions of people globalization has not
worked. . . . They
have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become
more insecure.2
I found it interesting that during my fi rst book tour—for
the hardcover edition,
in late 2004 and early 2005—I sometimes heard questions
from my audiences
that refl ected the mainstream press. However, they were
signifi cantly
diminished
during the paperback edition tour in early 2006. The level of so
4 A GAME AS OLD AS EMPIRE
phistication among readers had risen over the course of
that year. A growing
suspicion that the mainstream press was collaborating
with the corporatocracy—
which, of course, owned much of it or at least supported
it through advertising—
had become manifest. While I would love to credit Confessions for
this transformation in public attitude, my book has to
share that honor with
a number of others, such as Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents, David
Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival,
Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire, Jeff Faux’s Global Class War, and
Antonia Juhasz’s Bush Agenda, as well as fi lms
such as The Constant
Gardener,
Syriana, Hotel Rwanda, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. The American
public recently has been treated to a feast of exposés.
Mine is defi nitely not a
voice in the wilderness.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that the corporatocracy
has created
the world’s fi rst truly global empire, infl icted
increased misery and poverty
on millions of people around the planet, managed to
sabotage the principles
of self-determination, justice, and freedom that form the
foundations upon
which the United States stands, and turned a country that
was lauded at the
end of World War II as democracy’s savior into one that
is feared, resented,
and hated, the mainstream press ignores the obvious. In
pleasing the moneymen
and the executives upstairs, many journalists have turned
their backs on
the truth. When approached by my publicists, they continue
to ask: “Where
are the trenches?” “Can you produce the trowels that dug
them?” “Have any
‘objective’ researchers confi rmed your story?”
Although the evidence was already available,
Berrett-Koehler and I decided
that the proper response was to answer such questions in
terms that no one
could ignore and that only those who insisted on
remaining in denial could
dispute. We would publish a book with many contributors,
an anthology, further
revealing the world of economic hit men and how it works.
In Confessions, I talked about a world rooted in the cold war, in the
dynamics
and proxy confl icts of the U.S.–Soviet confl ict. My
sojourn in that war
ended in 1981, a quarter of a century ago. Since then,
and especially since
the collapse of the USSR, the dynamics of empire have
changed. The world
is now more multipolar and mercantile, with China and
Europe emerging to
compete with the U.S. Empire is heavily driven by
multinational corporations,
whose interests transcend those of any particular
nation-state.3 There are new
multinational institutions and trade agreements, such as
the World Trade Organization
(WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
and
newly articulated ideologies and programs, such as neoliberalism and the
INTRODUCTION: NEW CONFESSIONS AND
REVELATIONS 5
structural adjustments and conditionalities imposed by
the IMF. But one thing
remains unchanged: the peoples of the Third World
continue to suffer; their
future, if anything, looks even bleaker than it did in
the early 1980s.
A quarter-century ago, I saw myself as a hit man for the
interests of U.S.
capitalism in the struggle for control of the developing
world during the cold
war. Today, the EHM game is more complex, its corruption
more pervasive,
and its operations more fundamental to the world economy
and politics.
There are many more types of economic hit men, and the
roles they play are
far more diverse. The veneer of respectability remains a
key factor; subterfuges
range from money laundering and tax evasion carried out
in well-appointed
offi ce suites to activities that amount to economic war
crimes and result in
the deaths of millions of people. The chapters that
follow reveal this dark side
of globalization, showing a system that depends on
deception, extortion, and
often violence: an offi cer of an offshore bank hiding
hundreds of millions in
stolen money, IMF advisors slashing Ghana’s education and
health programs,
a Chinese bureaucrat seeking oil concessions in Africa, a
mercenary defending
a European oil company in Nigeria, a consultant rewriting
Iraqi oil law, and
executives fi nancing warlords to secure supplies of
coltan ore in Congo.
The main obstacle to compiling such stories should be
obvious. Most
EHMs do not think it is in their best interests to talk
about their jobs. Many
are still actively employed in the business. Those who
have stepped away often
receive pensions, consultant fees, and other perks from
their former employers.
They understand that whistle-blowers usually sacrifi ce
such benefi ts—and
sometimes much more. Most of us who have done that type
of work pride
ourselves on loyalty to old comrades. Once one of us
decides to take the big
leap—“into the cold,” to use CIA vernacular—we know we
will have to face
the harsh reality of powerful forces arrayed to protect
the institutional power
of multinational corporations, global banks, government
defense and security
agencies, international agencies—and the small elite that
runs them.
In recent years, the people charged with deceiving
ordinary citizens have
grown more cunning. The Pentagon Papers and the White House Watergate
tapes taught them the dangers of writing and recording
incriminating details.
The Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom scandals, and
recent allegations
about CIA “extraordinary renditions,” weapons of mass
destruction
deceits, and National Security Agency eavesdropping serve
to reinforce policies
that favor shredding. Government offi cials who expose a
CIA agent to
retaliate against her whistle-blowing spouse go
unpunished. All these events
lead
to the ultimate deterrent to speaking the truth: those who expose the corporatocracy can expect to be assassinated—fi nancially
and by reputation,
if
not with a bullet.
